Alternate Realities (53 page)

He walked about, directing this and that team as he had previously. He found himself ill at ease, knowing the temper of Waden Jenks, knowing that Waden had touched perilously close to the heart of matters. Cade Jenks was dead, and this proved certain things about Waden which Herrin had suspected; but then, there had been in that father-son relationship no love, or pleasure, or respect.

He also had power, by reason of his position in the University and in Kierkegaard. The apprentices regarded
him
with fear, because he had authority to hire and dismiss any Student or laborer from the project. At a word from him even an Apprentice would be banished from University and disgraced, condemned to the provinces; or a worker sent among the invisible Unemployed. The Students coveted the chance at Jenks Square. The laborers coveted the government support. They worked with zeal, in consequence. The dread with which they regarded that possibility of dismissal and the pride they took in being assigned to the project were evident in their application.

He watched the stacks of stone arranged, which were already waist high, and eventually, toward dusk, he spoke to his chief apprentice, Leona Pace, and saw to it that due care would be taken in unloading the stone which was still coming in on trucks from the warehouses.

“I shall hold you accountable,” he told her, “if any damage is done; and twice accountable if there is any weak stone set into the structure. Remember the weight this foundation must bear. If there is a flaw in any stone, however it came there, set it aside and hold it for my personal inspection. If you have doubt in any stone, set it aside. The supply of stone is endless; the State provides. Am I understood?”

“Master Law, without question.”

He nodded, walked away, through the stone circles and to that apartment overlooking Jenks Square which belonged to Keye,

“I’ve been watching,” she told him when he had, in front of the window looking down on the building, taken her in his arms and kissed her. Their relationship was by turns cool and by turns warm, and lately the latter.

“It looks like nothing at all as yet,” he said, relieving her of any duty to flatter him. He let her lead him to the table. She had promised dinner, and dinner there was, with flowerlights drifting in bowls among the dishes, and incense in the air. Keye had a servant to provide such touches, while he had never bothered, tossing things aside when done with them, to live in a warren of discarded stones and clothes piled according to washed and unwashed, cleanly—he was obsessive about cleanliness—but he confined his art to stone, not house-holding,

This was not, however, to say that he failed to appreciate beauty offered him. He sat down, gave the flowerlight nearest a push which sent it drifting through the maze of the crystal serpentine bowl and smiled at her.

“That was Waden down there today.”

“What, spying from the window? I thought you had classes.”

“Canceled still. The official, dreary respect goes on. You’ve been my sole entertainment—watching the trucks, considering your plight.”

“How, plight?”

“You understand me. Nothing escapes you; you take such pride in it.”

“Because I work for him?”

“No.”

“You mean to drag this through dessert, I can see.”

“I trust not. I’ve warned you, but you see only endurance. You plan to outlast him, encompass him, and he ... has his vanity. There was a time you knew where you were going; now you apply to Waden Jenks for a roadmap.”

“I am not political.”

“Where do you live?”

He frowned, patient with her games. “On Freedom, in Sartre, in Kierkegaard, in the University, in specific—how fine shall I dice it?”

“Until you smell the air and know you
are
political.”

“I confess to it then, but I’m politically unconsenting. I live in larger scope than Waden Jenks; our arenas are different.”

“Yours embraces his. As
you
embrace that monument—shells within shells—he won’t laugh when he perceives that Reality.”

“You are uncommonly keen this evening.”

“Only talkative.”

“He asked you to the Residency, as my companion.”

“What, are
you
going?”

“I said yes.”

“Well, I’ll not. Those who become embraced by stones of another’s shaping ... take what shapes they dictate, don’t they? I have my own comforts. I’ll watch. Come
here
, when you will; I’ll even give you the key. It may be a refuge more convenient than your own.”

“I suspect you of unguessed talents. You think I’ve erred.”

“Go if you like.”

He smiled slowly. “I shall, and come, and take the key too. I thank you.”

“I remind you I am fastidious in housekeeping.”

There was a time when he looked into Keye’s eyes and saw something reserved, and again not; he was never sure. Keye deserved regard. He had never caught her at humor, but sometimes, he suspected, at kindness. When he was with her sometimes he smelled earth and old boards, recalled a world quite different from the competition of the University and the fierce, cold Residency. Recalled that provincial reality where in their Self and for their pleasure, or perhaps because they were bound by primal instincts—his parents had surprised him with kind acts. He had treasured surprises of that nature, unpredictable in the main because there was no particular reason for them, and they were small—a favorite dish, something of the sort. Keye, he thought, had come from such a provincial origin, even farther up the river; Keye did some things which had nothing to do with the study and practice of creative ethics, simply because there were unrecognized patterns within her behavior.

Or doing such things pleased her, because the following of childhood patterns was in itself satisfying, and she played purposeful games watching others’ reactions to them, which was within
her
art. Keye’s field was, like his and unlike Waden’s, creative, and at moments when he thought of that, he reckoned Keye as greater than Waden gave her credit for being.

“No,” he said suddenly. “I’ll not take the key. And you know my reasoning.”

“What, you surrender to Waden’s bending but not to mine?”

“I have wandered between both. My eyes are open.”

“Pursue your liberty.”

She mocked him now. “Waden has erred about you,” he said. “Go to the Residency. Exert your influence there.”

“At your suggestion? Or at Waden’s either?” She lowered her lids like a curtain and looked up again smiling. “I am the only
free
individual in Kierkegaard. Go or stay. I am immovable from my Self. I’m the ethicist, and I am continually creating the ethic in my personal reality, which I am doing at this moment. Consider all my advice to you in that light.”

He thought it humor for a moment. Then he knew otherwise. He rose, stared down at her in outrage and distress. She continued to smile. “There is a reason,” he said, recovering his mental balance, “that you tell me this.”

“I refuse comment, perhaps ... but I don’t give reasons. Part of my creativity lies in letting others shape themselves around their own guesswork. You are—what? Omnipotent? Waden’s servant? Mine?”

For a second moment she had thrown him totally off his balance, and then he smiled and nodded. Let Keye think as she would. “Good evening,” he said. “I prefer a little quietude this evening, and I think we’re approaching one of our cooler periods. When you’ve resolved your personal dilemmas, or when you find it convenient ... I’ll hear you, but I’m tired this evening, Keye, indeed I am. First Waden, and then Waden again tomorrow. So if this is your humor, do without me.”

“You exude destruction. Perhaps I want you clear of me.”

“Power never comes from retreat, Keye.”

She stared at him, wise and amused as Keye could look, perhaps agreeing, perhaps refuting him by her very silence. He sighed, denied all but a good dinner, and walked out the familiar door, down the clean pebblestone hall, the same as every other hall in Kierkegaard, and down the stairs which was like every other stairs, all a blank slate which waited this generation, and his talent, and students of his teaching.

I shall be here, he thought, after them all. It’s my nature to take in inspiration, and upon that thought, he suffered such a narrowing of the heart, such an apprehension that he stopped in his tracks there in the stairwell and leaned against the pebbled wall, thinking a moment and cold with fright. An art which was necessarily dependent on inspiration arriving from external forces was—perhaps enslaved to those forces; and if it was, then he was. Keye could be right. It shook the assumption of a lifetime and demanded thinking.

He wandered out then, through the foyer and onto the street where the white electric glare lit small black figures against the white stone and the cranes wheezed and lifted their burdens like grotesque giants. He saw yet another course of stone going into place as a view which had been open in Kierkegaard all the years of his residence here became forever obstructed, imprisoned, cut off.

He built a snare for the eye; he did things until now unthought of; he discovered unconsidered and unfelt dimensions to his own work which verged on the chaotic.

An irrational force, a madness, a dark and Dionysian force. That was his work, which begun, acquired its own momentum which seized minds and impressed them with its own Reality.

Kierkegaard changed. It was begun. Keye and Waden had no power against it.

He laughed as he had laughed the sunny day he stood on that bronze circle marking the center of Kierkegaard and spun; but no one would ever stand there again, no foot in all of time to come would likely tread that spot, no one ever have that vantage which had inspired the work. Even if ten thousand years made a crumbled heap of all man had done on the site of Kierkegaard, a hill would stand there, of crumbled marble, of ruin, and memories. A city would have stood there, the heart of which was forever sucked in and warped and changed by his mind. The world would not be the same, since that heap of stone began to stand there, and never could be what it would have been had there been no Herrin Law.

But Waden Jenks had permitted the work, urged it.

The perplexities overcame him. He had interrupted the workers with his laughter, and now with his silence, They stood there, surely wondering who was there in the shadows. But then they began work again, no one investigating. There were madmen in Kierkegaard, the invisibles, who sometimes with sound or action intruded on the Reality of the city—who screamed, sometimes, or laughed, as if they made some attempt to be seen by the sane. Herrin drew breath, and walked quietly away from Keye’s apartment building and through the peripheries of the work.

“Sir,” apprentices murmured, recognizing him now, and offering him respect. He walked on, paying no attention to them, casting instead a critical eye to the stone which gleamed white in the darkness, sheened with the artificial lamps. No flaws were evident.

“Sir,” said Leona Pace, who came to intercept him. “I thought you’d gone.”

“Going,” he said equably, and walked on.

He refused to be disturbed. The physical fact of the sculpture reassured him that all Keye’s hopes to manipulate him and all Waden’s confidence that he did so ... were the necessary illusions of Keye Lynn and Waden Jenks.
This
, this stone, was real. He was not deluded into believing the substance was real; he discounted that. The
shaping
far more than the substance of the stone ... that was the reality. And the shaping was his.

He walked ... up the long extent of Main, through the narrow archway in the firebush hedge, onto Port Street, intending to go to the studio in the University, to apply his restlessness to his labors ... but the Residency was before him and he stopped, stared up at the bleak pebblestone façade which was identical to that of the University, or a warehouse, or anything else.

This, too, I shall change
, he thought, conceiving further ambitions, wondering which was the more important, to involve himself immediately in the Residency alterations or to intervene in the proposed new hemisphere programs.

MAN, said the plaque inset above the Residency entry, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.

And he smiled, knowing how that was set forth to the masses of Freedom, and what the real truth was, for in University they taught another maxim: The strongest survives, the weaker serve, the weakest perish.

Who am I?
the masses in the provincial schools were taught to ask.

The masses went on asking, diverted by the question and never really wanting the answer if they had known it. The sign was for them. They took pride in it. They saw the world in their own measure.

The Students at University learned a second question.
What is reality?
They doubted all previous questions.

And a very few attained to the Last Statement.

I
.

He smiled somewhat cruelly at the sign, which to the masses promised control of their destinies.

Perhaps the mad
, he thought,
have seen their conditions
. Inferiority was a bitter mouthful. The mad in Kierkegaard were one step ahead of the sane and subservient ... because most of those out there limited their thoughts—lest they see what the mad had seen, that they were not in control of anything.

Must not think further—or go mad, lacking power, which, after all, makes life worth living.

And is there one, he wondered (the inevitable question), only one man, after all, for whom the whole species exists? But humanity had no existence, of course, save in the mind of the one man who warped all that was about himself.

Himself.

He was, after all, very comfortable this night. He had simply recovered his previous state, before Keye, which was solitude. He thought of the first night he had begun to realize his solitude, the first night he had begun to conceive of himself as
psychurgos
and not as child, the night the visitor had come to tell him he was different.