In Partial Disgrace (31 page)

Iulus was the only man I ever knew who really understood America to the bone, partly because he was well-paid for it, partly because he had a number of perfectly attentive audiences, but primarily because of his unique education. He knew that lacking an interior discipline, democracies depended in large part upon a worthy opposition for momentum, and the worse thing you could do to a people who thought of themselves as a church and believed their truths to be “self-evident” was to take their enemy away from them. He also knew that the Dark Hero of the Secret Name was essentially about an inferiority complex, an obsession with predictability, an attempt to catch up to modernity. What the Soviets were too parochial to realize was that modernity had
already
destroyed traditional society in the West, and so their special path of maximalism was doomed to irrelevance, the freezing of petit bourgeois attitudes on a mountain of corpses. “They never had a chance,” was how Iulus put it, as early as 1968. “They bored themselves to death.”

It is hardly surprising that recent scholars have concluded that our “secret” operations in Cannonia had no effect whatsoever—and if anything prolonged the war, as well as the so-called Cold War, which in this writer’s opinion was the most destructive and pernicious of all wars, the largest non-event in history—a bizarre sideshow of poetic illusions, a full life’s lie that saw two great nations, each on the verge of fluorescence, abandon their inner struggles to export their kindergarten philosophies, inflicting millions of casualties upon noncombatants while erecting a great frozen glacis behind which all values decomposed. It will seem as obscure and incomprehensible to future generations as the Thirty Years’ War does to us.

What an astounding thing, eh, that a little piece of the Enlightenment, that aberration during which the great religious movements were thrown off stride for a moment, should be set down so fortuitously in
our
trackless swamps and pimpled plains? For we have just barely survived the most religious century of all time—religious in the sense of the absolute triumph of synthetic explanation and doctrine.

Now Iulus was hardly your typical secret agent, not a mole or turncoat, not a cipher, palimpsest, cryptographer, or operator; not an undercover man, dissembler, or counterfeit; not a hawkshew, sleuthhound, scout, tout, or reconnoiterer; certainly not what he was often called, nigger in the woodpile, bug under the chip, snake in the grass, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Not a flybull or derationator, not an informant, mouthpiece, snitch, or masquerader, not a sealed book, misprision, or huggermugger. He did not operate
in camera
,
sotto voce
, or
sub rosa
, or between you me and the bedpost, and most certainly he was no flatfoot, gumshoe, plainclothes horse, or house dick. In short, he owed nothing to those
contrapostos
who figure so prominently in our police entertainments, those marvelous sedatives that present every mystery as a legally punishable exception. “It’s easy enough to catch the murderer,” he often said. “The true detective is the one who prevents the murder.”

Iulus’s charge, as he patiently explained to me, was to create the perfect cover, to meld into the population, becoming simultaneously infinitely forgettable and unforgivably acute, retaining no allegiance to a foreign power, even one as inchoate as Cannonia, but expanding his sympathies totally with his adopted culture so he might better identify its breaking point. His “mission,” if one could call it that, was when reality finally stepped forward, when the erratic mucoid snore of America’s sleep apnea was particularly deafening, that he would be the only one awake. “Living the other’s death; dead in the other’s life
.
” This is Heraclitus, of course, the only Western thinker who makes any sense at all to the Cannonians and their Astingi comrades, with their love of puzzles and the darkest riddling, for thinking in their view is not real thinking unless it simultaneously arouses and misleads one’s expectations of symmetry. But their love of riddles has a moral dimension which is easily missed; games for them are also always ethical tests.

In the Cannonian cosmos, the Sleeper, as the bright twin of Death, does not experience a private phantom world, but while unconscious remains responsible for the conscious universe. This reaching through and across history is the distinctive Astingi blasphemy, destroying all our conventional notions of identity and the psyche.
“
Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper.”

How I would miss his profound but smiling pessimism, his nacreous intelligence, this fideist to the school of gliding. He was one of those strange people who, having rectitude, didn’t need freedom. Even now, rereading his scattered cantos, it is as if he is sitting in the room talking personally with me, the secret of all great writing.

¹

aluminum. 1945, sunk in North Sea by explosion of petrol vapors. 1946, raised and reclassified as a battery charging barge, NAP 111. February 1946, failed to return from patrol. June 1946, located off Cape Tarkhankutsky, raised and reclassified as stationary training platform, redesignated
Communist
.

January 1947, sold as scrap to Cannonia, disassembled, transferred via the Rhine to Frankfurt-am-Main, thence via the Ludwig Canal to Froim-onthe-Hron, there by lorry to the Gulo Orphanage and Ironworks near Belta Bella. Reassembled, refitted, and recommissioned as
Anti-Drakon
(K-666), put into transatlantic service from Turdes, Albania to Mt. Desert, Maine by the Cannonian Foreign ministry. Sighted by U.S. Coast Guard, spilling oil off Newfoundland, 1952, 1956, 1968, 1975, 1981, 1984, reported lost in underwater collision in the Sea of Azov.

1989, reappeared in Therepia, refitted, and recommissioned as the
Clara Schumann
, a tourist craft for trendy youth, plying the straightened oxbows of the Mze.

UNDER THE STARS

(Iulus)

Of all country things, the Professor was fondest of camping, sleeping outside under the grave stars with stories round the fire. We hitched up the oxen to the open wagon, filled its gunnels with hampers of fresh food, blue bottles of seltzer, dark brown bottles of beer, a great pile of feather comforters, some Turkish army tents, and tarpaulins of fleece. Then all of us save Ainoha pushed westward a few miles, horses and dogs running free beside, until we were quite alone in Klavierland, except for the herds of aurochs who stared at the oxen as though they were deformed. Given the slowness of our entourage, which included many of the servants, and the muddy banks exposed by a detumescent Mze (which in our part of the country often changed directions at the whim of its dead, diverted, underground cousins, sometimes flowing east and sometimes west; Father claimed to be able to determine the direction by smell), it was decided to take the ferry at the Sare landing, above Reil Island, where it was said the ashes of Achilles and Patroclus mingled with those of Helen and Ajax.

The ferryman’s house was a Lilliputian villa with whimsical bays and gables, and when the hunting horn sounded, his wife emerged at once, accompanied by a rooster. She raised a pennant on the ferry as we boarded, and by tightening a pulley against a taut wire beneath the water, let the current draw us across. The rooster perched upon the rudder, his lurid Bersaglieri tail feathers fluttering in the breeze. As the ferry nudged the far bank, he strutted over to Father, accepted the half-florin toll in his beak, and returned it to his jolly mistress. Then, transporting our
vie de chateaux
, we proceeded northwesterly into the land of no roads, no inns, no fables, and no police. It may have been the most bourgeois of caravans, but I felt as one with the Astingi, volleying a hail of arrows into the sun as they swarmed the Aurelian walls.

In the evening Father selected an islet of silver poplars and twisted cork oak, and in no time he was cubing the meat and slicing the potatoes into an iron pot suspended from a tripod. Father presided over goulash, Catspaw received the task of tethering the horses and clean-up, and the Professor was assigned to keep his eye on whatever dogs were to be spoilt that day. He had by this time learned to turn them with a single shout.

We spread the sheepskins around the fire as the sun stopped short and finally fell away. No one missed it. As the fog rolled in, the goulash was ladled out into metal bowls, stippled tin wirled with green, brown, and white, and then the call went up for stories.

Seth Silvius Gubik, in addition to his other talents, was also quite a raconteur, with the terrible ability to sum up a life in a phrase. His stories were transliterated from the flutter of his deaf and dumb Astingi mother’s hands, dead stories recounted discontinuously as he searched for words to match her recalled sign language, halting mid-sentence as if he were a painter cleaning his brush before each stroke. This stammering only added a sincere affect. Gubik was otherwise a totally quiet boy, diffident even, but in the midst of these cacographically related tales he was most fully composed. True, they never came out quite the same way twice, which of course only added to their reality. No one thought this contradictory or a subject upon which to build a world philosophy. He had the perfect audience, for we all took joy in hearing myths exploded and religious themes flattened out of existence, and the long pauses, the aphonia of his delivery, made you feel that you had somehow made it up yourself.

At first he did not get on with the Professor, being the sort of wise child whom adults consult without condescension. They tried to be sarcastic about it (“And what do you think of this, eh, Master Gubik?”) but surprised themselves by at bottom being sincere. The Professor was often angry that the stories never made a clear point. Their legendary unity was often scrapped entirely, or relegated to a kind of background noise.

Gubik’s manner of telling was so unaffected that one could not object to even the most bizarre relation of fact, and so seamless that one could not interject, though there were certainly sufficient intervals to do so. Nor did he seem particularly invested personally in his tales. He neither dismissed objections nor tried to refute them. He refused to professionalize himself. There was in his manner a wide-eyed incredulity, as if he were passing along something so obvious that one should really not make too much of it. In short, the Professor had to question the entire enterprise in order to participate in it, but found himself relocating all his queries onto hopelessly abstract grounds. Gubik listened attentively with a slight smirk, not of certitude exactly, but secure in knowing that while the game had been removed temporarily from his stadium, it would gradually find its way back. It was clear, nevertheless, that he sometimes incorporated objections to his stories in later versions. The Professor rightly saw this as the most hurtful kind of rejection, like a dog who sits before you politely, with all the earmarks of alertness and respect, but simply does not come. There was no lofty singing from this precocious boy. He didn’t know a strophe from an antistrophe, and he was on principle against the chant.

“An unshorn dog story, then!” the Professor cried out, as Father ladled more goulash into the bowls.

“Which one?” Gubik answered. “Found by dogs, suckled by dogs, led by dogs, or torn apart by dogs?”

“Whatever you wish. Whatever comes to mind,” the Professor said with an earnest grin.

Gubik held his bowl with both hands, slurping slowly, and we all followed the bobbing of his head. “So then,” he began as always, licking his lips slowly and batting his gray eyes, “from the dogs of the God Actaeon, I think, or perhaps it was Cromises the river god . . . In any case, a certain god in a certain grove had a pack of dogs, and from the finest of these he created a mysterious race of men and women, the Telechines, to fill the gap in the hierarchy between artisans and magicians. And unto them he gave a golden dog, a statue to remind them of their origins, and another sort of hellhound to stand upon the mountain and guard them, a dog with many heads, some say three.”

“Hesiod mentions fifty,” the Professor interrupted drily.

Gubik went on, pleased as always to be interrupted.

“This hound guarded the way to the cave of death, letting anyone pass who wished, but allowing no one out. The golden idol was beautiful, but cold and stationary. The guard dog was hideous but alive. On this golden dog the Telechines could lay out all their complaints and praise, all their poems and lies, and the golden dog was . . . mercifully silent.”

Gubik smiled slightly and measured us. “The golden dog gave birth to a piece of wood, which was planted and became . . . a vine? The many-headed dog gave birth to serpents, vermin, and fish. The horse mackerel, the sea sheep, the late-dying prepon who wiggles for hours even when cut in pieces, the clearch who takes his sleep outside the sea, the nimble, tumbling gobi, and the savage race of sea-mice, the crooked pouple . . .”

“That will do. No more fish, if you please,” Father interrupted, knowing well that when Gubik entered a lyric phase, he tended to lose the thread. Gubik was grateful also for this intervention—in fact, it seemed to energize him and his
voce velata
.

“On the golden dog they laid their poems, lies, and hopes, but he did not complain; that is why they worshiped him. Here was a god . . . As for the many-headed dog, he barked throughout the land at every movement and word, the same short, sharp, deafening bark—of affirmation, distaste, or warning it was impossible to tell—and occasionally he let forth a whine or a howl in which no person, act, or event could be distinguished. Now it happened . . . that a giant rabid forest pig came upon the camp of the Telechines, wreaking havoc and ravaging the land, uprooting the vines and goring sheep. Several warriors were sent with various weapons, but they failed and were killed. Throughout this, the many-headed dog at the cave was strangely and uniquely silent. They sent more heroes and even highly paid mercenaries against the forest pig, but none could deal with him. It was then decided that this was too serious a matter to serve as a test of individual courage. So for the first time they banded together in a hunting party, young and old, slaves and masters, guests and women, including among them Marea, a golden-haired, snow-souled girl and most reliable archer. A buckle of polished gold confined her vest, an ivory quiver hung upon her shoulder, and she possessed a pack of the fleetest hounds. Onto the hunt they pushed, stringing nets in the woods from tree to tree and, moving them ever closer, they encircle the monster’s lair. But the forest pig bolted and broke the net, and after killing several dogs and men, hid in a marsh among the reeds. The men followed his path, sinking to their waists in the mire. Marea watched all this closely. She sank, too, though not quite as deep, and then slipped her hounds from the thong, and they splashed up to their long ears in the muck. Soon the reeds parted as the beast began to move, the only clue a slight furrow in the marshgrass. Then Marea took an arrow, loosed it at the point of the furrow, and the beast sprung up wounded, spewing blood from its nostrils on the green flowers. The dogs were quickly hard on his flank, turning him toward the floundering men. Finally, four or five of the warriors, covered with black mud, lumbering as slowly as in a dream, plunged their spears into him. The last of these, the rock-footed youth Melagor, threw his spear behind the last rib, and with this the forest pig leapt up and fell furiously in death. A shout went up, glorifying the conqueror. But Melagor cut off the ear and a tusk, and presented them to Marea, insisting that the girl whose hounds had trapped the boar, and whose arrow had drawn first blood, be awarded the prize. This was the first and final gesture of love. Not a trophy or gift, but simply a gesture of fair due. The other men insisted they would be shown up, despoiled by a mere girl, if she were given the trophy, and an argument ensued. They ripped the tusk from her hands and then began a violent argument among themselves. Marea made a grave mistake here. She laughed. At this a battle in the mud ensued, and Melagor inadvertently killed one of the men. This was the first sin, though some say it came before. The girl who at first had blushed and laughed now tried to pass by, still carrying the pig’s ear. With slain warriors at her feet, the girl who was at first indignant, then amused, was now hysterical with grief, and these strange emotions, laughter and tears, so soon upon one another, stopped the men momentarily, and caused them to reconsider that the triumph, inexpert as it was, was somehow to be shared. But soon they were fighting again amongst one another, not for the glory but so the other could not have it, though by now the ear was shredded and of no use to anyone. The god of little faith watched this athletic spectacle in utter boredom. He had not gone through his furious motions to watch such predictable and banal sport, and resolving to begin again, changed all the Telechines into stags, forgetting Marea’s hounds, who remain to this day in the marsh as pike, and once the god had exited, other tribes easily caught the stags and destroyed them. Now alone, Marea leapt into the sea and was turned into a star, lit with a low blush . . . ”

Gubik concluded his obmutescent soliloquy, took a long drink of soda water, and waved his hand as if brushing away a fly. The group around the fire fell silent.

“That’s all?” the Professor insisted, flabbergasted. “I mean, it’s not exactly Goethe.”

Gubik crossed his arms and said nothing more.

“They changed their minds,” the Professor insisted. “It’s the beginning of civilization you’re describing. They saw their error.”

“Yes,” said Gubik, smiling with impromptu gravitas. “But it was too late.”

“Ah, yes,” Father echoed absently. “Too late. Right from the beginning.”

“And no one came to their aid?” the Professor said.

“No one,” Gubik said emphatically through a thin smile. “Dogmeat! The aurochs laughed so hard milk came out their noses.”

“And the star, the girl who changed into a star,” the Professor whined. “What was the name of the star?”

Gubik shook his head slowly. “Just one of the stars,” he said laconically.

“Then there’s no lesson at all,” the Professor said curtly. “It’s not very charming. I mean it rather dribbles out, don’t you think? You don’t make any connections!”

Gubik licked the rim of his bowl. “Thus far and no further.”

“There are, Doctor, you must admit, some pertinent if pessimistic observations,” Father broke in, as always protective of Gubik. The Professor was growing slightly apoplectic.

“Then what, may I ask,” said the Professor, now at the far side of exasperation, “is this story of injustice called?”

Our Astingi Homer squinted and looked up into the sky.

“‘The Dog in the Manger,’” he stammered. “There are probably better stories.” Then he rolled over and covered himself in sheepskin, and soon we were all asleep, save the Professor and Catspaw, who, with the help of an astronomical atlas, were scanning the heavens for the star of Marea.

“So full of holes, so flat,” the Professor was moaning, “no respect for either verisimilitude
or
illusion, and yet,” he pounded a fist into the flat of his hand, “everyone is entranced.”

“Strange how the ancient bards were so unobservant of nature,” Catspaw said consolingly. “Virgil didn’t know the Pleiades from Pisces, or whether the moon was rising or setting.” And then he uncorked the plum brandy as the Professor produced two Trabuko cigars.

The two men leaned against the wagon wheel, alternating puffs and swigs, until the phosphorescent constellations doubled. And though he had the weaker eyes of the two, it was the Professor who first spied the star sitting directly upon the Eastern horizon, and laid a hand upon Catspaw’s thigh. Catspaw squinted at the low blushed light for some time.

“A shepherd’s fire,” he dismissed it as, and returned to his oral pleasures in a doze. But ten minutes later, the Professor again squeezed his leg.

“It’s getting brighter.”