Touchstone (Meridian Series) (4 page)

“Heads, Mr. Gilbert, I am ever
the optimist, and hope to see our beloved monarch’s face on every toss!”

Gilbert tossed, and caught the
coin. “Heads it is, Mr. Wilde. Shall we retire to our corners for the bout? Mr.
Nordhausen, this snifter shall be the bell.” He gave it a tap with his nail and
it rang. “Five minutes, Mr. Wilde.”

“Have at you, Mr. Gilbert.”

“Geshundheit, Mr. Wilde.”

Nordhausen fumbled about in a
near panic. He remembered the pocket watch he had purchased from a curio shop
in preparation for this trip and managed to pull it from his coat pocket,
relieved that he had the good sense to put it there when he changed into this
rented evening wear. Still, he struggled to contain a slight tremor in his hand
as he flipped it open and stared at the clock face. The magnitude of what he
was doing continued to press itself upon him, cruelly now, as the time piece
seemed to taunt him with every tick of the second hand.

God, Oh God…were the seconds all
in order? Surely he was not here this evening on the night Wilde and Gilbert
decided to have this little contest. He was not the one to judge it. With every
tick he could almost hear the corresponding echo of a great hammer beating on
the Meridian of Time. Every word he spoke, every movement and gesture he made,
was altering the timeline now. His plan had already come unglued, and all
history, from this moment forward, would bear the stain of his willful and
headstrong folly. He was absolutely mortified, and he knew he deserved the
hardest lash that fate could deliver upon him, though he hoped, with all his
might, that these seemingly harmless moments would not wreak havoc in some
future time.

But what was he to do? Should he
turn and rush away into the night and end the contamination here and now? A
scene like that would make quite a stir. Should he play out the game, extricate
himself as pleasantly as possible and then slip away? That course made more
sense to him. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and he swallowed hard
as the two men began to write.

Wilde sat at their table, while
Gilbert retired to the bar. Wilde snatched a napkin, and drew a slim golden
pencil from his pocket and began to scribble. A small coterie had followed
Gilbert, and Nordhausen could hear muffled laughter from across the room.
Wilde’s junto was standing around him in silence, watching the Master work. He
scratched out lines in green pencil, sat back pensively, ran his fingers
through his long hair, wrote some more, crossed out the end of a line, closed
his eyes and steepled his fingers, wrote some more. He was a man in the grip of
a creative urge. To Nordhausen, he did not look like a man who was writing
comic verse. On the other hand, the hilarity from Gilbert’s group was various,
from chuckles, to snickers to howls.

Gilbert was done. Nordhausen
said, “30 seconds, Mr. Wilde.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nordhausen, I
shall be done presently.”

At five minutes, Nordhausen
tapped the brandy snifter, and called, “Time, gentlemen.” The irony of his statement
remained his own private torment for the moment.

Gilbert came back over and
settled himself in his chair. “Well, Oscar, what has the Muse of Comic Verse
dispatched into your noodle?”

Wilde stood to declaim, his
right arm behind his back, his left holding the napkin. He smiled puckishly,
and began:

       I love to hear the spoken
word,

               As long as it’s
my own,

       It matters little how
absurd

               My thesis may be
shown.

       I sometimes carry on for
hours

               When no one’s
there but me,

       It works to hone my native
powers

               Of smart
loquacity.

       But often, when I  listen
to

               Myself, I am so
clever,

       That what I say remains incom-

               Prehensible
forever.

With a flourish, he dropped the
napkin on the table, paused briefly, bowed, and delighted applause broke from the
listeners. Gilbert nodded and clapped, and rose to his feet.

“Very clever, indeed, Mr. Wilde.
Self-deprecation is the surest source of humor. Your lines and words are short,
the rhythm is rollicking, and you have a satisfactory ending…all in all a workmanlike
production. Writing for the musical theatre, you may want to use a longer line,
for the sake of your melodist. Do you maintain this is the inspiration of the
Muse or a vision of heaven?”

“A vision of heaven to the
extent it describes me, I am sure!” Wilde drawled. “I make no extravagant
claims for this trifle. Indeed, this club is hardly the Sanctum of Beauty; I am
working at a considerable disadvantage here. But let us see what you have
written – an aesthetic quatrain perhaps?”

Gilbert grasped his hands
together, and pressed them to his bosom. He looked up wistfully into the vague
middle distance, heaved a deep breath and sighed.

       “Ah, to be wafted away

               “From this black
Aceldama
of sorrow,

       “Where the dust of an
earthly today

               “Is the earth of
a dusty tomorrow!”

He dropped his hands, lowered
his eyes for a moment, then bobbed his head up with a huge grin. His cronies
burst into applause, and howled at Wilde’s clique, who were not quite certain
how to take it.

“Is that feeling? Is that
sensitive, Mr. Wilde? As Captain Corcoran says: Though I’m anything but clever,
I can talk like that forever!”

Wilde’s grin equaled Gilbert’s.
“Mr. Nordhausen,  Gilbert’s verse is surely inspired. I wish I had said that!”

Gilbert rejoined, “You will,
Oscar, you will!”

Both men turned again to
Nordhausen.

“So, Mr. Nordhausen, who is the
victor? Who wins the golden apple of the Hesperides?” 

Nordhausen despaired.

“You gentlemen have given me
quite a challenge. Give me five minutes on the glass, and I will award the prize.”

“Fair enough!”

Nordhausen retired from the
group. What on earth was he to say? How could he make a critical evaluation of
Oscar Wilde, just out of college, with his entire output ahead of him. Could he
say anything which might help the poor man in the horrible future he was going
to find? What if he said the wrong thing, and put off Wilde from comedy
entirely? That would change everything! 

He didn’t imagine Gilbert was as
sensitive as Wilde, but how could he judge a man who had taken the world by storm
and would churn out brilliant hit after brilliant hit for the next couple
decades?

He dug into his pocket and took
a pull of Miss Plimsy’s. Thank you, Mr. Curtis. A bit of chemical eloquence. Brrrrr….
nasty stuff straight out of the bottle. And the pesky numbness in the mouth.
He’d have to articulate carefully.

He heard the ding, and Gilbert
called to him. He nervously walked over to the table, where the entire group,
as one, stared at him.

Gilbert handed him a fresh
brandy, which he slogged to rinse out Miss Plimsy’s potion. Wilde, the wild
Irishman, drank whiskey.

It was show time.

“Mr. Gilbert,” he bowed, “Mr.
Wilde,” he turned and bowed.

“This is a hard task you have
given me. If I understand it, Mr. Wilde maintains that Art is inspired by a
Muse, that it comes through us from something above and beyond, and that the
artist drifts with every passion till his soul is a stringed lute on which all
winds can play.”

“Well enough put for my side.”

“Mr. Gilbert says all art is
occasional, and to prove his point, whipped out his little aesthetic ditty. He
says he can do that all day long, and I do believe it.”

“Perhaps we should have an epic
competition, eh, Wilde? You can do the Renaissance and I can do the
Restoration!”

Nordhausen hurried on, still
fretting over every word he spoke. “It is clear that Mr. Wilde produced, on
command, a comic verse, which excited laughter in your group, and general
approbation. So it would appear that Mr. Gilbert is the winner.”

“Hah, the practical American! I
did choose rightly! Let’s have three cheers for me! What ho?”

“On the other hand….” Nordhausen
interrupted gingerly.

Gilbert stopped in mid-huzzah.
“There is more? Is there a prize for runner-up?”

“On the other hand, no mere
mortal can do what Mr. Gilbert does. I could not, no one else in this room can
do what you do, sir.”

Gilbert bowed, puzzled. “You
honor me, sir, but what you say is no doubt true, although I am forced to
acknowledge it.”

“So, if no mere mortal can do
what you do, it is clear that your work is inspired, and we may as well
attribute the inspiration to a Muse, as to any other source. So, I must say
that Mr. Wilde is correct, and is also the winner.”

The group sat hushed for a beat,
as they tried to work out the logic of Nordhausen’s exposition. At the exact
same moment, Wilde and Gilbert burst into laughter, and stood applauding in
acclamation. The rest of the group joined them, and Nordhausen found himself
the focus of their adulation. He smiled, pleased that he had come up with
something to reward the effort of each man. Perhaps I’ve set it right, he
thought hopefully as he fingered his pocket watch. Internally he shrugged his
shoulders, dislodging the spectral Maeve from the perch she had occupied for
the better part of the evening. The hearty cheers and the glass of champagne he
accepted served to ease his troubled conscience.

“But my word!” Nordhausen took a
sip of champagne and set the glass down. “I’ve just had a look at the time and
I really must be off.”

The gleeful gathering protested,
but Nordhausen was determined to extricate himself before he was forced to
speak another word. The verse that Gilbert had spun out still haunted him, for
it carried the seed of his greatest fear. The dust of this earthly today was
indeed the earth of a dusty tomorrow.

I’ve tipped brandy with two
Prime Movers, he thought. God only knows what I’ve accomplished. He hurried
away from the club, drawing his overcoat close about him against the evening
chill. He wondered who actually won the competition in the time line he had
come from. He had a 50-50 chance of choosing the same verdict if he could have
just mustered the guts to hazard a guess.  His solution, awarding victory to
both of the contestants, had been clever, but was it wise?

And again, he realized that the
man, or woman, who had actually served as judge in the original
Meridian
, had been unduly robbed of that
moment by his interference. While it seemed an insignificant thing, that was
exactly the sort of contamination that Paul always warned him about. It was not
the great things, but the inconsequential ones that set the wheels of time to
turning.

Off in the distance he heard the
dull toll of a church bell timing out the half hour, and it gave him little
comfort. Some time later, he made it back to his hotel. He had another 24
hours, in this
Meridian
, before his retraction scheme
pulled him out. He needed sleep to gather his wits for the real intent of his
journey, but the thought that he had already set the world to havoc with a
toast of brandy kept him restless and tossing all through the night.

Part II

Contamination

“What Can we know, or what can
we discern,

when error chokes the windows of
the mind?”

—
Shakespeare:
The
Merchant of Venice

4

He stood gazing
up at the colossal red granite Horus looming six cubits over him.
Nordhausen had seen this before in photographs. The god was 5000 years old
already and would live forever. The building housing him was barely one hundred
years old, and would one day be dismantled or fall into ruins, but Horus would
remain. These islanders were wrangling rudely shaped megaliths into circles
when Horus was sculpted 2181 miles away, the distance of the hypotenuse of the
1500 mile square, Sacred Jerusalem with Gizeh at one corner and
London
at the other. He was as
perfect, smooth, curved, beaked and taloned, as he had been in
Karnak
. He had last been worshipped in
the desert 1500 years ago, by an Ethiopian who had made a pilgrimage.

In ancient times, the Egyptians
had seeded the earth with gods, and slowly, slowly, they were dispersing
throughout the world. Perhaps someday, when the right obelisk was installed in
the right cosmic vortex, who knew what long planned harmonic convergence might
ensue?