Chapter 1
Beneath a stone archway two devils in footman’s coats were kissing, and their reflections shivered gently in the canal below. One’s hair was cut very short, the other had a long, pale neck, and both were blue where their skin showed in the very early morning light. A flock of silent birds went overhead, their flapping wings the sound of running feet on rock. Icy air like cold and rounded river stones collided in the chest at every breath, an anchor held aweigh by night and knocking on the planks to wake the sailors from whatever soundness sleep for them could muster, lost the same at sea or shore, at sail or stilled, the same, that beckoning knock demanding in the calm of night the final gift be given. Such frozen air to pause the blood. A morning made by God for men to die in bed of failures of the heart and lungs. For quiet death. For men to mildly die of too-long life, forgiven or forsaken, their final sighs drawn from the depths of the well first struck by a birthing shriek and emptied then, with that last strength, resounding in the minds of watchers-on who hear that straining gasp and know the day will come for them the same, the same. Full of fear or fearless still the same.
Henry Clay thought so to himself as the day lightened, as he stood at the middle of a short stone bridge. He had been standing there, watching the devils kiss and seeing it with just his eyes, since the canal had been a pit of ink and the homes through which it ran a flimsy raft bestrewn with emblems to assert the strength of life aboard. Clay was not a man so given to despair that he felt himself the endurer of a burdening wisdom, nor, in fact, did he regard himself a very brave man at all. But at such a time of day, when lonesomeness presents itself not as a fact or as a weight, but presents itself to simply say I am, and here you are, as well, and what’s more here is all the rest of everything, and what do you make of that? he is a fool who pretends he is distracted from its voice by something else more urgent, and so it is not bravery that binds a man to this, but something more alike humility. And so helpless Clay was bound, gazing at the kissing pair, and seeing in them something which there wasn’t to another eye than his, as in the blue dawn becoming red they too became two costumed men, not devils, as the devil in them was banished by the quality of light.
His absent fingers brushed the coins inside his pocket and at this he glanced away to see the sweepers cleaning up the leavings from the carnival last night, the blown-up fireworks and paper bits a child’s wealth of taffeta and candy wrappers gleaming as the little winds that woke them from the brooms and bins in tiny lurching bursts dandled these expended treasures like a niece upon her uncle’s knee and made the cursing broom-men jump. A hoarse laugh came from Clay to see the dancing of the men; he quickly turned back to the archway, to not dishonor the thoughts that had mastered him there, but as the devils both had vanished so too both the men were gone, to wives or sleeping homes or both together, though whichever, they were gone, and gone with them, the spirits in the arch, the glimpse he’d had of something that had likewise been in him the same and now had been forgotten, returned to hidden kingdoms that it governed and returning him the powers he had lost. He felt now, with the absence of that mind that thought through him and used himself as its reflection to reflect its formlessness in form, the full nature of how powerless he’d been, how fragile, and that fact demanded action of him now, and so undestinied, he left, simply to depart the place of that tremendous mass.
As he went, he remembered a disease of which he’d learned that stole the minds of mice to make them easy prey for cats, in whose stomachs was the nicest home. The germ would mix two thoughts so mice confused the scent of cats and scent of sex to draw them near. A Hamelin plague to play the song of instinct incorrectly, wrong the sound and wrong the wretched meaning leading mice to dance the danse macabre and maketh them to lie down in green pastures.
Maketh the lambs to hunger for the lion, Clay wondered as he went. But it seemed too accidental of a thing to put the thought that way and make of God a piper to be paid.
Or steal the children if he never is, he thought, but still it seemed too big, he shook his head and tried to lay the thought aside, but the more he tried to leave it be the more insistent it became.
The buildings rose on either side like silent sphinxes. Even this, he shrieked in silence, Even this is grandiose and mocks itself and me by simply standing. Every thought is like a diamond, he said, and wrung a grimace at this accidental mystic piety. From any side its viewed it offers only partial glimpses; this facet in full and these others all in pieces. And then also the barely guessed-at vision of the other - unseen - end so poorly apprehended through the uncut heart. There’s no knowing it at once. And even gazed at long, it offers no completer knowledge. Each diamond is only poorly seen, the accumulation of a million impoverished glimpses and never one entire! and never one less incomplete than the last. And for the sake and on the strength of this or that more mutual glimpse, wars are fought by men who glimpsed it once and misbelieved a wholeness there. And then, too, these are wealth! Richer far the man who spends a life within a single shoddy stone to plumb it well than he who hoards and makes a flattering of gems a gilded mirror to reflect in every angle of those endless compound eyes a dazzling happy likeness. But death will take each one of them at once the same, and at his death that sparkling store will show his dread in multitudes, and amplified, and mock in him his fear with mindless glimmering faces; poor the death where rich the man, rich in thoughts or rocks; these fossil souls of some intestate heirless gods that died and left their puzzle in the earth! Whereby Man, usurping some primeval primogeniture has inherited the woe of thought, unresolved and irresolvable, looked upon but never through, a window in a lighted room out into a moonless night that can’t be pierced and only shows a shadow self gazing back upon the gazer. Insular and inescapable the room, the life, embellished with the runes of memory, idolatrous snake oil to soothe the pang of mystery. Small wonder then that man has set his stones in rings and crowns and scepters so to hide the dark forbidden side of these raw moons and think the side we see the whole affair and likewise sets the thoughts in armatures of state and church and study. (How lately did we think the spheres were coins!) And then - if this were not enough - even these are cut by men from their exhumed condition to better suit the image of a mystery! What thing is hidden from the eye inside a diamond is the same as what is hidden at the heart of every notion, the unattained thing that makes a vanity of sight and thought and life if it sought to fight the very mystery it is.
Exhausted by his fugue, arisen from the nameless place, the same that transforms fortune into torment by a sideways motion of the mind, Clay flung down his hands and stomping down the stairs into a basement bakery hung his coat upon a light-switch and plunged the little cellar into darkness. There came a shout of shocked outrage.
What’s the big idea?
Sorry, mumbled Clay, who took his coat and put the lights back on. As the lights came up slowly, he saw the fat baker, his side whiskers dusted with flour and streaks of wet dough decorating his burnt-brown forearms and though he did not want to, smiled helplessly.
Vandal! cried the baker, then also smiling, Wudde ya want then?
Breakfast? said Clay, brushing a thin topsoil of grainy salt and flour from a thick wooden cutting block in the corner, where a folding chair was set.
Hum! sniffed the baker, brushing his forearms with his hands and paling them completely. Still soused from the party, expect.
I don’t drink, said Clay, and felt his pockets, hearing the cheery clink of coins through the woolen.
Hum! luck for you then the damn drummer woke me up and the loaves baked early. Any louder and he’d’ve woke the loaves as well, the criminal, and I’d be robbed a living and a sleep. I prefer that sweet music you’re making there to a drummers din.
The baker was apparently very satisfied to have someone to talk to, and Clay didn’t mind, it kept his thoughts engaged. He smiled and shook his pockets again.
Ah! there’s the sound! What a magic creature, man, to fit such huge and pleasing bells in his trouser pockets to ring the morning. Matrimonial bells! Rolls and butter! milk and coffee.
It was hot as a smithy in the little cellar.
