Chimera (29 page)

But the very next night, while steering the steamboat numbly around the lake, he is vouchsafed, whether by Computer or by V. W. Beetle, an astounding insight. Mourning the loss of Merope, he remembers her comparison of the
NUMBERS
print-out to the primordial lawbook of her tribe: according to some commentators, this
Torah
was originally a chaos of scrambled letters, which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events described by those sentences came to pass. At the same time he idly notes that
notes
is an anagram for
stone
and vice-versa, and is thus (“by this mild
gematria”)
re-reminded of his former mistress. On the occasion of her reading out those thousands of narrative motifs for him to feed in enciphered form to Computer—quite as Polyeidus had fed the magic spells to Chimera—she had remarked: “Hey, they missed one: The Key to the Treasure. This fellow’s born into this family where all the men for centuries have worn themselves out looking for this particular Secret Treasure, okay? So when he grows up, instead of chasing all over the world like they did, he reads all the books in the library about Quests and stuff and decides that the Treasure’s probably somewhere in his own house—the Maeterlinck
L’Oiseau Bleu
thing, et cetera. That same night he dreams that there’s this big apartment of rooms right in his basement, that he’d never suspected, and for some reason or other, in the dream, this news doesn’t especially surprise him. When he wakes up he realizes that there isn’t any such apartment, but there
is
an old toolshed or storage closet down there that he’s never looked into, because the door’s all blocked with piles of junk left by his ancestors, and he’s absolutely certain that’s where the Treasure must be. So with no sweat at all he gets further than the others did after years of adventures and dangers and such. But to locate the Treasure’s one thing; to get it’s something else: when he clears the junk away he finds the door locked like a bank vault. The lock’s not jammed or rusty—in fact it’s very well lubricated—but it positively can’t be opened without the key, even by the best locksmith around. So he ends up having to search all over the world after all, right? But for the key instead of the treasure. He goes through the usual riddles and battles and monsters and clues and false trails and stuff and finally rescues this princess et cetera, and on their wedding night she finds this real pretty key in his own pants pocket. She thinks they ought to let it go at that, but he leaves her, rushes back to his own country and his old house, dashes down to the basement, unlocks the door, and finds the closet empty. Once he’s left the girl and her country he can’t go back, I forget why, so he throws the key away in despair and lives the rest of his life as a sour old hermit. On his deathbed, thinking about his adventures and his lost girlfriend and all, he sees that the Key to the Treasure
was
the Treasure, et cetera. It’s a piece of male chauvinist phallus-worship, but not a bad story.” At once, on his remembering this tale, everything is illumined for Bray in a series of flashes “like the fireworks reflected in Chautauqua Lake”: not
NUMBERS
but
NOTES
is his novel’s true title; 5, not 7, is its correct numerical base; what he’d thought a fiasco was the proper culmination of the first three-fifths of the project: a Five-Year Plan, so he realizes now, at whose
“Phi-point”
he presently stands
(“NOT
is to
ES
as
NOTES
is to
NOT”).
Those reams of random letters are a monstrous anagram for the Revolutionary Novel, to unscramble which will require no more than the “reprogramming” of Computer with these new insights.

To test his theory he feeds it a simple impromptu list of “fives”: the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and “Dr. Eliot’s shelf of classics,” the tones (Computer hiccoughed happily at this word) of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of “China,” the bloods of “Ireland,” the nations of “Iroquois” and divisions of “the British Empire,” the aforementioned Pentateuch, the days of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus’s last voyage, the stories framed by “Scheherazade’s
Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,”
the letters of the word
novel
(three-fifths of which et cetera), and a few non-serial odds and ends such as
quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet,
and
E-string.
These are as nothing beside the hundred-odd “sevens” already in the machine; yet with that meager priming, valiant Computer belches forth two remarkable observations: On the one hand, inasmuch as “character,” “plot,” and for that matter “content,” “subject,” and “meaning,” are attributes of particular novels, the Revolutionary Novel
NOTES
is to dispense with all of them in order to transcend the limitations of particularity; like the coded
NUMBERS
it will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes. Language itself it will perhaps eschew (in favor of what, is not clear). On the other hand, at its
“Phi-point”
(“point six one eight et cetera of the total length, as the navel is of the total height of human women”) there is to occur a single anecdote, a perfect model-of a text-within-the-text, a microcosm or paradigm of the work as a whole: not (what I anticipated) the “Key to the Treasure” story, but (what fetched me bolt upright in the Spartina alterniflora) “a history of the Greek mythic hero Bellerophon; his attempt to fly on Pegasus to Olympus like Apollo’s crew to the Moon; his sting; his free downfall to Earth like ditto’s to the
U.S.S. Hornet;
his wandering alone in the marsh, far from the paths of men, devouring his own Reset.”

Never mind that the events in this “quintessential fiction,” as Bray called it, were out of order and somewhat fanciful, like those in the lecture-scroll synopsis; they bespoke the presence of Polyeidus, Polyeidus, whose name I called and recalled, without effect. All his original conviction restored, Jerome Bonaparte Bray heroically concludes his appeal to the Executive Secretary of the Tidewater Foundation with a prospectus of the task ahead: In Year
E
(#1974/5), assuming the Foundation renews its support, he will reconstruct and reprogram Computer to compose
Bellerophoniad,
which he now describes as “that exquisite stain on the pure nothingness of
NOTES;
the crucial flaw which perfects my imitation of that imperfect genre the novel, as the artful Schizura unicornis larva mimes not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and insect-bitten truth of real hickory leaves.” In Year
S,
Computer will make the final print-out of the complete novel; the Second American Revolution will ensue at once upon its publication, and, like the First, trigger others, this time everywhere; J. B. Bray and H. Mack II will reassume their rightful names and thrones—the monarchies at first of France and England respectively, but eventually the emperorships of West and East; all existing stocks of DDT, pyrethrin, rotenone, and similar barbarous poisons will be destroyed, their manufacture prohibited forever; and the world will be restored to a New Golden Age.

I shivered with sympathy for the vision, loftier than my own in its redemption, not of a man, but of mankind—and for pity of the poor misfortunate visionary, his dreams struck down by a hand-scrawled cover-note to the application as lightly as the humming marsh-gnats I swatted with it:

There was no aiding J. B. B. (as I thought then) across the eons—though he, perhaps, had aided me. Sadly I reposted Bray’s prospectus on the tide and spent the buggy night considering my own history and objectives. In the morning, impatient for the next high tide to bring its message, I strolled the beach, sun-dried, sea-salted, and skipped shells across the water. When I rereached my starting point I found in the wrack along the high-tide line where sandfleas jumped not my familiar jug but, amazingly, a clear glass bottle, unlike any I’d ever seen, wreathed in eelgrass full of sand and tiny mussels. Around the outside, in letters raised in the glass itself, a cryptic message:
NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN;
inside, a folded paper. Trembling, I removed the cap and tipped the bottle down; the note wouldn’t pass through the neck. I cast about for a straight twig and fished in the bottle with it, grunting at each near-catch.

“For pity’s sake bust it!” cried a small voice from inside. Seizing the neck, I banged the bottle on a mossed and barnacled rock. Not hard enough. My face perspired. On the third swing the glass smashed and the note fell out: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, folded thrice. On its top line, when I uncreased it, I found penned in deep red ink:

On the next-to-bottom:

The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, ink spread from the letters in fibrous blots. Heartsick, I flung the blank paper down—whereupon it turned at once into a repellent little person, oddly dressed, with a sty in his eye and a smell of urine and stale cakes.

“I swear,” Polyeidus said, surveying himself with a sniff: “I tried your cousin Perseus—thought it would be appropriate? And look what I end up. I should stick to letters. How are things? Never mind; I know.”

“My life’s a failure,” I told him matter-of-factly. “I’m not a mythic hero. I never will be. I’m forty years old already. I’m going to die and be forgotten, like the rest.”

“Like your brother?”

“Never mind that. How do I get to be immortal fast?”

Polyeidus squinted. “You sure you trust me? Your wife seemed to think I was out to get you last time around.”

“Maybe you were. But you didn’t.”

“Why should I go on helping you whenever you get stuck? You think it’s been fun being Old Man of the Marsh all these years?” He swatted his arm. “Goddamn mosquitoes. And seafood makes me break out.”

“Evidently you had no choice,” I replied. “Zeus stuck you with the job, right? So it’s to your interest to get me constellated like Perseus. Who remembers the helper if the hero doesn’t make it?”

“Skip the arguments,” Polyeidus said. “I already know how the story ends.”

I pressed him urgently for that knowledge.

“Never mind. In this part I advise you, that’s enough. You want to be a mythic hero, you follow the Pattern. You want to follow the Pattern, you leave town in the Fourth Quadrant, et cetera. You want to leave town and do the second-cycle thing like Perseus, you got to get Pegasus off the ground. You want Pegasus to fly like before, you’re wasting your time with me and Athene.” Whether I knew it or not, he declared, riding the winged horse had always involved the goodwill of two goddesses, not one, manifested in the beneficences appropriate to each. Athene’s bridle was what reined him in and steered him; but what put him in the sky was Aphrodite’s sacred herb.

“Hippomanes!”

“What else? As a young man you didn’t need to think of that; what you had to go looking for was the bridle. Now you’re all bridle and no hip, and believe me, at your age it’s not easy to find.”

How so? Didn’t it grow by full moonlight at the lip of Aphrodite’s well, et cetera?

Polyeidus winked. “Those were the days, eh?”

In the Stygian marsh, then, where Perseus had got his gear? Ought I to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to—

“Reset. Don’t be naïve; it’s right
under
your nose—which doesn’t mean you’ll sniff it.”

I scrabbled in the reeds and rushes.

“O boy,” Polyeidus said. “I tell you what: forget about revisiting the places where you did your tricks, okay? This isn’t the
Perseid.
Instead, look up all the women you’ve ever loved, in order; that’s the sort of thing Aphrodite goes for. Somewhere along the line you’ll come across the big H. I envy you. When you get the pattern, stick to it. See you in heaven.”

I had more to ask: Once refueled, where ought Pegasus and I to fly? Assuming Corinth to be my first searching-place, ought Philonoë to accompany me there, or should I avoid her until her turn came in the series? For that matter, how many women comprised the series, and which ones? I could think offhand of only two—his daughter Sibyl and my wife—for whom I’d felt a considerable degree of passion for any length of time; but there were others—the Amazon lance corporal, for example—who had attracted me powerfully for a short while, and still others with whom I’d disported for an hour or a weekend. Which counted? But Polyeidus was transformed already from that nasty-looking little person to the precious Pattern—

—which I snatched from the mudflat, folded in the manner of the water-message, and fetched home.

“All aboard,” I said to Philonoë, and lining up our children and cabinet ministers on the dock, declared: “No telling when or whether we’ll be back. Here’s my wedding ring, Laodamia: hang it on a string around your neck. If you boys should start to quarreling over which should usurp the kingdom in my absence, settle the question by seeing who can shoot an arrow through this ring. Heh heh. Got that, ministers?”