Messiah (33 page)

"It would be a temptation to the others," she said. I remember that one sentence and I do remember the appearance of the garden though its location I have quite forgotten: there was a high wall all around it and the smell of moldering leaves was acrid. From the mouth of a satyr no water fell in a mossy pool.

Ah yes! the question and the answer. That's it of course. The key. I had nearly lost it. Before I left, I asked her what it was that Cave had said to her when he was dying, the words the rest of us had not heard. At first she hesitated but then, secure in her power and confident of her own course, she told me: "He said: 'Gene was right.'" I remember looking at her with shock, waiting for her to continue, to make some apology for the monstrousness of her deeds, for her reckless falsification of Cave's life and death. But she said no more: there was, I suppose, no explanation she might have made. We parted without farewells, without more words.

I left the gray garden which had become bitter cold during our conversation. I left America that same day and my real life ended.

There's more to it than this but I cannot get it straight in my mind. Something has happened to my memory. I wonder if perhaps I have not dreamed all this: a long nightmare drawing to its bitter close in this dry ruin of an older world.

It is late now. I still live though I am exhausted and indifferent to everything except that violent living sun whose morning light has just this moment begun to strike upon the western hills across the river: all that is left, all that ever was, the red fire.

I shall not take Cavesway even though I die in pain and confusion. Anubis must wait for me in the valley until the last and, even then, I shall struggle in his arms for I know now that life,
my
life was more valuable than I knew, more significant and virtuous than the other's was in her bleak victory.

Though my memory is going from me rapidly, the meaning is clear and unmistakable and I see the pattern whole at last, marked in giant strokes upon the air: I was he whom the world awaited. I was that figure, that messiah whose work might have been the world's delight, and liberation. But the villain death once more undid me and to
him
belongs the moment's triumph. Yet life continues, though I do not. Time bends upon itself. The morning breaks. Now I will stop for it is day.

1947 to November, 1953: Barrytown, N. Y.