When Znarf Akfak awakened the first orange morning on Meta-4 everything around him seemed familiar and, for that reason, unsettling. He had no memory of how he had arrived at this particular location, but that was not unusual. Znarf was one of the more experienced agents in a little known department of the confederation bureaucracy called the Office of Peripheral Anomalies. The appropriation which supported it did not even appear openly in the budget of the confederation. A different line with a different bland title concealed it each quadrennium. As part of his work, which had no specified value either to himself or to others, Znarf travelled often by the method of transcendental displacement. When you went this way, there was no retracing your steps. Even if you were convinced that you had made your journey in a distinct sequence, it could be demonstrated that your account suffered from all sorts of gaps, peculiar shadings and even glaring contradictions. All who travelled by transcendental displacement developed a taste for trying to give an account of how they had reached their destinations. The question had been investigated with customary thoroughness by the Office of Central Anomalies, which had concluded that these testimonials of the travellers themselves were no more reliable than any other data concerning the peculiar method. Although the matter had not been resolved once and for all, it did seem to be the case that it was of the essence of the method that no complete and consistent account of its workings could be given. One intriguing correlation had emerged from the longitudinal study by the Office of... read more
This is a story of the far-off Kingdom of Para. Few people from Africa, Europe or the Americas have ever visited Para, for it is located in a wild mountainous region at the base of the towering Himalayas. There are no roads into the country. In order to reach even the capital city, one must march for three weeks along narrow paths winding through dark jungles of dense bamboo. These jungles are among the most beautiful in the world, but they are the domain of the wily and cruel leopard, and he is jealous of intruders. Because it is so hard to get to, Para receives few visitors. There is nothing to disturb the peaceful, isolated life of the Paraese. Although their forefathers were fierce warriors, the people of Para no longer remember their ways. The last Paraese maker of poisoned arrows and lances died over a century ago, poor and unhonored, without even a son to follow him in his craft. The events of our story took place long ago, soon after the fierce forefathers of the Paraese, driven from the South by even fiercer warriors, had come to settle in the fertile valley of Xhatmand, at the base of the great Gauri Shankar glacier. By now, they have long since been forgotten. When they took place, during the sixth year of the reign of Ahir Gupta, one of the strongest and wisest of Paraese kings, Rana Doti was a young herd boy. Each morning, after he drank his bowl of curd, he would gather his father’s flock of sheep and goats together and climb with them to... read more
She went up early, three weeks before the solstice. She sat in the green Adirondack chair on the front lawn. She wrestled it forward until it was just three or four yards back from the staircase that led down to the dock. She did this herself even though it was very hard for her. She went out to sit in it after the morning fog had lifted, so that she could look out on the ocean and track with her eyes how it shifted between blues and grays, mingled them and then veered off in one direction or another, towards spangled bright or towards a more solemn sullen uniformity of dull. She may have been in pain sitting there, but the pain had become such a constant companion that she wasn’t always aware of it. Sometimes when it dimmed, she was surprised to notice that she missed it. She knew that she didn’t have that much time left. It wasn’t about measuring it. She just knew it, but didn’t tell anyone. What would be the point of telling them, anyway? This was personal. It was private. It was the last intimacy that she had with herself within herself. When you hurt for a long time, you started to see yourself as nothing more or less than a peculiar illusion. She thought of her rages and her lusts, of the different bodies she had worn, of the bodies that had come forth from hers. Her four children bobbed on the water like buoys. They were no different than the other buoys that marked anchorages in the harbor. She found herself... read more
Pascal was five that summer, a demiurge of childhood, unconscious of the life and beauty that brimmed over in him and spilled on everyone who came near, causing each one to smile his or her own smile, compound of memory and desire, of impudent hopes and impossible regrets, as if the most delicate issues in the past were still undecided, waiting for the movement that would release them. He had a dimpled smile that came easily and quick deep blue eyes that held no shame.He was rarely still. Nothing seemed to offend him. I was not quite four times his age, young, too, although I felt very old then, as if I carried great weights whose names I did not know on my back and had no hope of putting them down, as I could hardly tell them apart from myself. I have lost so much of what weighed on me and feel the poorer for it, for freedom can impoverish, rob us of definition, even of aspiration. I am sixty-one years old, a solid citizen who still retains an imagination and a feeling that he is subversive even as everything around him subverts him just as it sustains him. In my mind Pascal remains forever five. Suppose he is still alive and forty-five -years old. Inconceivable. Suppose he is dead. Also inconceivable. He lives in my mind and remains five years old. But there is another possibility. Suppose he is alive and a father or even a grandfather and from him or from one who has come from him there has sprung another little boy, another Pascal, not... read more
I had already reached the age when a man is tempted to try to tell himself the story of his life, as if it made sense, as if his life were a story, as if a path with footprints could be traced through the forest of his years. I had made an attempt to turn into a detective, one whose unreliable witness I was myself. I had discovered within myself a principle of uncertainty. The detective’s questions disturbed the witness, so the witness shifted ground. He became someone else, not wholly new, but yet not the same. This change elicited more questions from the detective who could not help himself in seeking clarity. He wanted to know what had happened and how it had happened and why it had happened. This was the form that his greed took. If this detective suspected he was driving clarity away by the very act of seeking it, the suspicion was only a fleeting one that soon leapt the perimeter of consciousness and was gone back into the wilderness, its natural habitat. The call came early in the morning as I was having my first cup of coffee, as I was half reading the newspaper, half excoriating myself for this reading of the newspaper, tantalizing habit of a lifetime. I was thinking for the one thousandth time, or perhaps the ten thousandth time that I had never seen a situation with which I was acquainted in depth reported accurately in the newspaper. Was the newspaper fact or jive, or both in one? “Is this Felix Bonarien to whom I am speaking?” The voice... read more
