Chimera (2 page)

“So entirely was he caught up in these problems, his work and life all had come to a standstill. He had taken leave of his friends, his family, and his post (he was a doctor of letters), and withdrawn to a lonely retreat in the marshes, which only the most devoted of his mistresses deigned to visit.

“ ‘My project,’ he told us, ‘is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I’ve been—where we’ve
all
been. There’s a kind of snail in the Maryland marshes—perhaps I invented him—that makes his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward the best available material for his shell; he carries his history on his back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he grows. That snail’s pace has become my pace—but I’m going in circles, following my own trail! I’ve quit reading and writing; I’ve lost track of who I am; my name’s just a jumble of letters; so’s the whole body of literature: strings of letters and empty spaces, like a code that I’ve lost the key to.’ He pushed those odd lenses up on the bridge of his nose with his thumb—a habit that made me giggle—and grinned. ‘Well,
almost
the whole body. Speaking of keys, I suspect that’s how I got here.’

“By way of answer to Sherry’s question then, whether he had sprung from her quill-pen or her words, he declared that his researches, like hers, had led him to an impasse; he felt that a treasure-house of new fiction lay vaguely under his hand, if he could find the key to it. Musing idly on this figure, he had added to the morass of notes he felt himself mired in, a sketch for a story about a man who comes somehow to realize that the key to the treasure he’s searching for
is
the treasure. Just exactly how so (and how the story might be told despite all the problems that beset him) he had no chance to consider, for the Instant he set on paper the words
The key to the treasure is the treasure,
he found himself with us—for how long, or to what end, or by what means, he had no idea, unless it was that of all the storytellers in the world, his very favorite was Scheherazade.

“ ‘Listen how I chatter on!’ he ended happily. ‘Do forgive me!’

“My sister, after some thought, ventured the opinion that the astonishing coincidence of her late reveries and his, which had led them as it were simultaneously to the same cryptic formulation, must have something to do with his translation to her library. She looked forward, she said, to experimenting whether a reverse translation could be managed, If the worst came to worst, to spirit me out of harm’s way; as for herself, she had no time or use for idle flights of fancy, however curious, from the gynocide that was ravaging her country: remarkable as it was, she saw no more relevance to her problems than to his in this bit of magic.

“ ‘But we know the answer’s right here in our hands!’ the Genie exclaimed. ‘We’re both storytellers: you must sense as strongly as I that it has something to do with the key to the treasure’s being the treasure.’

“My sister’s nostrils narrowed. ‘Twice you’ve called me a storyteller,’ she said; ‘yet I’ve never told a story in my life except to Dunyazade, and her bedtime stories were the ones that everybody tells. The only tale I’ve ever invented myself was this key-to-the-treasure one just now, which I scarcely understand…’

“ ‘Good lord!’ the Genie cried. ‘Do you mean to say that you haven’t even
started
your thousand and one nights yet?’

“Sherry shook her head grimly. ‘The only thousand nights I know of is the time our pig of a king has been killing the virgin daughters of the Moslems.’

“Our bespectacled visitor then grew so exhilarated that for some time he couldn’t speak at all. Presently he seized my sister’s hand and dumbfounded us both by declaring his lifelong adoration of her, a declaration that brought blushes to our cheeks. Years ago, he said, when he’d been a penniless student pushing book-carts through the library-stacks of his university to help pay for his education, he contracted a passion for Scheherazade upon first reading the tales she beguiled King Shahryar with, and had sustained that passion so powerfully ever since that his love affairs with other, ‘real’ women seemed to him by comparison unreal, his two-decade marriage but a prolonged infidelity to her, his own fictions were mimicries, pallid counterfeits of the authentic treasure of her
Thousand and One Nights.

“ ‘Beguiled the King with!’ Sherry said. ‘I’ve thought of that! Daddy believes that Shahryar would really like to quit what he’s doing before the country falls apart, but needs an excuse to break his vow without losing face with his younger brother. I’d considered letting him make love to me and then telling him exciting stories, which I’d leave unfinished from one night to the next till he’d come to know me too well to kill me. I even thought of slipping in stories about kings who’d suffered worse hardships than he and his brother without turning vindictive; or lovers who weren’t unfaithful; or husbands who loved their wives more than themselves. But it’s too fanciful! Who knows which stories would work? Especially in those first few nights! I can see him sparing me for a day or two, maybe, out of relief; but then he’d react against his lapse and go back to his old policy. I gave the idea up.’

“The Genie smiled; even
I
saw what he was thinking. ‘But you say you’ve read the book!’ Sherry exclaimed. ‘Then you must remember what stories are in it, and in which order!’

“ ‘I don’t have to remember,’ said the Genie. ‘In all the years I’ve been writing stories, your book has never been off my worktable. I’ve made use of it a thousand times, if only by just seeing it there.’

“Sherry asked him then whether he himself had perhaps invented the stories she allegedly told, or would tell. ‘How could I?’ he laughed. ‘I won’t be born for a dozen centuries yet! You didn’t invent them either, for that matter; they’re those ancient ones you spoke of, that “everybody tells”: Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves…’

“ ‘What others?’ Sherry cried. ‘In which order? I don’t even
know
the Ali Baba story! Do you have the book with you? I’ll give you everything I have for it!’

“The Genie replied that inasmuch as he’d been holding her book in his hand and thinking about her when he’d written the magic words, and it had not been translated to her library along with him, he inferred that he could not present her with a copy even if the magic were repeatable. He did however remember clearly what he called the frame-story: how Shahryar’s young brother Shah Zaman had discovered his bride’s adulteries, killed her, abandoned the kingdom of Samarkand, and come to live with Shahryar in the Islands of India and China; how, discovering that Shahryar’s wife was equally unfaithful, the brothers had retreated to the wilderness, encountered the ifrit and the maiden, concluded that all women are deceivers, and returned to their respective kingdoms, vowing to deflower a virgin every night and kill her in the morning; how the Vizier’s daughter Scheherazade, to end this massacre, had volunteered herself, much against her father’s wishes, and with the aid of her sister Dunyazade—who at the crucial moment between sex and sleep asked for a story, and fed the King’s suspense by interrupting the tale at daybreak, just before the climax—stayed Shahryar’s hand long enough to win his heart, restore his senses, and save the country from ruin.

“I hugged my sister and begged her to let me help her in just that way. She shook her head: ‘Only this Genie has read the stories I’m supposed to tell, and he doesn’t remember them. What’s more, he’s fading already. If the key to the treasure is the treasure, we don’t have it in our hands yet.’

“He had indeed begun fading away, almost disappeared; but as soon as Sherry repeated the magic sentence he came back clearly, smiling more eagerly than before, and declared he’d been thinking the same words at the same moment, just as
we’d
begun to fade and his writing-room to reappear about him. Apparently, then, he and Sherry could conjure the phenomenon at will by imagining simultaneously that the key to the treasure was the treasure: they were, presumably, the only two people in the history of the world who had imagined it. What’s more, in that instant when he’d waked, as it were, to find himself back in the marshes of
America,
he’d been able to glance at the open table of contents of Volume One of the
Thousand and One Nights
book and determine that the first story after the frame-story was a compound tale called ‘The Merchant and the Genie’—in which, if he remembered correctly, an outraged ifrit delays the death of an innocent merchant until certain sheiks have told their stories.

“Scheherazade thanked him, made a note of the title, and gravely put down her pen. ‘You have it in your power to save my sisters and my country,’ she said, ‘and the King too, before his madness destroys him. All you need to do is supply me from the future with these stories of the past. But perhaps at bottom you share the King’s feelings about women.’

“ ‘Not at all!’ the Genie said warmly. ‘If the key trick really works, I’ll be honored to tell your stories to you. All we need to do is agree on a time of day to write the magic words together.’

“I clapped my hands—but Sherry’s expression was still cool. ‘You’re a man,’ she said; ‘I imagine you expect what every man expects who has the key to any treasure a woman needs. In the nature of the case, I have to let Shahryar take me first; after that I’ll cuckold him with you every day at sunset if you’ll tell me the story for the night to come. Is that satisfactory?’

“I feared he’d take offense, but he only shook his head. Out of his old love for her, he gently declared, and his gratitude for the profoundest image he knew of the storyteller’s situation, he would be pleased beyond words to play any role whatever in Scheherazade’s story, without dreaming of further reward. His
own
policy, moreover, which he had lived by for many nights more than a thousand, was to share beds with no woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. Finally, his new young mistress, to whom he had been drawn by certain resemblances to Scheherazade—delighted him utterly, as he hoped he did her; he was no more tempted to infidelity than to incest or pederasty. His adoration of Scheherazade was as strong as ever—even stronger now that he’d met her in the lovely flesh—but it was not possessive; he desired her only as the old Greek poets their Muse, as a source of inspiration.

“Sherry tapped and riddled with her quill. ‘I don’t know these poets you speak of,’ she said sharply. ‘Here in our country, love isn’t so exclusive as all that. When I think of Shahryar’s harem-full of concubines on the one hand, and the way his wife got even with him on the other, and the plots of most of the stories I know—especially the ones about older men with young mistresses—I can’t help wondering whether you’re not being a bit naïve, to put it kindly. Especially as I gather you’ve suffered your share of deceit in the past, and no doubt done your share of deceiving. Even so, it’s a refreshing surprise, if a bit of a put-down, that you’re not interested in taking sexual advantage of your position. Are you a eunuch?’

“I blushed again, but the Genie assured us, still unoffended, that he was normally equipped, and that his surpassing love for his young lady, while perhaps invincibly innocent, was not naïve. His experience of love gone sour only made him treasure more highly the notion of a love that time would season and improve; no sight on earth more pleased his heart, annealed as it was by his own passions and defeats, than that rare one of two white-haired spouses who still cherished each other and their life together. If love died, it died; while it lived, let it live forever, et cetera. Some fictions, he asserted, were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them real. The only Baghdad was the Baghdad of the
Nights,
where carpets flew and genies sprang from magic words; he was ours to command as one of those, and without price. Should one appear to
him
and offer him three wishes, he’d be unable to summon more than two, inasmuch as his first—to have live converse with the storyteller he’d loved best and longest—had already been granted.

“Sherry smiled now and asked him what would be the other two wishes. The second, he replied, would be that he might die before his young friend and he ceased to treasure each other as they did currently in their saltmarsh retreat. The third (what presently stood alone between him and entire contentment) would be that he would not die without adding some artful trinket or two, however small, to the general treasury of civilized delights, to which no keys were needed beyond goodwill, attention, and a moderately cultivated sensibility: he meant the treasure of art, which if it could not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying, at least sustained, refreshed, expanded, ennobled, and enriched our spirits along the painful way. Such of his scribblings as were already in print he did not presume to have that grace; should he die before he woke from his present sweet dream of Scheherazade, this third wish would go unfulfilled. But even if neither of these last was ever granted (and surely such boons were rare as treasure keys), he would die happier to have had the first.

“Hearing this, Sherry at last put by her reserve, took the stranger’s writing-hand in her own, apologized for her discourtesy, and repeated her invitation, this time warmly: if he would supply her with enough of her stories to reach her goal, she was his in secret whenever he wished after her maiden night with Shahryar. Or (if deception truly had no more savor for him), when the slaughter of her sisters had ceased, let him spirit her somehow to his place and time, and she’d be his slave and concubine forever—assuming, as one was after all realistically obliged to assume, that he and his current love would by then have wearied of each other.

“The Genie laughed and kissed her hand. ‘No slaves; no concubines. And my friend and I intend to love each other forever.’

“ ‘That will be a greater wonder than all of Sinbad’s together,’ Sherry said. ‘I pray it may happen, Genie, and your third wish be granted too. For all one knows, you may already have done what you hope to do: time will tell. But if Dunyazade and I can find any way at all to help you with
your
tales-to-come in return for the ones you’ve pledged to us—and you may be sure we’ll search for such a way as steadfastly as we’ve searched for a way to save our sex—we’ll do it though we die for it.’