Chimera (28 page)

Of this obscurely touching epistle, its several familiar names glinting from their dark context like those shepherds’ fires I’d seen on my first flight, I asked a few trial questions—Who am I? et cetera—and receiving no reply, sent it out with mixed feelings on the next tide. I hopefully presumed Polyeidus to be following a classic pattern himself, the pattern of graduated approach, as had Athene on my appeals to her (I mean Deliades’s and mine) and Iobates in the matter of opening Proetus’s letter; as three days had elapsed already of the five I’d bid Philonoë wait, I called after the departing amphora to please do its trick if possible in two more steps rather than, say, four, six, or eight. All that night I swatted bugs, studied stars, listened to my heart beat, wondered what a Bellerophonic prospectus was. My name, from endless repetition, lost its sense. Toward dawn a ship sailed by, unless I dreamed it. By and by the pot-red jug bobbed back, barnacled now and sea-grown as if from long voyaging, et cetera. I watched impassive till it fetched up at my feet, fished out its contents, the script in places run, et cetera.

Another blank. The sheaf of papers was more bulky than
Perseid
itself, but though my reading skill was by that time fair enough, and I pored and repored through them, I comprehended most imperfectly what they signified, and despite a number of tantalizing references, could make no use of of what I could make sense. Overall, the document seemed to set forth its author’s plan for completing a project that sometimes appeared to be a written work of some heroically unorthodox sort, at other times a political revolution; but interspersed with Bray’s description of the project, the history of its first three years, and his prospectus for its completion, were literary polemics, political diatribes, autobiographical anecdotes and complaints, threats to sue a certain fellow-author for plagiarism, and pages of charts, mathematical calculations, diagrams, and notes of every sort. The hero described himself as descended “originally” from Jerome Bonaparte (brother of that Emperor so recurrent in Polyeidus’s accidents) and a “Maryland” lady named Betsy Patterson to whom Jerome was briefly married; more immediately from a princess by the name of Ky-You-Ha-Ha Bray who claimed marriage “in the eyes of God and the Iroquois” to Charles Joseph Bonaparte, grandson of Jerome and Betsy, during his tenure as “U.S. Indian Commissioner under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902.” There being alive at the time of his writing no “bona-fide Bonapartes” more closely related to the original Napoleon (whose name and honeybee insignia, even whose identity, he seemed sometimes to assume, as in the previous letter), Bray regarded himself as legitimate heir to the throne of “France”—whence his sobriquet “J.B. the Pretender.” But for all his noble lineage, Bray’s fortunes had been adverse as my own: the impostor rulers of the country France ignored his claims; like Polyeidus he was reduced to teaching, in a post far humbler than my honorary one at the U. of L., and to writing out for public sale a kind of myths called
novels.
His political enemies conspired to prevent publication of at least two of these latter, entitled
The Seeker
and
The Amateur;
worse, when he was visited (as was I by Athene) by a kind of deity—a minor goat-god named Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker—and vouchsafed, not a winged horse, but a sacred scripture called
Revised New Syllabus,
publication of which should have made him immortal, those same enemies contrived to plagiarize it entire, bring it out under a name with the same initials as its true editor’s, and—most insulting of all—not only represent the
R.N.S.
as “fiction” but allege that Bray’s touching foreword, which they pirated verbatim, was also fictitious, the work of a hypothetical author!

Disillusioned, Bray resigned his instructorship and left his family to “become as a kindergartener again,” dedicating his energies to the solitary task of making a concordance to the writings of the goat-god George Giles, who is to our Pan as, say, Polyeidus to Proteus. Packing his few belongings into a sort of mechanical Pegasus named V. W. Beetle, he retreated to the Lilydale community of his letterhead, an entire polis of seers and sibyls; there he established himself in a sub-group called Remobilization Farm, supported by the eccentric Maryland millionaire Harrison Mack II, who either also was or at times fancied himself to be “George III, the mad monarch of England.” (Noting that Mack II, mad, imagined himself not as George III sane, but as George III mad who in
his
madness imagined himself Mack II sane, Bray uses our word
paradox.)
When the group, “dishonored as are all prophets in their own country,” later moved to “Canada,” Bray stayed on, supported in part by the conscience-stricken author who had basely lent his name to the plagiarism plot, in part by side-efforts of his own as goat-farmer, fudge-maker, and skipper of the Lake Chautauqua excursion boat
Gadfly,
but principally by George III via Mack II’s philanthropic organization, the Tidewater Foundation. As best I could make out, the Five-Year Plan for the ambiguous “Second Revolution” was conceived not by Bray directly but by a second ingenious machine, an automatic Polyeidus called Computer which Bray was using in his scholarly endeavors; it suggested to him one day that he might better vindicate himself to the world and attain his rightful place among its immortals by putting aside the tedious concordance in favor of a Revolutionary Novel—the “scientific fiction” aforementioned, which in Bray’s letters to Mack II, perhaps also in his own mind, was either confused with or had aspects of a Novel Revolution.

In “Year
N”
of the project (ciphered 1971/2), having “called [his] enemy [George III] to [his] aid,” Bray used the Tidewater Foundation grant to reconstruct his machine in such a way that, once a number of works by a particular author were fed into it, it could compose hypothetical new works in that author’s manner. The results of his first experiments were in themselves more or less inept parodies of the writings of the plagiarist aforementioned, upon whom Bray thus cleverly revenged himself: they bore such titles as
The End of the Road Continued; Sot-Weed Redivivus; Son of Giles, or, The Revised New Revised
New Syllabus
—in Bray’s own cryptic words, “novels which mimic the form of the novel, by an author who mimics the role of Reset”; but they demonstrated satisfactorily the machine’s potential. Most of the rest of the year Bray spent recuperating from a nervous disorder, the effect of a poisonous gas sprayed about the area by his enemies on the pretext of eliminating lake-flies; nevertheless he seems to have acquired a mistress—“a tough little Amazon” (how my heart leaped at that!) named Merope, whose initial distrust of him as a “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” must have been overcome by the revolutionary nature of his work and his ardor in such causes as “the fight against DDT”—and to have altered radically his conception of that work itself. For in the Year
O
(code #1972/3) he began programming his machine to compose, not hypothetical fictions, but the “Complete,” the “Final Fiction.” Into its maw (more voracious if less deadly than Chimera’s) he fed all the 50,000-odd entries in “Thompson’s
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature”
the entire stacks of Lilydale’s Marion Skidmore Library plus a reference work called
Masterplots,
elements of magical mathematics with such names as Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Series, and (I could not tell why; it seemed his mistress’s suggestion) a list of everything in the world that came in sevens. Thus equipped, the machine was to analyze the corpus of existing fiction as might an Aristotelian lepidopterist the existing varieties of butterfly, induce the perfect form from its “natural” approximations, and reduce that ideal to a mathematical model, preliminary to composing its verbal embodiment. Such was Bray’s genius, his machine began the year by producing such simple diagrams as this
schema
for the typical rise and fall of dramatic action—

—and ended it with such “perfected” alternatives as the “Right-Triangular Freitag”—

-and the “Golden-Triangular Freitag”—

—which prescribed exactly the relative proportions of exposition, rising action, and denouement, the precise location and pitch of complications and climaxes, the relation of internal to framing narratives, et cetera. Little wonder he describes himself as humming happily as the machine all summer, eager for the first trial print-out in the fall: I myself was as involved by this time in his quest as if it had been my own, and searched vainly, heart-in-mouth, among his technical appendices and catalogues to see whether they might include the Pattern for Heroes, which surely Polyeidus must have plagiarized from him—unless, as seemed ever less implausible, Computer itself was some future version of my seer.

But my disappointment was as nothing beside poor Bray’s, in Year
T,
“the midpoint of [his] life,” at that long-awaited print-out. The title, NUMBERS, bid fair enough: its seven capitals, ranged fore and aft of his central initial, reflected promisingly Bray’s mathematical preoccupations, his friend Merope’s own special contributions (two “ancient” literary-numerological traditions of her tribe, called
gematria
and
notarikon),
and “such literary precedents as the fourth book of the Pentateuch, held by the Kabbalists to have been originally a heptateuch, of which one book had disappeared entirely and another been reduced to two verses,
Numbers
10:35,36.” But alas, as he himself was obliged to acknowledge, he “had not got all the bugs out of [his] machine”; what followed was no masterwork but an alphabetical chaos, a mere prodigious jumble of letters! These quires of nonsense “shocked [Bray] numb”—another sense of the title? To make matters worse, that very evening, thinking to divert him, Merope took him into the parlor of a group of militant radical students drawn to Lilydale by rumors that it was the hot center of a grand revolutionary conspiracy. When at one point in the conversation they brandished spray-guns filled with a chemical with which they planned to “defoliate the Ivy League,” Bray in his distracted anguish mistook them for his poisonous enemies and “narrowly escaped” (this part of the narrative is unclear) by means of a horrifying disguise, a venomous barb with which he struck down and temporarily paralyzed “[his] beautiful betrayer,” and a mad flight on V. W. Beetle. Merope, upon her recovery, left him to join the revolutionaries in their obscure immediate project of “filling the office water-coolers of certain large corporations with Lake Erie water”; Bray, convinced now that she was responsible for the
NUMBERS
fiasco, sat for a long while despondent in the rains of his project—for which, shortly after, the Tidewater Foundation withdrew its support. He describes himself as “rudderless as a ship whose T has been crossed”; as “without weather”; as “stung.” “Christmas, bah!” he snarls at the celebrants of Lilydale’s principal religious festival; at Year
T
s end (“July 3, 1974”), in a startling allusion to Medusa, he surveys the debris of his grand ambitions and writes: “My scrambled notes are turned to stone.”