Steven Brust - Agyar

I feel the need to write something more before I go on my way, something that can go on top of this pile of papers, and the last shall be first, as someone or other said in a different context.

It has been several days since I’ve been up in this little room, and in that time spring has come on with a vengeance. There’s a little joke for you, lover. But I don’t feel much like laughing. Since I was here last, I read this-what? What shall I call it? Collection of typed pages, I suppose. I read it, and it did to me what I hadn’t thought could be done any more.

For the love of love, how many changes can take place in a person before it all becomes meaningless and there is nothing left but a sort of numbness? Is that where I am now? No. Just the opposite; it is more like pins and needles of the soul.

Hmmm. Not bad. Do you like that turn of phrase, lover?

Lover.

There is something ironic in the way I’ve been using that word, and that isn’t right. There is irony aplenty, but not there, and in writing to myself, and to you, I ought not to hide behind the pretense.

I don’t know why reading these papers has made such a difference, unless it’s just that I hadn’t known before what you were thinking and feeling all this time. I knew what you did; I didn’t know why, and that seems to matter, though it flies in the face of reason. Even a few days ago, when I was last in this room, I thought all of these emotions were dead, and now they are in my face, coexisting with a hungerlike pain.

But that, I suppose, is the answer. I cannot deny the hunger; I will not deny the feelings, either. Does it really matter what you feel when you do something? Does it somehow make a difference if you’re sorry when you go blasting your way over someone’s life like a locomotive over a papier-mache doll?

How about that one, my love?

Yes, I think it does matter. We do what we have to do, and if we learn regret, than that, too, matters, or so I now believe. I will take these papers with me, and I will also take those poems that are sitting in my room below, and I will leave, as planned, and live, as planned, and read this again. Maybe I’ll arrange it all nice and neat, divide it into chapters, and put quotes from Shakespeare or something in front of each, and send it off somewhere. Perhaps if I read it again I will understand it a little better, although, come to that, I didn’t enjoy reading it the first time; it reminded me more than anything of looking into a mirror when I was fifteen and bothered by acne.

Maybe that’s it; maybe I have acne in my soul.

I shouldn’t joke about it, because it really isn’t funny. I saw myself, and I didn’t like what I saw. Can I do anything about it?

I know that you did.

Everything has melted, and spring, with her warm breeze slipping through the boards over the window, has created her own metaphor; that of tears from the melting heart. Two days ago I could not have written that with a straight face, and now I cannot bring myself to laugh, and that is your fault. Did you know what you were doing when you put this here for me to read?

I asked if I could change, and now, twenty minutes later, the question seems absurd. I am changing whether I wish to or not.

As did you, my love, and I know whose fault that was.

May is the month of growth, of flowering, so now is as good a time as any to begin.

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It seems to be working. Jim mentioned that there was an old typewriting machine in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and I can’t resist trying it out. It seems to have been built in the 1930’s by Royal, and it’s amazing how well it works.

This is oddly enjoyable. What should I type?

When I was very young, I thought perhaps I would be a journalist, so I taught this skill to myself, and that first paragraph was enough to convince me that it is still there. I might enjoy sitting here from time to time and putting marks on paper, if I had anything to talk about. To be a journalist, I think, means to have an eye and a memory for detail. Yet my own memory is sufficiently idiosyncratic that I wonder if I would ever have been capable of creating a coherent article, even had my life gone in that direction. The things I remember seem to come in odd gasps, with a picture here, an emotion there, neither in order of importance nor in order chronological, except for the most recent of events.

I recall, for example, from the Christmas party last week, how Mrs. Lockwitt’s earring dangled against her neck and reflected light from a fixture of four frosted sixty-watt bulbs. This image is very clear, but things from even a few weeks ago are dim, in that I remember they happened, but could not supply the details.

I remember that Mrs. Lockwitt was saying something to me, but not looking at me as she spoke. I think she said, “There’s something foreign about the way you speak,” and then turned so that she was facing me. I took the opportunity to observe: slightly round, late forties, heavily powdered. She wore something peach colored that might have looked all right if we weren’t in a room where everything was blond wood. I couldn’t decide from her remark if she was beginning a conversational gambit or snubbing me, so I gave a brief tight-lipped smile of the sort Miss Manners would have approved of and didn’t say anything. She-Mrs. Lockwitt, not Miss Manners-turned back to studying Professor Carpenter’s library, filled as it was with books, oak furniture, and academicians in several flavors.

She said, “Have you been around here long?”

I started to say yes, reconsidered, reconsidered again, and said, “A few weeks. Maybe longer or shorter, depending upon what you mean by around here.”

There were thirty-five or forty graduate students and instructors in the house, about half in the library, the others divided between the living room where Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain was on the stereo and the kitchen where smoking was allowed. Three or four young students were studying the professor’s collection of books, the others were all talking with each other about the breakup of the Eastern Bloc or the imminence of war, or telling jokes that you had to be a third-year student of German literature to understand.

“But you are with the college?” said Mrs. Lockwitt.

I caught her eye, held it, and said, “You don’t look like an academic.”

“Oh, I’m not,” she said, blushing just a little. She was, as I knew already, the professor’s lover, and had probably paid for a third of the books in this room, as well as the bust of Voltaire and the Degas that was really very fine work for a print. Carpenter, head of the Modern Languages Department, was a bent stick of a bloodless Englishman, and I wondered how often the two of them had sex, and what it was like. You never know; maybe they made the walls rattle.

I was thinking about leaving. The boring but rather pretty girl named, hmm, whatever her name was, who had invited me to the party had already left, and, more important, I had confirmed what she’d told me-the professor owned a house not far from there which had never been rented. The girl (was it Rachel? Rebecca? something like that) had been trying to convince me of the existence of spirits, and claimed that the house was demon-infested, which is how the subject had come up.

Whether it was or not, I had already pumped Mrs. Lockwitt for the location, and she had confirmed that it was deserted, apparently because she had convinced “Arthur” to move in with her. She said nothing about demons. I don’t happen to believe in demons, so I wasn’t surprised. I had found what I wanted, though, and was ready to leave. I took a last look around.