Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

There is still no good explanation as to why a man who sprang from a people who loved silence above everything should suddenly come out of his commodious closet and reveal himself. The intelligence community, like the literary, remains divided on the issue; professors and spooks competing as usual for the lowest esteem of their fellow citizens, as they trawl literature for moral fishies.

Devotees of economic man speculated that his cash flow was cut off. The psychological fraternity inferred that he experienced a crise de conscience. The Third Estate believed the book to be a hedge against betrayal by his sources. And literary folk worried about his intentions, only to dismiss them as irrelevant. Their methods leave no leeway for a personality who remains a mystery but who was also unafraid of any ethical test. Some have said he was a greater man than a writer. Well, who isn’t?

But certainly he was not giving himself up or away. Only an American could believe in that sort of historical resolution. Pzalmanazar passed messages as most of us mere mortals pass water. And whatever we found of his, we “intercepted” it when he wanted us to.

I believed, in short, that the release of his papers was meant to mark the historical top in the snooze of the all-powerful. If Iulus was now fully awake, would it be long before, at long last, reality would step forward in America, all the contracts redrawn, and incredibility be recognized? It was time to cash out. Cannonia had a tryst with Destiny and her girlfriend Fate. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps and America comes into its tenth generation, Cannonia will wake to life and freedom.

So when the Company asked me to prepare a final digest, reduce his ten-thousand page opus to a bland four-page summary, I saw that any appreciation of Pzalmanazar imperiled simplification as well as my station. The sophistication of his observations simply could not be paraphrased. A memoir without hindsight? A meditation on the inherent wildness of history? A novel for people who hate novels?

It was finally conceded that the only man we could hire capable of tracking him down was himself. . and his code name was changed to “Lost King.” (None could spell or pronounce “Iulus” anyway.) It was as if our two selves were rushing to meet across history, but as I closed the distance and reached out my hand, I saw that he had been walking away from me backward the entire time. The best I could do was put real people into situations that probably did not exist, which after all is what history is all about. And so I reluctantly ran this summary up their flagpole:

Fellow Colleagues:

Even our disenchantment has definite limits. The mystery is not that the

documents in question offer knowledge which is largely unknown. The

mystery is that there is no knowledge to be known about them.

That snake in their lunchbucket cost me plenty. Having been routinely told to forget everything I learned, I resolved now to earn my pay by garrulating elaborately on what I had formerly denied I knew. But Iulus the author, if not the agent, was soon forgotten, and I, supposedly so severe and disinterested, controlled the files.

Don’t get the wrong idea, but yes, Traveler, I fell for him.

Much of the next month was spent in expeditions to gather up Father’s manuscript. I climbed the tops of trees, Mother slashed her way with a saber through beargrass and thistlesage, platoons of hired hands were sent six abreast across the fields, while Catspaw and Öscar tracked with a pair of Chetvorah. The brambles dripped with our bloody dew.

Some pages were found floating on the stagnant face of the Mze, others plastered on the gnarled boles of great oaks, still others nailed like theses on a nest of thorns. The black velvet curtain in the study had been stripped of its quotes, the neat piles of manuscript scattered, the chess piece paperweights overturned. The vortex had even turned pictures to the wall. Clothesline was strung throughout the den, and every available paperclip and safety pin had been recruited to dangle dry the smeared pages. About a third of the manuscript appeared to be lost. For the first time in history, dogs were barred from his tower suite, and Father was in a low mood.

After one of these expeditions, our disconsolate crew was seated on the front stairs when a shabby closed carriage appeared through the lime trees at the end of the drive, driven by a not-so-excellent specimen of Skopje in a wide-brimmed hat, transporting a man dressed in tête de nègre and accompanied by what appeared to be two equally black bear cubs. Thinking it was perhaps a rich gypsy with his road show, Father reached in his pocket for the smallest change, then squinted in disbelief as the Professor and his charges hove into view.

No words were exchanged as the Professor dismounted and the black balls of fluff bounded out and immediately began to tear at each other’s throats on the gravel, a fight beyond anything witnessed in our animal world. They couldn’t have been more than six months old, their teeth and claws hardly more than cartilage, yet strings of blood and spittle flew in the air, and from a brief glimpse of the set of the jaws, Father recognized a fight to the death among embryos was ensuing, and that no human hand, no matter how courageous, could separate them. The Professor himself seemed paralyzed. Mother mobilized me — luckily enough, the garden hose had been laid out that morning across the drive like a mamba, and the jet of cold water broke the dogs’ rage, shocking them into a civilized stupor and leaving them sprawled in the gravel at a third of their former size, the soaked black fur settled about their still-soft skeletons. With almond eyes they regarded the gashes in each other’s throats.

“Sisters?” Father asked cheerfully, and the Professor nodded curtly. “Chows?” Father inquired..

“Chow chows,” the Professor adumbrated..

“Yours?”

“The Prinzessin’s royal stock — a gift. The very finest. I couldn’t be prouder.”

Father refused to touch the dogs or try to ingratiate himself in any way. He instructed Öscar to isolate them and dress their wounds.

Both men were still inwardly seething from the Professor’s proffer made and refused at the Black Dog, and Father curtly waved his confrere inside, apparently not wishing to lose control in front of the family.

The Count’s visit before the storm had, as always, been brief and to the point. Count Zich was the proudest man in Cannonia, his ancestors clan chieftains and margraves when the Hohenzollerns were still goatherds. He was greatly respected throughout the country not for his wealth, station, or political power, but because he was a world-class pianist who only performed for his friends at parties, never in public. He had just come from one performance, apparently, his stiff dress shirt protruding from his lintwhite duster, smelling of rockrose, veal, and lavender water. His still-dark hair was slicked back, but his sidechops were as white as his starched shirtcuffs. His soft boots were of the same yellow leather as the fringed harness of his grays. And his malacca cane was topped with the ivory figure of a defecating mountain goat. The Count’s immense composure relaxed everyone. He always took his seat facing east, where his ancestors had been kings. Ainoha lay on the chaise lounge in pantaloons à la turk , her long clay pipe nested between her breasts. Father was bolt upright in his favorite chair, smoking a straight pipe but letting it droop sideways from his mouth, as if it were curved. And even the dogs, feigning sleep, had their ears cocked for what was to come.

It seemed that the Count’s vast network of spies, whose main brief was to keep his friends out of trouble, had alerted him to certain delinquencies in the tax rolls of Semper Vero, and while Zich had covered these with his own funds, he thought it best to personally urge a sober retrenchment upon his camarade . As an afterthought, he mentioned the fact that as Europe and Asia had broken the peace, funds for a general mobilization might require some two thousand million imperials. And then as a second afterthought, he opened the monogrammed leather briefcase which never left his side, revealing a gold telegraph key, a small ivory composing keyboard of one and a half octaves, as well as a piano roll, and with incredible nonchalance, his beautiful, beringed hands tapped out a precautionary message in C-minor to the army (Caparison the horses, lower all border toll gates) with a coded variant to the king at Umfallo. Then, swearing everyone to secrecy, he confided the latest coup of his intelligence service, the shocking information that the Americans were about to outlaw drinking! this ominous news producing general incredulity.