Jesse Ball - The Way Through Doors

— Except that, said Piers Golp a bit ashamedly, there were no wars at the time, so I stayed home.

The guess artist and S. nodded in an understanding way.

— The first of these pamphlets appeared about two years ago, said Piers Golp. Then, about a year ago, new pamphlets began to appear with much greater frequency. Also, they were better printed, and displayed an obviously greater degree of attention and skill. About him I can hazard little, save that he is a young man of great leaps. He is very sly and is best pleased only when he surprises himself. I think that it is most certainly the case that the best artists are the best because they have in their hearts an infinite affection for the objects of the world.

In one of these pamphlets, The Foreknowledge of Grief, he plots out a rubric for creating a person to fall in love with.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one’s door. No, that is simply going out. That’s what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

So, one goes out into the world, and then one wanders about.

The querist goes out into the world, and wanders about. Perhaps the day is a pleasant one. It has rained while he was still sleeping, and this rain brought with it an attendant coolness that remained after the rain had gone north or east with the wind. The streets are fresh as though a blanket of snow has fallen. Each square of pavement has yet to be trodden upon. All the weight of past footsteps has been lifted. Through it the young man walks, looking up at the tops of buildings and into the boughs of trees. How often in our progress we forget to look up! And how much there is to see. A bird takes off from a branch and lands upon another. His eyes trail this bird, follow the branch, then follow the trunk of the tree back down to the ground. A dog there is running past just at that moment. His eyes perch atop the dog’s standing fur, and are shuttled back and forth along the street, far down and up to the dog’s mistress, who, in a loose pair of trousers and a light jacket, is returning from a morning promenade. Her hair is unkempt and in a morning disarray. Her face is flushed with the pleasure of the day. The young man has approached her with his eyes, in the company of her dog, but he will go no farther himself. She and the dog move off through the streets, and the young man continues.

He remembers that the pleasure he has in morning comes in part from a time in childhood when he would leave school and wander through the quieted town. Shaded streets were lined with silent houses. The beds of lawns cried out to be lain in. And how then he would go up to the old cemetery on Cedar Hill and lie in the cool space between the graves and sleep while all around him was still, and while, to his great happiness and enduring pleasure, his fellow pupils were seated in rows in a classroom, learning lessons.

In the city too there is a girl. She is the appropriate girl. But she is still sleeping, having refused sleep for the better of the night, having gone along a path of streetlights until the streetlights themselves went out, and the paling horizon ushered her up to her door and into her small room.

It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come upon her, and know her in an instant for who she is.

He pauses sometimes in the rooms that he keeps, looking over the equipment of his chosen profession, the printing press, the lithograph machine, the rolls of butcher paper, and endless space of desks and typewriters. He looks at the stacks of pamphlets he has made that are piled in corners and pinned upon the wall. And he thinks and knows in his heart that there is one glorious pamphlet waiting yet to be made. He calls this pamphlet by its name, World’s Fair 7 June 1978, and he longs for its arrival. Somehow he knows it is tied to the girl he cannot find.

Oh, the World’s Fair. What wonders will fill its pages? He makes notes towards its construction, building in his head and upon the page schematics of impossible architecture, pathways that stretch out across water, preserving in themselves a flatness of the earth to oppose every roundness, or a house in which all sound is diverted and played both upon and with, moved here and there, at distance and closeness, words sometimes amplified, sometimes dampened, and phrases cast upon precise winds, both proscribed and known.

He ponders interviews with artists who were never born, who say things he himself would like to say. These persons, beginning with a perfect biography, an inexplicable and wondrous origin, go on to thunder out the objects of his own hope. Oh, the World’s Fair. If there is an affection, a complete and dear affection, it is to this idea of the book that he will one day write.

He stood by the door one day, trying to replicate a posture he had seen in a mannequin, when the door sounded with a loud knock.

— Who’s there? he asked.

— Let me in, came the reply.

The pamphleteer went to the door and slowly opened it. A girl was standing there, dressed in the sort of khaki suit that best befits early-twentieth-century female explorers of Africa.

— Sif! he said. How nice to see you.

— And you, she said. It has been some time, I think.

— Yes, he said. I have been busy working on a pamphlet.

— Which one? she asked.

A glint came into her eye.

— Have you finished World’s Fair 7 June 1978 ?

— Of course not, he said. This one is a method for how to enter rooms.

— Well, then, said Sif. Let this be a lesson to you.

She entered the room, doing a slow sort of pirouette.

— Will you get a girl a drink?

She sat down on the edge of the sofa and watched him as he brought out a glass bottle that perhaps had once held wine, but now looked very much like

— Iced tea? he asked.

— Yes, thank you, she said. You know, I was thinking about the story you told me the other day. The one about the gambler. I’m not entirely sure whether or not he was imagining the girl, what was her name, having affairs.

— Ilsa, said the pamphleteer.

— Yes, continued Sif. I think her dress was unbuttoned and her hair wasn’t pinned up properly, etc., not by chance. I think it’s very possible that a man who could disappear into, what was it, a fold of heat and light, could very easily appear in a room, ravage a woman, and then disappear.

— That’s something to consider, said the pamphleteer.

— But on the other hand, said Sif, the story is interesting because it’s also possible that he is just crazy, that he imagined the whole episode with the devil, and that he is imagining all her possible adulteries. I mean, the point of it could just be that it’s ridiculous in the first place that she should be his property, that he should be able to barter her as an object in his possession in a wager with Satan. Am I wrong?

— Well, said the pamphleteer, there is the burn on his wrist. That’s real.

— He could be imagining that too, said Sif. He’s the only one who ever saw it.

— But the Chinese woman referred to it. And her grandmother too, said the pamphleteer. You can’t just ignore their testimony.