William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

But he used to tell Luke: You’re my best friend. — And Luke did not answer.

That mattered, but not sufficiently to ruin anything. Once he accustomed himself to the fact that Luke was his best friend but he was not, or not necessarily, Luke’s, he found the situation much easier than he had adoring the flittery Victoria when he was seventeen. For after all, Luke had steadily, loyally loved him. When his girlfriend Beatrice left him, Luke phoned every day, his love reaching like sunflowers. And perhaps Luke had known how to live, more than he had, or differently, or something. — Was Luke happy? — Not especially. So perhaps my life was not a failure, either. But what if it was? What would Luke say?

Luke was brave; he went away.

Isn’t Victoria brave, then? Or can’t she go away?

Returning to Mr. Murmuracki, he said: I’d like to visit Luke, if that’s possible.

Of course. He’s in the viewing room.

He asked himself: How could Luke have left me, when he was my best friend? But I wasn’t his, or at least he would never say so, and therefore I… — Tears rushed down his cheeks, because when Luke was still alive he had not told him enough how much he loved him. More than Victoria, and… The touch of his fingers against each other astonished him; he wasn’t yet dead! What should he be doing with the time?… Luke’s greatest failure as a friend was that he had nearly always said no. And his greatest failure to Luke was… Well, who was he, but a wispy ghost like Victoria, good for nothing but mist?

Do you remember the way, sir?

I think so.

Then go the other way. It’ll be your second left. By the way, Luke was a good man like your father. Take your time. I’ll be in my office.

The door opened by itself. The viewing room was darker than any moon crater. How he loved the sweet loneliness of the moon! As soon as he had seated himself, the velvet curtain rose. Through the ground glass he saw a rock-maze on a steel-blue plain of moonsand — which of course was not to say that the cemetery’s configuration could be overlaid upon some moon landscape. Now he seemed to be floating down a soft grey slope which shone with white boulders; he must be passing across the terminator. The moon was as rich as Victoria’s shoulders when she was seventeen and eighteen and thirty-six and a rotting ghost. The moon was lovely-black like the shadow side of a boulder.

He saw snow along the razor-ridges of a desert range, all grey and ocher-grey down the canyon-outlined mountain-triangles in that midday glare, and then along the sandy basin rose a narrow snout of red earth-monster, still for so long that it might not have been alive, concealing everything above its neck in a sprawl of honeycolored sandstone mounds. Luke and Raymond had gone that way, over the monster’s neck; and Raymond returned alone.

While he awaited them he felt that he could see time whole, as a rock with marvelous cracks. Every cleavage became a pattern or rune. It seemed to him that because the present travelled continually with him, it never ended, perhaps not even at death. This moment was ineradicable; therefore, so was he. It appeared that his present could never extinguish. Whether or not that was so, it scarcely mattered to him, although he did not know why it did not.

If anyone clambered up the moon-beast’s snout, it disguised itself by means of simple immensity, so that its scaly wrinkles become ravines, its deep folds canyons, its bristly pores chalky-green squiggles of saltbush. The lid of its cunningly shut eye was nothing but sand. One tramped like a fly across its rocky brow.

Upon a rock, another fly, a black one, busily drummed with all six legs, then gripped with two and kicked with two, like an apprentice swimmer holding onto the side of the pool, and finally rushed loudly away.

By late afternoon, the long chocolate-red beast was purplish-black: nearly as dark as the crow which flew over, and the lake-line was now dull and inconspicuous; the western mountains were reddish-purple, their crests, snow and triangles alike all going shades of blue; and suddenly time began again.

Then it came twilight, the time of desert colors. Raymond, as calm as if he were in his apron, with his magnifying goggles pulled down into place as he bent over the grinding wheel (every woodenheaded gouge in its place, flat edge up, the many pliers claws-up against the window), arrived and said: He stepped off the path.

Well, he wanted to go.

Raymond nodded. He was half retired, slowing down; soon he too would die.

They told Stephanie that Luke fell.

Now the moon-beast was below him, the lunar surface sweeping eternally toward and behind him, and the complete blackness of a white-rimmed crater passed beneath him, while far off to his left he saw a spaceship like a golden firefly hovering on its tail not very high above the violet-grey plain. Here came another crater; he remembered the smooth dark dimple in the moon of Victoria’s belly when she was seventeen. Thus all the moon lands, cold and white.

His father once bought him a set of compact binoculars, laughing with delight at the clarity of the lenses. The middle-aged son, who had never been able to see well or far, dully thanked him for the gift. He was grateful, but feared that his father had wasted money, for how could the son’s useless eyes ever be worthy? He nearly felt as if he had cheated his father. From time to time, and more so after his father’s death, he packed them along on his journeys, but frequently forgot to look through them. When he did remember to raise them to his tired eyes, he was not always certain what to zoom in on. It was always good to focus on a deer or a bear, of course; and at times they were capable of inciting in him the same pleasure he felt in handling a certain knurled chisel of Raymond’s. When he left them at home, he felt regretful, even guilty; how could he be so inconsiderate of his father?

(The reason that he had declined to use the witch’s green potion to bring back his father was this: He might bore his father. Surely his father was better off without him.)

There came a time when he returned the binoculars to one of the pigeonholes of his father’s desk, and left them there. Perhaps he was already getting sick by then. One night he dreamed that he took up the binoculars again and looked through them, only to discover that they were two grave-wells, except that one lens showed nothing but dirt and darkness while the other revealed, far down the black shaft, a silver sprinkling of stars.

If there could be a place where one desired nothing, by virtue either of eternally shining joy or of nothingness itself, then it must be (so he supposed) a place where one would no longer learn anything, and therefore evidently a place choked with dirt and darkness if not with distracting light; anything without an end to it sounded nauseating. In which of the two wells would it lie? And where would Victoria be? Although she never seemed to blame him for calling her up, and nearly every night told him some new tale of the quotidian, prairie dog life of the cemetery’s inhabitants, what if this spiderweb of other consciousnesses in which she seemed to exist were no more than the plausibly burrowing roots of one of those half-minute dreams which as we awake quickly grow down back into the past, so that for awhile we imagine that we dreamed for many hours? And why would she never tell him whether she had come from the dirt or the dark sky?

Now here in Mr. Murmuracki’s viewing room he seemed to see farther and better than he ever had — perhaps nearly as well as Luke once did. But Luke did not come.

All the same, he knew that Luke had loved him and was loyal.

He remembered Luke saying: What I want is to be free. I don’t want freedom from anything. I want freedom for everything.