Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

So is that the end of the story?

No. The traveler stood at the stone and on the stone visible to see were marks of axe and sword and the dark oxidations of the blood of those who'd died there and which the weathers of the world were powerless to erase. Here the traveler had lain down to sleep with no thought of death and yet when he awoke he'd no thought other. The heavens which he had been invited to scrutinize by his executioners now wore a different look. The order of his life seemed altered in midstride. Some haltstitch in the workings of things. Those heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to pulse with a reckless energy. As if in their turning things had come uncottered, uncalendared. He thought that there might even be some timefault in the record. That henceforth there might be no way to log new sightings. Would that matter?

You're askin me.

Yes.

I think it would matter to you. About him I got no idea. What do you think?

The narrator paused thoughtfully. I think, he said, that the dreamer imagined himself at some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the death of things. I think he saw a terrible darkness looming.

I need to be gettin on.

The man did not answer. He sat contemplating the roadside vegas and the barren lands beyond now shimmering in the newest sun.

This desert about us was once a vast sea, he said. Can such a thing vanish? Of what are seas made? Or I? Or you?

I dont know.

The man stood up and stretched. He stretched mightily, reaching and turning. He looked down at Billy and smiled.

And that's the end of the story, Billy said.

No.

He squatted and held up his hand, palm out.

Hold up your hand, he said. Like this.

Is this a pledge of some kind?

No. You are pledged already. You always were. Hold up your hand.

He held up his hand as the man had asked.

You see the likeness?

Yes.

Yes. It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.

So what happened to the traveler?

Nothing. There is no end to the story. He woke and all was as before. He was free to go.

To other men's dreams.

Perhaps. Of such dreams and of the rituals of them there can also be no end. The thing that is sought is altogether other. However it may be construed within men's dreams or by their acts it will never make a fit. These dreams and these acts are driven by a terrible hunger. They seek to meet a need which they can never satisfy, and for that we must be grateful.

And you were still asleep.

Yes. At the end of the dream we walked out in the dawn and there was an encampment on the plains below from which no smoke rose for all that it was cold and we went down to that place but all was abandoned there. There were huts of skin staked out upon the rocky ground with slagiron pikes and within these huts were remnants of old meals untouched and cold upon cold plates of clay. There were standing stores of primitive and antique arms carved in their metal parts and inlaid with filigree of gold and there were robes sewn up from skins of northern animals and rawhide trunks with latches and corners of hammered copper and these were much scarred from their travels and the years of it and inside of them were old accounts and ledgerbooks and records of the history of that vanished folk, the path they had followed in the world and their reckonings of the cost of that journey. And in a place apart a skeleton of old sepia bones sewn up in a leather shroud.

We walked together through all that desolation and all that abandonment and I asked him if the people were away at some calling but he said that they were not. When I asked him to tell me what had happened he looked at me and he said: I have been here before. So have you. Everything is here for the taking. Touch nothing. Then I woke.

From his dream or yours?

There was only one dream to wake from. I woke from that world to this. Like the traveler, all I had forsaken I would come upon again.

What had you forsaken?

The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dim and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams enchased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.

I got to get on.

I wish you well, cuate.

And you.

I hope your friends await you.

And I.

Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?

HE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in a concrete the by the highwayside where a roadcrew had been working. A big yellow Euclid truck was standing out on the mud and the pale and naked concrete pillars of an eastwest onramp stood beyond the truck, curving away, clustered and rising without capital or pediment like the ruins of some older order standing in the dusk. In the night a wind blew down from the north that bore the taste of rain but no rain fell. He could smell the wet creosote out on the desert. He tried to sleep. After a while he got up and sat in the round mouth of the tile like a man in a bell and looked out upon the darkness. Out on the desert to the west stood what he took for one of the ancient spanish missions of that country but when he studied it again he saw that it was the round white dome of a radar tracking station. Beyond that and partly overcast also in the moonlight he saw a row of figures struggling and clamoring silently in the wind. They appeared to be dressed in robes and some among them fell down in their struggling and rose to flail again. He thought they must be laboring toward him across the darkened desert yet they made no progress at all. They had the look of inmates in a madhouse palely gowned and pounding mutely at the glass of their keeping. He called to them but his shout was carried away on the wind and in any case they were too far to hear him. After a while he rolled himself again in his blanket on the floor of the tile and after a while he slept. In the morning the storm had passed and what he saw out on the desert in the new day's light were only rags of plastic wrapping hanging from a fence where the wind had blown them.