Home Fires

REFLECTION 1: The Journey

We sleep, and believe we wake with the minds we carried into bed with us, bearing them as a bride borne in her groom’s arms, the lifted, the treasured, the threshold flier; so we believe.

But we do not. That weary mind has been dispersed in sleep, its myriad parts left behind on the tracks, lying upon the infinite concrete ties between endless, gleaming steel rails.

We wake, and compose for ourselves a new mind (if some other does not compose it for us), a mind compounded of such parts of the old one as we can discover, and of dreams, and of odd snatches of memory—something read long, long ago, possibly something sprung into thought from a tele listing, the skewed description of a better presentation, the show as it existed in Platonic space. From such trifles as these and more we construct a new mind and call it our own.

And yet the personhood, the soul remains. A roommate I had one year woke each morning as a beast, woke roaring, shouting, and fighting. Fighting air, for the most part, for I soon learned to absent myself before his autocall, or to jump back if circumstance forced me to wake him myself; there is such a beast in all of us—no, several such beasts.

Chelle told me once that she woke each morning as a child, though strictly speaking it was untrue. It was most often true, I think, when she had been drinking and she was awakened an hour or two later, still somewhat drunk. She was small and guilty then, weeping for misbehavior she knew not of, a child like so many accustomed to being blamed and punished, quite often severely, for an act done or a word spoken in purest innocence. Thus I, who had met her at the university, came to know the child she had once been, and in truth to love and dread that child.

For me, on the morning of the yellow notice, things were otherwise—or perhaps the same: I thought myself young and thought Chelle with me in bed, or (when at last I accepted her absence from our bed) in the lavatory. She had reentered my life, and so my hungry brain embraced and swallowed her, gulping down Chelle whole, Chelle here and now. And since she was here, was now, I myself must be twenty-seven. Twenty-seven and awakening in the studio apartment I shared with Chelle before she enlisted and shared with her afterward only when she got leave. All this when the present Chelle, my new Chelle, was nothing more than a single sheet of yellow paper fallen from my printer.

Then I knew myself old; and for a moment, only for a moment, before I pushed back sheet and blankets, I thought I heard the light steps of Susan’s departure. She would leave me now, I thought, leave me to sleep and go down to her three rooms to wash and eat and dress and prepare for the day’s work. I had heard her, I thought; yet the door had neither opened nor closed.

I rose, and knew that I had not known the pleasure of her company during the night and had not wanted it. We are never quite so alone as we are in the company of others; a paradox, but a paradox in a world so filled with them that one more can make no difference—or only a small and trifling difference, though that difference may mean the world to some unfortunate individual.

As this one to me. I live by defending others from a law that is grown monstrous, devoid not only of justice but of the very thought and ideal of justice. I defend others, yet no one is more alone than I. In centuries long past, the accused was defended by a champion, a knight (paid, unless the accused was of the highest rank) who engaged the accuser’s champion in the court of justice, confident that God would defend the right. The time-wind rises, the mist disperses, and we see that nothing has changed. I have my squire and my pages, my body servants and men-at-arms, now called secretaries, clerks, researchers, and detectives; figuratively it might be said that I ride into court with Susan’s scarf bound about my helm. Yet who is more alone than I?

May God defend the right!

I look out over the city like an eagle from a spire of rock, and it is not my kingdom but my hunting ground. Nor am I the only hunter; others hunt there, and some may hunt me. The common man, so celebrated a century ago by those who were even then plotting to bring him down, has in this age been driven to the wall. Every elective office is held for life, and those who hold those offices may rule by whim if it be their whim to rule so. Hated, they glory in it, and know not how weak they are.

I know how weak I am, or I think I do; my imitation Vanessa does not, or so I believe, but she surely knows how weak she herself is, and she is far weaker than I, weaker than Susan, and no doubt far weaker than her daughter, the strapping lacrosse player, the glory of the women’s track team. It is not Vanessa’s weakness that attracts me, for I, possessing a superabundance of weakness myself, am never attracted to it; rather it is her defiance of her weakness, for there is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

Even in a dead woman.