Destiny Doll

TWENTY-THREE

That evening, beside the campfire, I opened the box that I had grabbed off the table in Knight’s shack.

We had traveled well that day, although with every step I took I fought against the terrible feeling that something called me back, that, as a matter of fact, there was an actual force which sought to turn me back. Slogging along, I tried to figure who it was (not what it was, but who it was) who tried to hold me back. Sara, perhaps-the feeling that I should do something for her, if it were no more than going back to wait in hope she would return. A sense of guilt at deserting her, although I knew well and good I’d not deserted her, no more than we had deserted either George or Tuck. A belief that I had somehow failed her, and in certain instances I undoubtedly had failed her, but not in this particular instance. I think that more than anything else the thing that bothered me was that she apparently had not believed me about what Hoot and I had seen back in the valley. The idea persisted that somehow I should have made her understand, should have so convinced her she’d have had no thought of returning there. The going back I could understand-if someone had stood just for a moment inside the gates of Heaven he would not suffer gladly being yanked from out the gates. The thing I could not understand was how she could have, willfully and deliberately, failed to understand, clinging to a beloved delusion in the face of fact.

Or could Hoot have been the one, I wondered, who was tugging at me? Was there something lying hidden in my mind, something that he had planted there in those last few seconds, that kept up a faceless nagging at me? I tried once again to dredge up the bit of information-any bit of information-bearing upon that final encounter, but once again I failed.

Or could it be Paint? I had played a dirty trick on Paint, setting him a task I was unable or unwilling to perform myself. Perhaps, I told myself, I should turn around and go back and tell him he was relieved of the charge I had placed upon him. I tried to fend it off, but could not erase from mind the vision of Paint a thousand years from now, (a million years from now if he still existed a million years from now) still mounting solemn guard outside the portals, waiting for an event that was not about to happen, still faithful to words long gone into the wind as the mouth that spoke them had long gone into dust.

Miserable with all these thoughts, I stumbled down the trail.

To a watcher, we must have seemed a strange pair, I with my ridiculous shield and sword, Roscoe with the pack slung upon his back, clumping along behind me, mumbling to himself.

We had made a good day’s journey when we stopped for the night. Going through the pack to get out food, I found the box I’d stolen from Knight. I put it to one side to look at after I had eaten. Roscoe gathered wood and I built a fire and cooked myself a meal while that great stupid hulk hunkered down across the blaze from me and chattered conversationally-and this time not rhyming words nor equation gibberish.

“One eye thou hast,” he told me, glibly, “to look to Heaven for grace. The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.”

I stared at him, amazed, wondering hopefully if he’d snapped out of it and could finally talk some sense-either that, or gone completely off his rocker.

“Roscoe,” I said, as quietly as I could, not wishing to startle him out of any new-found sense, “I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of something else. I wonder. . .”

“They can be meek,” he told me, “that have no other cause. A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, we bid be quiet when we hear it cry; but were we burdened with like weight of pain, as much, or more, we should ourselves complain.”

“Poetry!” I yelled. “Poetry, for the love of God! As if equations and senseless rhyming weren’t enough. . .”

He clambered to his feet and danced a merry, clanking jig and sang: “The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell; my mistress made in one upon my cheek. She is so hot because the meat is cold; the meat is cold because you came not home; you came not home because you have no stomach; you have no stomach, having broke your fast. . .”

He stopped in mid-caper and stared wonderingly at me. “Fast,” he said. “Last, mast, cast.”

At least he was back to normal.

He hunkered down by the fire again, no longer talking to me, but mumbling to himself.

The twilight deepened and the galaxy blossomed in the sky, first the brilliance of the central core, hanging just above the eastern horizon, and then, as night came on, the wispy filaments of the spiral arms became apparent, first as a structure of silvery mist, which brightened as the darkness grew. Wind whispered overhead and the campfire smoke, after rising vertically for a short distance, leaned over and slanted off into the darkness as it met the wind. Far off something was chuckling softly to itself and tiny forms of life scurried in the grass and brush just beyond the circle of firelight.

Shakespeare? I wondered. Had it been Shakespeare he had spouted? The words had sounded like it, but I could not be sure; it had been many years since I’d even thought of Shakespeare. And if it were, how had Roscoe known of Shakespeare? In the long flight out from the galaxy, on the long march up the trail, had Knight read it aloud beside the nightly campfire? Had he carried in his knapsack or in a sagging pocket of his jacket a copy of that ancient, almost forgotten writer?

I finished my meal and washed the dishes in the stream beside which we were camped, and set them aside for morning. Roscoe still squatted at the fire, writing with an outstretched finger on a piece of ground he’d smoothed.

I picked up Knight’s wooden box and opened it. Inside lay a thick sheaf of paper, almost filling it. Lifting out the first page, I held it so it was lighted by the fire and read:

Blue and high. Clean. Upstanding blue. Water sound. Stars ahead. Ground unbare. Laughter high above and blue. Blue laughter. We move unwise. Think unhard.

The writing was in a crabbed hand and the characters were cramped and small. Slowly I picked the words apart:

and thin. No end to start, no end to come. Foreverness and more. Blue foreverness. Runners after nothingness. Nothingness in emptiness. Emptiness is bare. Talk is nothingness. Deeds are emptiness. Where to find but empty? Nowhere, comes the answer. High and blue and empty.

It was gibberish, worse than the gibberish of Roscoe. I glanced down the page and the gibberish went on. Lifting a handful of pages from the box, I extracted another one. Page 52, it said in the upper right hand corner. And the text:

far is distant. Distances are deep. Neither short nor long, but deep. Some without a bottom. And cannot be measured. No stick to measure with. Purple distances are deepest ones of all. No one walks a purple distance. Purple leads to nowhere. There is nowhere to lead to.

I put the pages back into the box and closed the lid and held my hand hard against the lid to prevent the pages getting out. Mad, I thought; living out a life of gentle madness in a Grecian valley of a strange enchantment. And that was where Sara was at this very moment. Not knowing. Not caring, even if she knew.

I fought to keep from jumping up and screaming. I held as hard a hand against myself as I held against the lid to keep from leaping to my feet and go running back the way we’d come.

Because, I told myself, I had no right to do it. For once in my life, I had to think of someone other than myself. She had chosen to go back to the valley. There was something that drew her there. Happiness, I wondered, and asked myself what was happiness and how much did it count?

Knight was happy, writing his drivel, not knowing it was drivel, not caring it was drivel. Wrapped in a cocoon of happiness, in the sense of having reached a devoutly sought and lifelong goal, he was content, not knowing and not caring that the goal might be delusion.

If only Hoot were here, I thought. Although I knew what he would have told me. You cannot interfere, he’d say, you must not interfere. He’d talked of destiny. And what was destiny? Was it something not written in the stars, but in the genes of men that said how they would act, what they would want, how they would set about to get what they wanted most?

The loneliness came on me and I crouched close against the fire, as if its light and heat might be protection against the loneliness. Of all the ones I’d traveled with, there was only Roscoe left and in Roscoe there was nothing that would counter loneliness. In his own way, he was as lonely as I.

All the others had reached that half-seen, half-guessed vision they had followed. Perhaps because they had known, deep inside themselves, what they might be seeking. And me, what was I seeking? I tried to figure what thing I wanted most and, for the life of me, I could think of nothing.