LEGS CROSSED, BACK straight, arms tightly folded across his chest, he sits in his chair and waits for Cromwell to get off the phone.
He has assumed as tight-assed a sitting position as possible in order to prevent any further leakage of waste into his underwear.
Contracting his sphincter for all he’s worth.
His back is killing him, but the ache is the least of his problems now.
Cromwell is still on the telephone. Still listening for the most part. Every now and then he says, “Mmm,” or, “I see, I do, but …” or, “I know, I know, but …” and then he listens again to someone pleading with him for something.
The whole time that he’s listening, he’s keeping up a silent but lively banter with Saul. Chatting him up. Conveying what he wants to convey to him with an endless variety of winks and looks and facial semaphores.
It’s so damn good to see you, Doc, he tells him.
It’s been a while, that’s for sure.
I’m glad to see that you’ve recovered from that terrible tragedy, he tells him.
I was really worried about you. I mean, for a while there, you really had me worried. I didn’t think you were going to pull out of it.
Some people never do, you know.
But you’re looking good, Doc. You really are. Lost a little weight, didn’t you?
“I know, I know, but …” he says with sympathy to whoever he’s talking to on the telephone.
What a fucking bore this guy is, he conveys to Saul with a simple little roll of his eyes. He looks at his watch and mimes a sigh of someone desperate for the call to end.
But it’s clear to Saul that Cromwell is having a wonderful time.
Such a good time, in fact, that he’s letting the man on the other end of the line continue, as if the chance exists that whatever desperate plea the man is making to Cromwell might meet with success. Cromwell’s silence (while the man talks) only encourages this interpretation. Makes it seem (to the man on the other end of the line) that his words are swaying Cromwell. That Cromwell’s silence is one of rapt attention and serious reconsideration.
Saul knows all this because he knows Cromwell.
He feels that he’s known Cromwell all his life.
He has no idea who the man or woman is on the other end of the line, but he knows that whoever it is, man or woman, black or white, young or old, that Cromwell is fucking the person on the phone. Fucking them out of something. Or fucking them into something.
That’s why Cromwell was so eager to have Saul come inside.
To observe.
Saul also knows that he’s the next in line. He doesn’t know the details of Cromwell’s agenda, but he knows that as soon as Cromwell gets off the phone, he will fuck him into or out of something.
To help pass the time while he sits and waits for Cromwell to conclude, Saul tries to figure out how long it has been since the last time he saw Cromwell in person.
Last November, Saul manages to nail down the month if not the date.
Over breakfast.
In Pittsburgh.
In that hotel restaurant.
Cromwell and his young black friend.
It was a Saturday.
The same Saturday in November when Leila and Billy died.
His mind starts to reel. Oh, Billy. Oh, Leila. Oh, Mother. To keep it from reeling, he counts the intervening months.
Starting in mid-November of last year and ending in July of this.
November, December, January, February …
He can’t do the arithmetic in his head and has to start again. This time he resorts to counting on his fingers, which are tucked inside the armpits of the opposing arms folded across his chest.
Five months in one armpit. Three in the other. Maybe not quite three, since it was mid-November.
But over seven months, in any case.
Seven months is a long time, Saul thinks.
A very long time.
Until he entered this office and sat down in this chair, it seemed like a very long time since the last time he saw Cromwell.
But it no longer seems that way.
In a matter of minutes, Cromwell has managed to reduce that seven-month interval of separation between them to next to nothing.
To make him feel, as he is feeling now, that he was never really away from him at all.
Cromwell winks at him, raising one finger in the air to indicate that he’s getting off any second. He smiles. He mimes some messages his way. Saul counters with a mime of his own. No rush, Jay, I’m fine. Or something to that effect.
But the smiling monster he’s looking at, whom he thought he knew so well, appears to him now in a new, even more monstrous shape.
Behind that vast, monolithic forehead Saul sees the maw of a mind of such power that it can break the bones of time at will.
Not bend time, as has been theorized to occur in deep space, but actually break it and compress it into nothingness.
What Saul sees are the eyes of the Millennium Man winking back at him.
Maybe, Saul thinks, it’s here already.
The Millennium.
Maybe, he thinks, the Millennium came earlier than expected.
In 1991. The last year you’ll ever need to know.
He’s off the phone and up on his feet. The conversation begun with Saul in pantomime now ratchets into speech.
“Damn, Doc,” he says, “it’s so good to see you, you old bastard. It really is. Don’t ask me to explain why I’m so damn fond of you, but …
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he says, “for dragging you out here in all that traffic. It completely slipped my mind what day it was.
“And I’m truly sorry,” he says, “for having to stay on the phone so long. I’ll tell you honestly, Doc, sometimes I wish I could be the merciless sonovabitch everyone says I am. It would be a lot easier on me if I could.
“How are you?” he asks Saul. “Sorry if I seem a little tired. Listening to that guy simply wore me out.”
He’s not just lying to Saul. He wants Saul to know he’s lying to him.
It becomes a truth of sorts, this manner of lying. A Cromwellian truth.
A countertruth.
“I’m almost afraid to tell you,” he tells Saul, “why I had you fly out here all the way from New York in the first place. I hope you won’t get mad at me for saying this, but the number one reason I had you come out here was because I missed you. I really did. I know a lot of people in LA, it’s true, but all the people I know here are so …”
He is lying through his teeth, with his teeth, with his eyes, his gestures.
All become lies.
In its own way, it’s a spectacular show.
A constant Darwinian devouring of deeds by counterdeeds that are themselves devoured.
This perpetual nullification provides the endless supply of energy for his dynamic personality.
So Saul thinks, looking at Cromwell.
From Modern Man to Postmodern Man.
From Postmodern Man to this.
The Millennium Man.
The last man you’ll ever need to know.
The banter goes on.
Cromwell tells him this. He tells him that. Saul banters back as best as he can.
Each, according to the other, is looking good. Not just good but great.
They touch on various topics in no particular order. On politics. On the changing demographic landscape. The unusual changes in the weather worldwide. On trends in theater. There is a new Canadian ballet company that Cromwell can’t say enough about.
“Astonishing,” he calls it.
“They’re reinventing the vocabulary of dance,” he says.
“The situation in the Balkans seems unstable,” one of them says.
The other concurs.
It’s hard to know who’s saying what when nothing at all is being said over and over again. Zerospeak.
The temperature in Cromwell’s office seems to be dropping as they banter on.
Not plummeting or anything like that but definitely going down.
Or so it seems to Saul.
Or maybe it’s just me, he thinks.
It’s hard to tell if he’s feeling what he’s feeling or if he just seems to be feeling it.
The distinction between the two is blurred.
He crosses and recrosses his legs, folds, unfolds, and refolds his arms across his chest as a way of keeping his circulation going.
His armpits are clammy with sweat, and his fingers, when he tucks them inside those armpits, feel or seem to feel icy cold.
The metronomic ritual of his zerospeak banter with Cromwell is so mindless, so effortless, that he’s free, while they banter on, to think his own thoughts.
Saul thinks. He ponders. He wonders why he has come to LA to see Cromwell.
He didn’t have to come. It wasn’t even Cromwell who called him to fly out to LA for a meeting. It was his new black Brad who called.
Saul could have said no.
But he didn’t.
Curiosity got the better of him.
If Cromwell wanted him to fly out to LA, it could mean only one thing. That in Cromwell’s opinion there was still something left in Saul worth fucking.
And it was this possibility, Saul now thinks, that brought him out here.
By his own reckoning, Saul had come to the conclusion that he had been fucked out of everything already.
Cromwell’s invitation gave him hope that he was wrong in his self-assessment. That there was still something left inside him unfucked and intact.
Saul came here to find out what it was.
So in a way, he thinks, my presence here is an act of faith.
If the good can no longer see any good in me, if I can no longer see any good in myself, then the only thing left is to see what good the evil see in me.
And on it goes, the banter.
It doesn’t matter who says what, since there is no point in any of it except to pick up your cue when it’s your turn.
One says one thing.
The other says something else.
It could just as easily be the other way around.
At some arbitrary point, Cromwell reaches inside one of his desk drawers and pulls out a large yellow manila envelope and places it casually on top of the desk.
Here we go, Saul thinks.
The yellow manila envelope is larger than standard size. Longer, wider. And judging by its thickness, Saul, a connoisseur of yellow manila envelopes, figures that it contains between three hundred and fifty and four hundred pages.
Whatever is inside it is meant for him, but he doesn’t know what it could be.
It’s too thick for a screenplay.
Just the sight of the yellow manila envelope causes Saul’s mind to reel, it triggers a yellow manila envelope loop inside his mind.
The many, many yellow manila envelopes of his life.
He has to blink rapidly several times to keep from getting dizzy. To make the loop stop.
Cromwell in the meantime is telling him things he already knows.
About Prairie Schooner.
“We open this weekend,” Cromwell is telling him.
“We’re going to be on almost two thousand screens,” he tells him.
This is all common knowledge. Old news. Saul knows all about the distribution pattern for Prairie Schooner.
Cromwell knows he knows. The only reason he’s telling Saul something he already knows is to numb him before he fucks him.
Saul is wise to Cromwell, which is no defense.
“I think we’re going to be a huge hit,” Cromwell tells him. “A huge, huge hit.”
(His prediction will prove to be accurate. Prairie Schooner will turn out to be the biggest commercial hit of 1991.)
“And not just in terms of box office, either,” Cromwell says. “No. I think we have a huge artistic hit on our hands as well. The critics are going to love it.”
(This prediction will also prove to be accurate. Prairie Schooner will turn out to be the biggest critical hit of 1991 as well.)
“Speaking of critics,” Cromwell says, and lifts up some photocopied pages from the desktop. The pages are stapled together at the top, and Saul can see portions of the printed matter on the pages highlighted with a yellow marker.
“These are some advance reviews from the weekly magazines. They’re not out yet, but they will be soon. Here.” He hands them to Saul. “These are for you. You can take them with you and read them at your leisure back in your hotel, but check out the first few pages. The highlighted portions.”
Saul obeys.
He reads the highlighted portions while Cromwell reads him.
He is called a genius. On page after page, in paragraph after highlighted paragraph, he reads the word “genius” attached to his name.
“Only a film-savvy genius like Saul Karoo could have taken …”
He is neither surprised nor pleased, nor displeased, nor proud, nor ashamed, that he is anointed a genius for what he did to the Old Man’s work.
For reasons he can’t explain and has no time to dwell upon, it simply seems inevitable that he should be considered a genius.
Everyone has become sick and tired of authentic geniuses. But a hack being an artist is fresh and new.
He looks up to see Cromwell looking back at him.
“Speaking of movies,” Cromwell says in an apologetic way, as if admitting to a failure on his part to come up with a smoother transition to the business before them.
His apologetic intonation is totally countermanded by the little smile he’s smiling, which says: Sometimes it’s fun to be smooth and subtle in my transitions, at other times it’s fun to be brutal. I feel like being brutal just now. I hope you don’t mind, Doc.
He is sitting on top of the desk, his feet are off the floor, his hands are gripping the desktop. One of his hands, Saul observes, seems to be gripping the desktop harder than the other, causing one of his shoulders to dip lower than the other, creating a sense of distortion in the whole room.
“Speaking of movies,” he says to Saul, and without looking, as if he knows the exact location of the yellow manila envelope behind him, he reaches back and brings it forward.
The smile he is smiling now spreads, causing the dimples in the corner of his mouth to deepen and curve.
Saul is so focused on every detail he sees that he is becoming disoriented by the details themselves. By the shape of Cromwell’s fingers curled around the manila envelope. He never noticed before what long fingers Cromwell has. Long and soft and supple and seemingly boneless, like half-erect sexual organs.
“Speaking of movies,” Cromwell says, holding up the yellow manila envelope, “have I got something here for you.”
He puts the envelope down next to him and places his hand upon it. He pats it a couple of times, as if to indicate there is something of great meaning for Saul inside it.
And then he starts to speak.
“What’s different about this project from all the others on which we’ve collaborated,” Cromwell, perched atop his desk, goes on to say, “is that you’ll be involved in it from the word go. You won’t be called in to rewrite somebody else’s script, because this time you will be the one who writes it.
“I know, I know.” Cromwell gestures with his hands, as if deflecting Saul’s objections in advance. “I know the role you like to play. Know it well. You like to pretend that you’re nothing more than a high-priced hack who’s happy the way he is. Who neither wants to write nor thinks he’s capable of ever writing something of his own. It’s a good act and you’ve done it well, but it’s not worthy of you, and it hasn’t fooled me for a second.
“Nor,” he says, winking at Saul, “is it likely to ever fool anyone else again.
“Those reviews”—he gestures to the pages in Saul’s lap—“that’s just the beginning. When our movie opens this weekend, there are going to be many more reviews just like those. Even better. You’re in for it in the next couple of weeks. You’re going to be publicly exposed all around the country for being the brilliant artist that you are.”
Saul knows that he’s not an artist, brilliant or otherwise, but a part of him says, What do I know?
It’s not that Cromwell’s flattery is convincing him, but it’s because there is an absence of all conviction in Saul himself.
Saul knows everything except what to do with what he knows.
“I have here a manuscript of a book,” Cromwell tells him, lifting up his hand and then letting it fall on the yellow manila envelope next to him.
“A wonderful book,” he says.
“It’s a love story,” he says.
“I think this book will be a national bestseller as soon as it comes out.”
(He would be proven correct yet again. This book would sell over five hundred thousand copies in the first six months alone.)
“It’s being rushed into print. It should be out in the fall of this year. The publishers are very high on it. Very high indeed.
“It’s mine,” he says. “I own it. I bought the movie rights to it with you in mind.
“It’s a great story,” he says.
“Not just a great love story, but a great story, period.
“I suppose,” he says, letting his hand glide over the envelope, “you could call it a tragedy. A love tragedy. But then all the great love stories are. Or at least all the great love stories I’ve loved are tragedies.
“What it is,” he says, “is an in-depth, book-length expansion of a magazine story …”
Saul felt the sickening shock of what Cromwell was talking about. What the story was and what the book was.
A grimace, as of pain, appeared on Saul’s face.
Ignoring him completely, Cromwell went on.
“It’s a great story,” he said. “I couldn’t put it down. Even though I knew ahead of time how it was all going to turn out in the end, I was still hooked. I really was.”
Pausing, as if impressed that he had been so enraptured by something he had read, Cromwell then went on to tell Saul a little about the story itself.
The nature of the plot.
The characters who are caught up in it.
“It’s a love triangle, is what it is,” Cromwell told him.
He used all the real names (Leila, Billy, and Saul) and when he pronounced them, he did it in the proprietary way of someone who had read the book and was now talking to someone who hadn’t.
Telling Saul all about Leila and Billy and Saul.
Sitting on top of his desk, his demeanor both businesslike and congenial, his legs dangling, the shoe of one foot rubbing against the shoe of the other as he talked, Cromwell went on to tell Saul all about it, as if Saul himself had not experienced a single moment of the events described.
Saul sat there, trying to summon some appropriate response to what Cromwell was doing to his life.
What he needed was outrage. But he seemed to be out of outrage. Most of it had been used up, spent here and there as the price of passage through his portion of the twentieth century.
The little he had left was so diluted that he ran the risk of appearing ridiculous if he tried to use it.
Even the shock he had experienced when he realized the kind of book they were discussing was slowly slipping away from him and giving way to the numbness normally associated with postshock syndrome.
From shock to postshock in a matter of minutes.
What efficiency, Saul thought. What economy. One on the heels of the other.
They formed a loop, shock and postshock, and the loop started spinning around in his mind. The faster it spun, the less distinction he could detect between the two.
It wasn’t long before he was looking back at the moment he was in, as if it were in the past already.
As if time itself were on a loop, spinning around within the enclosed space and time of the year 1991.
Cromwell went on with the telling of the story of Leila and Billy and Saul.
He analyzed the relationships between Billy and Leila, Saul and Billy, Leila and Saul.
He delved into the nuances of character of each one of them.
He seemed to be saying that Saul might have a personal connection to the story being discussed but hadn’t written the book that Cromwell had bought. Cromwell was therefore talking about something he owned to somebody who didn’t.
Saul sat listening and not listening to Cromwell’s enthusiastic exegesis of Billy and Leila and Saul.
His hands and feet were growing numb with cold.
His lower back hurt as if something there was breaking in half.
And, despite all his efforts at holding it in, something fluid and warm was escaping through his anus.
The incontinence of his aging body shamed him.
I’ll be wearing diapers soon, he thought. A motherless old man wearing diapers.
The story that Cromwell was telling him (of Leila, Billy, and Saul) reminded him at times of events from his own life, stirred memories of Billy and Leila and himself.
The story he had lived and the story to which he was now listening were two different versions, but the fact that Saul had personally experienced one of them did not make that version the authoritative one.
In the atmosphere of Cromwell’s office, it was becoming more and more unimportant which version of the two was authentic.
At some point, the whole point became which one worked better as a story.
In the book version, Leila was a brilliantly gifted actress just needing a big break.
Saul remembered a Leila with an enormous talent for living and none for acting.
The Old Man’s film, in the book version, was a mess. Saul remembered a masterpiece.
By the end of the book, Saul was redeemed by the pain he suffered from the loss of the two people he had loved.
The real Saul, however, wasn’t sure that he had ever loved anyone and therefore he saw no possibility of redemption for himself.
And yet he could not deny that he was slowly but surely coming to prefer the Cromwell version of the story. The Cromwell version hung together better, so much better, than the version he had lived.
Does the story work? That was the question.
His didn’t. Cromwell’s did.
In the book the redemption of Saul was banal, but Saul had to admit that he was not immune to the beauty of banality. Especially not if it eased the pain of being who he was.
Every now and then it occurred to him as he listened to Cromwell that Cromwell was fucking him out of something precious and irreplaceable.
A kind of colossal Oneness was slowly conflating everything in Saul’s weary mind, and Cromwell seemed to be saying that the Oneness was the way to go.
“I’m the One,” he seemed to be telling Saul.
“You’ll have to admit,” he seemed to be telling him, “that you no longer work as a human being. What counts is what works.”
The monolithic Oneness in Cromwell, Saul had to admit, not only worked but gave every indication of working better than anything else on earth.
And the name of the Oneness was Nothingness.
Like a long-sought solution to a puzzle that had been so obvious that any child could have figured it out long ago, Saul finally realized who it was he was dealing with in the person of Jay Cromwell.
It was Nothingness.
Nothingness itself.
It was Nothingness he saw looking at him through Cromwell’s hazel-blue eyes.
It had been there all along. Cromwell was not a man who hid anything. He left it to others to hide, to make what they wished of the Nothingness they saw.
The time, Saul thought, all that time I wasted trying to figure out the motives of this man. Who he was. Why he did what he did. What his purpose was in fucking people out of what was left of their short lives on this planet.
For nothing, that was why.
For nothing at all.
And what did Cromwell get out of it? Nothing.
Saul was sitting in a modest office in Burbank Studios, but sitting on top of a desk across from him was no longer a man but a process. It was like watching countercreation in the process of turning events, lives, stories, language itself, into Nothingness. It was like witnessing the Big Bang in reverse.
No, it was not death that Saul saw in Cromwell, for even death was an event. This was the beginning of the death of events themselves. This was a process that nullified both life and death and the distinction between the two.
The Nothingness smiled at Saul like an old friend.
The Hollywood hack in Saul recognized in the Nothingness before him the ultimate rewriter, the Doc of docs.
“I can fix you up,” Dr. Nothingness said, smiling at him. “I can make you whole. I can take all the loose ends of your messy life and pull them together into a satisfying story line.”
Cromwell, smiling his smile, hopped off the desk. Limber and loose and light of foot, he took a couple of steps and stopped. Closing his hand into a fist, he threw a straight, lightning-fast jab and then snapped back his arm to inspect the wristwatch on his wrist.
“Damn,” he cursed cheerfully. “Always having to run. The traffic is probably still a nightmare, but I don’t have a choice. There’s a man I gotta see. I don’t want to see him but see him I must.
“Ah-h,” he sighed, full of despair, but delighting in the despair, “this is no way to live.”
They took a right outside Cromwell’s office and, walking side by side, set out down the long deserted corridor.
The yellow manila envelope that had been on top of Cromwell’s desk was now in Saul’s left hand. He had no idea when Cromwell had given it to him, nor did he remember taking it.
But it didn’t bother Saul in the least to be carrying that manuscript.
He knew, he didn’t know how he knew, but he knew, that he would not be involved in this project. It was a certainty so private that even he wasn’t privy to its particulars.
Saul’s number one priority at the moment was to get to a bathroom as quickly as possible and to hold back the torrent from gushing into his underwear until he got there.
There was a men’s room at the opposite end of the corridor, on the other side of the elevator, but although he wanted to rush there, he was prevented from rushing by his very distress.
It had not been easy keeping his sphincter tight while sitting in the chair, but it was much harder to keep it tight while he walked and at the same time tried to preserve some semblance of dignity so that Cromwell would not suspect his disgraceful condition. And so he had to take small, mincing steps.
Cromwell talked as they left his office.
“There isn’t an actress in Hollywood,” he was telling Saul, “who doesn’t want to play Leila. The agent of every superstar has called me already to relay his client’s desire to be considered for the part. And this frenzy is happening before there is any screenplay, before the book has even been published. It’s happening on the strength of the word that’s out on the book. Can you imagine what …”
He went on.
Saul was listening and not listening. Although he knew that he would not be involved in this project, the thought of Leila’s life being reduced to one more part in the career of some actress struck him as the final robbery of a woman who had been robbed of everything else in her life.
Oh, Leila, he thought.
When they reached the elevator, Cromwell thrust out his arm and jabbed the down button with his index finger. Saul, his sphincter weakening, excused himself and said that he had to go to the men’s room.
Cromwell apologized for being unable to wait. He had to get going. He was in such a rush that he couldn’t even wait for the elevator to arrive. He took the adjacent stairway instead.
“Call me when you’ve read the book and we’ll talk,” he shouted to Saul as he rushed down the stairway, relishing the rush that he was in.
Released by Cromwell’s departure, Saul broke into an inelegant, tightassed trot toward the men’s room.
Trotting, running, skipping, hopping. The roots of his teeth, broken and unbroken, hurt from having to go so badly. Tears of agony welled in his eyes.
He could see by the sign on the door that he had made a mistake and was entering a ladies’ room instead of a men’s room, but it was too late to change course now. Some biological countdown had been triggered by his entrance and there was no aborting it.
What does it matter? he thought. There’s nobody left in the building anyway.
He was in such a panic to sit on a toilet that the door of the stall confounded him when he tried to open it. Blinded by his distress, he couldn’t figure out which way the door opened, in or out.
Needing both hands for the job, he tossed the yellow manila envelope over his head (it missed falling into the sink by an inch) and pushed and pulled and banged on the door until it opened. He hurled himself inside, pulling down his trousers and his underwear with the urgency of a man whose clothes are on fire.
He sat down panting, completely out of breath.
There was nothing left for him to do but let go. He let go.
The bliss of discharge caused his eyelids to flutter, and then he shut his eyes completely.
That was close, he thought. That was real close.
Whatever had been tense inside him was loosening, whatever had been tight was letting go, becoming easy and open. His shoulders sagged. The vertebrae in his neck, in his spinal column, which had felt welded together in Cromwell’s office, now lengthened and stretched like Spandex. Eyes shut in bliss, he let his head roll forward.
That was close all right, he thought.
The fluid nature of his discharge, which he could both feel and hear, continued.
Must have been all those oat bran muffins I had for breakfast, he thought. And then a fruit salad for lunch. Too much roughage.
He yawned, feeling good, and then he yawned again, feeling even better.
One thing’s for sure, he thought to himself. I’ll sleep like a lamb tonight.
The toilet seat on which he was sitting was the most comfortable toilet seat he had ever sat on.
Its shape, or its proportions, he didn’t know what it was, but there was just something about it.
This is what I’ve needed all along, he thought to himself. One of these toilet seats. And then during those long nights in my apartment, when I can’t sleep, all I’ll have to do is sit down on the toilet for a while and it’ll be goodbye insomnia.
He made a mental note to get the brand name of the toilet seat before leaving the bathroom. If it turned out that it was manufactured only in Burbank and distributed locally, he could have one FedExed to New York. Or better yet, he could pick up one and take it back with him on the plane. Probably came in a discreet cardboard box. Fit it in the overhead bin.
He yawned again and opened his eyes.
The sight of all the blood in his underwear around his ankles puzzled him rather than galvanized him into any urgent action.
He looked at it in drowsy detachment.
Thank God it’s blood and not crap, he thought, as if soiling his underclothes with blood were somehow a nobler category of incontinence.
He considered panicking. Under the circumstances (all that blood) he thought he had every right, if not a duty, to panic. But the problem with panicking was twofold. In the first place, it was as if he had used up whatever panic he had just getting to the bathroom in time. For the moment at least, he felt completely out of panic.
In the second place, and this was even more germane to the whole question, he was feeling good. He was feeling so good about something. And since it was such a rare thing to be feeling this good about anything, he considered it his right, if not his duty, to just go on and feel good for a while longer.
As if making a deal with himself, he thought, I’ll panic later, in a few minutes.
Half-rising from the seat, elevating his rear and lowering his head, he peeked through the opening of his parted thighs and saw that the toilet bowl was full of blood. In addition to what was there already, he saw a thin but ongoing stream of blood issuing out of his anus and into the bowl.
He sat down again and flushed the toilet.
He hoped, but in a passive way, that the next time he looked into the bowl the water would not be nearly as bloody and that his anal bleeding, thanks to some hemostatic agent in his body, would be stopped.
But the next time he looked, the bowl was full of blood again and the thin flow of blood was still falling from his bottom into the bowl.
He decided not to look at the contents of the bowl anymore.
I could become compulsive about this if I don’t stop, he admonished himself, yawning.
It felt so damn good to yawn.
Simply to breathe was a joy.
When he inhaled, he felt his whole chest expanding with ease. It was hard to tell which was more enjoyable, inhaling or exhaling.
I could just go on breathing, he thought.
He was feeling so good, good and sad, good and tired, but basically good, that he could consider the problem of his bleeding without the risk of ruining how he felt.
The way he saw it, although he was certainly not a doctor, was that he had sprung a leak somehow.
Some little blood vessel somewhere had ruptured.
A little vessel that he had been carrying inside his body was now carrying him away.
The image pleased him. The vessel and the voyager. The taking of turns of being one and then the other.
Out there, at the very edge of the horizon of his uncluttered mind, he saw a single sail.
He recognized it, as one does a memory, long before it was close enough to be recognized with the naked eye.
It was like seeing a distant rider on the plains in a western. Although he’s far away, you can tell it’s him, it’s Shane, he’s coming back. And the heart both constricts and expands at the prospect of this much longed-for but unanticipated reunion.
That was how it was with Saul as he watched the little sail coming toward him. It was as small as a cherry blossom petal, but growing larger.
Sailing toward him.
The image of the solar schooner had at one time inspired him to consider writing something of his own and, as such, it was a happy memory.
But at the same time it was the vessel of his unrealized longing, a reminder that he had not accomplished his task and, as such, it broke his heart, for it seemed to him now that his longing was destined to remain forever a longing.
A wave of weepy sentimentality for his (and everyone’s) unrealized dreams swept over him.
He had a good cry over it and it made him feel better. Made him feel good again. Good and heartbroken. Good and scared. But basically good. He was feeling good about something again.
Something profound but simple seemed to be happening to him without, for once, any effort on his part. All that was required of him was to not get in the way.
New ideas for his Ulysses movie came to him. He had not a clue where all these wonderful new ideas were coming from.
He wished he had one of those little portable Olivetti typewriters and some paper, so that he could record the ideas for future use.
Even one of those stupid laptop things which he had never learned to use would have been nice to have right now.
But he didn’t even have a ballpoint pen on him.
As a last resort, he hit upon an old device, used by men in ancient times. He would remember. He would remember it all.
“That’s what I’ll do,” he said to himself. “And then I’ll put it all down on paper first thing in the morning.”
It felt so good finally to rid himself of all excuses for not getting down to work.
And so he began.
He started with the image of the solar schooner somewhere in space. Since there were no other objects around it in relation to which its speed could be gauged, the schooner seemed to be standing still, whereas, in fact, blown along by solar winds, it was hurtling through the space-time continuum at speeds approaching the speed of light.
On board the solar vessel was Ulysses.
He looked not so much like the Ulysses of old but like a Ulysses who had grown old. The mid-thigh tunic he was wearing, although made of royal cloth and trimmed with gold, was no longer flattering to his aged figure.
There was now a noticeable and unheroic paunch in his tunic.
Gone soft were his once well-shaped thighs. Gone the spring from his step.
His thinning hair was dry and brittle and streaked with gray. A scraggly, gray-streaked beard covered his wrinkled face.
The lonely look in his eyes was of a middle-aged wanderer who had lost much that he had loved and found very little to make up for it.
His teeth were still all his, but they were not all there. Some missing. Some chipped and broken.
When he peed, as he was doing now, it hurt to pee and the once powerful bull-like torrent was reduced to a series of intermittent dribbles.
Nor did it give him any pleasure, as it once had, to hold his prick in his hand. It was as if the thing he was holding and the hand that was holding it had both outlived their days.
His sleep, when he slept, was fretful, his dreams shallow, his nightmares full of regret. When he woke up, he did not feel refreshed, nor: did he know for what purpose he was waking up.
It was as if the same wearisome day awaited the same old Ulysses.
When he paced his ship, as he was doing now, after peeing, a pain in his lower back hampered his movement. There was something lonely about the way he reached back to rub his nagging pain, as if there was no one left to rub it for him.
As indeed there wasn’t.
The single most striking thing about seeing Ulysses pacing the deck of his solar schooner was that he was alone, passenger, captain, and crew all in one.
The once-famous warrior, wanderer, philanderer, the hero of the Achaeans, Ulysses, the king of Ithaca, could just as easily have been some King Lear of the cosmos without even a fool for company or the blessings of madness to take his mind away from the wrongs he had done.
Wrongs that could never be righted.
“Wherefore was I born?” he howled.
With nobody on board his ship to address this question to, he hurled it out into the space he was sailing through, with that combination of pathos and rage that sometimes accompanies the laments of old men and undermines their grandeur.
A close-up of Ulysses, the features of his face forming a mask of anguish and regret.
He remembered it all.
His wife Penelope, his son Telemachus, his home in Ithaca. It seemed only yesterday that he had been a happy man who could look forward to a peaceful old age in the bosom of his beloved family.
He remembered his return home after more than a decade of wandering. Dressed as an impostor, a homeless beggar. Seeing his son, a strapping young man now, whose growing-up years he had missed. How tall he was. How handsome. What shoulders he had. His beloved Telemachus.
The courage of his son, as they fought together side by side against the suitors, was all that any father could have asked for in a son.
The faithfulness of his lovely wife Penelope, in rejecting all those suitors for all those years, was all that any husband could have asked for in a wife.
He remembered their reunion. The three of them. The embraces. The kisses. The tears of joy of being together again.
But in the days that followed, something seemed not quite right to Ulysses.
Home again in Ithaca, he found himself feeling not so much unhappy as not as happy as he thought he would be to be back home again with his wife and son.
Something in the manner of Penelope and Telemachus cast a shadow on Ulysses’ joy as a family man.
It was not a question of love. He loved them both with all his heart, and felt loved by both of them.
The problem was that he had loved them and longed for them both for so long that this loving in absentia had become a way of life, and a way of loving for him.
During all those years of absence, he had thought about them, dreamed and imagined scenes among the three of them. The level of intimacy he achieved in his imagination with his son and wife was astonishing for one so busy and absent from home for so long. But as often happens to family men, it seemed to Ulysses that the longer he stayed away from home, the closer he grew to his beloved family.
It was this closeness that was now the heart of the problem.
The closeness, the level of intimacy he experienced with his wife and son could not match the closeness he had imagined with them prior to his return.
At times he felt superfluous in their company.
He knew that they both loved him, but he could not help noticing that they loved each other more. That the intimacy between them was of a special kind.
What Ulysses wanted was what they had.
He knew, of course, that the love bond between a mother and her child was a special one, accepted as such by men and gods alike. He knew that he could not expect to achieve the same kind of effortless intimacy with either of them in a matter of weeks. It was wrong of him to demand, as he sometimes felt like doing, “I am back, so love me as if I had never been gone.” He could not just drop in unannounced and expect to resume immediately where he had left off. He knew this. If he would just be patient …
But he lacked patience, as kings often do.
He wanted to hurry a process that could not be hurried.
He refused to accept the fact that he could not make up lost time. And so Ulysses, a crafty and daring king, came up with a crafty and daring plan.
There was, at the edge of their galaxy, a legendary confluence of the three mighty rivers of time where the past and the present flowed into and formed the future. If one sailed through the wormholes in space, it was neither a dangerous nor an overly taxing journey from Ithaca.
The confluence was a resort, a galactic spa of sorts, where those who could afford it went to discover the life they could have had if they had chosen a different course of action. The road not taken could be experienced there and incorporated alongside the road taken. It was the ultimate luxury of the superaffluent elite. Many became addicted to making this pilgrimage, spending their entire fortunes to live out every possible variation of their lives. Some visitors went mad due to the presence of so many parallel lives in their minds. Others, upon their return home, could not shake off a certain listlessness, a chronic disinclination toward action that stayed with them until their deaths.
Not all the side effects were extreme, but there was always some price to be paid after a trip to the confluence.
Ulysses, however, was undaunted. He had outwitted the Trojans, the Cyclops, and even the gods themselves. He had heard the sirens singing and lived to tell about it.
An acute case of hubris was goading him on, telling him that he could outwit time as well without paying any price at all. Where lesser men had failed, he would triumph.
He would take his family to the confluence and there, in one fell swoop, he would rewrite his absent years. He would not just rewrite his own life but the life of his wife and son and make it appear that their lengthy separation had never taken place.
Despite Penelope’s foreboding about the journey, despite the Delphic oracle’s warnings, despite forecasts and reports of unprecedented galactic disturbances, Ulysses left Ithaca and set sail for the confluence with his wife and son and a crew of forty men.
Initially, they made steady progress. The solar winds were favorable, the sail full. Even when a storm hit, nothing about it seemed particularly alarming except its suddenness. It was as if the storm came from nowhere. And then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, it was gone.
The winds died down and then died out completely. The solar sail expired and hung limp from the long mast like a wedding veil. Everything was calm and serene while they waited for the winds to resume.
There was no warning. Nobody on board the ship heard it or saw it coming, because when it came, it came at a velocity exceeding, by an unimaginable factor of 18.6, the speed of light itself.
A tidal wave of time, ripped loose and set into motion by some incalculable force, was streaking across the universe. Ulysses’ schooner was directly in its path.
The rest would have been history had not this tsunami of time traveled at such an apocalyptic speed that it precluded the possibility of any historical record being left behind.
Only Ulysses was left behind. All the others, his whole crew, his wife, his son, were swept away.
The wave moved at a speed exceeding the ability of the human mind even to record the memory of the event.
Only the calamitous inventory of consequences gave any indication that an event had occurred.
One nanosecond Penelope was, Telemachus was, and then they were no more. One nanosecond Ulysses was a king, a family man who was going to have it all, and then all was gone.
Grief-stricken, he howls. His grief becomes a rage. He claws at his face until it is covered with blood and scraps of skin hang in tatters from his fingernails.
But grieve as he might, he lacks the resources to find an expression for a grief that is commensurate with all that he has lost.
If madness could be had for the asking, he would plead for it.
Alone, all alone for the first time in his life, he sails back toward Ithaca, but, within eyesight of his kingdom, he realizes that there is no longer a home there for him. Not there, not anywhere else.
Homeless now, he sails on through space and time with only one aim in mind.
To find the gods.
To seek a reckoning with the gods themselves. To demand an answer from them: Did all this have to happen? Was it necessary that Penelope and Telemachus should die? Was it all a part of some divine plan? Or was it just chance in a random universe and the result of his own human pride and folly? He had to know.
“Wherefore?”
He sails on, looking for a passageway to Olympus, the abode of the gods, where no mortal has ever been. He wants a reckoning with Zeus himself.
He seeks information from the captains of the passing solar schooners he encounters and from the kings of the various kingdoms he passes in his journey. But none are of any help. They either do not know the way to Olympus or they refuse to provide him with the coordinates for the destination he seeks. His desire for a reckoning with the gods is seen by them all as the desire of a deranged apostate.
The word spreads about this homeless wanderer and soon no kingdom will even allow him to dock in its port for fear of retribution by the gods.
So he sails on alone. In the continual present of his mind the pain of loss lives on and the unanswered “Wherefore?” lives on and demands to be answered.
He encounters and traverses strange landscapes, mountain ranges of lapsed time, his schooner skipping from peak to peak, covering whole lifetimes in a matter of seconds, like a well-thrown rock skipping across a placid pond.
He skips across centuries and sees in passing the demise of the world he has known.
Gone.
Gone the kings and the kingdoms he has known. Gone Agamemnon and Menelaus. Gone the whole house of Atreus. Gone Hellas and Helen and Troy.
Gone as well are the empires that followed. Skipping across the time-lapse landscape, he no sooner sees an empire born than it’s gone.
The Achaemids of Persia come and go. The last Darius falls to Alexander of Macedon and then Alexander falls. Gone Persia. Gone Macedon. Gone Roxane, the dark-eyed daughter of Darius, wife of Alexander the Great.
The great and the not-so-great and the anonymous come and go and are gone.
Rome rises, declines, and falls, and is gone.
The Age of This. The Age of That. Different ages come and go and no sooner do they come than they’re gone.
And in every age, as in all the preceding ages and in all the ages that follow, it’s bloodshed that brings down one age and causes another to rise. Millions die in the name of some name and then the name goes down in a sea of blood, but the butchery goes on in the name of some new name.
Countless crusades and endless corpses of the crucified.
“Why do we live like this?” Ulysses asks.
No answer comes. He scans the infinity of time and space, looking for some telltale sign of a trail to God.
It is no longer his gods of old that he seeks to answer his questions. It is God the Creator.
All the gods he knew as a boy, as a man, are now long gone.
Gone Zeus and Poseidon and Pallas Athena, the goddess of the flashing eyes who watched over him. Gone Hermes and Apollo and Artemis and Olympus itself, where the gods dwelled and charted the destinies of men.
Gone the gods and the men who believed in them.
Everything, even the immortals, comes and goes and is gone, but the butchery and the bloodshed continue.
The wine-dark seas of poetry, Ulysses now sees, are seas of blood.
Nor can he deny that a ghastly measure of that blood was spilled by him.
All those men he slaughtered beneath the walls of Troy, and for what? For Helen? For Menelaus? For Agamemnon? For the glory of Hellas?
No, for nothing. It was all for nothing.
Even butchered cattle, he thinks, are put to better use than the useless slaughtered men.
He sails on through black holes and wormholes and loopholes in space, looking for God.
He ages, and although his aging is but a pittance compared to the eons he traverses, he does age. His hair, what little wisps of it remain, is all white now. His teeth are gone. Wrinkles like dry riverbeds cover his face. His eyes have receded in their sockets as if pushed back by all the horror he has seen.
Gone now are his crafty ways and his famous nimble mind that outwitted everyone, himself included. In their place, perhaps as a recompense for all that he has lost, is a tiny scrap of wisdom, no bigger than a handout a beggar gets. But as tiny as that scrap of wisdom is, it suffices to illuminate the life of a fool.
“I had it all,” he rages, “and I had it all just by being born. I was born alive in a world full of life. Wherefore, then, did I not cherish and love it all?”
“Oh, you fool,” he says to himself. “You miserable fool, the miracle of life was wasted on you.”
His wife, his son, any man, woman, or child, what he would not give for the privilege of loving them. He could now consume the rest of his days in the loving of a single living flower.
His heart aches to love, but there is nothing alive aboard his schooner except for himself. So out of desperation, Ulysses takes his right hand with his left and, clutching it to his bosom, he loves it.
Like some old grandfather cherishing an infant placed in his care, Ulysses rocks his living hand and sails on, looking for God.
He sails into vast dead-end tunnels of time and then sails out again and sails on.
There are no sea charts for the destination he seeks, nor are there stars pointing the way to God.
He starts to feel lost.
There are times when it seems to him that the space-time continuum he has been sailing through has split in two, and that he is now traveling through time alone, or space alone, he doesn’t know which, and has no way of finding out.
His spirit, like his sinews, begins to grow slack. He is just a little old homeless man lost in the universe, clutching his own hand for company.
And then, on an unusually depressing day (or night), when his thoughts are at their gloomy worst, he hears music streaming toward him through the darkness of space (or time). The music he hears is of such sweetness that he assumes it to be a hallucination of his demented mind.
But then, peering into space with his myopic eyes, he discerns blinking lights in the distant darkness, and the blinking lights seem to be blinking to the sweet music that he hears.
Standing stoop-shouldered at the helm, Ulysses steers his schooner toward the source of the music and feels his sagging spirit rise again. The melody is streaming past him like a gentle spring breeze (he remembers those breezes coming off the Aegean Sea) while the deeper undertones are pulling him tidelike toward the blinking lights.
He is in rapture. He thinks he is hearing the music of the spheres.
The lights beckon like a cosmic oasis with living trees bearing blinking lights for fruit. The closer he gets to them, the sweeter the music he hears. He thinks he is nearing Paradise. He thinks he is hearing angels singing.
He sails into the lights and is enveloped by music from all sides.
It is only now, seeing in horror their strobe-lit smiles and the flickering outlines of their naked breasts, that Ulysses realizes that he has been tricked by the Banalities.
They seem to be everywhere, in front, back, on both sides of his vessel, their ravishing lips parting to make music and song, their ravishing arms, moving like silken scarves, trembling with desire to press him to their naked breasts.
“Oh, lonely wanderer,” they sing, “wander no more …”
He had outwitted the Sirens by having his crewmen tie him to the mast. He alone of all men heard the Sirens sing and lived to tell about it. But he is alone now. There is nobody to help him, nor does he have his nimble wits to assist him. If he is to survive and continue his journey, it must be done by his will alone.
But his willpower is sorely taxed by the beautiful Banalities, creatures that are half bathing beauties, half nothingness, but so alluring in appearance that he cannot tell which half is which. And their voices are of such tormenting sweetness as to put the songs of the Sirens to shame.
“Homeless believer,” they sing to him, “find your home …”
The song tugs at his heart, as only a song sung by the Banalities can tug at it. His old heart feels like an anchor that he would gladly drop then and there. But he knows it’s a trap.
His willpower ebbing, desperate to escape before he succumbs, Ulysses steers wildly, looking for a way out. Whichever way he sails, the nubile Banalities sail right along with him, the beaming beauty of their eyes blinding him, the insinuating sweetness of their singing sapping his resolve.
“I must find God,” he shouts at the top of his lungs, but he hears a note of doubt in his voice, as of someone who is no longer certain.
The comely Banalities detect his uncertainty and turn it into another song.
“God is dead,” they sing to him. “There are no gods in the universe. There is only man and there is no man like godlike Ulysses …”
They sing, savoring the sibilants in his name, kissing him with its sound all over his body. Their eyes beam images of his once-youthful figure in all its glory and superimpose it on his aged form. He is made to seem and feel desireable again, a warrior king capable of satisfying many women and fathering many sons.
They sing his name as if in ravenous hunger for his sex.
In the reflection from their eyes, he sees himself mating with them all, one after another, sees his sons being born, sees himself in their midst, adored and beloved by them all.
“No,” he cries out in despair, like someone tormented by an irresistible temptation that he must nevertheless find a way to resist. “It is not new sons that I need. I need to know why I did not love the living son that I had. Wherefore did I not love my one and only child? I need to know why I was born and why I lived the way I did.”
“For nothing,” the ravishing Banalities sing in reply. Their song is like a love song and a hymn and a lullaby. They sing it in three-part harmony and with such sweet piety that their “For nothing” seems both right and true. As if only in nothingness is the nirvana where all his questions will be answered once and for all.
“No,” he cries out in his old man’s voice, “a thousand times no. Man was not made for nothing. Not even I.”
If resistance were a passing necessity, all would be fine, but it’s not. The persistence of their temptation requires a persistence of resistance and he feels himself succumbing. They are whittling away at him with their song, telling him not only that it is foolish to resist but reminding him (in song) that there is nobody here even to admire his resistance. No witnesses of any kind to pass on the tale of his struggle. No Homer to make an epic of his deeds. It’s all for nothing, they sing to him, nobody will ever know.
“In the ever-present present of my living mind there is still an I of whom I am aware, and it suffices that I will know,” he tells them.
It is not exactly a crushing rebuttal, and he knows it, and sees that they are not crushed by it. They seem amused. All reason and logic are on the side of the Banalities in this argument, but Ulysses is an old man and old men sometimes feel put upon by reason and logic and become unreasonable out of pure spite, like little children.
His temper tantrum (which follows) is not worthy of the high-minded debate they’re having, but he doesn’t care. He screams. He cries. He stomps his feet and flails his arms. He’s had enough. He’s too old for this. He wants to go home.
“I am who I am and that’s that,” he screams at them and keeps on screaming until his face becomes purple. He will not argue with them anymore. There is nothing left to discuss. He was who he was and that was that.
Rickety-legged and shaking all over, Ulysses hurls obscenities at them and steers his vessel without regard for the direction he’s taking, so long as it leads him out of there.
Which it eventually does.
He’s so worked up, however, that even when the lair of the Banalities is well behind him, he keeps on hurling invectives at them and calling them names.
Gradually, despite himself, he calms down and resumes his search for God.
But with the return of calmness, loneliness also returns, which the Banalities had dispelled for a while.
He starts to miss them, as voyagers often miss the obstacles of their journeys.
He saw his last star some time ago and there are no longer any stars to be seen, or distant comets, or heavenly bodies of any kind.
In the space-time continuum through which he is traveling in search of God, there is nothing to be seen or heard anymore. There is only a void and no way of knowing if the void through which he’s wandering is one of limits or limitless. It just goes on and on. There is no end in sight. There is nothing in sight. His only consolation is that it is not nothingness. It is a void, yes, but the void itself is something and he takes it on faith, as he must, that he is moving through it toward some other something, toward God.
His one and only consolation begins to wear thin, however, and then wears out completely, leaving him in the void without any consolation at all.
When it’s night, the void is dark, and when it’s day, the light of the day illuminates a void without boundaries or limits or anything within it to rest his eye upon.
The schooner in which he is sailing does not even cast a shadow, for there is nothing in the void to cast a shadow upon.
A single blade of grass would now seem to him like a landscape worthy of being called paradise.
He sails on, but he has no way of ascertaining if he is moving, because in the void he’s in there is nothing to move past nor anything, however fleeting, to move past him.
There is only the time-space continuum, but even the certainty of that begins to wane. For all he knows, the time-space continuum was discontinued a long time ago without his noticing.
Alone in his schooner, he starts to feel like a sketch somebody made and left unfinished, of an old man in a schooner. A picture hanging in the void.
His only hope is God, but even that hope turns against him, because for all he knows, the void that he is in is God.
For all he knows, he has found Him.
He does not dare call out to God as once he did so freely, because a dread accompanies the impulse to call out to Him and makes him refrain. The dread is that God might answer and validate by His reply that He is indeed the void. Slack-jawed in terror of this possibility, Ulysses dares not even whisper His name.
What little faith he has left that God is not the void is a faith so small and fragile that Ulysses endeavors to hide his fath even from God.
He was once a mighty king with a kingdom, he was once a father and a husband, and now he is reduced to this. He is a rickety old man with little faith. But he clings to it.
He sails on, seeing nothing and feeling unseen by anyone. His loneliness grows out of all proportion to the tiny size of the human vessel called Ulysses in whom this ocean of loneliness resides.
Without convictions or scheme he sails on, on faith alone.
There is no true north in the outermost reaches of the universe, no north of any kind, or south, or east, or west. There is no up or down. No things that loom on the horizon. No horizon for that matter. There is only the void and a voyager within it.
There are no corners to turn in this void, or bends to go around that reveal a vision or a vista. Therefore it is not only next to impossible but entirely impossible to convey the manner in which Ulysses suddenly sees God the Creator.
Even “suddenly” is an inaccurate way to describe it. When Ulysses sees God, the only thing that’s sudden is his own realization that he has been seeing Him for a long time.
There is no meeting as such between Ulysses and God. No kneeling, no handshakes or embraces. There is not even the dropping of the anchor, as if Ulysses, after all his wandering, has finally reached his final destination and can henceforth rest in bliss in the kingdom of God.
There is, Ulysses sees, no such kingdom. The God he sees is not a king who reigns or presides. The God he sees is a working God. He is God the Creator and Ulysses sees Him and continues to see Him in the act of creation.
He sees God hurling Himself from the outermost edge of existence into the nothingness beyond, plowing into that nothingness like a living plowshare and causing more time and space to be born. Over and over again, the Creator hurls, and keeps on hurling Himself, into nothingness. There is every reason to believe that this is an endless process.
Ulysses sails on after Him, in the wake of new worlds being born.
Sometimes it seems to him that God’s joy of creation is so great, and His love for what He does so all-consuming, that He doesn’t even notice Ulysses sailing along in His wake.
At other times, right now, for example, he worries that all of creation is a cosmic wheel and that all that God creates turns into nothingness and comes around again, so that God has to begin at the beginning and create time and space and life all over again. Over and over again.
When he prays, Ulysses no longer prays to God but rather for God to live on, so that nothingness will not have the final word.
The little faith Ulysses had, and to which he clung with maniacal desperation, is now completely gone. He has no need of faith anymore, be it large or small. In its place is an effortless kind of love for anything that lives. A love without motive of any kind.
He sees the living God plowing into the nothingness and pushing it back with creation. In addition to time and space being born, Ulysses sometimes sees, like an ocean of sparks from a forge, an ocean of subatomic particles streaming out of the nothingness and streaming past him on all sides. In those particles Ulysses sees the flora and the fauna of the subatomic world. Each little particle, he sees, is alive.
But all is not as Ulysses thought it would be when he set out to look for God. He was sure that finding God would be an answer to all his questions. It’s not.
His question as to why he lived the way he did remains unanswered.
The great “Wherefore?” is still with him.
So is the pain for all the many crimes he committed.
He had hoped that God would make this pain go away once and for all, but now discovers that there is no such thing as once and for all.
Amends, he discovers, cannot be made.
Love as he might, and love as he does, he now knows that not a single moment of unlove can ever be made up.
Not ever.
Nor can he bridge the gap that separates him from God. He sails on through created time and space, but God the Creator is always ahead, always creating more, and the distance can never be bridged.
And so Ulysses sails on, following God, with no hope of ever catching up to Him, or ever reaching a place called home.
He doesn’t know what course he’s on, but he does know that he’s not lost in the universe.
Every now and then he prays:
“Blessed be anything that lives. Father, mother, brothers, sisters, children of the earth, blessed be your very lives, for they are the joy of the world.”