Emperor of Gondwanaland (43 page)

Camus pondered this response for a time, striving to reorder his very conception of the cosmos. At last he asked a broken question. “This multiverse is ruled—?”

“By no one. It is benignly indifferent to us all. Which makes our own actions all the more weighty and delicious, wouldn’t you say?”

Camus nodded. “This is something I only now realize I have always felt.”

“Of course.”

“Can you give me a hint of the alternate outcomes of my actions? Will one decision on my part improve my world, while its opposite devastates it?”

The stranger chuckled. “Do I look like a prophet to you, Albert? All I can say is that change is inescapable in either case.”

Camus contemplated this unsatisfying response for a time before asking, “Do you have anything to aid me if I choose to accept this challenge?”

“Naturally.”

The stranger reached beneath his robe and removed a curious gun unlike any Camus had ever seen.

“Its operation is extremely simple. Just press this stud here.”

Accepting the gun, Camus said, “I need to be alone now.”

“Quite understandable. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, like a work of art.”

The stranger arose and made as if to leave. But at the last moment he stopped, turned, and produced a book from somewhere.

“You might as well have this also. Good luck.”

Camus accepted the book. The faint violet light reaching him from the dance hall allowed him to make out the large font of its tide,
The Myth of Sisyphus
.

The author’s name he somehow already knew.

After the stranger had gone, Camus sat for some time. Then he descended to the sands and began walking north, carrying both the book and the pistol.

Just where the stranger had specified, Camus found the sleeping man. His hands were pillowing his head as he lay on his side. The waves crashed a maddening lullaby. In the shadows, the sleeper’s Iberian profile reminded Camus of his mother, Catherine, who boasted Spanish ancestry herself, a blood passed down to her son.

It occurred to Camus that all he had to do was turn, walk away, and think no more about this entire insane night. His old life would resume its wonted course, and whatever happened in the world at large would happen without Camus’s intervention. Yet wasn’t that nonaction a choice in itself? It crossed his mind that to fire or not to fire might amount to the same thing.

The assassin stirred, yet did not awake. Camus’s grip on the pistol tightened. Every nerve in his body was a steel spring.

A second went by. Then another. Then another. And there was no way at all to stop them.

I think of this story as a cousin to my novella about Whitman and Dickinson, Walt and Emily, to be found in
The Steampunk Trilogy
. Poets—at least the majestic icons of the past—offer such perfect ready-made protagonists, full of weltschmerz and other high emotions. Grab a poet as your leading man or woman, and you’ve instantly got a wealth of human feeling, and likely also some ditzy, unconventional lifestyles to play with.

Even when you plunge them into a milieu of penny-a-word pulp fiction.

A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled

“Life is an after-thought …”

—Robert Frost, “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled” (written when he was eighteen)

Up the steep ascent of College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, in March of 1924, at a wintry, shadow-thronged hour long past midnight, labored the attenuated, castoff-swaddled form of the horror writer.

He had been tramping about through both city and countryside since 10 a.m. of the previous day, seeking to quiet his tumultuous brain, where thoughts raced like chips in a millstream. That selfsame morning had seen the dawn of his natal day, marking his fiftieth year of existence on this cursed globe. The intense self-reflection occasioned by this portentous milestone had immediately overwhelmed all the makeshift defenses of sanity he had erected over the past twelve years, since that tragic day in 1912 when his life went so radically off course. In anticipation of this sad anniversary, unable to pen either new fiction or correspondence, his wonted reading materials bleached of interest, the horror writer had hastily donned several layers of moth-eaten sweaters atop his omnipresent union suit, wool trousers, and broadcloth shirt. Against the exterior cold (hardly any worse than that in his cheap rented rooms; would spring never arrive?), he completed his outfit with the long tatty cloth coat kindly passed down to him by two of his few local friends, the similarly impoverished poetess Muriel Eddy and her husband, a fellow
Weird Tales
contributor, Clifford Eddy. Thus accoutered, with less than thirty cents in change to supply his nourishment for the day’s exertions, he plunged out of his grim widower’s flat.

In the ensuing hours he covered much ground. Heading north out of the city, he made for Quinsnicket Park, one of his favorite sylvan locales, where, during temperate seasons, he oft composed his work al fresco. But for once, sight of the massive boulders like Cyclopean monuments, and large, dark, mysterious Olney Lake had failed to raise his spirits. The leafless trees seemed to mock all human ambition, betokening a terminus to life upon the planet, a day when no living thing would stir from icy pole to pole.

From there he sought solace in several of his favorite small villages bordering the park, such as Saylesville and Fairlawn. But the hustle and bustle of factory workers and tradesmen and schoolchildren held no distraction for him today.

Despairing of his old haunts, he struck out for pastures less well trodden, crossing into Valley Falls and thence into neighboring Massachusetts. But even the suggestive, moss-covered, anciently disused rural cemeteries he chanced upon, with their weathered stones listing like drunken sailors, failed to lift his thoughts out of their weary self-pitying maelstrom.

From here, he had little memory of the paths and byroads he took. A vague sensation of having eaten at a lunch wagon—some noxious meat pie swilled down with coffee—remained with him. All he knew was that when dusk fell he was some score miles away from home, in the town of Bristol, on the East Bay. Weary and dispirited, he spent his last five cents on a trolley ride, but got off impulsively some few miles outside Providence. The rest of the hours until his footsore ascent of College Hill were spent at a nighted overlook of the bay, as he revolved the idea of self-destruction in his fatigued brain. The nigrescent tidal waters seemed to whisper alluring invitations to his soul.

But at last he not so much positively decided against such a cowardly way out of his troubles, as he merely acknowledged that today he lacked the initiative to consummate such a frequently considered relief. And so, without having either surmounted or been beaten by his nightmares, but rather merely exhausted them while they exhausted him, he once more turned his feet toward home.

Now, climbing from the sidewalk up the steps to his shabby Waterman Street residence, he fumbled for the key to a place he could hardly distinguish with the term “home,” a place equally meaningless to him as every other place on earth.

Beyond the front door, in the common hall, the smell of early-morning greasy breakfasts cooking on illicit gas burners came to him. Before he could attain the relative sanctuary of his own rooms, a door opened and a burly, shirtless laborer emerged, making for the communal lavatory. Through the open apartment door, the horror writer caught a glimpse of a teeming family scene—slatternly wife and mother, a pack of grimy children—and the mockery of what he himself had lost twelve years ago struck like a knife into his heart.

Pushing past the sleepy, unoffending laborer, the horror writer hurled himself into his own rooms. Still dressed, he fell onto his spavined cot and, mercifully faster than he would have predicted, Robert Frost was asleep.

The thirty-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire, had never provided an authentically agrarian living for Robert Frost and his family: his wife, Elinor, and their children, Carol (the only son), Irma, Lesley, and Marjorie. They had scraped by on loans and various makeshift subsidiary enterprises for twelve years. Owner of the property since 1900 (and even then only thanks to the financial support of his stern Yankee grandfather, William Prescott Frost), the ex-reporter, failed poultryman, eccentric schoolteacher, and would-be poet had ultimately failed to consummate his back-to-the-land dreams, just as he had failed with all the other schemes of his maturity, including that of making his mark on the body of American verse. Oh, yes, a few of his poems had been published, but only in such minor vehicles as the
Derry Enterprise
, the
Independent
, and
New England Magazine
. But as for achieving recognition from the Boston and New York critical establishments; as for having the mass of his unpublished work (all fine material, he was convinced) gathered into book form; as for elevating his name to the same plane as that occupied by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, and Edgar Lee Masters—well, at the despair-inducing age of thirty-eight, he felt himself as remote from these attainments as he had been at the callow age of sixteen, when his first poem appeared in the
Lawrence High School Bulletin
.

The year 1912, then, marked a self-appointed climacteric in Frost’s life. Determined to make a clean break with his discouraging past, he had fixed on the idea of transferring his whole family to England for an indefinite span. There, on the soil that had produced so many of the fine poets he admired, he felt that his talents would bloom and be appreciated. England held out the hope of the success that had so far eluded him in his native land. Gathering all his available resources together, including the annual stipend left to him by Grandfather Frost, the poet had just managed to cover the cost of the trip and a reasonable term abroad.

Elinor and the children were excited by the prospect. Even Elinor’s frequent nervous depression—a recurring melancholy matched only by her husband’s, who shared with his sister Jeanie a congenital disposition to black moods—lifted in the face of the foreign rebirth. Happily packing their many trunks, Elinor and the Frost children had speculated gaily on the new life that awaited them. Frost thought they sounded like a flock of the happy oven- birds he oft admired on his botanizing walks, and was pleased.

The family was set to sail from Boston on August the twenty-third.

A month prior to that date, Frost entered hell.

It was late evening. Frost had been out alone on a ramble, wandering the hills around Derry, his head stuffed with fragments of poems, visions of public accolades, visits to Westminster Abbey. Unlike many such occasions, he had forborne to take any of his children with him, neither his son Carol nor any of the girls. He had started late from home, and moreover he wanted his solitude.

Now, eager to regain his hearthside, nearing the road to his farm, Frost was disconcerted by unnatural activity at several of the neighboring homesteads. Flickering oil lamps behind curtained windows revealed that the diligent farmers and their wives were up and about much too late, as if agitated like a troubled hornets’ nest.

Intuitively fearing that the source of the neighborhood turmoil lay for some reason at his own residence, Frost quickened his pace. Could one of the children have fallen ill or been injured? Ever since the death of their first boy, Elliott, Frost had lived in fear of just such a tragedy.

The scent of smoke alerted him to the actual nature of the catastrophe. He began to run.

The entire Frost homestead, outbuildings included, raged as a solar inferno, unnaturally dispelling the night. In the rabid lineaments of the conflagration, Frost discerned a leering demonic face that conformed to the visage of his darkest terrors. A demon arising from his wallow to laugh, brushing the dirt from his eyes as he rose. And well Frost knew what the demon meant.

The useless equipment of the Derry Volunteer Fire Corps was ranked at a safe distance from the inferno, firefighters seeking to calm their nervous horses, despite their own human horror.

A familiar-looking mustachioed man with soot-streaked face, his name driven from Frost’s brain by the mortal circumstances, warily approached Frost.

“I’m sorry, Bob, but not a soul escaped. I’m sure it was quick for them though. The smoke itself—”

Those implacable words were the last sounds Frost was cognizant of for the next several days. His mind deserted his body and he collapsed to the warm, grass-tufted soil, the mockery of its rich summer fragrance of birth and growth competing with the charnel smell of the pyre.

When he next gained some small possession of his senses, he found himself in a half-familiar bedroom. Gradually he recognized the place as belonging to his friend Sidney Cox, a teacher at Plymouth High School. A nervous Cox himself sat in a chair beside the recumbent Frost. Upon seeing the older man’s eyes flicker open, Cox essayed a small smile and said, “Robert, welcome back to the world. You’ve been comatose for nearly a week, and we feared for your recovery.”

Frost’s voice husked sepulchral. “You’re addressing a dead man, Sidney, with words that mean nothing.”

Cox paled. “Don’t say that, Robert. You’ve experienced a huge tragedy, certainly, but one not unparalleled in human existence. Life goes on, after all. Surely all the worldly wisdom you’ve shared with me in our long talks will come now to your aid.”