R f nelson, p.17
R. F. Nelson, page 17
“I’m praying.”
He stood up with a sigh and went over to put another log on the fire.
*
Kate slept badly that night, by fits and starts. A little Before dawn, after hovering for some time between waking and sleeping, Kate suddenly understood.
She rolled over, grasped the sleeping William by the shoulder, and shook him. “Wake up! Wake up!”
With an uncomprehending grunt, he raised up on one elbow and stared at her.
“Listen, Mr. Blake. I’ve found the way out!”
“Out of what?” he said stupidly.
“This universe!” She sat up, her enthusiasm overcoming her weakness.
“There’s a way out, and it’s been in front of us all the time without our seeing it.”
William rubbed his eyes with a thick knuckle. “What are you talking about?”
“Time!” she cried. “There’s time in the place outside of time!”
“What?” His face, in the dim light, was a blob of incomprehension.
“Don’t you see? If you want to get out of the stream of normal time, you go into what we call the place outside of time. But it’s not really outside of time! There’s another kind of time there. Things happen. People grow older. Things like the battle between the lizard and human spirits begin, go on for a while, then end.”
“So?”
“Aren’t you awake yet? Don’t you realize what this means? Just as we can, by concentration, get out of the normal timestream into the place outside of time, so must we be able, when in the place outside of time, to concentrate and get out of the place outside of time into some other place, some place that’s really out of time.”
“No, impossible. We would have seen it…”
“We have seen it! Remember when we were on Urizen’s island and Urizen came rushing toward us out of the future? It wasn’t this future that we’re living in, it was the other future, before the change. From there we could see both futures. Both futures still existed! So there must have been some kind of time that was common to them both. It’s clear as day, Mr.
Blake! And when Urizen shot his own earlier self, where did the old self go?
And when the lizards drove out the human spirits, where did they drive them out to? And where did all those lizards come from in the first place.
Answer me that if you can!”
“Urizen would have figured out…”
“No, Urizen didn’t figure it out! But it’s true all the same. There is another place outside of time, a place where all the different futures exist together. There’s got to be!”
“If there was, we couldn’t find it.”
“Yes, we can!” She grasped his hand. “Come!”
New Lambeth was gone. The place outside of time was sparsely populated by lizard spirits who rushed past heedlessly on urgent but unguessable errands. Uptime the battle was over and the rip in the sky had vanished without a trace. The light was an even green, flickering only when you moved uptime or downtime. The images were less vivid, less alive than ever, and here and there Kate could see peculiar crumpling effects, as if the very fabric of space was on the verge of collapsing under some infinite weight.
She looked at William. He had a tail.
It was a small tail, but a tail nonetheless.
Kate thought, Perhaps I have one too.
She said firmly, “Concentrate, Mr. Blake, while you still have a mind that can.”
*
It was easy when you knew it could be done. She thought of the saying, A prison is a home if the door’s unlocked.
She had not known what to look for, and had almost ignored the effect when it had first appeared. An impression of distance. That was all there was at first.
Her impulse was to say, “That’s not it.”
But then she realized that she was seeing, more with her mind than her eyes, both the world inside the timestream and the place outside of time, superimposed, neither more sharp than the other.
“I think it’s coming,” she said to William, and clutched his hand.
Quite suddenly, with a rush, she was falling back away from her vision.
Everything was shrinking rapidly. Other things were coming into view, but they were too far away to see clearly. The light was growing brighter, taking on a brilliant bluewhite color.
She glanced to her right. William, still holding her hand, looked so startled she had to smile.
“You see?” she cried. “You see?”
She laughed out loud from sheer exhilaration.
The place they had come from was shrinking to a point.
A point is that which has position but no magnitude. A point has neither length nor breadth nor depth, yet it exists.
The place they had come from was part of a thin, glowing line.
A line is the course of a moving point, having length but no other dimension. In each line there are an infinite number of points.
Infinite! That was a word Kate had heard William use many times.
She’d thought she’d understood it, but she hadn’t… not until now!
The line they had come from was one of many. It branched and branched and branched again, and from each branch-sprang other branches. It was like a tree or, better yet, a fan. Far away it all stretched out endlessly, an infinite fan-shaped plane.
A plane is a surface such that a straight line joining any two of its points lies wholly within the surface.
Her mind struggled to understand.
The point she’d come from was a point in time. That point was part of a single timeline, the timeline of the lizards. But the timeline of the lizards branched, again and again. There were an infinite number of lizard timelines, and all the lizard timelines, taken together, were a branch of yet another timeline. And where am I? she thought. Am I really outside of time?
That could not be. Events still happened to her one after the other, in an ordered sequence. Even here, above the fan of time, above the infinite different branches of time, there was time.
She saw more. The fan could rotate. It could describe a vast cone… A cone! But what was outside the cone? As if in answer to her question she began to see another cone, completely within the first cone, yet branching off from it at a right angle.
William screamed. She saw he was covering his eyes with his right hand, clutching her with his other hand so tightly it hurt her.
She remembered, oddly, a line he’d written in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
“There, there, Mr. Blake,” she said soothingly. “Don’t take on so. There’s nothing to fear.”
He looked at her, his large eyes filled with more madness than she’d ever seen before. “There’s a limit!” he shouted.
“A limit to what?”
“You know!”
“The universe?”
“No! My mind!”
She turned away from him to look again at the cone. And the cone within the cone. And the cone within the cone within the cone. There could be no mistake. The light was very bright. It hurt her eyes.
There was light all around. It moved and undulated like smoke, yet was somehow solid. Was it made of colored glass? She tried to touch it, but could not.
And it seemed to her she could hear the light as well as see it, and the sound was of a vast chord on a cathedral organ, a single chord that changed constantly yet always remained the same. She could feel the sound on her skin, like sunshine.
And in the light and sound she could sense… consciousness!
A third time she looked at the cone. Of all the timelines in it, one was stronger and brighter than the others. Of all the points on that brighter line, one stood out like a spot of pure white flame.
Without words, something was directing her toward that flame, guiding her gently.
“Come along, Mr. Blake,” she said.
The cone hurtled toward her.
*
When the rain hit her skin, she was aware for the first time that she and William were naked. In the dim early morning light she looked at her hand. It was a human hand, not a claw.
She looked at William. He had no tail.
She looked around her. She was standing in the middle of the street, facing a house, and she recognized the house at once. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, Surrey, London, England, one of a row of terrace houses of eight or ten rooms each, surrounded by gardens, trees and bushes.
Home!
Something told her the year was 1794. Something told her there was no giant talking lizards in this world, no temples of Isis, no Albion, no Oothoon, no Golgonooza.
William turned toward her, dumbfounded.
“We’d best go inside,” she told him. “Think of the scandal if the neighbors should see us as bare as the Good Lord made us!”
The front door was as they’d left it, unlocked.
Inside, William remarked, puzzled, “There’s no dust… and we’ve been gone so long.”
Kate said, “No we haven’t. It was yesterday afternoon when we left here.
We’d been about to go shopping… Remember? I suppose we’ll have to go shopping today instead, but you must shave first. You look a sight!”
She put on her robe, after drying herself with a towel, and stood at the back window watching the rain fall on her wild grape vines and her poplar trees.
Soon William joined her, saying, “How do I look?”
“Much better, without the beard.”
“Kate! You’ve been crying!”
She nodded, lowering her eyes. “Yes, I suppose I have.”
“But we’re home now! Everything’s back the way it was.”
“That’s true. Perhaps I’m being silly…”
“Is it Ore?” he asked softly.
She nodded. “Yes, it’s Ore. I miss him you know. He was a dear thing, in spite of his… bad complexion.”
“Perhaps we can go back, get him away from Urizen. Perhaps we can bring him here, and he’ll change, become… like other little boys.”
Something told her the process of change, when it had gone beyond a certain point, was irreversible.
She shook her head. “No… but thank you for being willing…” Here she broke down and cried for a long time.
That afternoon, however, though she felt weak, she and William went shopping, and William got a haircut.
*
CHAPTER SEVEN… 1827
The Blakes were old. Kate was still vigorous, but William had, for several years, been suffering from recurring attacks of what he called
“shivering fits,” each worse than the last, and lately from jaundice as well, both symptoms of gallstones, the disease that would eventually cause his death.
They no longer lived in Lambeth, though Kate occasionally walked past their old home and paused a moment in the street to look at it. They had two small rooms on the ground floor at No. 3 Fountain Court. In one of them he lay, his bed laden with well-thumbed books in French, Latin, Italian, Greek and Hebrew, reading, writing and drawing by turns, when his weakness would permit. The most-read of all his books was his Bible, which had been all but destroyed by constant use.
The house stood in a narrow slit between the Strand and the Thames River. His long engraver’s table was placed under the room’s one window so that he could, while working, look out across the squalid yard and see this river, as he said, “like a bar of gold.” The fireplace was in the corner opposite the window. It would have warmed him as he sat there. A pile of portfolios and drawings that he could have consulted were on the right hand end of the table, near the room’s only cupboard, and on what would have been his left was a pile of books placed one upon another. He had no bookcase. There were just two pictures on the walls: a copy of an illustration by Giulio Romano of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and, close by the engraving table, Albert Dürer’s “Melancholy the Mother of Invention”.
The bed, like everything else in the room, faced the window, as if the window was a theatre stage on which the seasons performed an endless, enigmatic and slightly boring, but nonetheless fascinating, play.
The other room, though it served as a showroom for his work, was much darker and somewhat smaller. It was nothing like the Lambeth place, but William was not unhappy here, and the landlord never pressed them if the rent was late; he was a certain Mr. Baines, Kate’s brother-in-law.
So here William lay, not like a sick man, but like a languorous Roman emperor reclining on a royal dais, his great bald forehead rising majestically above an oddly shrunken face, clean-shaven, calm, and dignified. His eyes had not changed: they were large and strange as ever, but everything else about him was in some way paler, smaller, more shrunken… the ruddy color of his skin had been replaced by an alarming yellowish white. Yet he was an emperor for all that, though his toga, tunic and sandals had been replaced by a linen nightshirt, worn but white with the whiteness that comes from many washings.
He sighed, looking out the window at a beautiful August morning, at the white clouds piled on the horizon, on the familiar skyline of Lambeth across the Thames. Then he heard the front door open and close gently, heard whispers, the rustle of clothing.
“Kate, is that you?” His voice was not strong.
“Yes, Mr. Blake. Me and a neighbor lady that’s giving me a hand with things.”
He turned his head as Kate came quickly to his bedside. Her blouse was white muslin with slightly puffed sleeves; her skirt was long and full, also of white muslin. It did not fit her very well, as it was a hand-me-down from “the other Kate”, William’s sister. The neighbor lady hung back in the doorway, fidgeting.
“Can we talk?” William said.
Kate shot a meaningful glance at the neighbor lady, who said in a half-whisper, “If you need anything more…”
“Not now, but thank you so much. You’ve been such a comfort,” Kate told her.
The woman left, grateful, it seemed, to escape from the presence of sickness. Kate removed her broad-brimmed straw hat and threw it on the table, not looking at William. “So much to do…”
“We really should talk a bit,” William said.
Kate sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’ve heard some gossip next door. Would you believe…”
William broke in. “Today’s the day.”
Her face showed she understood. Today was the day of his death.
“When?” she asked.
“It must be sometime after six this evening. I jumped uptime—it isn’t as easy as it once was—and I saw my corpse, here in the bed, and you bending over me. That was about seven-thirty. I fell back into present-time before I could see anything more.”
“Can’t you hang on a bit longer? There’s unfinished work. We’ve got that engraving to do. Mr. Cumberland’s bookplate…”
“You’ll have to finish it without me.”
“No, I can’t!”
“You can. We’ve worked together for years. All our best work we’ve done together. I have grand ideas, yes, but I haven’t your skillful fingers. On this job the grand ideas are all done…”
“But the other work…”
“Do the best you can.”
“It’ll be perfectly rotten! Alone I do such trivial things, though it’s true I do them quick and well enough to please the customers. If it was you, could you go on and work alone?”
“I suppose not.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve never been a real artist, never been able to give life to the things in my mind. It’s when we worked together… my rough clumsy sketches and your fantastic finished work. It’s when we’ve worked together that we’ve made pictures that could have come from the hand of Raphael or daVinci. All the prophetic books, all the books based on the things we did in distant times and places. We did them together, Kate!”
“The books aren’t finished either. What about the ‘Book of Kate’? That was to be your gift to me. The master key that unlocks all the rest. It’s almost done…”
“That, too, you must finish yourself. You can do it. You know all I know.
You can do all I can do.”
“I can’t!”
“You must.” He opened his eyes and looked at her anguished face. “We must preserve the key. Otherwise those who come after us will not understand. Remember what we saw uptime? My work will be taught in schools, to children, but nobody, not even scholars who spend a lifetime at it, will understand my meaning. ‘The Book of Kate’ can change that.”
“I don’t know.” Kate frowned. “Perhaps it’s better they don’t understand. Perhaps what we know can… do harm. Would it be good if hundreds… if hundreds, thousands, millions of school children learned to invade the place outside of time, learned to change history? There are too many timestreams already. It makes my head ache to think of them all.
But Robert told me…”
“You’ve seen Robert?”
“He came to me last night, to comfort me, I suppose. He says all the spirits have come back to our own time line. He says the timeline of the lizards is dying.”
William was surprised. “How can a time line die?”
“Our time line has a strength the others lack. Our time line is sustained by eternal law. The others are sustained only by human will, and the human will fades.”
He took her hand. “I see, I see. Then something must be happening to Urizen. Perhaps he’s dying too.”
Kate shuddered. “Don’t use that word ‘dying’.”
“You remember what I said when our old friend Flaxman died last year?”
“You said you thought you should have gone first.”
“And I said I could not think of death as more than the going out of one room into another. That’s what it is, too. Who knows that better than we?”
“Yes. Yes, you’re right, of course.”
“And now I’m tired. I want to take a little nap. Don’t worry, though. We will talk again before… before I leave.”
Kate watched him as he fell into a light slumber. She did not tell him what else Robert had said. She did not tell him that Urizen, when his proud intelligence had begun to fade in his changed lizard body, had gone insane and, with his newly grown teeth and claws, torn Vala, and Ore to bits. Why tell such upsetting things to a dying man?
