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---- == inter\face 14 == Winter 1997 / Spring 1998 Featured in this issue of inter\face * C. E. Chaffin * Susan E. Dunn * Peter Meyerson * Henry Packer * Chris Scheil * J. Kevin Wolfe ---- inter\face is: an electronic brick wall to spraypaint the graffiti of our souls [JKW] ---- C. E. Chaffin Poems <code> These rude approximations, how I tire of them. Tangential, having a hope of the center, but the archer is too weak or his vision indistinct. When he pulls the bowstring back he dreams of heaven in a bull's eye but when the shaft flies he is lucky to graze the straw. He goes on believing the target accessible. If he did not, he would go mad, or at least go madder than he is. It is crazy to try, but more crazy to ignore that which cannot be gained by the employment of language. Words hang from our mouths like lost notes. We collect them because we believe that the attempt of telling might activate a parallel tone in minds that share the harmonics. The thing is ever beyond us. Sometimes our eyes connect in perfect intersection of sympathies as if we knew for certain. Words come as an afterthought. They cannot impart incorporeal wonder any more than a liturgy precipitates visions. </code> Manic Depression <code> I loathe this familiar prison where algae frosts the moat water in sickly pink phosphorescence whenever the moon is new, where the ghost that dogs me always wears my face and the vacant eyes of empty guard towers accuse me of intent and foreknowledge as if I had a key. The sun rises, stone walls dissolve. I clench a marigold in my teeth and tango on the flaming grass. The soil beneath is black with crematory ash. I pray the lawn is thick enough to hide the darkness I dance over. In a jester's diamond pajamas I crack a joke about myself-- Doestoyevsky would understand: "If I kill myself I prove God doesn't exist because his failure to intervene demonstrates my power is greater than his and thus I am really God." The crowd's laughter is nervous, begs reassurance. "Here is a cross to climb," I explain, "there, a halo. "Combine the two into a ring toss." </code> In 1997, C.E. Chaffin had over eighty poems accepted for publication both here and abroad, including print-zines and e-zines such as Agnieszka's Dowry, Beauty for Ashes, The Blue Penny Quarterly, Byline, Envoi, Free Cuisenart, Gray's Sporting Journal, Moonshade, Pearl, Poetry Café, Recursive Angel, The Rockford Review, Solitary Harvest, Slumgullion, Sparks, 2River View, and Zuzu's Petals, among others. He also published his first book of poems, Elementary, through Mellen Poetry Press (PO Box 450, Lewiston NY, 14092-0450 (716) 754-2788 $12.95 + $5.00 S&H. EDITORS PLEASE WRITE FOR A FREE COPY! A second-generation native Californian and a family physician, Dr. Chaffin lives in Southern California with his wife and three daughters. He strives to make his poetry spare and intelligible, believing a poem should not just "be" but also "mean." ---- Susan E. Dunn [note: [The original version of this poem] has hypertext links and a graphical background. Hopefully we can incorporate these elements soon...] The thing is, is (for JL) <code> The is isn't an Is or an i.s. or an is is. You'd stop the stammer speak is such as "this is the thing" or "the thing, it is here," or "here it is, the thing ." There you go dotting my I's be- cause my grammar's no good -- yanks pell mell into ta(l)k not speech broad voweled and wastes wor- ship the plain Hi- (Kuh says Zuke right in or between the I's). A-dieu, champ "nous nous cajo- lions" grrR rose or eros c'est la vie. (But Cupid's too stupid-- I prefer the nerve of Minerva.) And what about the that that? This is, is that, that was the poet the bride the hinge -- between the is , is </code> Susan E. Dunn is Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Current projects include a critical work on the avant-garde poet and artist, Mina Loy (1882-1966). ---- Peter Meyerson Closed Circuit Although they exchanged ritual news of the weather and the family on the phone regularly, Martin hadn't visited Sarah for nearly three years. Now, standing at the foot of her bed, he wondered if she was pleased to see him. Her expression or, more accurately, the lack of it, revealed nothing. Sarah was almost ninety. Her parched, furrowed little face was framed by a halo of thin dead wheat, punctuated with clots of lipstick, spikey mascara and long fake eyelashes; a grotesque face which, without its dentures, curled back into itself like a burnt match. His mother's face. He couldn't quite take in this painted Jazz Age doll all at once, couldn't, for more than an instant, consider her tiny red- speck eyes (a wounded mongoose squinting at the sun, he thought), eyes which in the past had 'never missed a trick.' Nor did Sarah, gazing at the mute TV set planted in the corner, look at her son. Martin turned toward the set. Displayed was a shadowy black and white image of the lobby's glass-door entrance where, from time to time, some weary, hunched ancient shuffled slowly through the portal. "What's that on the tube?" he asked. "The lobby. I watch them come and go" she replied. "This is how you spend your days?" "You got something better for me to do?" she said, her eyes never leaving the set. Definitely an edge there, Martin thought. For three years she had made his excuses for him, embraced the ruse of the loving son. It was, "Darling, I know you want to come, but what can you do? You're so busy." But now that he was here, there was an unmistakable hint of "How could you have stayed away so long?" Martin's father had died fourteen years earlier, and Sarah memorialized her husband's death by taking to her bed with a variety of largely imagined ailments which, over time, became real. Her occasional dizziness and light-headedness due, the doctors said, to wildly fluctuating blood pressure, eventually became firmly rooted in budding emphysema. Which didn't erode her dedication to unfiltered Camels. Between each cigarette Sarah took deep swills from an oxygen tank. "Don't worry," she assured her son. "I stub them out good. I won't explode." "This is no way to live to a hundred, ma," Martin said. "A hundred? Ninety's ten years too old already. I wish I'd gone at eighty," She meant it. Martin was sixty-five, an age at which most people have lost their mothers, may already be dead themselves; yet, suddenly, he felt like a child abandoned in a dream, wandering through an unfamiliar landscape aching to find his way home. ---- Martin and Melinda were talking in the living room while Sarah, pretending to nap, strained to catch her children's words. A futile endeavor; her erratic hearing demanded less distance and more volume. "...Who knows what's she's doing? She's practicing to die." Melinda's bitterness hissed through a narrow slit that echoed with cracking crowns. That tiny mouth, Martin thought, the ruin of her pretty face. Martin "She go out?" "Never," Melinda replied. "Or not any more, not even to my house for holiday dinners." "Anybody visit?" "Who? They're all sick...or worse. Besides, she doesn't want anyone to see she's grown old." "You don't like her very much, do you?" "Oh, please, what do you know?" Melinda said, welcoming the chance to unburden herself. "You breeze in once every three or four years...to what? Pass judgments? You try taking her phone calls ten times a day. You take a turn coming up here twice a week to fill the fridge "She wants to be taken care of." "A stunning insight." "What about a home?" "Oh, sure," Melinda said cynically. "She says she'll jump off the balcony if I even think about it." Then, faltering: "I...couldn't do that to her." After his sister left, Martin mused about his parent's generation. The last of their kind, he thought, children of immigrants, people of the boroughs drawn in the end to the damp heat and thick, mnemonic air of Florida. What better place to grow old and die? Here is where their youth has led. Here, just staring at the sea, they conjure up the lost beaches of August Martin had always deplored his mother's lies and manipulations, her appalling vanity, the pathetic facade of abundance and culture she constructed for the benefit of others, and maybe, above all, the way she'd always denigrated his father. As a child, he hated her; as an adult, after years of therapy taught him to forgive, he simply didn't like her. But there was one event, a childhood incident, which he had never forgotten and never forgiven her for. When Martin was five years old, a few months after Melinda was born, Sarah had announced that it was time for his first visit to the dentist. Just a checkup. After a short taxi ride to the office of the family pediatrician, Dr. Shaw, they were driven to a private hospital on the Grand Concourse not far from their Bronx apartment where they were seated in a waiting room. Dr. Shaw murmurred a few words to Sarah, chucked Martin under the chin, grinned reassuringly, and disappeared through a pair of swinging doors. Uneasy, Martin asked whether Dr. Shaw was a dentist, too. "Of course he is, darling," Sarah said. "You're not worried, are you? Don't be worried. We'll be home in half an hour." Fifteen minutes later, two attendants entered the waiting room and approached Martin from either side. Wthout a word, they closed in on the frightened boy like a pair of claws and, suddenly, grabbed him, pulling the child, flailing and screaming, through an open door. From the depths of his terror, Martin caught a momentary glimpse of his mother's face. But, strangely, for the rest of his life, even after years of intensive psycho- therapy, he'd never been able to recall her expression at that instant. In a small operating room, the attendants strapped him to a table. Immobilized, surrounded by masked adults, Martin watched as they placed a noxious, cotton-filled ether strainer over his face; someone told him to count to ten. Martin knew with profound certainty that he was about to die. His last thought before passing into unconsciousness was why his mother wanted him dead. What had he done? When he awoke, he learned that he'd had his tonsils removed. >From that moment on, Martin earned his reputation as a 'difficult' child. ---- "I think she's waiting for pop to come home from the hospital," Martin said. "Well, she's in for a big surprise." The floor-to-ceiling doors of the boardwalk restaurant had been removed, giving diners a view of passersby, of the beach of and an enormous orange moon inching slowly out of the sea. "I don't mean consciously, for god's sake." "Well, excuse me," Melinda said, studying her menu. Martin's confident psychologizing had been irritating her for fifty years. "She's filled with remorse." "Uh huh. About what?" "Pop, obviously. How she couldn't handle being with him at the end. She couldn't even go to the hospital that last week." "That was a long time ago." "So what? Guilt doesn't heal itself. She's waiting for him to come back and forgive her, tell her he understands." "What do you say we order?" Melinda said. "I'll have the pompano." "Fish? You're a meat-eater." "I was. Before I leaked." "What're you talking about?" "My aortic valve. It sprung a leak." "Since when?" Melinda was alarmed. "I don't know. I found out a couple of weeks ago," Martin said matter-of-factly. "Is the pompano any good here?" "Martin. What...what does it mean?" "Not much. It's a slow leak. Congenital. Completely benign. There aren't any real symptoms...except for a slight arrhythmia. I just have to make sure my blood pressure stays normal. The cardiologist says there's a good chance the condition will remain stable. If it doesn't, then it's...take my heart, please take my heart." "A transplant?" Melinda's hands began to tremble. She put the menu down. "Valve replacement. At my age they'd probably give me a porcine valve. Imagine. A pork chop in my chest." Then, noticing her distress. "Melinda, it's a routine operation. The survival rate is ninety something percent. And I'm in excellent health. Honest, sis. Nothing to be upset about." "Well..." Melinda said, somewhat reassured. "You don't seem very worried." "I'm scared shitless." ---- After Melinda dropped him off at Sarah's apartment building, Martin stopped at the security desk and waved at the closed circuit TV camera. "That for your mother?" the guard asked. "Yeah." "She's not home." "She's always home," Martin said. "Uh uh. They took her away." "Who took her away?" The guard shrugged. "The ambulance people. We got an ambulance in the building on twenty-four hour call," he said. "What happened?" Martin could feel his balky valve refusing to seal, flooding his heart with regurgitated blood. "I dunno. She looked alive to me...But I'm not a doctor." ---- "I got a little dizzy. I fell down. That's all. I'm fine." Nurtured around the clock, Sarah was happy, the reigning queen of the cardiac unit at Humana Biscayne Hospital. She smiled at everyone, made jokes, ate whatever they put in front of her, asked the doctors about their families, the nurses about their boyfriends. "No boyfriend? What about my son here? He likes them young. His last wife was half his age." "Ma, please," Martin said, embarrassed. "They're so good to me here," Sarah said pointedly. ---- During the week Sarah was in the hospital, the family -- Martin, Melinda, her husband, Art, and their two grown children - - explored their options and reached an agreement. On the day Sarah returned to the apartment, they gathered to tell her what her future held. Since she could no longer take care of herself and since the family couldn't afford a live-in companion, Sarah would have to enter a nursing home. "I'd rather die!" Sarah said. "Ma, it's the nicest place in Florida. There's a waiting list a mile long," Melinda said. "I'll wait." Melinda unfolded a colorful brochure depicting the ivy- covered, Spanish colonial buildings and exquisitely manicured grounds of the Miami Home for the Aged and laid it out on Sarah's lap. Sarah swept it to the floor with a rancorous sneer. "How could you do this to me?" "If it weren't for the judge "A home! You want to put me in a goddamn home!" On Sarah's lips the word, usually a synonym for 'safety' and 'love,' became an obscenity. "Don't think of it as a 'home,' ma," Martin said. "Think of it as a fancy hotel with round-the-clock service." "It's a home!" she shouted. "Old people in wheelchairs and walkers. Droolers staring at the walls...I have nothing to say to these people. It's not for me." "Well, what is? Huh? Besides driving your daughter crazy, lying here like a half-dead fish and staring at the lobby all day and all night!" Martin said, shocked by the vehemence of his outburst. "Nothing's for you! No one! You're just too good for everyone, for all of mankind! I mean, Jesus, what the hell do you want?" "I told you. I want to be dead." "Well, it won't be long." Sarah raised her eyes and looked at Melinda. "Look at how he talks to his mother." "I'm speaking for all of us, ma." ---- Martin woke in a sweat at four-thirty in the morning, pursued by echoes of a nightmare the substance of which was just beyond his grasp. His chest was pounding violently, like some atonal madman turned loose upon a kettle drum. It was too early for his dose of Toprol, but he took a tab anyhow and, gradually, his heart returned to something resembling a regular beat. After his panic subsided, he began rethinking the events of the afternoon, bewildered not so much by the anger behind his outburst, but by his failure to control it, to conceal it not only from Sarah, but from the rest of the family as well. As the sky began to lighten, Martin got up, went into the kitchen, and made a pot of decaf. Sarah's bedroom door was slightly ajar and he peeked in to see if she was awake and wanted a cup of coffee. Martin knew instantly He lifted the bedsheet and covered his mother's face, then went to turn off the TV. The lobby was no longer empty. Martin could see the back of a small, graceful figure who, he could have sworn, was Sarah wafting through the open doors. He had an urgent impulse to call out to her. But it was too late, a lifetime too late, to start all over. ---- Peter Meyerson spent ten or so years in magazine and book publishing in New York before moving to L.A. to write and, on occasion, produce TV shows. He only recently began writing fiction. His first story, Small Miracles Are Better Than None, was published online several months ago. ---- Henry Packer Conversation with the Man in the Iron Mask November 20, 1703, Paris, France. In the very early dawn a burial detail out of the Bastille brought a coffin to the cemetery of St. Paul. There, resenting the work, they dug a hasty grave. The air, though dry, was cold, the ground hard and difficult to work. From what little we know, they would have comprised a standard prison labor force, as small as possible, no more than four prisoners to carry the box and use the shovels, a priest to say the words, and two guards to ensure that nothing else occurred. One of the prisoners might have glanced at the coffin but no more. Others had died for less, and he would know it. Most probably, the guards showed more alertness than a burial warranted. Fingering their rifles, shifting in brown boots from one cold toe to another, they would have tried without success to seem uninvolved, talking rations, furloughs, prostitutes, or money, and also never daring more than a glance towards the coffin. The sight of the group might have elicited some fascination in a passerby, but there were none. Other authorities had seen to it. The men dug, lowered the coffin, and filled in the displaced soil as fast as they could. A hidden observer took in every gesture, spoken word, and glance, and every one of them knew it. Finally, the priest intoned the correct Latin phrases. As the rest hurried back to the prison, never once looking back, a single guard stood sentry. With elaborate care, he knocked a clot of caked, clayey mud from his right boot heel and then stood at attention. Afterwards, none of the men ever referred to the event again, even to each other. They obeyed their orders without question. It was an age of royal authority. The Sun King Himself still reigned unchallenged on the throne, and the revolution, yet two generations in the future, was unimaginable. The grave contained the last remains of a very strange prisoner. An old man, he had died in his cell the day before after a recent illness, undeniably a natural death. Engravers had carved the name "Marchioli" on his headstone and nothing else - no date of birth or death - and no one asked a question, but no one believed the name either. No one knew the man's real name. No one ever saw his face. From the first day of his imprisonment to his last, on pain of death, he had never once removed the mask that covered his face completely. This unknown man had spent his last five years in France's most infamous prison. Before then he served time on the island of St. Marguerita off Cannes, and yet earlier at the Pignerol prison in a French territory of what is now Italy. According to the records, he put in his first appearance there, just after the death of Cardinal Mazarin, in the year of our Lord 1661, a peculiar date, and one which may, after all, shed some light on the mystery. The year 1661 became pivotal in pre-Revolutionary French history when the death of the Cardinal created a political vacuum only the king or another cardinal could fill. Louis XIV did not like rivals, and so ended the temporal power of cardinals begun under Richelieu and began an absolute monarchy of a kind unprecedented since the pharaohs. If anyone ever figures it all out, they may conclude that the sentencing of the Man in the Iron Mask amounted to the first expression of that power. In all, the man's internment lasted thirty-four years. Even his attending physician knew nothing about him. No one did. To this day, his name, age, place of birth, title, or even his physical characteristics remain a total mystery. Those are the only facts. Between them, both Voltaire and Dumas presented all kinds of theories, but they always had to invent a few facts, the first of which shows how far they went from the truth. It always frustrates me that the most commonly accepted notion about the Man in the Iron Mask is also the most inaccurate: he never wore an iron mask. The mask he wore was velvet. Voltaire simply invented the 'iron' mask, and Dumas popularized it. Both great thinkers were wrong. Anyway, the inaccurate title stuck. Maybe it gave the enigma a cognomen, a familiarity even, as though its catchiness made the prisoner more familiar almost comprehensible. 'The Man in the Iron Mask' must sound more compelling than 'the Man in the Velvet Mask', although I can't imagine why. In the nation of France, the 18th century exploded, as we all know, into the 19th, and history found more flamboyant subjects. In time, the ancient prisoner became an obscure figure, one of many. Slowly people began to forget he lived at all, and nowadays if anyone ever heard of him, most of them believe him to be a fictional character. No one knows the truth. I suppose for simplicity's sake as well as poetry's, I'll use the prisoner's more familiar title. It has a ring to it. Of course, I'll spare you the painstaking efforts it took to secure my interview. Frankly, gaining access to the Bastille and the cloistered cell proved far more difficult than going all the way back to the end of the 17th century. Even then they made me wait to or three years. Before they granted my request, time had all but run out. It was already 1701. The governor of the Bastille, a M. Benigne de St. Mars, was a martinet in a spotless uniform, permitted me my audience with the prisoner only after I proved to his satisfaction (don't ask me how) that I had come first of all from America, and secondly from the 20th century. Back then, you understand, Europeans just didn't perceive us as very important. We'd only been New York about forty years and were still busy warding off natives and selling pelts. Even so, I had to swear I'd return immediately, speak to no one but the prisoner, and during our conversation, not even refer to his name, age, rank, or place of birth. Actually one anecdote may turn out to be true, although only Voltaire mentioned it. Once, while still on the Island of St. Marguerita, the prisoner scratched some kind of message on the bottom of a dinner plate which he then tossed out the window towards the strand where a local fisherman stumbled across it. Acting either as a solid citizen or a greedy one, the commoner brought the plate to the governor who declined to read the message but asked the fisherman what it said. When the man admitted to complete illiteracy, the governor replied "tu as de la chance," and released him, unthanked and unrewarded. Once the man left the room, the governor smashed the plate to pieces, ground the pieces up, and personally spread them in the ocean like ashes. Odd as it sounds, I believe the anecdote for the simple reason that, although I never mentioned it, the Bastille governor himself insisted, more than once, that it never happened, and he added it right away to my list of forbidden topics. For what it matters, he would have been the same man as the governor of the St. Marguerita prison. The Man in the Iron Mask went along with M. Benigne de Saint-Mars wherever the King assigned him, even as far back as Pignerol. Come to think of it, if anyone but the King knew the secret, it would've been this governor. It's apparently true that the governor always stood in the prisoner's presence. Maybe I should have pressed him a little more, tried to catch him off guard, but his tight-lipped manner rendered our dialogue short and to the point. "Je ne sais rien, Monsieur, et il ne faut pas en parler avec vous." He pronounced the word 'faut' a little like 'fou', and it sounded very Gaelic and unnerving, so changed had the language become since his time. Revolutions, invasions, telephones, televisions, and radio, all lay between the governor and me, and his language, like his habits of obedience and command, never altered, for all that the future might bring. So he laid out the ground rules, and I knew I'd have to guess around the mystery enough to find out as much as I could, or if possible, how much, if anything, there was to know. The cell I entered lay in the farthest recesses of the Bastille's western tower. Palatial by any prison's standards, fine lace curtains hung across the window and veiled the bars. Some lush fabric in an oxblood paisley draped almost every object in the room, including the walls, chairs, a small footstool, half the writing desk, and the large, canopied bed. On the floor, line after line of books set with meticulous care against all eight walls suggested hours of solitary reading. As my eyes adjusted to the half-light, the door locked more than twice behind me. From a corner, a polite, dignified voice spoke. "They tell me you have questions." Drawing closer to the seated figure, I felt in the soles of my feet my heart beat against the stone floor even smothered like this in the plush carpeting supplied without question to this, their most unique inhabitant. Not one page of my research, none of the days spent negotiating with old world bureaucrats, not even time travel itself had prepared me for the sight which met my eyes. He sat just outside a shaft of window light, perfectly still, like a man meditating on the same topic for thirty-odd years. On the high back of his chair lay a black on violet pattern. His legs, crossed at the knees, wore black calf high boots and black culottes, and his elbows, perched on the chair arms, supported two forearms from which sleeves of a finely woven black shirt descended like curtains, concealing everything but the pale hands clasped at his chin. It was then that I realized he had addressed me in English, not in French, and I assumed someone had told him it was my own language. He spoke with an accent I still can't place, but which was neither French nor Italian, destroying in one sentence both of the 'respected' theories about his identity: i.e. that he was an Italian named Mattioli, or a Frenchman by the name of Eustache Dauger. "I've been told your French is not so good," he went on. "As you can see, I am quite comfortable in English." Quite uncomfortable, I stood a moment until one pale hand left his chin and indicated a chair. "Please," he said. I sat and pulled the chair as close to him as I felt acceptable. Clearly accustomed to the subtle authorities of aristocracy, he accepted my reticence without question. Even the governor of the prison always stood in his presence. Curious, a man of some title. The very white, articulate hand returned to its perch, and his fingers interlocked. "The pallor you no doubt note in my skin comes invariably from years of confinement. I seldom see the sun, and then only through this window. Other prisoners, depending on crime or rank, sometimes take walks in the court, but it's a privilege denied to me. I remain forever inside, speak to no one, and no one speaks to me, except now and then out of necessity. Only the governor asks my needs. What I request they always grant. Even my journal remains intact. They tell me they'll destroy it when I die." He waited for me to speak. "They say you're from the twentieth century. Is this true?" "I'm not supposed to tell -" "I wouldn't ask," he asserted, as though the question couldn't matter. "I take it I am also unknown in your century." "You are," I hesitated, wondering if three decades of isolation had inured him to even this much anonymity. "Even up to my own time, they're still guessing . . . sorry." From behind the dark cloth a pulse of acknowledgment nodded. "So that's it then? Some of us gain immortality by writing beautiful poetry or absolute truth, by painting exquisite canvases, uncovering the secrets of nature, or leading great, conquering armies, while I alone have the distinction of being well known simply for my unknowness. Unique, isn't it? Anyone else history mentions must of necessity possess a tangible legacy. I, on the other hand, have left only a puzzle." He stared at me. "So what is it that brings you all the way backwards in time and across the ocean just to ask me questions? What do you expect to accomplish?" "I want to find out the truth, once and for all." "You've come to the wrong place." Across the courtyard the sun fell below the opposite wing of the prison. The shaft of light through the window swept the floor, up the opposite wall, and went out. The cell grew even darker, and I smelt a mustiness. My host retrieved a taper from the fire in the grill and lit a candle. In the sudden darkness, the flame cut a perfect arc from the iron to the wick just as his wrist flicked it out. The symmetry, I decided, of a million nights of practice. Obediently, the candle wavered on, and in its glow I saw, more clearly, and really for the first time, the infamous mask. Its shape surprised me but made sense, and I almost whispered 'of course' to myself. For the most it formed a velvet hood, more deep red than black, which covered every inch of his face except the mouth. A triangular aperture from the tip of his nose to his chin enabled him to breath, speak, and - I assumed - to eat. Out of the hood's open back flowed waves of long, white hair in profuse luxuriance down his shoulders and upper arms, and through two oval slits his eyes peered out, very dark brown, almost black. Something odd, also, that I should mention: the absence of a beard. Curious. From time to time, he must have been allowed to draw at least the bottom of the mask upward and apart to shave. In his century, shaving was a more difficult procedure than it is now. Did he shave himself? Did a servant perform such a dangerous task? Why did anyone allow it? "Please sir," he whispered, abruptly sitting back out of the candle light and returning his hands to his chin. I must have leaned too closely to him, and I mumbled an apology. "For your own sake, take care. On pain of death no one sees my face. Even a visitor from another century." "Yes, but why - in God's name?" "In God's name, there are too many whys in the world. When I was your age . . . a long, long time ago, I wondered all the time. No one answered. After a while you cease to wonder." Edgily, I backed away. "Do you mean to say, even you do not know?" "I was once a soldier," he replied. "I may not name my rank, but I saw a lot of war. No soldier asks why." "You don't know why they condemned you?" "There were many girls . . . or even women . . . in my life. One never asked why of a lady and expected a reasonable answer. Their delight lay for me in their denial of the question." "No ever told you why they did this to you?" "Think for one moment, sir," he said. "You are the only one who was ever permitted to come in here and ask me questions - no doubt by virtue of your coming from another age - and yet you too, like everyone else, were forbidden to see my face. They did, however, give you a list of questions not to ask: name, place of birth, and, of course, the 'plate incident', yes?" "Yes, that's right." "But they never told you not to ask my crime." "No, they did not." "Why do you suspect they didn't?" As I shrugged, an impatient wince entered his voice. "It follows that they either would not care if I told you, which is hardly likely - any hint of what I did to deserve my punishment would point even an amateur historian rather rapidly to my identity - or they knew I couldn't tell you. You might ask over and over again, but I simply could not answer." "But you never asked them yourself?" Again, the velvet tipped in the slightest hint of a nod. "They just silenced me. Of course it was worse in the beginning. On pain of death I was not to speak . . . to anyone. The guards stood over me with drawn swords during the first weeks, at every hour, until I lost track of time. They grew more lenient after some time, for some reason all their own. But when finally they let me speak, I learned right away no explanation would be forthcoming for my confinement, the bizarre nature of an exile even from the eyes of fellow men. When my requests grew more persistent, I received certain punishments - two of them severe. As time passed, they began to grant me all my personal needs, everything I asked, except the most important. Any time I tried to argue, discuss, or even plea, they silenced me, until finally it dawned on me that my captors themselves did not know . . ." "Did not know what?" "The answers. Maybe only the King knows my crime. After all these years, perhaps even He forgot it. Who can say? Maybe even He never knew. Maybe no one ever knew." "Have you met the king?" I asked. "No." "Never?" "No. To my knowledge, no. It may be that he passed incognito through my homeland once. There were rumors." "Did you ever speculate?" "Speculate what? Meeting the king? The nature of my confinement? My possible crime?" "Yes." My conciseness amused him. "One comes," he recited, "to regard one's mask as an article of flesh, like what everyone else must wear under their skin. My life may be an allegory: punishment without reason, no sentence, no respite, no absolution, subject only to the arbitrary rules of an unanswerable monarch no one ever knew, Whose motives are wholly His own." He dropped a quiet laugh. "A standard of fellow creatures." "Do you have a guess?" "Well, I did wonder, all the time, of course. At first I begged to remove it. I physically knelt right down before them, but no one replied. They just obeyed, and finally I obeyed as well." "So, the nature of your crime, and the need to hide your face is as much a mystery to you as it is to the rest of the world?" "A greater mystery, because I alone in the world know who I am. My friends and relatives, the few who might remember me, apparently believe I died . . . with honor . . . or so a guard once told me. The governor would change the subject the few times I asked. He deferred to me but managed to evade. A certain lover of mine - I can't see her face anymore, and her name brings back unwelcome memories - M. de Sant-Mars had the grace to tell me she died some years ago. That's all I've ever heard of house and home. His throat cleared. "The mystery of my crime is greater to me because I have no recollection of having done or said anything to warrant this . . . " His elegant hands opened to encompass the cell, books, furniture, mask and himself in a single gesture, fluttering the candle flame as his fingers relocked. A hawklike shadow of his profile flashed up the cell wall, and, hugely silent about us, the Bastille itself entered the conversation. "It is perhaps what life must be like somehow indefinitely prolonged at the bottom of an oubliette." His eyes watched the light flutter back into balance. "They deny me nothing. I speak only to myself or when spoken to, responding on occasion to my doctor's questions. There is no doubt a reason . . . there always is, but I will never know it. You become resigned." "Resigned?" "Why not? After all, my life is rather easy. My first fears abandoned me. I never went without and never did an atom's weight of good or evil. They even permit me the occasional sip of wine." Once more, the huge silence fell between us, and I thought I heard, from behind the velvet, a soft intake break clear enough to suggest that the Man in the Iron Mask had shed a tear. "'There is,'" he quoted, "'divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.'" "You know Shakespeare?" The question suprised him. "I have read virtually every greater or lesser work of literature written in any of the civilized languages since Homer. If there exists an important book of philosophy, theology, science or math, poetry or drama before my time, it is unlikely that I have not read it. I have the time, you see. And no one dictates what I read, think, or write in my journals so long as they go unread. No one dictates my waking or sleeping hours, or when or what I eat. I have all the simple pleasures." "But you never wanted your freedom?" "Of course I wanted it. I never used the word 'never.' There were of course times I used to plot elaborate escape plans, but none of them worked. None of them could have worked. Whoever said nothing is impossible never met me. My whole life proves the reverse." He hummed a tuned into his hands as though warming them or thinking. I grew even more curious. "What's the reverse?" "Everything is impossible." As I waited, he went on. "Here we sit, in the year of our Lord Seventeen Hundred and one, or thereabouts, progressing no further than year zero from the Crucifixion - maybe lapsing backwards, for all we know - in consternation at our own impotence, losing finally even enough impetus to proceed. I may very well be someone." His voice trailed off. "What was that?" "I may very well be someone. Wouldn't that explain it? I must possess a face I don't recognize." For the only time during our dialogue, he reached up and actually touched the velvet. "It belongs to someone else. Curious?" "Hmm?" "Are you curious? Would you like me to peel it back for an instant?" "God yes," I exhaled. "But they'd kill me." "They'd kill both of us." He lowered his hands. To my own suprise, I became furious. "What difference would it make? How in the world could I possibly recognize you?" My outrage provoked the mildest of his shrugs. "Did you really come all the way from the twentieth century?" "I really did." "And they can do that sort of thing?" "Well, actually, no they can't. Most people can't that is. I received a special dispensation due to my obsession." "Your determination to meet me?" "Yes." "And they let you do this just to meet me? You uprooted yourself, left your culture and your century, just to introduce yourself to a permanent stranger?" "Yes." "Truthseeker?" "I guess." "They make a mess." "I guess." "Even if they let you ask my name, perhaps I couldn't answer. Maybe I never knew it." "Well, one of the popular theories is that you are the twin brother of the king." "Yes," he laughed. "I've already heard that one. The governor told me. Amused, he was, if I recall." "Amused?" "Hardly even near the right age, sir. Also they wouldn't have bothered. Succession is a simple matter of timing. The birth of a twin brother doesn't upset anyone. They just select the older one. The younger becomes heir presumptive to the throne, pending the birth of a son. That's all there is to it. In fact it's always a good idea to keep an heir presumptive around for stability's sake in the event of the king's death. No one would have given it a second thought. Aside from which, if they really wanted to rid themselves of a younger twin, the last thing they'd do is put him in a dungeon in a mask. They'd probably just put him to the sword. The entire tale is predicated on the notion that harming one twin would somehow harm the other, pure superstition, not a matter of state at all." "Isn't there a question of not shedding royal blood?" "Not a principle any king would follow in this day and age. It's medieval. No ambitious pretender sheds a tear at the shedding of royal blood. Even if I were really the older brother. It's absurd. The theory doesn't work. None of them do. All the theories are wrong." I hesitated. "It's what most people believe." "People believe things," replied the Man in the Iron Mask. Glancing around the room, I took in bed, chairs, and desk, wondering about the fabrics and curtains. For the first time, I noticed a small side table on which sat a pot of coffee and a half drained cup out of which wafted the aroma of rich, French mocha and next to which lay a folder of pages. Even from where I sat, I saw meticulous handwriting covering each page from edge to edge. No suggestions of headings or margins. What I wouldn't give to pour over those pages. He noticed. "Like to see my journal?" "I can't." "Tantalized?" "Well," I cleared my throat. "It's a history no one knows." "You've studied French history?" I nodded. "Of course it gets stranger about eighty years from now." "I can imagine." "You aren't from France, are you?" "No," answered the Man in the Iron Mask. "I most certainly am not." "Could you possibly be - " A clang of steel like a sword or swords against a breastplate exploded in the chamber and left no doubt that someone else was listening and that I had just begun to phrase one of the forbidden questions. His eyes receded into the oval pockets of the mask. "This conversation is over." Without question, I stood. The pocketed eyes hesitated and glanced back and forth with a hint of despair, as though to prolong my presence, to add some remote or tangible detail. After crossing so many boundaries in time, space and bureaucracy just to meet him, for all my cleverness, I knew less now than I did before setting foot in this cell. If anything, by destroying each plausible explanation, my questions only compounded the mystery. Like the echo of a pebble bouncing down an endless stair, one of his last phrases clicked on and off through my head: 'all the theories are wrong.' All the theories. Every theory. Each theory. Click. Why wasn't I disappointed? "It's a privilege to meet you sir," I mumbled. Maybe the respect I felt rose out of some substratum in my own problems, a place just under my chest where I always feel ulcers or frustration. From the vantage point in which he sat, hidden even from himself, he could notice what he chose. Right now, he noticed the reconciliation take place inside my head. "Thank you," he replied. "Maybe the real answer is unknowable." "Maybe." I looked at the stony western wall. "Time travel is useless." "In this case." With miles and centuries to cross before I slept, I turned away. The Man in the Iron Mask had yet another year or two to live. To this day I wonder if they ever let him know his offense before the end. History, of course, doesn't say. A rhythm entered the air. Turning back, I saw that for the first time since my arrival, the Man in the Iron Mask was standing. He towered like a king above me, and I wondered if it were his heartbeat I was feeling. Plain to see where the twin theory came from. His eyes darting about the cell again, he stepped towards me, almost desperate to impart some last secret, weighing perhaps the risk of both our executions. Funny, I thought, they'd also have to execute the listener in the walls, who would be consigned by vows only to report that he had heard the whisper, but forbidden to tell what whisper he had heard. Scared to death right now I'll bet, I thought, terrified. The prisoner had far less to lose than either of us, and if he decided both our lives were worth the gratification of a whisper, he could cost us both our lives. I might survive three steps beyond the door. And the listener. How long would he live? I smiled. For me it was worth the price. For him? Who knows. The Man in the Iron Mask reached his decision. His back arched down like an old man's, and he brushed a white wave of hair from his right shoulder, turning away from me. "No I won't tell him!" He snapped upward towards a curtained window. "You're not going to die tonight! Not for me." I reached to touch his shoulder, thought better of it, and turned away. "Are you going past Calais?" he asked, his face to the wall. "Yes I am." "I've been there. I liked it." I didn't have the heart to tell him my method of going from here to there necessitated covering time as well as space. Not a constant rate. As you might guess, time lacks symmetry. Calais might be ten years in the future, or as far ahead as the reign of Napoleon III. Not the seventeenth century fishing village the prisoner remembered at all. As everybody knows, time proceeds in episodes. When I stepped through the cell door, the candle went out, and I suppose he must have extinguished it. The door slammed shut behind me. Once again, a rhythm seemed to enter the air. I didn't see the guards but knew they were there, and in the stone walls I could hear what sounded for all the world very much like the voices of thousand children whispering. ---- Henry Packer is a novelist, poet, screenwriter, and short story writer who lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife Rebecca. He also does a little systems analysis on the side. ---- Chris Scheil <code> Then one detects the enigma, the luminous viral component as one microscopic polestar flame in the shape of a licking corona. Pre-Socratic ombudsmen were striking magnesium bars for the pleasure of flashes surmounting the mylar sheath, the coated spasmodic glyph, the amphetamine grill in the skull immersed in a viscous conjecture of liquefied poppies atop a lighthouse abandoned to "Nature" & Her omnivores: the inclement sky, the massive, involute waves like frayed ribbons of velvet entangled in rigging on sloops going down in the grip of a violent mid-sea squall. There is a "crying out," a rush towards the hatches only to find the exit signs have swum into view, & the stopwatch repeatedly jarred on the palm of a systems consultant will inevitably click, then starting timing the lathe's revolutions again. That singular click, that ungraphable hitch in the otherwise turbulent soundscape escapes its demise, its home in the gravity well with every other centripetal object engulfed by this lesion of absolute depth, this radiant dust-bowl of sibilant noise, out of which nothing undappled might flee but the fractured, sidereal light some cloud tops deflect or its mimic, the flash of a Nikon recording the pasteboard skintone of yet one more incredulous tourist inscribing his name on the Sphinx with a Swiss Army knife. Knowing this "actually happened," what archives are ransacked for vellum, what post-hypnotic activity logs unseal themselves in a spasm of richly vertiginous horror in the face of this hysterical festschrift on grooming, a knowledge of which is akin to what, the sucking of pebbles by nomads departing a drought-stricken wadi, each searching the skyline, each asking his neighbor: is the terminal speckled like this is? A looming takes place in an orchard of fruit- bearing trees, near which acres of rapeseed partly encircle a chemical processing plant on the edge of a delta the color of luminous tungsten. A looming in bullion-hued light. A looming, over which the slow-moving airships continue to wander & hover, each incessantly casting its oval of glacier-like, day-killing shadow. </code> Chris Scheil earns his keep as a professional book seller. He has published intermittently in a few local and regional journals, including: Big Fish, and Sky. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.J. ---- J. Kevin Wolfe The Fiddler and His Lady <code> He made his fiddle a lady in the exhaled haze of a Dingle pub As the drums and strums danced the clack of Keryl's spoons the old men scratched their violins But not Maguire's lady She cooed and sighed as his chin so gently rested on her body His peaceful touch drew across her like a warm breath through hair of silk Then the rogue Jim made her weep til she bit us with her pain and a drip of tears seasoned the Guinness But he knew his lady so well The instant he smiled and her hopes took wing She laughed like he'd never made her grieve Her chorts so loud they drew a curious boy who jigged on the stains of the floor She giggled at the jests of Macguire's bow and the boy floated above the hardwood his feet occasionally tapping the floor At closing time Jim laid his lady in her worn velvet bed and locked her away as if she only wanted to sing to him He hugged her under his arm protecting his rare lady from the damp chill of the Irish summer night. </code> Kevin Wolfe. This affliction of poetry: there is no cure. It was only in remission all these years I've written humor on a nationally syndicated radio show. Through the numerous articles printed in Writer's Digest Magazine where my cartoons have appeared as well. Even through the passion of writing three cookbooks. Why do we write poetry: because he have to. I thoroughly appreciate those involved with the Web poetry movement which is putting the most real of things back into our virtual world and giving us an electronic brick wall to spraypaint the graffiti of our souls. |