excerpted from a novel in progress
Nothing could be more humiliating than how, in the end, the world succumbed to him with total indifference to its own fate.
Jakob spends his final days on the porch with his Biographer and his nights in bed with his comics, rereading the final issue in which Jakob as Nazi Hunter at last collects his greatest prize, the head of Wilhelm Wieland himself, his own progenitor, or so the juvenile lore of that classic series would have it—the man who, had Jakob not killed him at the end, might well have lived forever, waking up morning after morning to pour a glass of Black Milk and stumble onto the porch with his ancient penis hanging out of his bathrobe to sit in a leather armchair erupting with stuffing and resume telling the life story that, once it’d been transcribed, would stand as the only known account of who and what the artist known as Jakob, creator of the Chapel of Humiliation, whose edges exceeded all attempt to see beyond them, had really been.
He sits there day after day inhaling the scent of leather that gathers within the Chapel walls, which grow more definite the longer he and his Biographer sit within them. They can feel those walls capture and contain the fantasy of a world beyond this one, until that fantasy is no more than another grotesque exhibit somewhere in the Chapel’s hindquarters. Yet another perverse fixation that Jakob the Creator brought to bear once it grew clear, even to him, that Jakob the Conqueror would never quite exist.
Still, every morning, he rises from his spartan old man’s bed and clambers beneath the hundreds of fetishes and dreamcatchers that descend from the ceiling to tickle his hair. Pretending he’s a nun rising in her convent cell to greet God’s sunrise, he pushes through them to reveal the window that faces the back of the cabin and peers out at what, for an instant, appears to represent the untrammeled territory beyond the Chapel’s walls, the apocryphal or heretical lands in which events once occurred, or still occur, or are about to, that have no place in the Biography’s increasingly rigid canon. A canon which, as soon as it’s complete, will serve as the Chapel’s holy book and from which future Jakobs, if there are any, will permit not the slightest deviation.
Indulging the nun fantasy as long as it will last, he thinks: I stand upon the threshold between pre-history and its successor, the living gateway between the Dark Ages and the Age of the Biography, aware of both and at home in neither. It occurs to him here that perhaps the supreme achievement of the Biography, and thus of the Chapel that will sanctify it forever, hosting priestly readings of its pages many times a day, is the suggestion of this untrammeled desert beyond. The realm of opportunity that has not yet turned to stone, not yet been locked into the pages that will contain every facet of the lives, inner and outer, of all the Jakobs still to come, who will look back on their own deep history and swear that no rupture or schism ever occurred. Stunted Jakobs who will see only solace in the Biography’s perfection.
He takes one last look at this unmapped expanse. Then, as the sun rises higher, he lets the vision burn off. The land through the window grays out to reveal the Chapel walls in the distance in this direction as well. The sand becomes a painting of sand. Jakob removes his wimple and thinks, I am a God for whom there can be no heaven because every notion that occurs to me is incorporated into the plane I already inhabit. Never again will I let the devil possess my thoughts, tempting me with the possibility of a space beyond my own control. I have been through too much, and put the world through too much, to allow such cravenness to overtake me now. From now on, I will surrender to nothing but myself.
He pours a glass of Black Milk and takes it to the porch to sit in the leather armchair on the left, atop the leather mat and behind the leather tarp that he and his Biographer have purchased on successive trips to the Party Store in town, and he tells him exactly what he just thought. “I am a God for whom there can be no heaven because every notion that occurs to me is incorporated into the plane I already inhabit. I am a God who has remained upon an Earth that the Messiah declined to redeem—an Earth that perhaps failed to generate a genuine Messiah in the first place, or that did once generate him but then, because there was no place else to go, reabsorbed him back into itself. And so you, my Biographer, have come to bring our story to an end in the only—lesser, much lesser—way that either of us can imagine at this late point in time, later than it should ever have been allowed to get.”
“I know,” his Biographer replies, and points to the place in the Biography where this line is printed.
Indeed, there are times when Jakob wonders whether they’re writing or reading the Biography—whether perhaps they are already no more than monks, or nuns, who inhabit the Chapel where they perform their daily obeisance. For this reason he makes a point of never looking at the copy open upon his lap, his fingers wedged exactly at the point where the reams of printed pages give way to the desert of blank ones.
They talk until noon, roaming again and again over Jakob’s rise to the heights of world-historical fame, situating him at the pinnacle of aesthetic influence just at the moment when the secular world was re-sacralizing itself, toppling the new gods of reason and order so as to raise the ancient ones back in their stead. They fit Jakob into this unprecedented paradigm shift, as the Creator of the universe in which his story played out, though leaving aside the suggestion, however apparent it must be to both of them, that Jakob then authored his own Biography from a cabin on a mountaintop above the town where, perhaps, only a few souls recall that he ever existed. The town to which he retreated in shame after…
He jumps to the story of how his father beheaded his mother, “Right over there, just where I’m pointing,” and left him to flee the site of her sacrifice and make his way into the City alone, building himself into that which his father could never become, even as, inevitably, those years of toil made him into the father who would then, when the time came…
They iterate along these paths, shuffling and reshuffling the pieces in search of the plane on which they miraculously fuse, until hunger overwhelms them both. Then they put the notepads and recorders away and go inside to fry eggs on the stove and toast bread in the oven. They eat in the dim and dusty kitchen and recall the night when Jakob followed his sleepwalking mother up the mountain in the dead of winter and ended up at this table, drinking Black Milk across from Wieland, who looks at him with the same expression now.
Each sips that milk and feels ambition course through his body, so much that, after a few minutes, neither can remain sitting. They rise and stalk around the cabin’s tiny rooms, knocking over sculptures and piles of comics and bowls of teeth and beads destined for dioramas of the sunken town and the town beneath that and the town beneath that. Even now, with everything nearly complete, ambition overwhelms them, steaming and gathering beneath the low ceiling, dampening and peeling the cabin’s chamomile and daffodil wallpaper, until such a reek of old glue and putty fills the space that they can’t bear the prospect of another session on the porch until they’ve made the journey into town.
“Let’s go to the Party Store,” one says to the other. “We need more props.”
They step carefully through the spiders’ shadows and over the altar upon which Jakob’s mother’s blood still lies, hardened like amber, unless it’s Party Store blood that a previous duo left as a joke. From there they trek into the woods and down the mountain, past the remnants of the giants from an earlier age, a primitive time of direct and improvised worship before the Biography put those energies into plain and enduring language, and before the Chapel guaranteed that no other Book would ever take its place. From before people understood that the Word comes first, Jakob thinks, and whatever seems to have transpired can only seem that way insofar as the Word suggests it.
As they work their way down through the woods, Jakob looks over at his Biographer and notices how much the man resembles a younger version of himself. It’s not the first time he’s noticed this, but each time its truth impresses itself more deeply upon him. Over the years—the possibility that it really has been this long feels new, like the weight of their collaboration is only now catching up with them—this man has ceded whatever particulars might once have made him someone else and ended up instead a miniature version of the man whose life he gave up his own in order to chronicle, as perhaps all genuine Biographers must. Jakob takes this in and dwells on its implications, torn between pity and a kind of cruel pride at having so thoroughly overwhelmed another life.
The oaks and pines along the sloping trail rustle and fill the air with musk as he pictures leaving his Biographer in his place. Departing through what he considers his Secret Window, the window through which he peers as a nun each morning, and ceding the cabin to the man who, for reasons perhaps inaccessible even to himself, gave up whatever freedom he’d been born with to create, over hundreds or, when all is said and done, thousands of pages the illusion that Jakob, a giant among men, lived only once and left a legacy from which all future generations could benefit.
The mountain trail deposits them in the Tick-Singing Meadow, in which grayed-out scarecrows of the Boys’ Boys loom, trying to beat a dog to death with a brick but moving so slowly that, by the time they make impact, the dog, if it’s alive, hardly notices.
Jakob and his Biographer watch until they feel the scarecrow-state likewise pulling them into a scene long since finalized in the Biography. The danger of wanton repetition, of falling back into what they’ve already accomplished, no longer needs to impress itself upon them. A permanent future in this meadow is not hard to imagine. Thus, painfully, they rip themselves free and leave the Boys’ Boys to their slow torture and hurry, as best they can, up the country road to the Party Store.
The Party Store stands alone at the edge of town, upon the many acres where, in earlier ages, fairs and festivals of dubious provenance once pitched their tents and disgorged clowns by the dozen to roam the fields and meadows in the hot summer nights. Jakob and his Biographer ding through the front doors, never altogether on their hinges, and begin their daily circuit through the sordid air past what was once Ragtown, enclosed now beneath a tented ceiling. They then pass through halls of mattresses and old clothes and into the furniture district, where Greta, long since exiled from her gallery, sits on a stool with a clipboard and a pen dangling on a length of yarn.
She looks them over but says nothing as they run their hands along the leather headrests of a row of split and sagging recliners, testing each for the precise feel of the final moments of their years together, in which the Biography will draw to a close or accept its permanent incompleteness. The Deep Leather Future. Jakob lets the line slither through him, in and out of the Biography, a line he read or thought or heard long ago, when he was still scraping around the lip of the Lincoln Tunnel, weighed down by the knowledge that his own greatness, his essential coming into his own, was at once guaranteed to occur, since, according to the Biography, it already had, and, for that reason, prevented from occurring, marooned in a version of events that did not include him as anything but one more reader.
He runs his fingers along one headrest and onto the next, his eyes tracking between his Biographer and Greta and the whole expanse of cracked leather, which seems to expand as he works his way through it, the walls receding to allow in more and more and more chairs, so far and so fast that soon vertigo intercedes, a horrible image of never leaving this room, of everything coming only to this, all livable space filling with monks and nuns slumped in leather armchairs chairs, sterile and silent and determined to put their lives to no use beyond scrutinizing a few lines of the Biography again and again and again, a few words even, as few as possible, and he collapses in the chair he happens to be standing closest to, uncertain whether he’s in the town below or back on the mountaintop, having long ago bought all the chairs there were, two for every day they worked on the Biography, an expanse of chairs so far-reaching there could be no walking beyond it, only sitting and reading and thinking and talking and waiting and dying.
He closes his eyes and gasps, “Sold! Sold, sold! Two of them, whatever it costs!”
Greta sighs, disappointed for reasons that Jakob can almost glean, and marks something on her clipboard with the attached pen. “They will be delivered in the morning,” she says. Then she rises, wincing as she puts a braced foot on the carpet, and limps toward the edge of the display hall, disappearing behind a curtain that Jakob instinctively turns away from. Something he isn’t meant to see, he can tell, is back there. Something that, were he to see it, would extinguish the final embers of the illusion, if it is an illusion, that allows him to continue along the path he’s on, toward whatever lies at the end. To complete his performance motivated by the tiniest speck of possibility that it’s no performance at all.
The end of the interregnum that’s marked the full extent of what he’s able to consider his life, even if it stretches into other, shadier realms way back where he began and just up ahead, where he senses he’s almost arrived. He watches the curtain close and thinks about the final stretch of the Biography, the blank pages that stand between him and wherever he’ll end up. With his Biographer beside him, he leaves the Hall of Leather and enters the even more cavernous Used Book Depot. Horst, silent and lifeless, sits on a stool with a cigarette dangling between his legs. Piles of papers and full boxes and empty boxes and crates of unsorted mail, ingoing and outgoing, all covered in butts and ash, litter the area around his stool, growing sparser toward the back, along the side devoted to guidebooks and religious studies on the Chapel, parallel to the other side of the depot devoted to issues of Jakob as Nazi Hunter as well as fan art and spinoff volumes, some following events far beyond the final issue, beyond Wieland’s beheading and into a heretical scene in which Jakob stands in the yard in his open bathrobe and burns all the issues he’s collected, filling the Chapel with black smoke until it blacks him out as well, culminating in an ultra-rare issue that allegedly consists of nothing but black pages, hand-roasted over a fire so the smell never wears off.
He gazes across the depot to where this issue is mounted on the wall in a locked glass case. Then he turns to the shelf at hand to examine a book full of photos and sketches of the Chapel’s many rooms and levels, flipping, as he always does, to the thick section on the Party Store. He flips through the front sections, showing the Hall of Leather with a dot for Greta, and then the Hall of Mattresses, where an early tableau that he debuted at the Venice Biennale showed all the people he would then seem to share the world with being conceived and born and then quickly re-impregnated, until enough people had accrued on those mattresses to fill the streets and bars and restaurants of all the towns and cities where the Biography took place, and to mount the museum shows and to attend those shows and write them up and read those write-ups and then attend because of what they’d read.
Until, Jakob thinks, the world I inhabited—the world I built in order to inhabit, all the while dreaming only of escape—felt enough like a world to deny whatever evidence remained that it wasn’t and could never be one. That there could never be such a thing as a world, not in the way I really meant it.
He flips past all this until he arrives at the section on the Used Book Depot, showing photos of these rooms from olden times, and extremely detailed floorplans, starting with an overview and then zooming in, page by page, until he sees himself in delicate cross-hatched charcoal standing where he’s standing, reading the book he’s reading, looking toward the ceiling to see if someone is looking down on him, pencil in hand.
This moment always shocks him into a tremendous appetite, a need for a large, hot, greasy dinner, with plenty of wine, to soothe his organs and restart his blood flow. To rebuild his body after having almost come undone, with enough weight in his belly to stay firmly anchored to the floor.
He puts the book on the shelf and heads to the back of the depot for the final stop: the original, hand-written copy of the Biography in a glass case illuminated by a low orange sconce. A royal red ribbon marks the place where the printed pages end and the blank ones begin. The final future of the universe, Jakob thinks, at once enraged by its emptiness and desperate to lose himself there. Not for the first time, though more vividly than ever before, he can see himself vanishing, outrunning the ink into the blank spaces where perhaps, at last, his name will be forgotten on its way toward a place where it was never known.
The light dims over the Biography to show that visiting hours are over. Just before a wheezing friar in rope sandals puts a cold hand on each of their backs to lead them away, Jakob and his Biographer read the words, “He returned to the cabin alone the next morning after a Last Supper at Chez Pierre and a final fitful sleep in the Waiters’ Room.”
So, to Chez Pierre they direct themselves now. All around, as they make their way out of the complex, they hear curtains rustling and see faces popping out to watch them go, either those of monks and nuns retiring for the evening and hoping to catch a glimpse of the subjects of their devotion passing by, or else museum-goers peeping through slits in the exhibit, illicitly seeking a glimpse of a room that’s already closed for the day, or one that has not yet been set up.
They pass through a final curtain and a lobby where exhausted workers with vacuums on their backs suck dust from cracks in the concrete. Then they exit into the smog over the boulevard of old factories and processing plants that leads, over the course of a mile or more, to Chez Pierre.
On their way, they pass the jail where Jakob was taken after killing his wife. The cell door is open now, a special evening event, first Friday of the month. The Warden leads the eager crowd inside, declaring, “Here, if you look and listen closely, you will find him still. The greatest prisoner our humble town jail ever had the privilege to host.”
They join in, picking up plastic cups of white wine and dipping carrots and celery stalks in hummus dotted with sesame seeds and black pepper. They carry these through the Warden’s wake, past couples and small families and dapper loners angling for a view of the man in the cell, narrating famous passages from his Prison Diary in which, over the course of years spent in total solitude, he invented the Holocaust to justify what he’d done to his family and why he’d had to do it. “To force upon the world the factors that had, long before I was born, warped my genes into those of the man who’d done what I did. I returned again and again to the Party Store, where I gathered the cheapest, shabbiest materials I could find, those picked over and rejected by the Rat People, and, out behind the town, in the lots and the fields and the ruins where earlier settlements once stood, I built the camps. The shredders and the ovens and the pits into which I funneled the ashes of all those who’d ever known me, not only my wife and son but the font of all the Jakobs there could ever have been, the whole generative principal that kept replacing me and egging me on and undermining me until I too walked into the oven and closed the door and, settling into the leather armchair inside, put the revolver in my mouth and waited to go up in smoke, my ashes rising up and up over the abandoned fields and the stopped chimneys and the circus tent in the pumpkin patch beneath which no acrobats would ever again fly, up and over the sleeping streets of the town, over the house I grew up in and in which I raised my motherless son, over the garage where I glued those two lifetimes to the same epoxy and Styrofoam base, until I came to rest with my Biographer in the lot behind Chez Pierre, lit by the headlights of the Tyson Meat Truck as it pulled out after making the night’s delivery.”
The man in the cell beckons the guests toward him and, one by one, with the Warden’s blessing, he whispers something in their ears that visibly changes them. Jakob and his Biographer shudder and fight their way through the crowd as it turns hostile, much faster even than they’d thought it would, punching and kicking and gasping as they struggle to avoid hearing whatever the man in the cell has to say.
Panting in the air outside the prison and uncertain if anyone has followed them, they watch the Tyson Meat Truck depart through an alley between two windowless, doorless brick hulks. They follow it as fast as they can, and it seems to slow to let them catch up. In tandem, they arrive at the loading dock behind Chez Pierre, where the maître d’ appears to have been expecting them. “Right this way, sirs,” he says, gathering the only two menus on the stand and leading them past dozens of empty tables to a booth in the back, the only one with a tablecloth and place settings ready. He dusts ash off the menus, chokes a little, then opens them to the specials page and walks off.
Jakob and his Biographer glance at the offerings, each wondering whether tonight marks a celebration or a requiem, and, in either case, for what? The point of cessation seems to have arrived, but it carries with it no clear sense of accomplishment, no relief or well-earned fatigue, only the awareness that things go no farther. Perhaps the true finale, the war to end all wars, was fought by others, by men who look like them and bear their names but are, or were, possessed of a clarity and a courage that Jakob and his Biographer, in the guises they’ve come to dinner in tonight, cannot even impersonate.
Either that, Jakob thinks, or there was no war, no reckoning, no Lincoln Tunnel to traverse between being a nobody and being a Genius on a scale for which history had no precedent—two states that, as he considers it now, do not seem distinct enough to tell apart.
“We’ll have two of everything,” he says, handing the menu back to the maître d’, who’s changed into a red-velvet-and-bow-tie waiter’s suit. “And all your wine.” He looks at a fresco of the Meeting with the Couple From Another Town on the far wall, ruminating on Jakob’s first feast here, his all-important renunciation of the Outsider Art Exhibit the Couple was planning at the American Folk Art Museum, which, in a sense—he sees the ovens in the empty fields, their chimneys spitting black and red smoke—set him on the path he has since then had to walk, through age after age after age, until finally returning here, to the same table he sat at then, looking up from his reverie only when the familiar scent of Chez Pierre’s finest Riesling reaches him through the ash cloud.
He takes a sip, nods to the waiter, and closes his eyes while the man empties the bottle into a decanter and then serves the appetizers from the cart he’s rolled over. Jakob toasts his Biographer and declares, “To a job well done.” He has no idea that this is our last night together, Jakob thinks, at once aware and unaware that his Biographer is thinking the same thing about him. As he works his way through the wine and the plates of watercress salad and diced rare mushrooms and smoked Icelandic oysters, he feels the many versions of this moment peel apart and flap together in a desert breeze from beyond the world in which they’re toasting the end of the Biography, and also the world in which this scene, like all scenes, is and has always been part of that book. Yet all that seems to matter is the breeze, stirring up cold sand in the dead of night, and the feeling of the desert’s unconquered expanse, pages that will never be filled and into which, after this supper is finished—and they’re already cutting into tremendous bloody steaks and pork chops with spiced pineapple and grilled bream and branzino with white truffle mustard—he will disappear, leaving his Biographer stranded in the world he created, sealed inside the Chapel with nothing but his own words to guide him.
For the duration of the meal, they put these thoughts out of mind, though they eat as if preparing for a long journey. As if this really will be their last supper, and the length of the journey they will then be able to undertake depends fully on how much energy they manage to store here, at this table, so covered in meat and stew and platter after platter of noodles and squash and roast turnips that, should they choose to do so, they could indeed bring the Biography to an end simply by eating themselves to death.
They crush lobsters with mallets and suck the claws clean and tear meat from the bones of bulls and oxen, nodding when the waiter asks if they’d like more wine, more brandy, more cognac and then, after a while, more cake, more mousse, more crème brulee. Syrian, Turkish, and Egyptian tobacco in gleaming emerald pipes. They wave hands covered in blood and suet and raspberry sauce, wiping their mouths with their sleeves until their sleeves are also drenched, their bodies slick and shimmering with sugar and alcohol and fat and adrenaline, the lonely world that Jakob built in his Prison Diary, the Holocaust he had no choice but to invent, fading from memory, as shabby now as the materials he cobbled it from.
They eat and drink so much that Chez Pierre has to call the Tyson Meat Truck back for an emergency delivery. Subsequent courses—scallops, kidneys, sweetbreads—are served barely cooked, barely seasoned, plate after plate of meat stacked upon the empty dessert dishes. Tobin staggers in with three skinned pigs on his shoulders and throws them down on the table, collapsing it onto the carpet.
Jakob and his Biographer go on gorging, slipping around in the juices that merge their bodies with what they’ve consumed, slipping off their seats and onto the pig-stained carpet where they slide in crab juice and sweat and molten chocolate, stuffing as much down their throats as their hands can hold while an artist on a scaffold paints this scene on the ceiling. They gurgle and watch their likenesses appear overhead until, as had to happen, they black out and the Maître D’ moves them one by one into the Waiters’ Room.
There they lie on cots, side by side in sleeping caps with scratchy blankets pulled up to their chins, and they dream parallel dreams of great careers in the city. While monks tiptoe in with buckets of scented oil and coarse rags to perform extreme unction upon their bodies, they fill the Whitney and the MoMA and the Broad and the Tate Modern with sculptures so large, and with so many copies of the Biography, that soon no structure except Mass MoCA can contain their production. They take up residence there, a little boy lost in the walls and the closets and the ductwork while his Biographer follows him around, listening for scratches and taps beneath the floorboards and above the ceiling tiles, writing down all he can glean, filling notebook after notebook so as to produce a Biography that is already stocked, in a dozen languages, in the Gift Shop across the concrete lobby from the front desk and the coat check.
Once this process is completed, the two of them roam the museum together, down into the basement where the bunker with its two leather armchairs has been recreated, the revolver forever smoking on the desk, and then across the gravel walkways between buildings toward the vaulted warehouse, inside which the mountaintop altar and the cabin, wedged just beneath the ceiling, stand empty. They hook ropes to their waists and climb along a steep path made of resin and epoxy and rebar and concrete, forcing their way up past the porch where they recorded the Biography and into room after room stuffed with comics, all the way to the Secret Window exhibit in back.
Here they gaze onto a landscape that no Mass MoCA, no matter how immense, could possibly contain. They take turns pressing their eyes to the glass to behold a flat tan expanse beneath a neutral blue sky, beyond which, it is at last clear, even to them—unless they too are no more than figures in an installation whose edges they will never find—no New Jerusalem awaits. “The only salvation there could ever be for them,” the Secret Window plaque reads, “is the salvation of exile qua exile. Wandering without the slightest hope of finding their way home.”
When they’ve each read this plaque and come to the only conclusion it leads to, they step away from the window, climb down the mountain, pass an off-limits exhibit called The Chez Pierre Kitchen, and enter one called The Waiters’ Room. Inside, they see two bodies asleep on cots, wearing sleeping caps with scratchy blankets pulled up to their chins. The bodies moan and whimper, rolling side to side, as if in the grip of a troubling dream.
Jakob and his Biographer pull on monks’ robes and take up buckets of scented oil and coarse rags. One by one, they lean in to kiss these bodies, whispering farewell, each to the one that most resembles his innermost image of himself. “Your long journey is at an end,” they whisper, pulling the blankets up and over the sleepers’ faces and pressing down until the whimpering stops. “The Third Age is nearly here.”
Out beyond this exhibit, they eat breakfast in the Mass MoCA café as dawn breaks over the museum. Sipping Black Milk and stealing glances at Jakob’s parents as they share a plate of bacon and eggs before another day of searching for their lost boy, Jakob and his Biographer prepare to take their leave of one another.
A cool desert breeze blows across the café, seeping through an open window in the Gift Shop. They sit together for a long moment, inhaling the scents of sand and salt and envisioning what a Third Age, infected and bedraggled by the unfinished business of the Second and yet still, to some essential degree, free of it, will feel like. Then the Biographer nods, puts his hand lightly atop Jakob’s, rises, stuffs his Styrofoam plate and cup in the trash by the soda machine, and walks off. He enters the Gift Shop, opens the window the rest of the way, and disappears through it, vanishing into vivid white dunes and cloudless blue sky. Jakob watches him turn as monochrome as his surroundings, all texture and hue bleeding out until he’s no more than a stick figure in the background of a print of a famous painting for sale on a rack called Secret Window: Seven Studies for Jakob’s Final Masterpiece.
Jakob stands in the Gift Shop and spins this rack around and around, uncertain whether he hopes his Biographer will reappear, even if only in a sketch. He watches the seven studies spin, each revealing the Secret Window and the landscape beyond it from a slightly different angle, hypnotized by the sense of endless space, real and yet closed off to him for good now.
“Can I—?”
“I already have these at home!” Jakob shouts at the bewildered saleslady. “They’re plastered all over my walls.”
He marches away, shaking, threatened, intending to stomp out of the Gift Shop and out of the museum for the last time, but he stops by a rack near the door and, once again, falls to browsing as if nothing had happened a moment ago. He studies the many editions of the Prison Diary, flipping through pages in Russian and Chinese and Arabic, puzzling over the letters until he feels the saleslady approaching yet again, about to ask, or try to ask, the same question.
“Okay, okay!” he shouts. “I’ll take one.”
She rings up an English version and hands it to him in a glossy white Mass MoCA bag with a brochure for upcoming Wilco concerts and a bookmark beneath the receipt and he walks off with it under his arm, through the lobby and the main exit and beneath the gigantic “Chapel of Humiliation: All the Lives of Jakob” banner that hangs over the parking lot. He gets in his beat-up Chevy and turns the key and begins his last drive through the quiet, slowly gentrifying streets of North Adams, working his way into the Berkshires as the sun rises over the valley.
He climbs until, at high noon, he merges onto the road his father once drove with an Ace Hardware ax in his lap and his son blindfolded in the back seat, the boy’s mother trembling beside him. He retraces that route now, forcing the old car higher and higher until he reaches the point just beneath the summit beyond which he can drive no further. Here he gets out, leaving the keys hanging in the ignition, and retraces the path his father once dragged him along, and along which he dragged his son, with his wife and mother screaming at them both to stop, to let the boy live, and, all at once, a wave of rage and terror overwhelms him so thoroughly that his eyes fill with belching chimneys and pits of bodies and cascades of poison gas, and it’s all he can do to stumble through the spiders’ shadow and into the cabin where, as Wilhelm Wieland, he has at last earned the right to die in peace, having given the Chapel all it required of him, and perhaps a little more for good measure.
He drinks a glass of Black Milk from the fridge, strips naked and pulls his bathrobe over his withered body. When he feels strong enough, he begins dragging the thousands and thousands of issues of Jakob as Nazi Hunter into the clearing, where, over the course of days, he builds a pyre upon the old sacrificial mound. The pyre grows so high, somehow overshadowing the cabin in which those issues had been stored, that, by the time he sets it alight, the flames and the smoke rise so thickly and so fast—consuming the cabin and the surrounding trees and peeling the leather from the thousands of armchairs that lie scattered in the woods and melting the spiders and cracking all the neglected giants strewn among the lower reaches of the mountain with their desperate adherents inside—that they occlude the ceiling of the Chapel and allow Wieland, for a long, final moment, to imagine they are at last rising into the genuine and unbounded sky, the impartial realm from which the totality of his achievement will now be judged by the version of himself who got away, demanding access to the Third Age when he at last understood that no one was coming to offer it.
Then the two chairs he ordered from the Party Store yesterday arrive in a truck and two hulking teenagers unload them. Jakob swells with rage at the world’s ignorance in continuing to iterate the story that is now clearly over. He wants to shriek down from the sky, “Leave me alone, you philistines, go away!” But, gagging and wheezing from the smoke, he finds it’s all he can do to watch the flames consume these delivery boys and their truck, mixing them into the cloud that is already so dense and so dark that he hopes it will never recede to reveal what remains of the Chapel behind it.
When it does, leaving only those two chairs beneath a ceiling frescoed with the early stages of the Biographer’s solitary journey into the desert, Jakob sits naked in one of them, blanketed in cooling ash, and pulls the Prison Diary from its bag. He puts the bookmark out of sight by his feet, licks his finger, listens to the clacking of phantom spiders overhead and, picturing all the adventures to come, even if his only role therein will be as a remnant here below, opens to the very first page.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City trilogy, as well as the story collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition, out later this year. He lives in NYC and is online at: raviddice.com.