course, under the circumstances, but I’d be lying if I said that such disloyalty didn’t sting.
Edward does not share my sentiments. He thinks the venture a fool’s errand which can only end in disaster. And he has good personal reasons to disapprove — it was his own sister, you see, my dear Charlotte, once Love 999, who orchestrated the whole thing.
Edward always believed that his sister’s conversion to my cause was only temporary, an aberration brought about by the unusually persuasive recruitment techniques of Love, Love, Love and Love. As it turned out, the transformation is permanent and irreversible. She remains my truest convert. Curious, is it not, how it is often the worst skeptics and bitterest cynics who become the most zealous of us all.
But Edward has further reason to be distressed at his sister’s defection. She has taken poor Grossmith with her. Deprived of a husband and confronted with evidence of his duplicity in the most upsetting manner, the housekeeper decided to throw in her lot with the new Pantisocrats. I wonder what use she can be to them, since she is well past child-bearing age and unlikely to be much good as either a poet or a farmer. Perhaps she can organize the cooking or busy herself with some light cleaning.
It is a source of concern to me that I have not heard any news of the Pantisocrats since their departure. I have scoured the papers to no avail, begged the guards and the doctors for any whisper they may have heard in the outside world, but it seems that they have disappeared. Pity. I should like to have known how it all turned out.
The last time I saw Edward Moon he had said goodbye to them all that very morning, come hotfoot from waving them off at the docks. I asked if Charlotte had mentioned me and he assured me that she had not. Something in his manner, however, coupled with the suspicious speed of his reply, convinced me that he was lying. He would admit only that there had been further tears and recriminations at their parting. It was, as I understand it, a final goodbye.
Moon told me that he intended to travel. A certain respect had grown up between us in the months of our conversations and we were able to bid one another a civil farewell and shake hands almost amicably. I told him that I intended to write a full account of all that had happened, to which he replied that I should do precisely as I pleased.
The last I heard, he had gone to Africa, wherein he traveled widely, eventually forming something of a bond with a particular tribe of its indigenous people. For all I know, he lives there still. I am reminded of some lines by the poet:
I have a deal more time on my hands. My hosts have continued to be accommodating and I am allowed light and space in which to write, as well as a limited number of foolscap sheets and a single pencil. No pen, unfortunately — I have often requested an inkwell and nib, but there is some petty rule here about spiked implements and sharp points. They do not discourage my work, though at the end of each day everything is taken from me for safekeeping. I feel sure that my skill has grown with the tale’s telling and I am concerned that the opening sections must seem amateurish and crude in comparison with later chapters. I have repeatedly asked if I might not be allowed the complete manuscript, if only for an hour or two, so that I might make some revisions and clarifications from which the work can only benefit. To date, they denied my every request.
No doubt you can tell from the clinical manner in which I have related this narrative that I am not a man inclined to excesses of the imagination.
However, I have been much troubled of late by a recurring dream.
It is not as other dreams — no fragmentary jumble of dredged-up memories and half-forgotten faces, no meaningless kaleidoscope of impossible juxtapositions and incongruities. Nor does its detail fade and vanish in the morning but lingers in my mind long after I have woken, acquiring such permanence and solidity that I wonder if what I have seen is not somehow more than the fantasies of sleep but a piece of reality. The truth.
Every time it is the same. It begins deep in a forest, all light beneath the canopy of trees tinted a dusky green, strange birds screeching overhead, creatures chittering unseen in the undergrowth. I see twelve people — six men, six women — trekking through the woods, often having to hack and battle their way through the foliage but, rather wonderfully, always endeavoring to walk forward in pairs, in crocodile formation, like schoolchildren on a day trip to the zoo. Some of them I recognize — Mr. Speight, Mrs. Grossmith, Mina the bearded whore. Dear Charlotte is with them, too, radiant even as she battles, perspiring, with tree-roots and recalcitrant branches, her natural beauty complemented and enhanced by that of her surroundings.
At the head of the party is a man I do not recognize at first. Completely bald, his pate gleams with sweat as he leads the others through the trees. Baffled, I watch his progress for a while until at last it comes to me. Even though I have had this dream dozens of times before, on every fresh occasion I am astonished by the realization. It is the Somnambulist, stripped at last of his sideboards and wig, of the props and make-believe of his life with Moon, come at last into the cleansing light of revelation. His skin is untanned and, as ever, he says nothing.
At length, the party emerges at the edge of the forest on a small promontory some feet from the ground. They look down and see below them the great expanse of the Susquehanna, its thick blue ribbon coiling through the landscape, framed on either side by lush, glorious swathes of perfect green, unpeopled, fertile, poised for Pantisocracy.
The Somnambulist gazes upon this sliver of Eden and smiles. Then he opens his mouth and — to my everlasting surprise and joy — he speaks. His voice sounds nothing like what I had expected.
“Well, then,” he says. “Where do we start?”
