to $750 a pop, and shrinking. All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to do with the grim, simplex desire for more information, more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of power, whether governmental or corporate (if that’s a distinction you believe in).
You look at Windows 95 blooming on to the screen, and you think, Magic. But for those who understand the system down to molecular level, nothing magical remains – all is revealed as simple repetitive drudgery, what we might even denounce as a squandering of precious operating time, were it not for Technology’s discovery of how to tap into the velocity situation prevailing down at the smaller scales –
The fatal temptation for a fiction writer who must accept the presence, often a necessity, of magic in his own work, is to solve difficulties of plot, character and – more often than is generally suspected – taste, by conveniently flourishing some prop, some
Through all this meanwhile runs a second plotline – a whodunit, in which Daniel must solve the uncompromisingly earthly question of who murdered his mother, Annalee Pearce, in an alleyway in Livermore, California when he was 14, complete with multiple suspects, false trails, the identity of the killer not revealed till the final pages. The story traverses a map of some moral intricacy, sure-footed as Chandler, providing twists as elegant as Agatha Christie, as all the while Daniel’s education proceeds.
Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled, climaxing in a legendary Lo-ball confrontation with the cheerfully louche Guido Caramba, in a literary poker passage as classic as it is funny, and in its appreciative devotion to a game where the moral stakes are so high, ranking up there with comparable parts of Kawabata’s
The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise – another illicit skill, given that it’s already forbidden to impersonate policemen, doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, and who knows what all besides, as if someday all varieties of disguise will be statutory offences, including Impersonating an Ordinary Citizen. At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta, by now also one of his prime suspects in Annalee’s death, who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.
At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate techno-caper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of the analog sort – optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms – his non-digital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility.
He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel’s life’s tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don’t learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we’ve come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel’s unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below – by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensible literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel – though it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us – after ‘To know, to will, to dare,’ as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic – we must keep silent.
FICTION.
—Maria Prophetissa
Daniel Pearse was born on the rainy dawn of March 15, 1966. He didn’t receive a middle name because his mother, Annalee Faro Pearse, was exhausted from coming up with a first and last – especially the last. As near as she could figure, Daniel’s father might have been any of seven men. Annalee decided on Daniel because it sounded strong, and she knew he’d need to be strong.
At Daniel’s birth, Annalee was a sixteen-year-old ward of the Greenfield Home for Girls, an Iowa custodial institution administered by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin. She had been placed there by court order after attempting to steal an ounce bar of silver from a jewelry-shop display case. She told the arresting officer she was an orphan of the moon, and told the judge that she didn’t recognize the court’s authority to make decisions about her life. She refused to cooperate beyond giving her name as Annalee Faro Pearse. The judge sentenced her to Greenfield till she was eighteen.
Her second month at Greenfield, Annalee confided her suspected pregnancy to one of her roommates. The next day she was called before Sister Bernadette, a small, severe woman of fifty with an office as meticulously spare as her heart, though not nearly as dour.
