from him. If this were a nameless place I wanted, illogically perhaps, to know why it had no name and, even more, how it had come about he had never asked the name.
“You said the days were full,” I said. “Exactly how do you fill them? How do you pass the time?”
“Mike!” said Sara sharply.
“I want to know,” I said. “Does he sit and contemplate his navel. Does he. . .”
“I write,” said Lawrence Arlen Knight.
“Sir,” said Sara, “I, apologize. This cross-examination is bad manners.”
“Not for me,” I told her. “I am the roughneck type who wants to get some answers. He says no one who gets here ever wants to leave. He said the days are full. If we are to be stuck here, I want to know. . .”
“Each one,” Knight said softly, “does what he wants to do. He does it for the sheer joy that he finds in the doing of it. He has no motive other than the satisfaction of doing very well either the thing he wants to do or the thing he does the best. There is no economic pressure and no social pressure. He does not work for praise or money or for fame. Here one realizes how empty all those motives are. He remains true only to himself.”
“And you write?”
“I write,” said Knight.
“What do you write?”
“The things I want to write. The thoughts inside myself. I try to express them as best I can. I write and rewrite them. I polish them. I seek the exact word and phrase. I try to put down the total experience of my life. I try to see what kind of creature I am and why I am the way I am and try to extend. . .”
“And how are you getting along?” I asked.
He gestured at the wooden box upon the table. “It is all there,” he said. “The bare beginning of it. It has taken long, but it is a task I never tire of. It will take much longer to finish it, if I ever finish it. Although that is silly of me to say, for I have all the time there is. Others may paint, still others compose music, others play it. Or many other things, of which I had never heard before. One of my near neighbors, a most peculiar creature if I may say so, is making up a most complicated game, played with many sets of pieces and many different counters on a board that is three dimensional and, at times, I suspect it may be four, and. . .”
“Stop it!” Sara cried. “Stop it! You need not explain yourself to us.”
She shriveled me with a look.
“I do not mind,” said Lawrence Arlen Knight. “In fact, I think I may enjoy it. There is so much to tell, so much that is so wondrous. I can quite understand how someone coming here might be puzzled and might have many questions ,he would want to ask. It is a difficult thing to absorb.”
“Mike,” said Hoot.
“Hush,” said Sara.
“Difficult,” said Knight. “Yes, very difficult. Hard to understand that here time stands still and that except for the going and the coming of the light, which fools us into measuring time into artificial days, there is no such thing as time. To realize that yesterday is one with today and that tomorrow is, as well, one with yesterday, that one walks in an unchanging lake of foreverness and that there is no change, that here one can escape the tyranny of time and. . .”
Hoot honked loudly at me: “Mike!”
Sara came to her feet and so did I and as I rose, the place changed-the place and man.
I stood in a hovel with a broken roof and dirt floor. The chairs were rickety and the table, lacking one leg, was propped against the wall. On it stood the wooden box and the litter of papers.
“It is beyond human experience,” said Knight. “It is, indeed, beyond human imagination. I sometimes wonder if someone in some distant age, by some process which I cannot even begin to understand, caught a glimpse and the meaning of this place and called it Heaven. . .”
He was old. He was incredibly old and filthy, a walking corpse. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones and pulled back from his lips, revealing yellowed, rotting teeth. Through a great rent in his robe, caked with filth, his ribs stood out like those of a winter-starved horse. His hands were claws. His beard was matted with dirt and drool and his hooded eyes gleamed with a vacant light, eyes half-dead and yet somehow sharp, too sharp to be housed in such an ancient, tottering body.
“Sara,” I shouted.
For she was standing in complete and polite absorption, listening ecstatically to the words mouthed by the filthy old wreck who sat huddled in his chair.
She whirled on me. “For the last time, Mike. . .”
By the look of cold fury on her face, I knew that she still saw him as he had appeared before, that the change was not apparent to her, that she still was trapped in whatever enchantment had ensnared us.
I moved fast, scarcely thinking. I clipped her on the chin, hard and accurately and without pity, and I caught her as she fell. I slung her over my shoulder and as I did I saw that Knight was struggling to push himself out of the chair and even as he continued his efforts, his mouth kept moving and he never stopped his talk.
“What is the trouble, my friends?” he asked. “Have I done some unwitting thing to offend you? It is so hard at times to know and appreciate the mores of the people that one meets. It is easy to perform one misguided act or say one unguarded word...”
I turned to go and as I did I saw that wooden box on the table top and reached out to grab it.
Hoot was pleading with me. “Mike, delay do not. Stand not on ceremony. Flee, please, with all alacrity.”
We fled with all alacrity.
