hand, impersonating foreign dignitaries with an eye to defrauding uncharitable bishops, being ambushed in lightless alleys by knife-wielding ruffians, and coming home early to discover his newlywed bride in bed with his mistress’s husband.”
“It is as if you had been reading my diary,” Jack said wonderingly. “Had I a diary to read.”
“That is because you are the active sort of character, whose chief purpose is to move the plot along. I am, however, more the reflective sort of character, whose purpose it is to expound upon and thus reveal the inner meaning of the narrative. But I see you are confused-let us step briefly out of my story.”
And, as simply as one might turn a page, Jack found himself standing in a pleasant garden, awash in the golden light of a late-afternoon sun. The king of the Mummelsee was seated in a chair which, though plain and simple, suggested a throne-indeed, such a throne as a philosopher-king might inhabit.
“That is very well observed of you,” the king said in response to Jack’s unspoken observation. “It is possible that, with encouragement, you could be converted to a reflective character yet.”
“Where are we?”
“This is my dear friend Dr. Vandermast’s garden in Zayana, where it is eternally afternoon. Here, he and I have had many a long discussion of entelechy and epistemology and other such unimportant and ephemeral nothings. The good doctor has discreetly made himself absent that we may talk in private. He himself resides in a book called-but what matters that? This is one of those magical places where we may with equanimity discuss the nature of the world. Indeed, its aspect is such that we could scarce do otherwise if we tried.”
A hummingbird abruptly appeared before Jack, hanging in the air like a frantic feathered jewel. He extended a finger and the bird hovered just above it, so that he could feel the delicate push of air from its madly pumping wings upon his skin. “What marvel is this?” he asked.
“It is just my daughter. Though she does not appear in this scene, still she desires to make her wishes known-and so she expresses herself in imagery. Thank you, dear, you may leave now.” The king clapped his hands and the hummingbird vanished. “She will be heartbroken if you depart from our fictive realm. But doubtless another hero will come along and, being fictional, Poseidonia neither learns from her experiences nor lets them embitter her against their perpetrator’s gender. She will greet him as openly and enthusiastically as she did you.”
Jack felt a perfectly understandable twinge of jealousy. But he set it aside. Hewing to the gist of the discussion, he said, “Is this an academic argument, sir? Or is there a practical side to it?”
“Dr. Vandermast’s garden is not like other places. If you were to wish to leave our world entirely, then I have no doubt it could be easily arranged.”
“Could I then come back?”
“Alas, no,” the king said regretfully. “One miracle is enough for any life. And more than either of us, strictly speaking, deserves, I might add.”
Jack picked up a stick and strode back and forth along the flower beds, lashing at the heads of the taller blossoms. “Must I then decide based on no information at all? Leap blindly into the abyss or remain doubtful at its lip forever? This is, as you say, a delightful existence. But can I be content with this life, knowing there is another and yet being ignorant of what it might entail?”
“Calm yourself. If that is all it takes, then let us see what the alternative might be.” The king of the Mummelsee reached down into his lap and turned the page of a leather-bound folio that Jack had not noticed before.
“ARE YOU GOING TO be sitting there forever, woolgathering, when there are chores to be done? I swear, you must be the single laziest man in the world.”
Jack’s fat wife came out of the kitchen, absently scratching her behind. Gretchen’s face was round where once it had been slender, and there was a slight hitch in her gait, where formerly her every movement had been a dance to music only she could hear. Yet Jack’s heart softened within him at the sight of her, as it always did.
He put down his goose quill and sprinkled sand over what he had written so far. “You are doubtless right, my dear,” he said mildly. “You always are.”
As he was stumping outdoors to chop wood, draw water, and feed the hog they were fattening for Fastnacht, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung by the back door. An old and haggard man with a beard so thin it looked moth eaten glared back at him in horror. “Eh, sir,” he murmured to himself, “you are not the fine young soldier who tumbled Gretchen in the hayloft only minutes after meeting her, so many years ago.”
A cold wind blew flecks of ice in his face when he stepped outside, and the sticks in the woodpile were frozen together so that he had to bang them with the blunt end of the axe to separate them so that they might be split. When he went to the well, the ice was so thick that breaking it raised a sweat. Then, after he’d removed the rock from the lid covering the bucket of kitchen slops and started down toward the sty, he slipped on a patch of ice and upended the slops over the front of his clothing. Which meant not only that he would have to wash those clothes weeks ahead of schedule-which in wintertime was an ugly chore-but that he had to gather up the slops from the ground with his bare hands and ladle them back into the bucket, for come what may the pig still needed to be fed.
So, muttering and complaining to himself, old Jack clomped back into the house, where he washed his hands and changed into clean clothing and sat back down to his writing again. After a few minutes, his wife entered the room and exclaimed, “It is so cold in here!” She busied herself building up the fire, though it was so much work carrying wood up to his office that Jack would rather have endured the cold to save himself the extra labor later on. Then she came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you writing a letter to Wilhelm again?”
“Who else?” Jack growled. “We work our fingers to the bone to send him money, and he never writes! And when he does, his letters are so brief! He spends all his time drinking and running up debts with tailors and chasing after-” He caught himself in time, and coughed. “Chasing after inappropriate young women.”
“Well, after all, when you were his age-”
“When I was his age, I never did any such thing,” Jack said indignantly.
“No, of course not,” he wife said. He could feel the smile he did not turn around to see. “You poor foolish dear.”
She kissed the top of his head.
THE SUN EMERGED FROM behind a cloud as Jack reappeared, and the garden blazed with a hundred bright colors-more of Poseidonia’s influence, Jack supposed. Its flowers turned their heads toward him flirtatiously and opened their blossoms to his gaze.
“Well?” said the king of the Mummelsee. “How was it?”
“I’d lost most of my teeth,” Jack said glumly, “and there was an ache in my side that never went away. My children were grown and moved away, and there was nothing left in my life to look forward to but death.”
“That is not a judgment,” the king said, “but only a catalog of complaints.”
“There was, I must concede, a certain authenticity to life on the other side of the gate. A validity and complexity which ours may be said to lack.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
The shifting light darkened and a wind passed through the trees, making them sigh. “On the other hand, there is a purposefulness to this life which the other does not have.”
“That too is true.”
“Yet if there is a purpose to our existence-and I feel quite certain that there is-I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
“Why, that is easily enough answered!” the king said. “We exist to amuse the reader.”
“And this reader-who exactly is he?”
“The less said about the reader,” said the king of the Mummelsee fervently, “the better.” He stood. “We have talked enough,” he said. “There are two gates from this garden. One leads back whence we came. The second leads to…the other place. That which you glimpsed just now.”
“Has it a name, this ‘other place’?”
“Some call it Reality, though the aptness of that title is, of course, in dispute.”
Jack tugged at his mustache and chewed at the inside of his cheek. “This is, I swear, no easy choice.”
“Yet we cannot stay in this garden forever, Jack. Sooner or later, you must choose.”
“Indeed, sir, you are right,” Jack said. “I must be resolute.” All about him, the garden waited in hushed stillness. Not a bullfrog disturbed the glassy surface of the lily pond. Not a blade of grass stirred in the meadow. The
