Through a Glass Darkly

The entanglement of Will’s latest—and last—obsession began with a book. I remember his reading it; or rather, I remember his tone and shortness of breath during those frequent phone calls—the excitement that buzzed with his voice across miles of cable to stand my hair on end. He never told me the title, nor did I really want to know; if he’d told me, I would have had to read it, out of curiosity if not a sense of obligation; and I know I’d never find what Will had in the spaces between its innocuous-seeming mix of adverbs and punctuation-marks.

It was a well-known book, or so I inferred, but only Will had uncovered its true meaning. He told me so, in one of those first conversations. “Listen to this!” he said, with a sort of electricity in his voice that I recognized after years spent watching him solve jigsaw puzzles and Rubik’s cubes. “‘In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form,’” (quoting the book, I imagine).

“That’s very interesting,” I replied, with the equally familiar sensation of having been discarded by the whirlwind of his genius.

“Interesting?” he repeated, incredulous—as always—as to the extent of my naïveté. “If this is merely interesting, my friend, then . . . well, never mind. What of this passage: ‘there is identity in different men as to their substantial form, and diversity as to the accidents, or as to their superficial shape’!” Again I could respond only with inconsequential politeness, and I could almost hear him shaking his head. “Never mind, my friend, never mind. But there is something here—I know there is!—and I think I’ve almost found it.”

The next time I heard from him about his discoveries was a few weeks later, long after he’d finished the book and begun his journey to who-knows-where. (I’d talked to him many times before then, of course—recognizing the animation in his voice that betrayed the status of his undertaking—but our conversations were never about the book itself.) There was a long-distance call from an unknown number, and then Will’s voice—hushed, expectant.

“I cannot tell you where I am,” he said, “only that I’ve found it. It’s real; the abbey is real.” He continued thus about an “abbey,” though his ranting grew gradually more incoherent, so that I was almost worried as to the state of his sanity: “Strange that it said ‘Italy’ but nothing else—coincidence? Rearrange the letters, it’s a code! A code, yes, and I’ve found it, though I shall not say, I cannot say where.”

“Are you in Italy?” I asked, bewildered, but he seemed not to hear.

“The Aedificium stands! ‘Fallen like fallen angels’ . . . but I cannot say more. Only this: no further phone calls, and do not speak to me of computers and wireless things. They are watched, and I cannot be watched! I must solve this thing, I must. . . . I shall contact you, of course, though through more . . . antediluvian means.” And then he hung up, and I was scarcely able to fit a word or two between the ragged seams of his diatribe.

I must admit that over the next week or so, I stopped waiting for him to call. I assumed that this was yet another of his wild goose chases, his red herrings, his diversions; I assumed he would be back soon enough, knocking on my door at the most inopportune moment and helping himself to the last of my egg salad. If only I’d . . . but no, this is not about my regret, though I have plenty of it; this is about Will. And I received a letter from him that following Tuesday, so heavily stamped and post-marked that I couldn’t tell, for the life of me, where it had originated:


Dearest friend,
   I entrust my knowledge to your keeping, seeing as there is no one else I can turn to and I cannot die with these secrets buried also in my grave. The book is real, it is the mirror! I have found the "ruins," and I have walked among them—the stables, the church, where that mighty door yet haunts me with its ghost, the Aedificium, crawling with relics of memories. Written in the past, of a greater past; but it is nothing if not a warning of the future! There are secrets here that divulge the end—no, not that alleged Apocalypse so trumpeted in blood and bone, but truth! Ah, truth, and what is truth if not a "mirror of the world," a mirror of the hope to which we, my friend, subscribe? I fear these words are cryptic, but discount them not, I beg you! . . . If the suppliant of a madman counts for something in these times.

   Again, I beseech you: keep my name; do not empty it of meaning as my body is emptied thus of life.
   Yours,
       Will


I was willing, at first, to discount the letter exactly as he’d mentioned: as the raving of a lunatic. But something in his urgency convinced me, and besides, he’d been my closest friend since the day we both could walk. Such talk of death worried me; I began to fear that, in some obscure obeisance to hidden signals no one else could see, he’d take his life. I needn’t have worried, though—not of suicide, in any case. Another letter came, and it was shorter; if anything, it was more incoherent than its predecessor:


X—
   I have transported myself. The stars are right; the trumpets ring shrill upon my ears and fill them with the music of what should have been. The signs are everywhere, divine, even; I can almost taste the saccharine swell of poison on my tongue. But fear not. These walls grow more solid every day, and soon they shall accept me, my ‘superficial shape.’
   You know my name, though it means nothing to me here.


Reading this letter, the strangest awareness overcame my senses: for a second, a fraction of a second, even, I could almost hear the scratch of pen on parchment, the low melancholy of praises sung; I could smell the rich of stables and the must of withered bindings. And then I blinked, and it was gone. I noticed, then, that the letter was written on the most peculiar paper: thick and heavy, smooth with the efforts of a man’s hand rather than the process of mechanization. An odd shuddering tickled my spine, and I turned the envelope over: I noticed, without surprise, that there were no stamps, no postmarks. No name except my own.

I waited for another letter with a frenetic worry bordering on panic. What could he mean by this? Will had always been eccentric, but this. . . . In the meantime, I scoured the two letters that I had for clues with the same sort of detective-esque absurdity with which I imagined him reading that book: rearranging symbols, looking for codes, highlighting important words, searching for phrases in old newspapers. The hunt consumed me, and after caffeinated nights of sleepless investigation, I began to imagine patterns on the insides of my eyelids when they closed for jarring moments of microsleep—and then find them vanished at the point of consciousness, just illusory wishes, just amusement-park mirrors of reality. It was to no avail: either the letters meant nothing more than what they said, or (more likely) I was an unworthy match for their elegant labyrinths.

He never sent another letter, and I never heard from him again. I have failed, though I can only imagine that he has succeeded. And now I write this down so that I can keep my silent promise to his memory: so that his name will never be empty.