Welles stares at him. There’s a flat warning in his eyes, one Stanley hasn’t seen since those first moments when they met on the beach. Here at last is the Welles he’s wanted to talk to: the Welles with barred doors in his house, the Welles who keeps guns in his desk-drawers.
Their eyes remain locked for what seems like a long time. Then, without blinking, Welles flops back in his deckchair and sighs heavily. He puts his hands behind his head, interlacing their fingers. You have my apologies, he says. Indeed, you are not a child. Childhood’s end arrives when we realize that the world is unacceptable. Am I right? It’s unacceptable! It’s corrupt! It is a vale of sorrows, a kitchen full of smoke, a perpetual travail. What can we do? We can capitulate. We can give up our expectations, and accept what is the case. Or, we can fight. We can resist. Here, I think, is where the desire to create originates: from this great visceral disgust with the world, and with the experience of living in it. I’m not speaking of a desire to reform or reshape the world, mind you. I’m talking about the desire to negate it entirely, to replace it with something better, more suited to ourselves. In recognizing this desire, of course, we find ourselves in the company of our two friends, the poet and the magus.
Welles stands, lifts his beer from the tabletop, walks to the deck’s wooden railing to gaze toward the sea. When I was a young man, he says, I admit I entertained the notion that the poet and the magus are somehow unified by this refusal. That they are, in fact, identical. I thought that a poem, properly made, can become a magic spell, and can transform the world. I have matured somewhat, and I now see that I was mistaken. The poet changes nothing. He creates palatable alternate worlds, and he invites others to take refuge in them. From such vantage we can sometimes look upon our own base and quotidian existence and see it with a clearer eye, but this is accidental, and beside the point. The poet’s trade is illusion. I am a poet.
Why not be a magician, then?
Because it doesn’t work, Stanley. It’s a pointless waste of time. Worse! It’s like the child who ties a blanket around his neck and jumps through a window, convinced by his television that he can fly. It’s choosing to live in a poem that has become invisible to you as a poem. It’s not magic, it’s madness.
I don’t accept that.
At your age, Welles says, I suppose you probably shouldn’t. At my age it’s hard enough. Listen, I don’t wish to seem glib, or disrespectful, or to suggest that your question isn’t a good one. I have given this a great deal of thought—I still do—and that is my honest answer. The world simply does not work that way.
Welles peers down at his backyard. His elbows are locked; his hands are widely spaced on the wooden rail. The thick outline of his body looks like some kind of glyph.
But what if it’s like you said the other night? Stanley whispers. What if all this—
He moves his beerbottle in a wide circle, indicating every solid thing surrounding him. Welles’s back is still turned; he doesn’t see.
—what if it isn’t real? What if it’s just a reflection of something else? What if there’s another world?
Welles doesn’t answer at first. He sags forward a little, like he’s tired. Can you think of any reason, he says, to believe that that might be the case?
It feels right, Stanley says. It feels possible.
It does, doesn’t it? But then it would. Of course it would. I will say this: if you choose to believe it, then you are in very distinguished company. After all, that was the charge that Plato levied against us poets, wasn’t it? That we are pretenders of wisdom, copiers of copies. Perhaps we are. Who can say? Perhaps we’re wasting our time on fancies, while the real conquest of the invisible world is being carried out by modern-day alchemists, wearing the white smocks of atomic scientists and aerospace engineers. Perhaps we’re being sentimental: we cannot bear very much reality. We say we long for it, but when it finally emerges and fails to present us with our own pretty reflections, we recoil. We retreat to our islands in the river, and we pine away like the Lady of Shalott.
Have you ever killed anybody, Mister Welles?
Stanley catches his breath, blinks in surprise. He hadn’t intended to ask the question, wasn’t even thinking it. Was he?
At the edge of the deck, Welles is motionless and silent. Almost invisibly, the stiffness has moved from his elbows to his back. Stanley’s breathing fast, scared at first that he’s said a bad thing—and then he’s just scared, he’s not sure of what. Somewhere below a treefrog has started to chirp. Now Stanley can hear dozens of them, all over the neighborhood, that he hadn’t noticed before.
No, Welles says. No, I have not.
Stanley has a fast out-of-control feeling, like he’s going to vomit. I have, he says.
Welles is half-turned, still facing away. You have, he says. I see.
Probably a lot of guys would tell you something like that just to impress you, Stanley hears himself say. And maybe that’s partly why I’m telling you. But what I’m saying is true. When I was thirt—