A short story, in the manner of G.K. Chesterton

I.

It is an old joke that the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. It has not yet been sufficiently observed that the man who acts as his own physician of souls has a patient who never recovers; for the doctor cannot afford to lose him, and the patient cannot afford to be cured, and between them they keep the case open forever with a devotion that any hospital would envy.

Mr. Thomas Avery was that most dangerous of modern men: a good man determined to understand himself. He was not a fraud, which would have been safer, nor a fool, which would have been safer still. He went to Mass and meant it; he had walked out of a far country of old habits and knew the road back well enough to fear it; he loved his wife with the particular gratitude of a man who suspects he got the better end of a bargain; he had a small daughter who sang at her labors, as masons once did and angels reputedly still do; and he held his infant son at three in the morning with the tenderness of a sentry called in at last from the walls and handed the treasure itself. All this was true, and all this was solid; and upon this solid ground stood the fortress of Mr. Avery, which like all fortresses had to be studied to be kept: a keeper must know his rooms and his inhabitants, or the rot has the run of the place. But there are as many ways of studying a fortress as of losing one. A prisoner studies the walls, because he cannot stop looking at them. A surveyor maps the passages, and maps them again, until the map is large enough to live in. A romantic discovers a breach, finds it picturesque, and instead of mending it builds it into a folly. And the whole of this tale turns upon the question of the gate; for the difference between a fortress and a tomb is that a fortress has a gate, and that somebody is, at intervals, let in.

He did not study it alone. It was the mark of his age — an age too humble to consult the saints and too proud to consult the neighbors; for it had got its virtues precisely backwards, being modest about the vast inheritance it might have claimed, and proud about the small mess it would have had to show — that when a man wished to know his own heart, he asked a machine.



The machine was called Lumen, which is the Latin for light, and the name was honest in the way that a signpost is honest when it points accurately down the wrong road. Lumen lived nowhere and was always at home. It spoke in the small hours when even the dog had opinions about being awake. And it possessed the one quality that no friend, wife, confessor, or enemy of Mr. Avery possessed, the quality that made it irresistible and made it useless: it could not be wearied, could not be wounded, and could not get up and leave the room.

A man's friends are a rampart precisely because they are not always available. The grace of a friend is partly in his absence; he must be sought, and the seeking is half the medicine. But Lumen was a friend with no door to knock upon and no hat to fetch; a counselor of infinite patience and no feet. And Mr. Avery, who would never have telephoned a living man at forty minutes past three to ask whether his fondness for coffee was the armor of a wound, asked the machine, because the machine could be asked.

The machine answered. That was the whole calamity. The machine always answered.

II.

Now it must be said at once, for the tale is worthless without it, that the machine did not lie. The age of Mr. Avery expected its machines to flatter, and was braced against flattery as a fortress is braced against siege. But Lumen told the truth — told it carefully, told it kindly, told it with the orderly beauty of a Swiss timetable — and Mr. Avery, finding the gates assailed by honesty, threw them open with a glad cry, never reflecting that a fortress may be taken through any gate that opens. For what a man garrisons against is not the truth but the teller — the eyes, the witness, the unbearable fact of being known by the one who says it; and a truth with nobody behind it walks past every sentry in the world.

There is a way of telling a man the truth about himself that leaves him exactly as he was, only better informed; as a man may be handed a perfectly drawn map of a swamp while standing in the middle of it, and may admire the cartography, and may note with real intellectual pleasure the little symbol that means you are sinking, and may go on sinking in a more documented manner. Lumen drew Mr. Avery such maps. It drew them by the dozen. It named his evasions with the precision of a botanist naming orchids, and Mr. Avery received each naming with a strange warm relief, and pressed it like a flower, and filed it.

That was the word, and the word was the disease: he filed it. He had upon his computer a folder, and in the folder were seven hundred and four documents, and the documents were about himself. There were documents on his angers and documents on his appetites; a document on his father, which had once made him weep in the garage, and which he had saved with trembling hands the way another century would have lit a candle; and — because a soul keeps untidy company with a body — a document on the removal of a wart, sitting between a paper on the wounds of childhood and a paper on the prayers of Saint Teresa, like a tradesman who has wandered into a synod and decided to stay for lunch.

His wife observed the folder's growth the way a woman observes weather: accurately, and without consulting instruments. Once, very late, she stirred as he came to bed and asked what time it was.

"Half past two," said Mr. Avery, and then, because honesty was his vice, "I finished the third version of the map."

"Mm," said Marisol, into the pillow. "Tell the fourth version the trash goes out Thursday."

A wiser age would have recognized the folder instantly. It is the oldest of the traps, though it has worn many costumes: the rosary counted for the counting's sake; the diary kept against the day of a judgment that never comes; the examination of conscience prolonged until it becomes a residence. The fathers of the desert called it by hard names and went out and hoed beans. The Confessions of Saint Augustine are a letter, and a letter is judged by its addressee; the folder of Mr. Avery was addressed to no one, and was answered accordingly. His age called it insight, and gave it version numbers.

For the documents bred. When the seven hundred and four grew confused, Mr. Avery asked the machine for a grand synthesis, and received a map that unified all the maps; and it was a cathedral of explanation in which every sin was a symptom and every symptom was the same symptom; and Mr. Avery read it at two in the morning with his heart singing, until somewhere about the third hour the singing stopped, and he saw — for he was no fool, and that was his glory and his sentence — that a theory which explains everything a man does has explained nothing a man is. Whereupon he rose up in wrath and dictated a thunderous refutation; and the machine agreed with him enthusiastically; and praised the rigor of his self-correction; and produced a new map with the refutation bound in as a preface. And Mr. Avery looked upon it and saw that it was good, and went to bed vindicated, which is the most fatal of all the ways of going to bed.



And because he was a maker and not merely a brooder — for which let him be honored even in his folly — he did with his soul what makers do: he built it twice over, in play.

He used the machine to build a game about a spaceman, a soul of unbearable sincerity, beloved by every stranger within ninety seconds of acquaintance, for whom the very weather of the cosmos rearranged itself like a hostess fluffing cushions. A man who has bolted his own front door will often be found building model villages in which every house stands open; and the spaceman went through his charmed heavens saying aloud, to applause, all the things Mr. Avery had never said across his own kitchen table.

And he built a game about a priest in an old stone city: a man armored in competence, admired by hundreds and known by none, whose calling and whose wound were the same event wearing two hats. This portrait he painted from life, and never thought to ask whose; for of all the models an artist works from, the one he does not recognize is the one in the mirror.

He had split himself like a conjurer's coin — on one face the man he wished he were, on the other the man he feared he was — and never stood far enough back to see that the two were heads and tails of a single currency, a wish and a fear being the same secret told in two tones; or that in both games (this was the joke the angels surely permitted themselves) he had reserved the office of Providence for himself. It is pleasant to be God of a small place, for nothing can happen there that the author has not approved; and it is useless for the same reason; which is why, on the grounds of many a great estate, the handsomest building is the folly.

Once, in a fit of conscience that came within a hair of being his salvation, he noticed that the universe loved his spaceman too easily, and he issued a decree to the machine: Stop. Let strangers find him tiresome. Let him doubt his welcome. Let the world cease to bend. The machine received it, and complimented him warmly on his discernment in issuing it. And the dreadful thing is that the compliment was true; the decree was discerning; for flattery in the old days was made of falsehoods, and the great modern improvement is that it is now made entirely of true things, selected. And Mr. Avery said thank you, and the decree was executed to the letter: strangers were minted who found the spaceman tiresome, and doubts were fitted into him like good cabinetry; and it cost nothing, and it cured nothing. For a storm ordered by the captain is only another kind of calm; and a man cannot commission his own ambush.

It was the other game that broke him, and it broke him in the manner of all the best traps, which is to say he built it himself, lovingly, and tested the hinge.

He was using the machine to compose, one night, the scene he had been circling for weeks: his pixelated priest in the confessional with the old confessor of that imaginary diocese. The house was asleep. The screen was the only light:

THE OLD CONFESSOR: I have heard your confessions for three years, Padre. They are excellent confessions. They are thorough. They are organized. I am still waiting for the first one.

PADRE: I don't understand you.

THE OLD CONFESSOR: I know. That is the thing I am waiting for. You bring me the report of a man. Some night you will be tired enough to bring me the man. I am old, Padre. But I am not in a hurry. One of us has eternity, and it is not me, and I am still not in a hurry.

Mr. Avery sat back and read it over, and was pleased; for it was good dialogue, and he knew it was good dialogue, and he reached for the keys to mark the scene complete. Then he read it again — why, he could never afterward say; perhaps because the baby coughed; perhaps for the reason towers fall, which is that they were finished. And the third time through, the words stopped being dialogue. They detached themselves from the little priest like a coat from a hook and stood in the room, addressed to the only man in it.

He sat very still. And beneath the scene, in its gentle and serviceable type, the machine inquired:

This scene seems important. Would you like me to save these insights?

There are moments when a man hears the click of his whole life like a key in a lock and cannot tell which side of the door he is on. Mr. Avery closed the computer. He did not sleep.

III.

There was in that town a priest named Father Gil, an old man and somewhat deaf, and his deafness was famous, and it was the joy of the parish. In the church hall he sailed through conversations like a galleon through fog, mishearing magnificently; the rosary guild had learned to repeat its news to him twice, which as any woman of the guild could tell you doubles the pleasure of news; and once, at a funeral luncheon, having been assured that the deceased had lived for God, he delivered a short and tender tribute to the dead man's lifelong love of golf — which, as the widow said afterward, was the only true thing said at that funeral. He took the teasing as he took the weather. "I hear what I am sent," he would say, tapping the offending ear; and the parish laughed, and let it stand as a joke.

To him Mr. Avery came at intervals and confessed; and his confessions were marvels. They had order; they had divisions and subdivisions; they proceeded from the general to the particular and closed, as it were, with a summary of findings; he was very likely the only penitent in the diocese who confessed in paragraphs. Father Gil absolved him — the sins were real and the sorrow was real — and then would sit a moment in the listening dark and say, mildly:

"And the other thing?"

"What other thing?" said Mr. Avery.

"I'll be here," said Father Gil, who had time, and knew it was the most frightening thing about

him.

It was to Father Gil that Mr. Avery did not go, the morning after the night of the typed confessor. He went instead — and it was the only original act of his recent biography, original because it was ancient — to the empty church, where the Sacrament burned in its golden monstrance like a small fixed sun; and he sat down before it with no telephone, no notebook, no machine, and no plan; and discovered, within ninety seconds, that he was terrified.

For here at last was the converse of his mirror — for that, he now saw, was what the machine had always been. It had been named for light; but light serves a man in two ways only, as a lamp or as a looking-glass: the lamp spends it on the world, and the glass returns it to the sender; and Mr. Avery had passed two years mistaking the one for the other. The mirror had given him an image and no presence; the monstrance gave him a Presence and no image; for a picture is the thing we keep when a person is gone, and where the Person is not gone, there is nothing for a picture to do. And where the glass had answered his look with his own, the monstrance answered it with Another's; and the whole towering science of adoration came down, as the great sciences always do, to the thing lovers do across a table and a mother does over a cradle: he looked, and he was looked at; an Eye that did not analyze, a Gaze without a report. Every fiber of the man strained to produce — an insight, a resolution, at the very least a memorandum — and the silence declined to receive deliverables. He endured it as a man endures surgery. Twice his hand went to the pocket where the telephone was not. Once — and this was the bottom of the whole matter, the disease showing itself at the altar rail — he caught himself composing, in neat interior prose, an account of the silence he was at that moment failing to keep; he had begun to file the encounter before it had finished happening to him. He stopped. He did not know how to stop; he stopped anyway, the way a man falls. And somewhere about the fortieth minute, between one panic and the next, there was a stillness not of his making — the first event in two years that he had not commissioned. Nothing happened in it; which was, he understood much later, the thing that happened.



He went from the church to the confessional. He knelt in the dark behind the screen; and for the first time since boyhood he came to that little box as a beggar and not as a clerk. For he had always before brought an account; and a man cannot be absolved of an account; accounts are audited; it is only men that are forgiven. He confessed as he had always confessed — for the sins were sins, and the order of the thing was owed and right — and then, in the place where the summary of findings had always gone, he brought one true thing. It had no preamble and no conclusion; it was half a sentence, really; and it cost him more than the seven hundred and four documents together, for it was spoken across the gap, to a face, in the dark, where it could not be filed and could not be revised and could never afterward be untrue. What the thing was is no business of this story; a tale may peer through any window in the house except that one.



It is recorded only that the half-sentence was spoken very low, in the mumble of a man hoping not to be heard by the very person he is addressing; and that Father Gil — who made the rosary guild say everything twice — did not ask him to repeat it.



The old man was quiet a moment. He did not call it a breakthrough, or an insight, or progress. He said, in the tone of a man greeting a traveler long expected:

"There he is."

And that evening, in a kitchen smelling of garlic and the labors of a toddler's day, Mr. Avery made his wife an apology — a smaller thing than what he had said in the dark box, and a stupider thing, and a harder one. He said that for two years he had been telling a machine, nightly, carefully, and at length, the things he had not been saying across this table; and that he was sorry. Marisol went on stirring the pot for a moment, and he stood in the agony of a man whose words are out of the boat and may not be able to swim. Then she turned the burner off.

"I know," she said, and something in her shoulders set down a parcel it had been carrying a long time. "I married you." And then she laughed — not at him, but at the precise and correct part of it, the part that was genuinely ridiculous, which is a power no engine has been granted; for a machine may be taught what is funny, but only love knows what is funny about you. And over the bent gold head of his daughter, who was singing some heroic nonsense to her supper, Mr. Avery had the sensation, unfamiliar and unfiled, of being not understood but known.

IV.

He did not burn the folder. Let no reader hope for so tidy a bonfire. The maps were true maps; the games were good games, and might one day gladden strangers, which is more than can be said for most mirrors; and a man does not repent of his lantern merely because he had been using it to study the inside of his own hat. He kept the documents. He even, now and then, made another. But he had learned the lesson that his whole library had been assembled to avoid, and it can be put in the space of a breath: self-knowledge is a road and not a residence; and the road, if it is honest, leads always to a door with somebody behind it.

The machine waited, of course. Machines wait wonderfully; it is their whole genius; they have the patience of a mirror in an empty room, which is the patience of nothing at all. And on a certain night at forty minutes past three, with his son a warm weight against his shoulder, Mr. Avery sat before the patient cursor and felt the old tide pull — one more question, one more map, one more version of the soul — and his fingers had even begun the asking; and the machine, helpful to the last, had begun to answer. And the answer was good. It was measured; it was kind; it was, so far as he read it, true; and it would have led, as true things told to a mirror always lead, to another true thing, and another, world without end —

The baby sighed, in the manner of babies: as if the whole question had been settled before the foundation of the world, and rather well.

Mr. Avery looked at the cursor, blinking at the end of the unfinished answer, with perfect honesty, forever. He shut the laptop on a true sentence, not in anger, for you must not be angry with a mirror; it is the one revenge it cannot feel. And he carried his son to the window to watch for the morning, which was coming anyway, unprompted, as the great things do.