Latin and Greek were taught me by Dr. Trefusis, 09-01, the aged philosophe. In his youth, he had been welcomed at the courts of Versailles and Sansouci. His knowledge was prodigious; his mastery of philosophic depths was total, though his notions were somewhat eccentric. He worked with me word by word, leaning over my shoulder as I parsed my way through Tacitus and Homer; which instruction must have seemed to him not unlike the sea-captain, who having braved the catastrophic blasts and giddy precipices of the mælstrom, and but skated to their side; having passed with expert haste through the clashing Simplegades; having sat in the sick green eye of the hurricane, surrounded by the hulking wrecks of other, less fortunate, fleets; now wades with a little nephew in the warm shallows, collecting trash and pretty bits of shell. He must have looked out to sea with his glass sometimes, and wished for the spray, and men with whom he could truly speak of the rigors of navigation.
With him did I read of the fall of empires and the rise of the gods from the darkness of eternal night. With him, I read Cicero’s defense of murderers, and Suetonius’s history of murderous kings; Plautus’s comedies; Seneca’s tragedies; Ovid on the art of love and Aristotle on the love of art.
I saw that emperors may have their day, but then, surrounded even by pomp and luxury, they may fall, and their cities be in ruin.
Dr. 09-01 had a kind, but gloomy, disposition. He only rarely cut my palms with his ferule for mistakes. He would, of an afternoon, smuggle up gingerbread from the kitchen, and would speak at length of Rome and Greece in their glory with his mouth full and spraying. He was exceeding lanky, and coiled himself in corners of the room, balled up silently and watching while I stuttered my construes.
Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruins of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.
He was possessed of a belief that nothing existed, or to be more precise, that only when things were perceived could we be sure that they existed. He troubled himself in arguments, therefore, that when he was not in his chamber, and no one else was in his chamber, there was no one who could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that his desk still existed, no one to say that the candle still guttered by the bed; or that the bed had not simply frayed apart into atoms.
To combat this situation, he requested that one of the slaves periodically creep to his door when he was absent, and hurl it quickly open, to determine whether the desk remained, or whether, with no one to perceive it, it had simply given up and dissipated. When 03-01 protested that this was hardly worth the vigilance of busy servants, Dr. 09-01 took the task upon himself, and developed the habit of leaving company quite suddenly and charging above-stairs to his chamber, throwing the door open, and crying, “Ah ha!” He found, always, that matter had retained its dubious solidity in his absence; but this did not deter him.
Gradually, he developed the startling habit of entering rooms with a leap.
He maintained that we were surrounded by a vast shadow, a universal emptiness as wide and long as space, in which there were small molten bulbs of color and light, wheresoever there were beings to perceive them. He believed that as we walked, the world of objects unfurled before us like the painted scene for a play, turrets, and moats, and topiary aisles slapping down into place just before we would arrive.
Once, late at night, he roused me and took me to an empty room. I was somewhat afraid. The silence of the house was enormous.
He stood me with my back to the wall, one inch from the paneling. He stood next to me. We faced the same way.
“Sir,” said I, “for what have you —,” but he hissed, and I fell silent.
For a long while, we stared straight forwards, side by side, in the empty room. It was a summer night, and the dogs of the town barked for a time, and then ceased. Still, we stood. Some ten minutes passed; then fifteen.
“Do you feel it, child?” he asked. “The wall is gone. Space is gone from behind us.”
I could feel nothing.
He said, “All that is there now is the eye of God.” He shivered. “The pupil is black, and as large as a world.”