Fragment

The following is a frag­ment of a letter by Golias Bauknecht to an unknown Lucretia.

‘I happen to think, based on our recent conversations, that you’d heartily disagree with this characterization, but I think you’ve got things figured out that I’ve only begun to be aware of. Amazing, I think, how deeply one can pride himself on his reflexivity and be simultaneously so opaque to himself.

‘What keeps me writing you, when you flake out and write me little in return? Well, I’ll fess to feeling trapped in a labyrinth, with only a thread leading back out. How many hundreds of ambages and treacherous jagged-edged anfractuosities have I wound this damned twine around, and how loose it feels in my hand, as if the end could lie anywhere anymore, in any dead end or dangling down any blackened punjee pit. And yet I have this abiding faith in someone trusted and loving keeping the end for me just outside the labyrinth’s entrance. And I have to have this faith because otherwise I’m alone among reeking bones and the blankness of same-walls, same-steps, and it’s no minotaur I fear but the possibility, if I make it to the center, I’ll be crowned with horns and become the mintoaur—that the labyrinth was not made to contain a monster, but to make them, as fools carelessly amble in, and learn to loathe the outside, to stalk the maze and sniff horribly in the damp, to find freedom in turns constrained by walls.

‘When I began my career, I found that multiple times per day I walked by the small chapel in the southern wing, which was little more than an enlarged closet with a stained-glass window backlit, a short altar with scripture, and two rows of close and simple pews. No one ever sat in there. So I did. I sat when times were rough. I sat when I wasn’t actually depressed but rather concerned for my colleagues or something in society at large, something big and horrible in the world. I tried to pray—I don’t know Whom to. It was a call out in the dark for something I was missing. And having called out for it in earnest and with humility in the dim little recess of this niche chapel had its own small reward of comfort. I never heard a response, but that seemed not to be the point. It was the fear and trembling. It was the abstract faith in the prayer itself as a means—not to the thing I said I needed—but the fulfillment of some emptiness of my soul.

‘I need to know we could have been a couple. Not necessarily forever, not necessarily married and feeding each other gummables in senility. But that you and I could have been together, and expressed mutual love, and had adventures and good times, and horrible arguments, and heartfelt apologies. And that when it ended, we were both convinced it was the best for us, and parted amicably. I need to know because of all things I’ve missed out on I feel I missed out on something truly special and unique, and perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, and if it were that, at least I could say, well it could’ve happened, but for this and that, and if not, then I don’t know what it is, what have I yearned for so desperately that I muted and abused the feeling of restlessness with every truncheon I could lay hands on: apathy, procrastination, careless momentum, marriage, booze, prescription drugs, theater, books, games, exercise, pogonotrophy.

‘Whom can I address this to? Clearly not to you, Lucretia, who must have a tenuous self-assurance of my emotional stability and an even more tenuous commitment to indulging my foolishness, you who are happy, a country apart, years separated, newly married, you who it never seemed to me needed anybody, though I felt I needed you the most.

‘This is stupid—I just want to get it all out, but then our correspondence must end because it would be awkward and I would have betrayed the terms of an amicable friendship. And if I couldn’t get it out, I’d almost rather just stop corresponding—which would last only for so long, before my shameful yen for you got the better of me, and another pathetic unsolicited chain of letters unfurled greasy in your lap.

‘I’m not getting any younger. For the first time that’s bothersome. I’ve squandered my twenties in marriage and training, neither of which delivered what I thought it would. I want out of this maze and I want you to be holding the thread in the sunshine, I want to see your smile in person again and hold your hand in clean air. I always loved your hands, little stubby but delicate hands that belied their own dexterity. I loved your smile. I loved your eyes, the deep brown like pure oil pigment, the way your eyelids made them almond-shaped and deep. I loved your hips, I loved your hair. I loved you disarming me with everything you said. That more than anything—no one else could, at least not in a way that left me utterly charmed.

‘If it’s a spell I’m under, wish it away or wish its consummation. If not—well, we must reconcile ourselves to reality and its disappointments, and not dwell on imaginary forces, eh? My track record with reckless romantic gestures is not good. I’m afraid to mount so large a one when I’m so sure it would fail miserably.

‘What does scratched out give you? What was it, that others you doubted you could marry, hitched you two together so quickly? Why wasn’t it me?

‘You and Salva and I were supposed to go to university together. Everything fell apart. She was a fling and all the while I loved you. Nothing afterward was quite right.

‘I don’t know how to finish this.’

The letter was found among a large box of fragmentary typescripts, most of them drafts of identified works, some of them clearly snippets of new works that are yet undiscovered. The letter itself is written in Bauknecht’s affected and cramped hand, with one substantial scratch-out that has affected legibility. The rest, to a dedicated scholar, is readily legible, despite a clear urgency and fervor to the writing, not often seen in his measured takes of fiction and verse, where it seems almost as much a pleasure to write as it is to compose.