Part 3 ii.)

The Shakespeare Chronicles

a novel

James Boyle

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It should be attributed as follows.

“James Boyle, The Shakespeare Chronicles: A Novel

Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/467168

Published by Lulu Press.

ISBN 978-1-4303-0768-6

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of the Elizabethans, all of the characters are fictional. Immaculata State and its university exist only in my imagination. In particular, the university should not be confused with any educational institutions bearing a similar name. Any resemblance to real people, natural or legal, heretic or orthodox, living or dead, is unintended. I have taken some liberties with Elizabethan history, and freely entered into the labyrinth of transposition, revisionism and conspiracy theory which surrounds this subject like a privet maze. The authors to whose work I refer are real and I am indebted to them, particularly to the ideas put forward by the intriguingly named John Thomas Looney in Shakespeare Identified 1920, [Frederick A. Stokes Co]. A more recent and extensive version of the same hypothesis can be found in Charlton Ogburn’s, The Mysterious William Shakespeare 1988, [Cardinal Books]) Finally, a wonderful (and absolutely hilarious) overview of the authorship question is provided by Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives 1993 [Oxford U. Press.] I must stress, however, that substantial fictional modifications have been made and neither Mr. Looney nor any other of the authors I mention are to be held responsible for the story I tell here. My goal is entirely different from theirs.

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) | 3i.)

September 21^st

A dream at last! I will get to it in a moment. But first, the problem with which it presents me. I had not been graced with a dream for weeks. Last night I had one. Why now? The only sure method is that of empirical science. I must identify the differences between yesterday and all the other days, formulate ‘fragile’ hypotheses about true causes and then test them by experiment. No fallacies of induction from me. Three possibilities present themselves. First possibility: by repudiating September 9th’s disgusting maunderings about aphorisms and advantages, I rendered myself more worthy to receive a dream. This depends on the idea that the dreams, like religious visions, are a reward for past (and a guide to future) virtue. The taint of namby-pamby Christian philosophy hangs over this hypothesis like the carrion reek over last week’s battlefield. But I am, above all, a man of knowledge. I shall exclude no idea merely because it is personally repulsive. Second possibility: my brooding over a reproduction of the Welbeck abbey portrait of Edward stimulated last night’s dream by amplifying in some way whatever faculty of natural sympathy produced the dreams in the first place. This would be my hunch and for exactly that reason, I shall test it more rigorously than the others. Final possibility: last night’s dream was either entirely random, or simply occurred because some requisite interval had passed since the last dream. Both of these last ideas are repugnant to me. If God does not play dice with the universe, how much more do these dreams – lacking Evil, the punishment of innocents, the tempting of Job and all of the other things which theologians find it hard to explain away – evidence benign purpose rather than randomness or some mindless chronological schedule. But again, I am a man of knowledge. If my experiments show that this is the answer, I will accept it. Cardinal Bellarmine said to Gallileo, "There is no place for your truth in our church." That is Quandary’s way, not mine.

Now, to the dream.

***

Edward – in his mid-thirties – is reading a letter in a manner one could only describe as "violent," now casting it down on the floor with an oath, now picking it up to read again. The next time he picks it up, I direct my attention over his shoulder. The letter is addressed to Edward and written in a relatively legible hand (for which I am profoundly grateful, being used to the secretary scrawls of Elizabethan scribes.) It begins as follows "If thy body had been as deformed as thy mind is dishonourable, my house had been yet unspotted, and thyself remained with thy cowardice unknown. I speak this that I fear thou art so much wedded to that shadow of thine, that nothing can have force to awake thy base and sleepy spirits..." This is pretty good going! I admire a man who can write a really insulting letter. I wonder whose family has been shamed by Edward’s (amorous?) activities. And who can be the "shadow" Edward is supposed to be "wedded to"?

Ah. Edward had just chucked the letter on the floor again. This temper doesn’t make for easy reading. So many people confuse temper with will when it is really its opposite. Now he is picking it up. That’s the mark of a good insulting letter. It really gets the attention of your audience. "..Or dost thou fear thyself, and therefore hast sent thy forlorn kindred, whom as thou hast left nothing to inherit so thou dost thrust them violently into thy shameful quarrels? If it be so (as I too much doubt) then stay at home thyself and send my abuses: but if there be yet any spark of honour left in thee, or an iota of regard of thy decayed reputation, use not thy birth as for an excuse, for I am a gentleman, but meet me thyself alone and a lackey to hold thy horse.." Oh dear, it’s back on the floor and the oaths Edward is swearing are now baroque in their excess. Before the letter flutters down, I manage to catch "sight" of the name of the sender. Tho. Vavasor. The name rings a bell, though I can’t place it. And that is it, the dream is over, the shortest yet. If I am to go on the evidence of previous dreams, this must have been the smallest possible significant unit of information in the telling of some story, but for the life of me, I cannot see how.

Another anomaly strikes me: the dreams have given me all this information about the life, but around the writing itself there is silence. If Edward is really "Shakespeare".. (not that I doubt it, you understand, I merely put it in the conditional sense to show that I retain the detachment appropriate to a scholar.) If Edward is really "Shakespeare," then when will I see him with pen in hand?

***

October 14th

No dreams. For the last two weeks, I have set aside anything to do with Edward and concentrated on eradicating the lingering Quandary-like characteristics from my personality. I am training my will the way an athlete trains his body. I set myself exercises. I invited Bambi to my office yesterday. She came in, blushing prettily around the cheeks and throat, expecting she knew not what.. and sat, completely mystified as I gave her a lecture on the importance of Euphuism to the development of Shakespeare’s style. She was dressed as fetchingly as always and I was sure I could detect in her a hankering for the forbidden pleasures of the desktop, but despite the fact that the desire burgeoned in me, my behavior was so correct that even Zeb Geist (who colours every time a woman enters his office) would probably have approved.

In case you think I have taken the delusionary road of boy scout virtue, and sexual repression, let me tell you of one of my other exercises. My next door neighbor, Mr. Saikewicz, has always been a favourite of mine. He is a dry, leathery old man, a survivor of Buchenwald who watches the obsessively petty concerns of Charlotte Russe with an air of perpetual amazement. Mr. Saikewicz ignored the other residents but he had always talked to Quandary, whom he called ‘an educated man, at least.’ Ah, how much of Quandary’s character is summed up in that parenthetical ‘at least.’

Mr. Saikewicz lives alone, and in the two years since Jean left, he had become a frequent visitor to the house. He would sit and drink Quandary’s bourbon and deliver slow and sarcastic commentaries on the world around them. Subjected to his sardonic gaze, Quandary always felt like a fat and bumbling adolescent. Late at night, both a little bombed on bourbon and sarcasm, they would send out for a pizza. Mr. Saikewicz liked his with anchovies, Quandary did not. Inevitably, they would order anchovy pizza and Quandary would pick them off one by one. It became one of those intense olfactory memories – the oily, fishily pungent smell of anchovies on his fingers would trigger an image of Mr. Saikewicz, leaning back in Quandary’s favourite chair and swirling the bourbon in his glass as he poured gentle scorn on this and that. Those unwanted sandwich-onions and pizza-anchovies should be laid on Quandary’s grave, like a wreath.

In any event, when Mr. Saikewicz came to my door the night before last, I realised at once that I had here a worthy test for my will-power. Little intimidates Mr. Saikewicz, and who is to wonder? He has had all of the weakness dried out of him. All that remains is a little sardonic humour, an old man’s amusement at the follies of the world. I find him delightful company – indeed, he is one of the few people I can tolerate for any length of time – but I would not allow that to sway me. I set myself the task of breaking him in a single evening.

He must have seen me since the Changes, but when he came to the door he pretended that he hadn’t. Quandary would have stammered explanations under the pressure of that calm and mocking gaze. I waited in silence, a half-smile on my face.

–– Ah, Mr. Saikewicz, the Job’s comforter of my evenings. Come in, come in.

This was a good start, but Saikewicz is no pushover. He walked past me slowly, looked around the living room and, with a theatrical gesture that seemed terribly European, spread his hands in mock puzzlement.

–– Job? I am not an educated man like yourself, Dr. Quandary, but I see no ashes, no dung heap, no..

Here he leaned forward and pretended to inspect the gleaming dome of my head as I poured the bourbon..

–– No running or pestilential sores, no pot – what is the word? – shards or fragments? Yes, that is it. No pot shards or fragments with which to scratch yourself..

I knew he wasn’t finished, so I concentrated on getting the ice into the bourbon. Saikewicz went on in that careful, pedantic English of his.

–– Though of course, your pretty wife left you. As did Job’s. Has that tested your faith, Dr. Quandary? I had not taken you for a religious man. Here he paused as if struck by a sudden thought.

–– Is this why you have shaved your head? Will you now dress in yellow robes, sell roses on the streets and chant "the jewel in the flower of the lotus" in badly accented Urdu?

You see what I meant about him being a worthy test? He is one of those people who conducts a conversation by always pushing, jabbing, keeping the other person off-balance. Quandary had no defenses against this kind of thing. I smiled again and passed him his bourbon.

Quandary had always found Mr. Saikewicz’s hands to be the most attractive thing about him. I had to agree. They were leathery and stringy with muscle, browned by liver spots and the Charlotte Russe sun. The tendons on the backs of his hands were clearly defined, fanning out to his fingers like some ingenious Victorian mechanism of rods and joints under a cover of soft, old leather. Something about them proclaimed that these were important hands, experienced hands, hands which had caressed melancholy Hungarian beauties, turned the pages of sacred books, scrabbled through the desolation of the camps. There was history in those hands. Nevertheless, as they took the bourbon glass, they shook ever so slightly.

They did not shake from nerves, of course. So far as I could discover, Mr. Saikewicz had no nerves left. They shook in that dreadful betrayal of an old man by his body which makes the most resolute of men look as though he is palsied with fear and uncertainty. They say that we do not run away because we are afraid, we are afraid because we run away. If that is so, then Mr. Saikewicz could become old and nervous because his hands shook.

–– Careful you don’t spill the glass... Mr. Saikewicz, your hands are shaking! What’s the matter with you? Are you nervous?

I admit that this may seem an overly simple strategy. Picking on an old man for the infirmities that come with his age may appear to be an unduly obvious way of gaining the upper hand, but I have to say that in my experience (and Quandary’s) genius consists of the ability to find the simple in the complex, while cleverness is the exact opposite. In any event, he glared at me then, the strongest reaction I had ever seen from him. It lasted a second, and then the sardonic smile was back.

–– No, not nervous. Senile. When you are my age Dr. Quandary, your hands shake, your eyes go, you forget things.

This was good. By admitting his infirmities, he hoped to take them out of my reach. No matter, I could wait.

I went to the phone to order the pizza, not asking Saikewicz if he was staying for dinner. It made him feel predictable, I think, an old man who was always coming round for company. I wanted him to know he needs. Why should he think he is different? The pizza place answered on the third ring. The girl who answered sounded enthusiastic, as if my hunger gave her genuine pleasure. I think they are required to. I ordered pepperoni and mushroom, waited until I saw Saikewicz’s expensive false teeth opening to tell me I had forgotten something, and asked her to include a little carton of anchovies. She seemed delighted, as if the quirks in customer’s orders were as precious to her as the twists and turns of great literature. "Carton of anchovies? No problem." In truth, I find this solicitous willingness to please to be reassuring. "Peppers on half, pepperoni on half, overlapping by 15 degrees of arc, black olives in the space left vacant? With double mozzarella and no MSG? Certainly sir, we’d be happy to." How can we think ourselves stereotyped, faceless, unimportant creatures when our smallest quirky wish is law to an eager service industry? To one like myself, who sets no boundaries on the satisfaction of the will, this is the perfect society. As I put the phone down I could see the knowledge of my transformation in Saikewicz’s rheumy old eyes.

When the pizza came, I watched him fumble distastefully with his little paper carton, dropping fragments of oily, smelly fish onto his portion with fingers that trembled ever so slightly. Quandary would have pitied him. Then again, Quandary was a doormat. Who wants pity from a doormat? Of course, Saikewicz wasn’t finished. He asked after Jean, thinking I had nothing but Quandary’s yearnings under this newly shining pate. There were other things. For some strange reason he kept asking about my shoes. Had I lost any recently? He must think me a fool and a weakling. I wanted to tell him about Bambi. I take nineteen year old beauties on my desktop. Is that the act of a weakling? I beat down second hand car dealers. Is that the act of a weakling? Saikewicz must have sensed my resolution because he switched the subject.

–– So, Dr. Quandary, what plans do you have this semester? Another article, perhaps? A monograph, even?

He dropped the remains of his pizza into the box as he said this, and began scrubbing at his hands fastidiously with a paper napkin. His glasses flashed as he glanced over at me. Always, I feel that he is laughing at me, but there is nothing I can put my finger on. Perhaps my pique made me unwise.

–– Actually, it is something a little more important. A major discovery, I think.

As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake. Saikewicz positively beamed. I had to endure his floods of condescending enquiry.

–– A major discovery. Really? How fortunate you are. So few people even make minor discoveries. You must tell me all...

And so on and so forth. Of course, there was nothing I could say, nothing I could reveal. There is a lesson here. I am strongest when I keep my strength hidden, when I do not reveal my secrets. My secret is the power I have over them. To tell other people is to give them power over me.

I did my best to regain the momentum, asking if he wanted to wash the smell of anchovy off his hands, asking him if could manage the stairs, if I should walk him home. Those words must have been wormwood and gall to him. I am sure of it. In any event, I managed to show my mettle and that is the main thing. After he left, I took my bourbon to bed and sniffed my clean fingers again and again but I still didn’t dream at all.

***

October 28th

It came to me recently that if I want to understand the dreams, I should study other people who claim to have been granted visions, dreams and revelations. For the last three nights, I have been watching the televangelists. Sometimes I listened to their ranting, at other times I turned the sound down, put The Cure or The Stranglers on the stereo and sat back in my Lay-Z Boy recliner. My television is large and imposing – Jean and Quandary bought it at a yard sale – but there is something wrong with the colour. The world is an ugly place in my television, a flickering inferno of red-faced devils, muddy colours and poor contrast. The flickering light fans out into the darkened room where I sit, sipping my bourbon, watching for hints. At first, I felt I had made a terrible mistake. Such awful preachers. Even their hair looks false, never mind their theology. All that strutting and wailing and calling on God to send the marines into Cuba. "Lean forward and touch the TV and you will be saved." Or healed. Or made rich. With the sound off the effect is.. similar. Thrashing guitars, fuzzy recording, hints of satanism and anal sex. The creatures on the screen seem to move in time to the music, choreographed by an unseen hand.

The recent sex scandals did not surprise me. Most of the preachers have a hungry look, something not easily appeased by the restricted displays of affection available in a church. Of course, I do not share the popular disapproval of their peccadilloes. Why shouldn’t they screw their acolytes and devotees? Someone is going to. But I am disgusted by the way that they have made Christ into a namby-pamby milksop of a figure, raised in a Southern town, fond of shoo-fly pie and hush-puppies. Someone who might sell shoes and talk knowledgeably about the local football team. The only time one got any hint of the wild demiurge who threw the money changers from the temple, is when they used to talk about Jesus’s war on communism. But even there, it was a very American Jesus, technology dependent, working in close cooperation with the secular powers. I imagine him with M 16 rifle in hand, bound up with the flak jacket of righteousness, hitting the beach of some defenseless island in the Caribbean at the head of his cadre of mid-Western farm boys, strong of faith and white of teeth. With no communists to fight, Jesus has turned to homosexuals. No M16 is required, merely a complacent and unshakeable faith in the bigotries of the day. My vision of Jesus is rather different; a wiry Semitic longhair made of will, full of contempt for the established order.

In any event, as I watched the TV preachers and marveled at their hair and teeth, I realized that there were messages for me here. First of all, the very existence of these charlatans is a testament to the power of desire and will. They want money, so they go on television and ask people for it. As simple as that. And for as long as they can maintain their chutzpah, they are safe. But being bound up by the canons of church morality and Southern respectability, they have to pretend a propriety alien to the driving force which took them to success. That is their downfall. The choirboy accuses. The secretary gives an exclusive. The donkey tells all. At that moment, they should admit everything but not in these painful drips of repentant confession, squeezed out excruciatingly, like a urinary tract infection of the soul. No, they should broadcast the truth in glory and triumph. "Yes, it is true. I did it all and it was great. What have we sons of Christ to do with herd-morality?" Instead, they model their behavior on the pathetic mea culpas of American politicians. Trying to change their allegiance from the Will to the Moral, they are, upon the instant, seized by the mutable, rank-scented many, stripped of their theme-parks and torn limb from limb on national television. This is the message I have been sent. Do not swerve. I can no more desert the Changes than I could leap from a galloping horse. Something to remember in times of adversity.

***

November 7th

No dreams. I see no point in writing this journal without them. Instead I wait, biding my time, doing the things Quandary never dared to. Have you ever noticed the telephone numbers on the backs of toothpaste tubes? "If you have any questions or comments about this product please call.. " and then they give an 800 number. Why? What do people say? What do the operators tell them? Every morning Quandary had picked up his toothpaste tube and peered at the toll-free number absently as he drove the brush back and forward over his large, expensively evened teeth. The other night as I slouched in my chair, sipping bourbon and waiting for sleep, I resolved to call. I wasn’t lonely, you understand, just interested.

I carried the toothpaste downstairs and dialed the number on the back. The phone rang for a long time. I was about to hang up when a woman answered. She sounded surprised, the way some people do when they answer the phone, as though they didn’t know they had a telephone in the house. She said "Hello?" a couple of times, in an increasingly puzzled way. In the background I could hear music and children’s voices. I was about to hang up, thinking I had the wrong number, when I realised that this was a toll free number. It couldn’t be someone’s house. –– Hello. Is this the toothpaste number?

–– What?

–– I’m sorry, I must have the wrong..

–– Toothpaste!?

–– No, I’m sorry, I must have misdial..

–– No!

–– ..dialed, it was a toll-free..

–– That’s right!

–– What?

–– This is the right number. The, er.. toothpaste number.

–– Oh.

Having exhausted our conversation with this frenetic burst of words, both of us fell silent. I could still hear household noises in the background, the sounds of children playing, a radio on low. When she spoke again her voice was hesitant.

–– Do you like it? The toothpaste, I mean.

–– Sure.

–– Oh. Good.

I realised that I was going to have to say something more than this to justify my call.

–– Well, to be honest, it tastes more of cinnamon than it used to.

–– Ah. I’d better make a note of that.

She covered the phone with her hand, but I could hear her calling to someone (one of the children?) to bring her a pen and paper. This was really too much. I could hear running footsteps now and some more whispered instructions.

–– ... tastes.. more.. of.. cinnamon

Now she was saying the words aloud as she wrote them. I waited until she had finished before I spoke again.

–– Do you mind if I ask you a question?

–– Not at all, sir.

I didn’t like her calling me sir, it added an unnecessary note of formality to our conversation.

–– What do people normally say?

She was silent for a long time after this, and I thought she hadn’t understood the question. I was about to explain when she finally spoke.

–– Actually, you’re the first..

I find it hard to explain my feelings on being given this piece of information. There was embarrassment certainly, amusement – so no-one, at least no-one Un-Changed, did call these numbers...!! – and even some puzzlement. Why was this woman taking these calls at her house? But the overall feeling was one of triumph. Almost sexual triumph. I had been her first.

Her name was Barbara, it turned out. I liked her voice. It had a slightly breathy, professional tone that I associated with hairdressers and dental hygienists. I imagined her in crisp white polyester, white stockings and flat shoes and almost lost the thread of our conversation. The toothpaste company transferred its toll free number to her home number every Wednesday between five and eight. It was an easy twenty dollars, she said. Pure luck then, that I had got her. It could have been anyone. We talked for twenty five minutes, half of them taken up with saying good-bye. I made a note of the times when she is answering the phone. I may call again. The poor woman must be terribly bored. It would be a kindness to entertain her.

***

November 9th

No dreams for seven weeks. I am increasingly dispirited. I sleep twelve or thirteen hours a night and still wake exhausted. My classes are lethargic, lifeless things. By now my students have wearied of finding dirty bits in Shakespeare. I sense their anger building and building. In the past, this might have roused me to wildness, to pleasure, but now it is merely another background drone of annoyance. Nothing I can do seems to make any difference. I sleep with the Welbeck Abbey portrait of Edward above my bed. His haughty countenance greets my bleary and dreamless awakenings. For days at a time I watched the televangelists, but nothing in their careful, blow-dried ecstasy could awaken my Will. I tried matching wits again with Mr. Saikewicz and left with the odd feeling that he pitied me. That was the worst. Yesterday a student asked me a question and I rubbed my head, realizing only after I had done it that this was one of Quandary’s favourite, pathetic little gestures. Worse still, my fingers felt bristles. I must have forgotten to shave. Even my gleaming pate is now showing the signs of my decline. I am beginning to lose touch with the Changes. I look back at the amphetamine confidence of the prior pages in this journal and it is as if I am listening to another person. Sometimes I can hear Quandary lurking in the wings, muttering to himself and whining. I go to sleep hoping I will see Edward’s face, but I see only Jean’s.

Today, I reviewed my options. I must find some way of getting back to my dreams and I must find it quickly. I thought of another romp with Bambi, but the idea is unattractive, repulsive even. The only thing that has worked so far is putting myself in close contact with some Shakespeareana. Admittedly, the Welbeck Abbey portrait has done nothing since that dream about Thos. Vavasor’s insulting letter. Perhaps it is "used up." I have to believe that is the explanation, if only to give myself hope. Really, the conclusion was always obvious. If it is contact with things Shakespearean that produces the dreams, there is only one thing for me to do. I must go to England, and quickly.

This is not as sudden a decision as it seems. I knew that the dreams would send me to England sooner or later. Only there after all, will I be able to find concrete proof of this, the greatest of all frauds. Yet I had imagined that the dreams would send me there with a plan, an itinerary, a clear vision of some unanswerable proof lurking in some country house library or dusty chest of papers. I had not imagined that I would need to go to England merely to have the dreams. Why not? Because going to England seems like a major step and Quandary never took major steps without a clear plan to guide him and a guarantee of success. Once again, I find mediocrity, linear thinking, "reasonable expectations" creeping back into my thoughts. I had thought these parts of me to be dead, but they are merely dormant, like the spirochetes which wait thirty years before they awake and burrow their way back up the spine to the brain.

My classes will not be finished until the end of November. Part of me is tempted to leave now, but I will need the spurious respectability provided by this job. Only three weeks to wait, then I can escape and rediscover my dreams.

***

November 14th

This week was purgatory. Frankly, I don’t know how I endured it. "Exactly what is it that I, above all, find insupportable, that I am unable to tolerate, that suffocates me? A bad smell. The smell of failure, of a soul that has gone stale." So says my hero and yet this is exactly what I have had to suffer. I can feel failure creeping over me, staleness in my outrage, mediocrity in my life. I must dream again. I must. I could be bounded by a nutshell and still count myself the king of infinite space, were it only that I had my dreams!

A deputation of students has been to see the Dean about some imagined infraction of mine. My goat feet have danced an antic hay on their deepest prejudices, I fear. They are ready enough to welcome lust and badness in their lives, in their rap songs and penny dreadfuls and even in their dorm rooms, where they all dress up in catalogue-bought lace and follow the directions in the sex manual. But when it comes to the Great Books.....? No, no, no. I give them a Shakespeare obsessed with sex and death and they tell me these themes exist only in today’s counter-culture. (Admittedly, they don’t call it that. Most of them probably think the counter-culture is an accountant’s art society.) I read to them of pricks and worms. I woo them with romance.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse

Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read;

And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse

When all the breathers in this world are dead.

‘When all the breathers in this world are dead.’ All. The longest lived baby drawing its first breath at the moment these words were written drew its last four long lifetimes before you were born. Every person, every animal, the bunnies and the Kokomo dragons and the nests of ants under rotting logs, all across a teeming world from Shoreditch to Saigon, from the Matto Grosso to Montmartre, all of them dead, and every last one of their children and their grandchildren, too. All the breathers in this world are dead. Who can imagine it? To be a poet is to be worse that Ghengis Khan, than Hitler, to commit imaginary genocide on a scale unknown even to modernity. And all for some bimbo. Or so I tell them. The class didn’t like it. They were uncertain how to voice their displeasure. One of them told me that I shouldn’t make it sound so sordid. Shakespeare was a great writer "because he gave us great poems about universal themes like mortality and stuff." They think he was writing for them. They think they are the "eyes not yet created." They think this stuff has been sent down through the generations, for their eyes only, like some Federal Express package from Hell. ‘Mortality and stuff’ is for dead people. History stops with us.

I admit that I could have dealt better with this comment. There were probably better tactics than to yell at the unfortunate young man, "You’re going to die, you know! You personally. Worms are going to eat your eyes!" To be honest I was surprised at the passion in my voice. This sex and mortality theme has nothing to do with the Changes, after all. Perhaps the hiatus in my dreams has unnerved me. In any event, I told the Dean it was an exercise in academic freedom, an experiment in teaching methods. That shut him up pretty quickly. I think he was surprised. Like most administrators, he believes that academic freedom is too important an idea ever to be used. In this he is rather like my aunt, a woman who kept the plastic delivery wrap on her sofa for fifteen years so that it wouldn’t get "spoiled." I am the nemesis of the infinitely deferred life.

Wednesday has come around again. When I got home, I called Barbara again on the toothpaste line. For some strange Quandary-esque reason, I had been ludicrously apprehensive of her reaction. As though there was something strange in continuing our discussion! Actually, the conversation was very easy. Both of us were happy. She was being paid and I was getting it for free. I got the distinct impression that she didn’t get on well with her husband. She had wanted to go on to graduate school after getting her degree in home economics, but he had stopped her. Barbara felt that he was more interested in having a wife who had been a homecoming queen in college, than in marrying a real person with real ambitions. I had to agree. As the call went on, I realised that there was no reason why I should not meet this woman. How deliciously ironic it would be to have met someone on a toll-free toothpaste line. I decided to press ahead and find her address.

–– So, do you live near here?

There was a perceptible pause before she answered. This question clearly went beyond the cozy world of service industry intimacy.

–– Why? Where are you calling from?

Well done, Barbara, I thought. Don’t give out your address. I could be a monomaniacal sex-fiend who hears voices. In fact, I am!

–– Charlotte Russe. You know, Immaculata.

I didn’t say "Immaculata is for love affairs" because I didn’t want to scare her off. As it happened, I needn’t have worried. She laughed.

–– Nope. I don’t live anywhere near you. I’m sitting in K.C.. Kansas City, Missouri.

For a wild moment, I thought of flying out there. I could get her to give me her last name and then it would be a simple matter of going through the phone books. I could claim I was there with some conference. As I once did with Jean.. I could claim I was there for some conference and she might be amused enough at the coincidence that she would agree to meet me for a drink.. No, a coffee. She would think it more respectable. Then the Quandary-esque side of me rolled back and I could imagine the whole thing. She would refuse straight off. She would be out. We would sit uncomfortably in some expensive hotel coffee shop, faking bonhomie and desperate to leave. She would be ugly and middle class and she would turn me down anyway. Being a Man of Knowledge means knowing when a plan is doomed as well as daring. I decided to end the conversation on a lighter note. Perhaps she would think she was the one who was being too forward.

–– Well, I’ve got to go. So tell me, why do you think other people call this number?

–– I don’t know. Probably for the same reason you did.

Stupid woman, I can’t think what I ever saw in her.

Measured against Jean, of course, any woman would look dull and lumpish. What lesson lies in this fact? I walk around the house late at night, listen to the echoes of my own feet and hear Quandary gibbering in the corners. There is a price to the Changes. The price is that, where Quandary could hide his failures beneath convention and artifice, I have no defenses. I think obsessively about Edward. So what if I rescue his reputation? What does this do for me? Am I wrong to think this way? When this all first started, these things seemed so clear. Now complications cloud my vision. Are the dreams only half of my transformation? The Changes tell me to abandon myself to desire and to will. What is it that I will?

***

November 20th

Two weeks until my departure. I have been having dreams, but not the right kind. These are shameful dreams of Jean and.. failure. I will not set them down here. There is a limit, even for a man of knowledge. Yesterday evening, I knocked on Mr. Saikewicz’s door but he was not in. Or did not answer. When I got home tonight I nearly called the toothpaste line again. This shows how far I have fallen that I should even think of calling that ridiculous woman. Besides, this is Tuesday. She wouldn’t be there.

***

November 29th

Much has come clear in the past nine days. There has been fasting and praying, some gnashing of teeth. The Changes were not sent to me merely to rescue some Elizabethan nobleman from obscurity, or even to clothe Stanley Quandary’s body with the glory of the greatest literary discovery the world has ever seen. Art cannot be separated from life. Say what you like about Quandary, he always remained true to two great loves, his heresy and Jean. How stupid of me to think that the Changes dealt with one and not the other! It would be a-symmetrical. It would be, what shall I say.., unaesthetic. I thought of expunging the pages in which I display Quandary-like weakness, but on reconsideration I have left them in. The Changes are a form of rebirth. How could I imagine there would be rebirth without blood and tears? The tears have been mine. The blood will not be.

***

Read Part 1 | 2 i.) | 2 ii.) | 3i.)

Part 4 will be posted on www.shakespearechronicles.com next week. (Note – the sections in this version are slightly different than the chapters in the published book)

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