77 Shadow Street

One

The young Sophia Pendleton descends the stairs in 1897 but also in 1935, in 1973, in 2011, and every thirty-eight years thereafter, although she has long been dead. During the brief period between the first crack in the space-time trapdoor and the instant when it is flung wide open, all the transitions past and future must occupy the same moment in the present, briefly melding. I bit the life from Sophia before the nineteenth century became the twentieth; yet she sings her nursery rhymes and descends the stairs in 2011 as in 1897, immortal for that brief moment.

Likewise, an Indian brave from 1821 wanders for almost a minute through the Pendleton’s banquet kitchen and along the south hall on the ground floor. He is bewildered, frightened, a tomahawk raised and ready. But he fades away before anyone ever encounters him.

Back in 1897, Sophia hurries to the kitchen of Belle Vista to enjoy her shaved ice flavored with cherry syrup, giving no thought to the hard life of the iceman who delivers the forty-pound blocks three times a week. He will no doubt exhaust himself by late middle age, die young, and leave this world as poor as he entered it.

But exploitation is not always or even most often just a matter of the wealthy draining the blood of the poor. The wealthy themselves can be exploited by the likes of the envious security guard who is writing a tell-all book, by hired assassins like the son of the famous intellectual. Indians were exploited by the Europeans, but many Indian tribes previously had warred with and enslaved one another. As you have observed, it is the nature of human beings to exploit one another ruthlessly and to ravage nature as well, again and again and again over the centuries. No class or race or faction is innocent of that crime.

In the kingdom of the One, there is never exploitation of any individual by another. No masters, no slaves. No wealth, no poverty. Every predator is prey, and every prey is a predator. The earth is never torn open and disfigured for its oil or its gold. I am the fulfillment of your vision, the justification of your life.

Consider the boy, the songwriter’s son, who dreams of being a hero like those in the books that he incessantly reads. Yearning to be a hero, to live a life larger than life, he is no less a threat to everything you believe than he is a threat to me. By their nature, heroes leave outsize footprints, overblown and dangerous legends; therefore, in a well-ordered and efficient world, there can be no place for them.

The boy will have no hope of being a hero when his eyes have been eaten from their sockets, when his tongue turns as black and silent as char, and when I reach within his heart and squirm through its throbbing chambers.