golden carapace projected a heart-shaped turnkey. As Nathan inspected the book further, its legs splayed wide upon the spine with a clatter, and he. It seemed to indicate amusement rather than anger, for the Knight’s helmet tilted to one side slightly.
Then, one gauntleted hand mimed the twisting of a key. Nathan did so, surprised at the torsion required to crank the thing. It was as if the crab's innards were gummed with thick oil. Nathan persisted. Finally the key offered no more resistance.
Its final yielding revolution must have locked a vital cog into position, for the crab’s claws sprung apart. The book eased open. The boy’s eyes devoured the front page, which read in raised gothic type:
Our conversation: Commencing at the time of our meeting; between Nathan and myself - concluding one hundred and seventeen pages hence.
There was nothing else.
“Do you want me to read this?” asked Nathan, regretting the words even as they left his mouth.
A nod from the Knight. The crab’s claws crackled and the front page eluded its grasp. Its replacement slipped across the gulf between the pincers and was instantly snagged. An unseen spring must be powering the pages’ progression, Nathan realized. Each leaf was bonded to the book’s spine by a thin strip of copper. He gave a gentle tug at the current page, but the crustacean would not relinquish it. The boy eased his fingers from the book. The words before him read:
The proceeding content has already been written. Every word of our conversation to come lies herein. When the appropriate moment is reached, it will be revealed to you. Ponder this paradox, Nathan.
Nathan did. The crab was merely a time-piece, whose watch-springs and toothed wheels were churning inexorably to the moment when its claws would snap apart again.
There are exactly 94 pages in this book, there will never be one more and never any less. They correspond exactly to the questions you will answer me and my responses. Now then. Tell me something only you know, that you’ve never told anyone else.
“I buried an action figure down by the pool and could never find it again. I thought Jeremy might have taken it but I never asked him about it,” Nathan replied quickly. The next page was revealed even as he completed the last word.
A lost toy is a serious matter. Now then, was my response written before I asked you to name the secret, or were the words you’re now reading written after asking?
The boy thought the latter, and told the Knight, adding:
“It’s not a paradox, though. If you’d let me open the book, then I could see if the pages have anything on them or not, and I’d know for sure.” The crab clattered again.
The paradox exists in that the certainty of either can never be established.
Nathan felt himself warming to the argument.
“Yes it can. You just need a big enough crowbar or something and then you could find out.”
Indeed. Let us leave that for a moment. The other alternative, read the book, is absurd. That I somehow have prior knowledge of your words and have already transcribed them.
“To do that, you’d need to know the future. You can’t travel into the future,” said Nathan.
Determinism is what we’re really discussing, Nathan. Cause preceding effect. The violation of determinism is abhorrent to us, because it revokes free will. And according to lore, we accord only God or the Devil that privilege.
Nathan squinted with concentration again. For a moment, he considered calling Death to his side, to tear the book open and reveal the great mystery. He relented and returned to the page:
Let us return to your assertion about a crowbar. There are unknowable places and things in the universe. The state of Death is one, of course, that is pertinent to you and I. This encompasses the greatest paradox we shall ever know, that everyone shall join our gaunt friend yet none shall ever part from him.
This steel-encrusted bully was making him the foil of a prank. Its trappings of clockwork and parchment were more elaborate than Paul Forster’s, no doubt about that. The underlying malice was most likely identical. He placed the book upon the rock.
The crab’s eyes, he noticed now, were rubies set on stalks of stubby brass. The book whipped open.
Paradox can be as simple as incongruous juxtaposition, the pairing of inherently disparate elements, it read.
Nathan grimaced with concentration the last words. He had once been to a carnival where he shot jets of water into a clown’s gaping mouth to fill a balloon emerging from its head. Nathan felt this way now, as if blood was swelling he paid to a sure point of explosion. He placed the book before him.
“Do you mean things in the wrong place?”
Yes. An eloquent summation! Exactly.
“The book can’t just be like an alarm clock with the pages as the alarm, if you know what I mean. That’s impossible.”
Paradox. Not impossibility. And paradox is the truest state of the universe.
The boy knew he should walk away from this game. The last words intrigued him.
“You think? Why don’t you know for sure? Aren’t you some kind of soldier of Death? Like us?”
You are not in his service, any more than I am.
“Then why were we brought here?” Strength, unexpected yet welcome, sat at the boy’s right shoulder. “Why are you here?”
The Knight sent his sword clattering with a fist to the scabbard. Nathan jumped back in alarm. Then he recognized the noise-making as gesture of approval.
That’s the way of it, boy, the book read, Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Nathan smiled. “I like that.”
So said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Such eloquence is beyond a mere messenger such as me.
“Then you are a servant of Death, then. A messenger boy, like you say.”
The Knight’s hand fluttered towards the sword’s hilt, then stilled mid-movement.
Messenger boy indeed! Lucky it is for you, boy, that 500 years in this minor hell has bled my honour a bony white. Why, in my fullest season ...
Nathan apologized quickly, realizing now the three dots after “Season” were combined with the man’s faceless glare into the distance. This struck the boy as slightly ludicrous, and he bit his sleeve to stifle a giggle. The book’s flicking revealed:
The message I shall impart is not his. He has nothing to say. Look at him, Nathan.
Nathan did, hoping his fading smile would be lost upon Death.
His existence is bereft of doubt or hesitation. He is a pure expression of will. This is what must and always be, if life is to persevere.
“Why should it? If he left us alone, we could live forever.”
Into the realm of paradox we go, son. Life is defined by Death.
The Knight bade Nathan to sit. The next page whispered across.
Our time upon the earth is brief. Human-kind occupies a trifling insignificance of the span for which life has existed.
Nathan nodded. He had more than once induced within himself a sense of utter meaninglessness by contemplation of this fact.
A butterfly’s wings will bear it but for a single week of life. Do they express this certainty? Are they dreary tools of function, as bereft of adornment as the parchment these very lines are written? No. In hues iridescent do they proclaim defiance, Nathan! Not of the insect itself - although, had nature favoured their race with intelligence, a noble clan of butterfly philosophers would ponder such as this - It is life itself that refuses to concede.
“Jeremy told me …” Nathan blushed. “I had heard that animals have colours to attract a mate.”
Well done. Plumage and finery are indeed displays to denote breeding fitness in pure evolutionary terms. Let us now think further. Life best defies Death not in a being’s single lifetime, but in the revision of whole species. Humanity is not the culmination of life’s plan, as if there were such a thing! We readily appropriate billions of years of evolution to lay upon the altar of our hubris.
Nathan frowned. When he looked back at
the book, another page had appeared.
Arrogance, it read.
Nathan nodded at the Knight.
If we are the penultimate expression of life, then why do we still die? Why have we need of this Death? If creation had stopped with us, then surely we would be gifted with immortality!
The Knight drew his sword and lanced the sky with it.
Let all creation defer to our inherent majesty! Why, the smallest babe shall lie upon a bed of serpents! In envy, let the flower wither and seas drain to nothingness! Let the very planets cease their motion!
He held his weapon high for a moment after Nathan had devoured these words, then brought it to earth.
Life holds not such pretensions for any of its creatures, and neither should we. Here we are, four-score years and ten our allotment. A collection of primal urges are we, enshrouded within every cell of our being the ghost of what we were, every shrewlet or lizard-kin or fishling, for you were once such as these.
“We’re more than that. People, I mean.”
Of course we are. Of course humanity’s achievements do not merit such reductionism. But it is still true nonetheless, and thus we reach paradox again.
Let us cross over to an ancestral hall, Nathan, through which we might trace back your line as far back as creation itself. In its doorway stands your father. At his back and arm’s breadth away stands your grandfather. Behind him stands his own, and thus regresses your line.
Nathan raised his hand. The Knight nodded at him.
“Wouldn’t it be both my parents, though, not … not just my Dad?”
The book advanced.
Indeed. But to illustrate this