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A King Swann Fee Chapter 1

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Michael Bolerjack

A King Swann Fee, Chapter 1 2013 Michael Bolerjack

Parallel Lives invite comparison. Everyone desires themselves or detests themselves. There is no non-attached admiration, no detached despising. To be in any relation without judgment is difficult. Some choose non-relation. Non-relation though is related to relation. There is nothing un-related. And so we walk and live and move and have our being in relationship, in pairs, parallel, to each other. There are, for instance, lovers, subjects, objects, masters, slaves, producers, consumers, creators, destroyers, critics and the like. We would, some time, step out of this. Others, either through ignorance, confidence, negligence or wisdom, give themselves to the set and do not withhold, though one among us, in theory, cannot be accounted for, so that no set of relationships can ever be called closed, figured, reckoned, solved.

This radical in-completeness, or contradiction, is in the inability to square things. We, parallels, will only meet in our extremity, someday transcendent. We will be free. Compact, not dense, shaken-down, unspilt. It was as if they were written, and he was always writing about her. They were said in the right way, at the right time, and together they said all they had to say. Everything that had to be said, they said. I look at their lives together as a script. Almost a scripture. Which will not go without commentary. Their exegesis, that is to say, my eisegetical view of their marriage, cannot help but combine their story with my own, and yet, they played the greater part, and as he told her, or promised, or wished, perhaps we will play until our last breath. They played at it, then, in

risk, but not in a hazard of probability or possibility. They were impossible. They were real. Some people come from far away. Some never go anywhere. So it was with them. She went north, and though he did not know it cognitively, in substance he waited for her. He did not think he was waiting for something or someone. It was not for him a tale by Henry James of a beast in a jungle, something that awaited, never arrived. The worst had already happened, had happened to him as if by accident, as if he were his own involuntary manslaughter. Someone once told him he was waiting for nothing. It was not true. He was not waiting. Yet it did arrive.

He had tried to tell her about this. I believe it was on their date before their first movie. She really couldnt understand his story. She knew something had happened. Perhaps he had done something. Perhaps someone had done something to him. I cannot speak for her, what she believed, or what she knew. At the time she seemed filled with hope, and hope will have its object. I do not think it mattered to her what had happened, but that it mattered to him, that she could see. But what did she really see? We only see things from our own angle. Perhaps, in the end, we only see ourselves. I do not think she thought in this way, though, but peacefully waited, without knowing what would be, for it to be.

Ten years later, she laughed and told him that she had had no idea what he was talking about. By this time she knew. And he knew that she had not known. They had taken their places, side by side, without really knowing one another, and only thinking that each one knew themselves. In this way they acquired their direction. For unless we are two, we have no direction. On his own he had had a certain magnitude. With her, only with her, his prime, they found what otherwise might be called a path. It was not a void, a trackless waste, they crossed. They neither breached a trail, nor were broached. I think by their passing they changed the space itself, as they were themselves transformed. I do not know if it was that simple, to say they were parallel to each other and to the

time they witnessed. Is anything ever so simple so as to say they were taking part in the, or everything they saw took place in them? Perhaps they, parallel to each other, were but oblique to the time, as if they did not mirror it exactly. And so, set eschew, apart, they, without hardly knowing it, or only later becoming aware of it, did reflect a longer view, out of perfect symmetry, toward what would be. They did not break it, but set it ajar, and by so doing, set it right. I do not think it will be possible to tell their story completely. This is neither their fault, nor mine. It is not their fault, for they were already complete, in a way, from the start. And I, I cannot help but contradict myself, and perhaps the truth is unverifiable. Even though I believe

this to be the case, it is still a worthwhile thing to speak of them as they were to me, seeming as they did. As I said before, they have the greater share. Like Horatio, my part is small, and however essential, is nevertheless unimportant, compared to what they were, and they did, and they became.