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Robert finds him in the alley’s darkness by the whites of his eyes and the God-shaped hole in his movement.
“Give me honesty, Robert, and I can figure out the rest myself.”
“Here’s a truth for you: you’ll come into the light, and pay for it with your head. Dishonesty in darkness is still dishonesty.”
“I was under the impression that you Friends worship the Light.”
Robert doesn’t know if he should deny this blasphemy and gross misunderstanding of a rather simple religion, or permanently and physically ban him from the premises of his business. But his back aches after twelve hours of standing and serving. He built his place with a well-paid loan and semi-confident knowledge of shrewd business logic. Motivations are predictable.
Yet to his despair, Woodhull’s hands are more dexterous than his own, and he pries apart the wood of his building and uses his hands like he is peeling a ripe fruit. (At the very least, he certainly does not use them to turn the pages of Kant’s abstractions).
Woodhull’s eyes are dark blue in the light of a streetlamp. A memory of the blue glass that stains his countertop with color mocks him. He has nothing to say but stare.
Woodhull’s infuriating flippancy returns: “I can promise you an excellent view of my imaginary execution.”
“I would not even go near your corp--“.
A slow smile. “Yet you’re choosing to be near my body now.”
(Robert does not give much thought to his body often. He is only a figure cloaked in black, absorbing all light).
Certainly. Robert shoves Woodhull’s shoulder against a slat, and trips over a piece of fallen wood from his boarding house, rattled from a recent violent storm. The first thing Robert notices is that Woodhull has the spiny body of a troubled man; mind forgetting the very easy fundamentals of meat and cheese.
It is hard to even see the whites of his eyes against the darkness.
(Meanwhile, up the street, a shouting crowd departs the theater. Robert can play pretend with patrons or spies. He will not exeunt. He can play this new part for just a moment).
(Earlier, the stage actor mourned Ophelia. There were tears on his cheeks - cold, and wholly unseen to the audience).
Certainly this is honesty, too.
All he can think of to say at the moment is: “I offer you bread - as Christ tells us to - and you keep yourself starved. You’re a senseless man.”
Their lips are too close.
Woodhull is staring back: “Then I’ll feed you.” Woodhull’s lips slot against his much in the way Judas kissed Christ, he considers. Woodhull has identified a fated man.
(Later, the blackguard crawls into his bed with sweet-stained hands).
----
He can’t remove his noose of a cravat, hands too busy supporting his body against the door.
Some heretics (Catholics, Woodhull) see suffering as a wheel. He is standing on a platform, the noose a pulley. In this dream, he entertains the self-flagellation of the Jesuits, and lets the rope work.
His mind in sleep has taken his memories and minced them into pieces. The existing timeline of the past branches off. He is moving through too quickly.
Here, Robert is riding to Woodhull's skeleton of a house. Upon arriving, Woodhull's lingering burn appears to Robert as a chain around his neck (to Woodhull himself, something more like a halo). He arrives to surrender - to speak of his fear - but he can’t hear himself talk over the clinking steel of Woodhull’s binding. He had prepared an explanation for his visitation. Its futility is sudden. Robert stares into Woodhull’s eyes long enough to replace the memory of Simcoe’s. He must dig to explain his terror. Between books and prayer, he had long developed a diplomatic relationship with the external world, but there is coded movement in it that he needs Woodhull's help to decipher. A machine that cannot change with the help of others will rot.
Robert looks through Woodhull's eyes, while Woodhull is not looking back. He looks through the eyes of Woodhull's wife. She's gone loose in her tears, and Woodhull's gaze stays hard and fixed on a point in the distance past the woods. Woodhull witnessed the birth of his son, and this means that he has seen the pragmatism of pain and so no longer runs from it.
Robert breathes deep, and calls forward the type of hard sobriety that makes customers resolve to ask for little from him. The air here is less heavy than that of his hometown. Woodhull won't look at him. They do not take the time to sit down.
"You entangled me under false pretenses. Now, your problems become mine."
Woodhull leans himself against the threshold between them, infuriatingly: "I will take on your pain, too. I can carry another burden. The means justify the ends."
"Oh, is that the philosophy that the law department of Kings College imparts on its students?"
"We do learn of Machiavelli. As "well-read" as you are, you must understand." It is clear that Woodhull would prefer to smile at his own wit, but can't summon the power.
Robert doesn't see books as silly language games, like Woodhull does. "I gain knowledge from books, but not always wisdom. There is none here."
Far too confidently, Woodhull responds. "Knowledge doesn't replace the reality of the world around you."
"Reality will catch up to you. You know of fate."
""Fate" is just any other day."
"And you have lost the privilege of deciding if you live or die. I would have preferred to keep mine."
"I have something better than wisdom or knowledge. Here’s truth, in your language:
Romans 8 says: "We know that the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Woodhull's voice turns to that of a preacher.
For a moment, Robert sees a light come through Woodhull's mask of a faceless fieldworker weak with exhaustion, and shakes. "God comes from the outside. You will not change the Earth as he does, though all know you wish to."
Woodhull laughs.
It is impossible to convince one that God is more than a scalpel to skin away the hours (and Robert's God is something more like a hunting knife, anyways). Now, Robert knows they are not communicating, he is just grasping at memory. This is ground they have tread, the only variation the code by which it is spoken in. Luckily, Woodhull surrenders in his way.
He leans forward to Robert's body.
The hands that grasp his assure Robert that their owner is experienced at untangling the binds he wraps himself in, and at applying salves to the burn around his neck. The body of the world will fix itself in due time, as Congress reassembles in the middle of mayhem, and as Rome birthed the Byzantine. Their wrists are touching and Woodhull's pulse is choppy. He wants to be nearer.
To Robert's despair, the waltz has gone amiable.
Robert decides that he cannot unscrew himself from this world Woodhull has formed. He tries. Woodhull is a man prone to revelation rather than patience, and revelation does not ask for justification.
At age eight, he was told that all acts - entertainment, gluttony, the meeting of bodies - are born sinful, and all claims otherwise must be vindicated to the point of prostration. George Fox has been vindicated in his visions, too; handing out rhetoric like a worn Bible.
That brief light in Woodhull's eyes (an artful execution of color) draws his own from the ground, where he usually looks while he prays and walks.
For a few minutes, he can step off the platform and into Woodhull's belief that history is a lowest form of voyeurism (and no less pathetic than God's).
On this platform, there is a good view of the horizon.
It is unfortunate that at a certain time, sunrises and sunsets look the same. He can see his Meeting House from here, with the sun skewered on the spire.
---
Gibbons has a book that is four thousand pages of fates and dead ends. Gibbons does not acknowledge that Daniel, biblical prophet of Persia, simply wrote that Rome (or something like it) would fall to pathetic pieces of iron - no care for the cause of it, or the choices of those within. It is all direct truth, and the Prophet lives in bliss.
George Fox too dreamt of the End Times and great conflict of the material.
George Fox tells him that every form of war (military battles, duels, the consumption of primal needs) is always fruitless. There are no options to be had, only the apocalypse that comes with Light.
(Unfortunate conclusion: The battling of one’s nature is futile, too).
There are men who would perhaps call Mr. Gibbons a false prophet, identifying the principles of caving countries. But this is a faulty comparison - America is not yet an empire, it is a hallucination. But maybe that is not entirely accurate - it has become real enough for the aristocrats across the Atlantic (and, of course, those with enough guineas move reality).
(Counterpoint: the General from Virginia does too, in all of his brute power, and with his loyal soldier-subjects who pull him along as equipage).
Emperor Augustus must have burned the pages of Daniel in brimstone.
(Conclusion: Anglican he is, Washington most likely has no regard for the Old Testament either, and so pays the fog of providence no mind).
His head hurts. These thoughts are bordering on blasphemous now. It is important to remember that Rome rotted from the inside out.
During the collapse, pieces of time elsewhere rose. Events follow each other in a confusing procession that must be sorted.
(Conclusion: It is clear that the machine of history must be halted by the force of the present. The merchants and legislators struggling against Whig psychosis deny this).
Fox (and thus, Christ) tells him that novelty leads to pain and pollution of thought. As of late, he senses novel truths (and thus, bases for choice) hidden somewhere. Robert knows this as one can feel eyes on their back - but one can only look over their own shoulder for so long before an ache in the neck becomes too much.
Robert can only hope his truth is fully tangible (in a news report of the end of the war, or much to his dismay, in Woodhull’s hands. Hume says that understanding tangibility is also a fruitless struggle). Regardless, Woodhull's body is an odd new creature that makes clear a new type of suffering, which possesses a few principles:
This suffering comes with the surrender of “fate”, which is bred by illusions.
Christ offered, and then urged, the freedom to use the material (Woodhull's fine skin, into which he buries face and shouts into the cavern of neck to no response) with good intentions.
According to Romans, Christ's spirit - and so, his gift of freedom - is a law, Robert remembers. It’s his to follow.
Like all historians, Gibbons wrote a fantasy of a book. He is a straightforward and attentive illusionist. Robert closes the heavy pages, and takes out an ink that can appear like magic.
(Conclusion: It is common to be rife with anxiety. It is also normal to hope. This could be over soon. Someday, his observances too will be a mirage).
---
Sometimes Robert moves from the fundamentals of collapse to Shakespeare. Concealed in his desk there is a copy of Macbeth, circled then crossed out:
“I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell, that summons thee to heaven or to hell!” The call for choice can come in a confusing Chorus.
(Possible conclusion: the call for choice is not the same as the call of fate).
Macbeth too had listened to the promises of seers, though he suspects Woodhull and Tallmadge don’t have the necessary insight to play those parts.
In the end, Macbeth did not keep his head.
Shakespeare did not write of the fate of Macbeth’s spies. It’s likely for the best.
(Conclusion: and yet, perhaps it could be said that Emperor Augustus, Macbeth, and Mr. Hale of the Connecticut Militia all hold a profane wisdom - wade through the river of blood).
---
There is a bell housed in Philadelphia. When he looks at Woodhull (when Woodhull is not looking back) he is reminded of the pathetic sound of miscast iron that this bell had at first. Its grating ring was mocked by the fine Quakers of Philadelphia.
Then, long after its original casting, it clearly rang throughout courtyards and jailhouses. Proven by Jefferson putting pen to paper, there is no futility in words. They make movements in the world in a long chain.
But perhaps the Apostles discarded the notion of their futility first (an outpour of confidence in belief, three thousand years ago. Woodhull is not the first, and that fact must count for something).
Woodhull walks in the world hearing the toll, and believes all will hear the toll again in the future, though it relies - for the most part - on the choice of others to sound. It depends on the owners in their high towers, and not on the collection of distant information by farmers, too hidden to make the right noise.
Woodhull can't accept this. Robert does.
(Like the bell, Robert can keep time, too, though he won’t say so. There is a quiet ringing in the back of his head. He drowns it out with patrons’ breakfast chatter).