This breakthrough with the sun as the living dead also meant that Noah could for the first time see a clear order in the system’s other, and until then somewhat ill-thought-out, categories, “living things in the living,” “life that resembles other life,” “living things in the dead,” and “dead things in the living.”
Once he’d added “the sun” and “nothing” to the system, and could see that it fit, he began considering the sun’s subcategories. They’d previously consisted of stars, cherubim, lightning, winter lights, conflagrations. But if fire was a process, “conflagrations” had to go. What of the rest? The stars burned eternally and by themselves, and therefore had to remain. The cherubim burned eternally and by themselves, so they had to be there too. Lightning occurred only in concert with clouds, and disappeared, so consequently had to be struck out. But winter lights? They disappeared and therefore came under fire, but also burned by themselves and so belonged under the sun.
When he arrived at this point, after many hours of success, he felt sick with frustration. Would it never work out! And it was always some minute, trivial, and completely unimportant point that stood in the way of the system’s perfection.
He jumped up and began pacing about in the room, stopped in front of the table by the wall, picked up some of the stones without thinking about what he was doing, lay down on his bed, closed his eyes. But he found no solution there. Only the yellow and green light that rippled above the mountains on dark winter nights.
It was doubly irritating, because his thought about the winter lights was what had set the whole thing in motion. And now the same subject was bogging it down.
What was it he’d actually thought?
Negative fire, was what he’d thought. That had been the flash of inspiration. Even though it had been wrong and winter lights weren’t negative fire, it was Nothing that fulfilled that role, it had given his thoughts the necessary perspective.
But wait!
He sat up in bed, looked across at the stones he’d just been holding in his hand. Fire burned hot, winter lights burned cold. And so he’d imagined they were inverted fire. A negative conflagration. But wasn’t it actually the same as the life in the stones? That was also cold. Why? Because it was only an image of life.
Winter lights were the image of fire. That’s why they burned cold. They resembled fire in the same way as the insects in the stone resembled insects, but they weren’t fire, they had none of the characteristics of fire, apart from appearance.
That was it.
That was it!
He sat down at his writing table again. If this was right, there were images within all categories, apart from Nothing. The formation of images permeated all existence. Just as comprehensively as life and death.
Tentatively he sketched in a new outline:
LIVING THINGS
DEAD THINGS
THE SUN
NOTHING
Dead living things
Fire
GOD
The force of life
The force of death
The force of image
At a stroke, all four categories that had caused him so much trouble — because deep down he’d known they weren’t valid, in the sense that they weren’t to be seen as separate entities, but in some way integrated within the greater picture — were swept away.
It was as simple as that. And as beautiful. Four categories that contained everything in existence, three that contained the forces, two for the transitions, one that contained the creator.
There was nothing more.
That was all.
Numb in the head after so much concentration, Noah cleared his writing table, doused the light, and went to bed. But he was far too animated to sleep. In his mind he rehearsed all his reasonings again. The deep-seated composure that usually spread through him when he’d brought a task to perfection hadn’t come, and sensitive as he’d learned to be toward his feelings, no matter how vague, he felt that something wasn’t right.
It sometimes happened that he tricked himself into thinking that a problem was solved even when, deep down, he knew it wasn’t. He tried constantly to combat this lack of honesty within himself, but when it came to the rub and he was sitting there after hours of work, whether on a drawing, a system, or a complicated series of thoughts, he sometimes said to himself that that was good enough, that that was as far as he was going to get, and even though at the start he’d specifically told himself that this time, this time he wouldn’t surrender to the wheedling voice, but would go on until the perfectionism of his real self had been fulfilled. But no. When it came, he gave in to it. Every time.
Just as he had this time.
A vague uneasiness had come over him when he’d placed the cherubim under the sun. Something within him knew this wasn’t right. This inner voice, the only thing really worth listening to, he’d ignored.
But, after all, it wasn’t too late. It just took a lot of effort to raise himself to where he had been. Not least because he had already savored the taste of victory.
Noah sighed deeply, pulled back the bedclothes, and got up from his bed for the third time that evening.
In a show of energy he rubbed his hands together and said the cherubim! the cherubim! aloud to himself several times as he lit the candle and picked up the pile of papers from the floor beneath the table.
“Of course they don’t come under the sun!” he said as he sat down. “Of course they don’t!”
He had listed the cherubim under Fire in his original system for the simple reason that they flamed. The cherubim flamed, and had done so for as far back as the memory of man extended. But even then he’d had an inkling that his categorization was too rudimentary. Even though no one had seen the cherubim close up, there was a body of knowledge about them. They belonged to the angelic order, that was certain. And man had been created in the image of the angels, that too was known. So the cherubim had in some way to be like human beings. But did this mean that they were constrained to the same life as man and all other living things on earth? Much pointed to the contrary. The cherubim’s lives were eternal, and therefore more closely linked with “dead things” than “living things.” Could they be another variant of the sun’s “living dead”? The fact that they also burned made the thought tempting.
But then there were the Nephilim.
Noah had never heard of any person who’d ever seen a cherub or an angel. But lots of people had seen Nephilim. Including his father. This had been about ten years before, at the market in Nod. It was dead and was being exhibited in a tent there. It was the biggest sensation at the market that anyone could remember. Lamech had queued the whole morning to get in, and had paid handsomely for the ticket, but without protest: he knew how pleased Noah would be when he got home and could relate everything he’d seen.
For a long time the Nephilim had been nothing more than a rumor, even more nebulous and vague than those about angels, which, despite their vagueness, had existed time out of mind. The Nephilim were new. How new nobody was sure. Perhaps a hundred years old, perhaps five hundred. Most of the people in Nod lived in towns along the coast, and those who settled in the forests kept largely to the edges. But the forest stretched hundreds of miles inland, and it was in this wilderness, so boundlessly uniform in its infinite number of spruce trees and small lakes, that rumor had it the Nephilim lived. Regions so desolate that decades might pass between any human visit. No one could say what they looked like, they were as shy as they were sly; the only thing to go on were the tracks they sometimes left, presumably by accident, and the occasional glimpse of something shadowy between trees far off, which, it had to be admitted, might as easily have been an elk or a bear as a Nephilim.