Ozymandias

He keeps a small apartment now. Fourth floor, no elevator, because climbing the stairs is one of the few things that still feels like time passing.

In the mornings he drinks coffee he does not need and watches the street. He has learned to love streets. A street is an honest thing — it shows you where people want to go by where they have worn the stone. He has seen this same instinct cut through grass, through sand, through marble, through asphalt. The path of least resistance is the oldest law he knows, older than any he ever carved into a tablet, and he carved a great many.

There was a time he signed his laws Ozymandias, King of Kings. There was a time men knelt for the privilege of hearing them.

He has the sonnet memorized. Of course he does; he has everything memorized, that is the curse and the trick of him. A traveller from an antique land. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone. He remembers the sculptor — a quiet, half-deaf man who worked faster than anyone the king had ever hired, and who got the sneer exactly right, the cold command, because he had seen it on the king's living face and had not been afraid to copy it. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair. That was the boast. He had meant it the way the young mean everything: forever.

The poet got it right. That is what undoes him about the poem, even now — a young Englishman who never saw the desert understood the desert better than the king who built in it. Nothing beside remains. The boy understood that the words would outlive the works, that the despair would not come from the greatness of the statue but from its absence. He had wanted to find that poet and shake his hand. By the time he went looking, the poet had drowned. They are always drowning, or fevered, or shot in some idiot duel. The mind that can hold the whole of it never seems to come with a body that wants to stay.

His does. He has never learned why.

He has been a great many men between that king and this tenant. He was a beggar for ninety years once, in a city he will not name, because he wanted to know what the bottom of a society could see that the top could not — and the answer was everything. He was a historian three separate times, under three separate names, and watched his own earlier histories cited by his later selves. Once, gloriously, he watched a rival scholar denounce one of his books as a forgery, which it was, and which was also true. He was an engineer. He was an inventor. He changed the world at least twice in ways that have his fingerprints nowhere on them, because that is the only honest way to change a world. Anything with your name on it becomes a statue eventually. Anything with your name on it ends as two trunkless legs in the sand.

He remembers the cradle. Not poetically — actually. He remembers when a wall was a marvel and a wheel was a rumor. He remembers the first time he watched someone teach, really teach: an old woman showing a child not which berries, but how to tell — the difference between handing down an answer and handing down a way of finding answers. He has spent the rest of his very long life watching humanity confuse the two.

That is the thing that tires him. Not war — war is loud, but it is at least awake. What tires him is the forgetting. He has watched humanity build a beautiful idea the way you build a cathedral, generations of hands, and then watched the grandchildren of the builders walk through it without ever looking up at the ceiling. He has watched a library burn and felt the precise grief of knowing exactly which shelf mattered. But the burning libraries were never the real loss. The real loss was always quieter: a method that simply stopped being taught. A question that stopped being asked because the asking had been replaced with something easier and worse — memorize this, repeat this, you will be tested on it and then permitted to forget it. He has sat at the back of ten thousand rooms where children were taught the names of things and not one thing about how the names were won. Education, done that way, is not a transmission. It is a controlled demolition with a graduation at the end.

He does not think humans are stupid. He wants to be very clear with himself about that, on the bad mornings. He has never met a stupid century. He has met a great many centuries that were handed a smaller inheritance than they were owed and told it was the whole estate.

His own mind was not built for this length, either. He knows that now. A human mind is a riverbank; it is meant to hold a season, a life, a few cherished dead. It is not meant to hold four thousand flood years. So he has learned to let the river take most of it. He does not remember the faces of most of the people he has loved, and he has decided to call that mercy rather than describe it the other way. What he keeps — what he has trained himself, ruthlessly, to keep — are the important parts. Not the dates. The methods. Not the kings. The questions. He is, in the end, a very old man walking around with the load-bearing ideas of the species folded into his coat, quietly terrified of the day he sets the coat down somewhere and cannot recall the room.

He has rules now, in his late era. He does not go to war; he went to enough, and war only ever taught him things he already knew about people, at a price he was ashamed to keep paying. He stays out of prisons, on either side of the bars, because a prison is a building designed to make time itself the punishment — and time is the one weight he cannot feel, so his presence there would be a kind of obscenity. And he avoids paperwork. He says this part lightly, and people laugh, but he means it with his whole chest. He has watched more good ideas die in paperwork than in fire. Fire, at least, is honest about what it is doing.

He has looked for others. This is the loneliest paragraph of his life, and he keeps it short. For a few thousand years he assumed that whatever happened to him must have happened, somewhere, to someone else — that there had to be another long memory out there, another coat full of load-bearing ideas. He left messages. He developed an eye for the signs: the figure in the old painting who looks too specifically bored; the recurring anonymous donor; the family that always seems to lose its records in exactly the same generation. He chased every one of them down. They were always just people — wonderful, ordinary, mortal people, living the single season a mind is meant to live. He has accepted it. He is the only one. Whatever he is, the universe made it once and did not consider it a success worth repeating.

So he waits.

That is the part that would surprise the ones who only know the sonnet — the ones who think Ozymandias is a story about arrogance and ruin. They have the despair right and the reason wrong. He does not despair because everything ends. He learned, a long time ago, to be all right with endings; an ending is just the river doing its work. What he wants — the want that has kept the stubborn, unkillable body of him climbing four flights of stairs — is to see them get out.

He has watched them look up since before there were words for what they were looking at. He has watched the same upward tilt of the same head in a hundred thousand different faces — child and astronomer and fool and king — all of them doing the one thing he has never once grown tired of watching a human being do. They look up. Whatever else they forget, and they forget so much, they break his heart with how much they let themselves forget — they have never once stopped looking up.

He thinks they will make it. Not soon. Not cleanly. They will do it the way they have done everything: half-remembering, re-deriving in the dark what some burned library already knew, paying twice for every mile. But he thinks the upward tilt of the head is load-bearing too. He thinks it is one of the important parts — and he thinks, against four thousand years of evidence and entirely on the strength of that one gesture, that it is the part they will not lose.

When the first of them stands on something that is not this Earth and turns to look back at it — small, and blue, and far — he intends to be alive for it.

He has earned the right to watch one thing last forever.

He climbs the stairs. He counts them, the way he always does, because climbing them is one of the few things that still feels like time passing — and because somewhere very deep and very old in him, in the part that was once a king who believed forever was a thing you could carve, he has never entirely stopped counting up toward something.