(urth) Short Story 192*: The Card

[Marc Aramini]

#THE CARD

"The Card" first appeared in the March 2005 edition of *Asimov's Science
Fiction* and has never been collected.

##Summary

An unnamed narrator (who enjoys telling stories and is probably meant to be
Gene Wolfe) presents the story a police officer named Augie, the husband of
his daughter's friend, relates over the course of a car ride. They pass a
man Augie's age "shuffling along the sidewalk" in a bad part of town, which
sparks Augie's tale: "See that guy? He's going to damn me."

Augie identifies the man as Wilhelm Boyd Anton, who lived a few houses down
from him when they were children. Wilhelm later seemed to be doing well for
himself financially, until an event changed his life and he began beating
and cutting himself in public, losing almost 50 pounds of weight. He had
seen a card floating in a gutter, and when he picked it up, saw that it was
one of the rather old fashioned Catholic religious cards with the picture
of a saint on them which "went out of style when the rosary did and never
really came back." In this case, Wilhelm saw his own name and a painting of
himself as a younger man, with the title "Blessed" rather than "Saint" -
implying beatification but not canonization. "He was a married guy with a
wife who loved him and two kids back then, you understand, starting to get
fat and lose his hair." Wilhelm
thought about the possibility of doubles and then read about anomalies.

Augie gives several examples of anomalies, first using police investigation
metaphors, describing something which doesn't belong at the scene of the
crime, allowing a conclusion to be drawn. He mentions a barrette found at a
murder scene committed by a woman, a snuff box alone on the counter of a
convenience store where a murder and robbery were committed, for the clerk
knew the man who robbed him usually bought snuff every day and grabbed it
as he walked in, and then other things that don't belong where they are: a
kangaroo shot in Minnesota, a pen with the name of a store and a phone
number on it that simply don't exist. Angie says the book he researched
this in "says that things like that are crossovers from another
possibility. ... It's not far from here, only we can't get there. Usually
we can't, but sometimes we do. ... So that was the way Billyboy explained
the card to himself, see? There was this other world, he'd been different
there, and probably God had dealt him the card to show him how it could
have been for him."

Augie also reveals that Wilhelm knows exactly where he went wrong:

>There had been this one girl.  I'm not going to tell you what he made her
do, or how he made her do it. Not what she did trying to scrag herself
afterward, either. All of it was as ugly as sin ... That last part, the
thing she did to herself, wasn't just ugly. It was messy. The thing was, it
was supposed to do for her, only it didn't work very good. She stumbled
around screaming and bleeding. She'd fall down, and he'd figure she was
down for the count, but when he was trying to call nine one one she'd be up
and grabbing him again, bleeding all over him and yelling that she wanted
to die, he had to let her die.

Anton tries to save her and patch her up, hoping the whole while that she
will die and that it would be over. The hospital will not let him in, and
as he dozes there he has visions of the whole event over and over. This
continues in the night and the next day, when he still fails to get in to
see her.  Her brother calls to say she has died, and that he is coming to
hurt Anton. "The brother punched him two or three times, knocked him down,
and kicked him. And that was that. ... He still had the dreams, only not
very often. Then he found the card." After that he begins to cut and beat
himself and loses his job.

"He doesn't do that because he likes it, or to punish himself either. He
does it to get his mind off what he did and what happened afterward. He's
repented and confessed and all that, but he can't stop thinking about it."

Augie claims that Anton could tell our narrator how it ends if he talks to
him, for "He knows, see? He's talked to God about it and talked to some
angels about it, and talked to Father Mike ... and [Father Mike] told me.
... He knows how it's going to to end, and I'm the one that's going to end
it."

The narrator must here say that he doesn't want to know about it, because
Augie responds: "Hell's bells. Did I ask you if you wanted to know? ...
Have a little charity, for Christ's sake. Let me get this off my chest." He
says one day Anton will take the card and show it to Augie, and Augie will
deny that it is him, reading a different name from the card and showing
Anton how little he resembles the picture.

>And he'll die. That and all the cutting and whipping and stabbing will be
punishment enough for him, for every bad thing he ever did, her included.
He won't be beatified here - or he doesn't think he will. Father Mike's not
so sure about that. But he'll be a saint in Heaven, and she'll meet him
there. They'll kiss and sh'll forgive him for everything, then and forever.

>Only I'll die and be damned and never get out.

>Because of the lie. Because when I say it isn't him and pretend to read
the made-up name I'll be lying through my teeth.


##Commentary

Like many of Wolfe's modern urban stories in which there seems to be a
character who could be Gene Wolfe, this story deals with a very Catholic
and dualistic idea. The state of Blessedness which is under discussion is
part of a process in the Catholic Church and the canonization of saints,
but the story also deals with the possibility of redemption and the
difference between a sin born of ignorance sincerely repented and one
undertaken with foreknowledge.

The philosophical framework of the tale is that in *this* reality Augie
(whose name is probably short for Augustus, the influential early Christian
saint who wrote "On Lying") is damning himself by denying a truth that will
harm and destroy another human being. There is a sense that there are some
moral absolutes at play and a "scale" of damnation - it seems that this
particular lie will be mortal rather than venial - in this case, knowingly
bearing false witness against his literal neighbor. (See the Catechism in
Religious Allusions below for more details here). While it is clear that
Augie believes this version of Anton will also be saved, there is a
question about whether this particular version of Anton, excoriating his
flesh in an attempt to forget his sin, will actually be "Blessed" ... this
story seems a more overtly spiritual version of Wolfe's similarly
second-hand first person tale, "A Fish Story" - in which a man sees a
better version of himself and is forced to confront what he really is.

The "tale within a tale" narrative framework in Wolfe has been employed
several times in his shorter work, and allows Wolfe to create a
simultaneous empathy and distance with the secondary speaker in something
which one might be tempted to compare with the cognitive estrangement of
standard science fiction applied to a modern setting. The unusual thing
about Wolfe is that he tends to employ this double narrator in settings
which are *almost* realistic. This story, for example, could just as easily
be the self-flagellation of a man driven crazy by an image he believes he
saw on a card and the aftereffects of a traumatic event for which he feels
responsible - yet in Wolfe, for the most part the spiritual or mystical
explanation for the events is of course the valid one (Ironically, I feel
the most notable exception to this is the event most often simply accepted
as mystical in nature: that of Patera Silk's enlightenment in *The Book of
the Long Sun*, where Crane's explanation of a brain event, from its first
utterance, seems absurd - but might actually be just as true.)

The holy card which was once in vogue among Catholics is designed as a
reminder of the communion of saints, who act as intercessors for mortals
still living and remind humans of what they are called to be. Here, this
card quite literally serves that purpose. (Usually, saints are considered
patrons of a particular problem, need, or profession.) Certainly in this
case, Wilhelm needed the call to repentance, but it destroys his functional
life. The failure of a man to achieve his potential can certainly be
attributed to free will, but this story complicates the idea of free will
because of Augie's knowledge of the sin which will supposedly damn him - an
almost harmless lie, when he is telling a story of attempted suicide and
probably sexual sadism (or, alternatively, an abortion) which ends with the
sinners reunited in heaven. Augie's sin seems to pale in comparison, and in
the Religious Allusions section below we will attempt to look at the
orthodox explanation for the relative severity of his transgression. I
believe that the primary crux of the tale is that one man's sin might quite
possibly serve to beatify and martyr another man - a re-enactment of the
salvation of the death of Christ, where the sin of executing an innocent
man serves to expiate the multitudinous sins of mankind. One man's
damnation is another's salvation in this story.

##Religious allusions

In this case, we must actually look at the structure of the Catholic
Church's canonization process. Even in modern times, there are four stages
to this (Servant of God, Heroic in Virtue, Blessed, and Saint) - and for
Wilhelm to be "Blessed", he must have been in the third stage. The issue
for this is that the individual must usually be deceased before they can
even be declared a Servant of God. A bishop or church authority figure will
open an investigation to determine that indeed the person was worthy of
veneration on his or her path to acting as an intercessor for the living
with God (a saint will have the "beatific vision" - the perfect
intellectual communion with the other saints and God that is salvation -
and even in the reality of the story, it seems that Anton might be
experiencing that: "He talked to God about it and talked to some angels
about it and talked to Father Mike down at Saint Scholastica's about it.
And he knows."). For the second step, the individual in question must have
exhibited certain virtues: faith, hope, charity, temperance, justice,
fortitude, and prudence (and Augie begs our primary narrator to listen to
his own yet to be committed sin: "Have a little charity, for Christ's
sake"). In order for the person to attain the title of "Blessed" which
Wilhelm seems destined to achieve in some reality, there must be a
documented miracle or a martyrdom. (Will Augie's fatal lie count as a
martyrdom for Anton?)

Flagellation has a strange place in the history of the Catholic Church. In
the middle ages it might very well be seen as a form of penance for ascetic
movements, and in the 13th century it spread to a social proclamation of
piety, but the Catholic Church eventually condemned the act as heretical.
However, there are still some Roman Catholic Churches which seem to
practice it even in Italy during Lent, with some others, such as Catholics
in the Philippines, even crucifying themselves. We should probably view
Boyd's actions as "mortification of the flesh" rather than flagellation, an
attempt to eliminate and destroy the sins born of the body and its desires
- and many penitential saints in the history of the Catholic Church
practiced this extreme form of asceticism. The goal of Anton is not to
excoriate the sin from his body, though that may be what he is
accomplishing - it is, according to Augie, to get the terrible sin and his
guilt out of his mind.

Both the catechism and St. Augustine himself have something to say about
lying. *The Catechism of the Catholic Church* is very specific on its
treatment of the eighth commandment:

>"YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF"

>THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

>You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

>It was said to the men of old, "You shall not swear falsely, but shall
perform to the Lord what you have sworn."

>The eighth commandment forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations
with others. This moral prescription flows from the vocation of the holy
people to bear witness to their God who is the truth and wills the truth.
Offenses against the truth express by word or deed a refusal to commit
oneself to moral uprightness: they are fundamental infidelities to God and,
in this sense, they undermine the foundations of the covenant. ...

>Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear
witness to it: "It is in accordance with their dignity that all men,
because they are persons . . . are both impelled by their nature and bound
by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They
are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct
their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth." ...

>"Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence
that they were being truthful to one another." The virtue of truth gives
another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what
ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty
and discretion. In justice, "as a matter of honor, one man owes it to
another to manifest the truth."...

>Before Pilate, Christ proclaims that he "has come into the world, to bear
witness to the truth." The Christian is not to "be ashamed then of
testifying to our Lord." In situations that require witness to the faith,
the Christian must profess it without equivocation, after the example of
St. Paul before his judges. We must keep "a clear conscience toward God and
toward men."...

Interestingly, this section of the Catechism even confronts martyrdom, and
couches much of the gravity of the sin attached to willfully lying based on
the concept of "charity", which Augie directly mentions in his plea to be
heard:

>Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means
bearing witness even unto death. The martyr bears witness to Christ who
died and rose, to whom he is united by charity. He bears witness to the
truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine. He endures death through an
act of fortitude. "Let me become the food of the beasts, through whom it
will be given me to reach God." ...

>"Neither the pleasures of the world nor the kingdoms of this age will be
of any use to me. It is better for me to die [in order to unite myself] to
Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth. I seek him who died
for us; I desire him who rose for us. My birth is approaching". . .

>Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or
act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. By injuring
man's relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the
fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.

>The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it
deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the
harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial
sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice
and charity.

>By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of
speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to
others. The deliberate intention of leading a neighbor into error by saying
things contrary to the truth constitutes a failure in justice and charity.
The culpability is greater when the intention of deceiving entails the risk
of deadly consequences for those who are led astray.

>Since it violates the virtue of truthfulness, a lie does real violence to
another. It affects his ability to know, which is a condition of every
judgment and decision. It contains the seed of discord and all consequent
evils. Lying is destructive of society; it undermines trust among men and
tears apart the fabric of social relationships.

>Every offense committed against justice and truth entails the duty of
reparation, even if its author has been forgiven. When it is impossible
publicly to make reparation for a wrong, it must be made secretly. If
someone who has suffered harm cannot be directly compensated, he must be
given moral satisfaction in the name of charity. This duty of reparation
also concerns offenses against another's reputation. This reparation, moral
and sometimes material, must be evaluated in terms of the extent of the
damage inflicted. It obliges in conscience....

>Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every
request for information or communication. The good and safety of others,
respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being
silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet
language. .... No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not
have the right to know it.

It appears as though Augie's sin in distorting the truth is mortal because
it lacks the charity he begs our primary narrator for - punishing someone
who has already been punished enough to the final brink of death. Is the
instrument of one man's damnation the same as another's salvation? There is
something transformative and compelling about this concept that might form
the crux of the spiritual conflict in the story. In the same section of the
Catechism, the goal of art is considered, which might be worthwhile in the
positioning of Wolfe as a particularly Catholic artist:

>The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and
moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of
spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself. Truth in words, the
rational expression of the knowledge of created and uncreated reality, is
necessary to man, who is endowed with intellect. But truth can also find
other complementary forms of human expression, above all when it is a
matter of evoking what is beyond words: the depths of the human heart, the
exaltations of the soul, the mystery of God. Even before revealing himself
to man in words of truth, God reveals himself to him through the universal
language of creation, the work of his Word, of his wisdom: the order and
harmony of the cosmos-which both the child and the scientist discover-"from
the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception
of their Creator," "for the author of beauty created them."

>Created "in the image of God," man also expresses the truth of his
relationship with God the Creator by the beauty of his artistic works.
Indeed, art is a distinctively human form of expression; beyond the search
for the necessities of life which is common to all living creatures, art is
a freely given superabundance of the human being's inner riches. Arising
from talent given by the Creator and from man's own effort, art is a form
of practical wisdom, uniting knowledge and skill, to give form to the truth
of reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing. To the extent that
it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to
God's activity in what he has created. Like any other human activity, art
is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the
ultimate end of man.

>Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its
particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the
transcendent mystery of God - the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and
love visible in Christ, who "reflects the glory of God and bears the very
stamp of his nature," in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily."
This spiritual beauty of God is reflected in the most holy Virgin Mother of
God, the angels, and saints. Genuine sacred art draws man to adoration, to
prayer, and to the love of God, Creator and Savior, the Holy One and
Sanctifier.

In any case, all of this can be condensed into the concluding statements of
this section of the Catechism: "Lying consists in saying what is false with
the intention of deceiving one's neighbor. An offense committed against the
truth requires reparation.The golden rule helps one discern, in concrete
situations, whether or not it would be appropriate to reveal the truth to
someone who asks for it."

In light of Saint Augustine's importance to the development of Catholic
Doctrine, it is worthwhile to take a brief look about his basic conclusion
about lying, from his treatise *On Lying/De Mendacio*

>Certain it is, albeit all this disputation go from side to side, some
asserting that it is never right to lie, and to this effect reciting divine
testimonies: others gainsaying, and even in the midst of the very words of
the divine testimonies seeking place for a lie; yet no man can say, that he
finds this either in example or in word of the Scriptures, that any lie
should seem a thing to be loved, or not had in hatred; howbeit sometimes by
telling a lie you must do that you hate, that what is more greatly to be
detested may be avoided. But then here it is that people err; they put the
precious beneath the vile. For when you have granted that some evil is to
be admitted, that another and more grievous may not be admitted; not by the
rule of truth, but by his own cupidity and custom does each measure the
evil, accounting that to be the more grievous, which himself more greatly
dreads, not which is in reality more greatly to be fled from. All this
fault is engendered by perversity of loving. For being there are two lives
of ours; the one eternal, which is promised of God; the other temporal, in
which we now are: when a man shall have begun to love this temporal more
than that eternal, for the sake of this which he loves he thinks all things
right to be done; and there are not any, in his estimation, more grievous
sins than those which do injury to this life, and either take away from it
any commodity unjustly and unlawfully, or by inflicting of death take it
utterly away. ...

>It clearly appears then, all being discussed, that those testimonies of
Scripture have none other meaning than that we must never at all tell a
lie: seeing that not any examples of lies, worthy of imitation, are found
in the manners and actions of the Saints, as regards those Scriptures which
are referred to no figurative signification, such as is the history in the
Acts of the Apostles. For all those sayings of our Lord in the Gospel,
which to more ignorant minds seem lies, are figurative significations. And
as to what the Apostle says: "I am made all things to all men, that I might
gain all;" the right understanding is, that he did this not by lying, but
by sympathy; so that he dealt with them in liberating them with so great
charity, as if he were himself in that evil from which he wished to make
them whole. There must therefore be no lying in the doctrine of piety: it
is a heinous wickedness, and the first sort of detestable lie. There must
be no lying of the second sort; because no man must have a wrong done to
him. There must be no lying of the third sort; because we are not to
consult any man's good to the injury of another. There must be no lying of
the fourth sort, that is, for the lust of lying, which of itself is
vicious. There must be no lying of the fifth sort, because not even the
truth itself is to be uttered with the aim of men-pleasing, how much less a
lie, which of itself, as a lie, is a foul thing? There must be no lying of
the sixth sort; for it is not right that even the truth of testimony be
corrupted for any man's temporal convenience and safety. But unto eternal
salvation none is to be led by aid of a lie. For not by the ill manners of
them that convert him is he to be converted to good manners: because if it
is meet to be done towards him, himself also ought when converted to do it
toward others; and so is he converted not to good, but to ill manners,
seeing that is held out to be imitated by him when converted, which was
done unto him in converting him. Neither in the seventh sort must there be
any lying; for it is meet that not any man's commodity or temporal welfare
be preferred to the perfecting of faith. Not even if any man is so ill
moved by our right deeds as to become worse in his mind, and far more
remote from piety, are right deeds therefore to be foregone: since what we
are chiefly to hold is that whereunto we ought to call and invite them whom
as our own selves we love; and with most courageous mind we must drink in
that apostolic sentence: "To some we are a savor of life unto life, to
others a savor of death unto death; and who is sufficient for these
things?" Nor in the eighth sort must there be lying: because both among
good things chastity of mind is greater than pudicity of body; and among
evil things, that which ourselves do, than that which we suffer to be done.
In these eight kinds, however, a man sins less when he tells a lie, in
proportion as he emerges to the eighth: more, in proportion as he diverges
to the first. But whoso shall think there is any sort of lie that is not
sin, will deceive himself foully, while he deems himself honest as a
deceiver of other men....

>But it is time that we set bounds to this disputation: in the
consideration and treatment whereof altogether there is nothing more meet
to be, before all else, borne in mind and made our prayer, than that which
the same Apostle says: "God is faithful, Who will not suffer you to be
tempted above that you are able to bear, but will with the temptation make
also a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it." ("On Lying (Saint
Augustine)")

##Names

-*Wilhelm Boyd Anton*: His first name means "will" or "desire" and
"protection". Boyd means "blond" or "yellow", and Anton means "worthy of
praise".

-*Augie*: A shortened form of Augustus (or, in this case, possibly
Augustine), Augie can mean "deserving of respect" or "great". Of course St.
Augustine is one of the most influential thinkers and saints in the
formation of the Catholic Church - he helped to standardize the idea of
original sin. [Augustine is also one of the figures which makes the
Catholic Church particularly malleable in the light of scientific
discoveries, viewing Biblical texts as metaphors for truth which do not
necessarily need to be literally true to be valid - this symbolic paradigm
greatly informs the manner in which Wolfe writes and seems to be an
attitude inimical to many Protestant Fundamentalists - in which the Bible
is quite literally inerrant at the factual level. To a symbolist, seven
days could be seven trillion years, or even an instant separated into seven
stages, and Cain a tribe of troglodytes - but still, some numinous way,
*be* Cain.]

-*Father Mike*: The priest at St. Scholastica's, Michael's name means
"poor" and "humble".  St. Scholastica is the patron saint of convulsive
children and nuns, and serves to protect from storms. There was a private
St. Scholastica Academy in Chicago which closed its doors in 2012, but in
this story it sounds more like a parish than a school.

##Unanswered questions

It seems that Wilhelm was "Blessed" in a different reality, but that the
priest thinks he might achieve it in a different way in the reality of this
story. Why can't Augie do something different, armed with the knowledge of
what might damn him, if Wilhelm can become "Blessed" even after a much more
malicious sin? Both would end in the death of another. Is Augie's sin
mortal because of foreknowledge and the intentional nature of his future
action? Does his lie martyr Anton, in the absence of other miracles, to
make him "Blessed"?

If Wilhelm and the girl whom he wronged kiss in heaven, what about
Wilhelm's once mentioned and then forgotten wife and children? What about
them in this reality, let alone in the afterlife? Did he commit his sin in
his youth or later, after he was married and had children?

##Connection with other works

The Arismaspian stories, which deal with the proud reaching for celestial
powers; "Procreation", which confronts a man hubristically creating his own
miniature universe and naming it after himself; "A Fish Story", in which a
man sees a better version of himself going to comfort a dying relative; and
"How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen", in which an author searches for the
past on a remote island and instead finds a priestly specter which he takes
as a sinister omen for his own fate - all of these stories involve a kind
of personal spiritual search that is explicitly allegorical or religious in
nature, and all of them seem to feature a writer or teller of tales who
might be Gene Wolfe himself.  It is clear that these modern, possibly
biographical though still fantastic sketches, are concerned with
*possibilities*.   "The Card" and "A Fish Story" really make this overt, as
if stepping sideways into another universe actually seems possible.  Even
"The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", in which the Wolfe author tried to exert
ultimate control, wound up being a story in which stepping through
different realities, mimetic or not, was actually possible. I believe this
is an outgrowth of Wolfe's spiritual exploration of free will, and is also
a feature of *The Book of the New Sun* with its multiple iterations of
reality.  We cannot change what we have done, but we can change what we
are, and in an infinite universe (in Wolfe's fiction, at least), perhaps
there truly are a multiplicity of paths that were taken, in some mysterious
way.

#Resources

-"Article 8: The Eigth Commandment". *Catechism of the Catholic Church*
2006. Web. 25 April 2015.
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a8.htm

-"On Lying (Saint Augustine)". *New Advent*, Kevin Knight. 2009. Web. 26
April 2015. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1312.htm
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