Enniscorthy Sweeny is introduced as a puzzling figure, often seen as a “spacious bungler” who always had “sufficient room” to work. He was a man both widely “known” and completely misunderstood. Despite many people feeling they grasped his essence without facts, thorough investigators found that the more they learned about him factually, the less they truly knew him.

About half the people in the country knew him spontaneously. They caught the essence of him without factual knowledge, understanding him in a way that did not rely on facts. Their knowledge consisted of a “wooly clutch of facts” that were not correct. Those who winnowed the facts properly found they knew him hardly at all. Paradoxically, the less they knew him, the more they liked him.

A popular idea exists that Sweeny has something “world-wrecking” about him, though there is nothing in the facts or pseudo-facts to support it. Was Enniscorthy Sweeny the man who left the iron door of hell open for world changing and ruination? Or was that door always open, and did he try to close it?

One of the earliest suggestions that Sweeny can alter reality occurs in his boxing match with the heavyweight champion of the world. The setup is a sports reporter’s joke: Sweeny asks if the champ’s timing is off, if his footwork is rusty, if his punches have lost steam. “Get in the ring with me and find out,” the champion dares, three times. And Sweeny accepts.

What follows defies physics. As Sweeny agreed to fight, he “seemed to grow a foot taller”; the narrator leaves the mechanics unexplained. When they squared off, something was “very, very wrong” with the juxtaposition of the two men. The size discrepancy had vanished. The speed differential was even more pronounced: The champion, known for quickness, moved “slow as a sloth” while Sweeny’s hands were “lightning.” Then one lightning movement “flashed out a little bit too far.”

Here reality itself becomes unstable. At first, everyone believed the champion was dead: his skull crushed, his jaw “crumbled-up cardboard,” a length of white jagged bone protruding. Then, two or three seconds later, none of this was true anymore. The injuries receded like a waking dream. The champion opened his eyes and was “all right.” The episode suggests a revision of appearances or reality, although the narrator also invokes optical illusion. Sweeny’s apology is telling: “nine parts repentance” blended with “one part secret delight,” “the rye whisky that flavors it all.” The champion perceives the truth: “You always get a thing when you want it bad enough. Always.” This was a boyhood wish granted, and the world bent to accommodate it. The story passed into “half-legend,” leaving its extraordinary details suspended between report and disbelief. See: The Effector Formulae

Sweeny’s failures are as revealing as his triumphs. As a sportswriter, he committed “howler after howler.” Most notably, he sometimes forgot to mention who won. This wasn’t carelessness. Sweeny believed he could influence outcomes by wishing, so he deliberately suppressed his partisanship. In several cases, he left out the winner because “it really did depend on him.” If he wrote that one side won, that side would have won. So he left the results out, and “the fates, after looking over their shoulders and being certain that he would not interfere, would go ahead and settle the things.”

His business ventures showed the same pattern. He entered a dozen independent businesses (carnival operator, silent filmmaker, automobile manufacturer, art dealer), and each time made money quickly, then experienced “grinding doubt and doldrums,” then sold brilliantly. Only afterward did buyers discover the business was a “shambles.” The explanation: “Ennis could breathe a spirit into a business for a while, and then it would thrive. And then his spirit would go out of it and it would be a hollow hulk.”

Most tellingly, Sweeny was “not a good prophet,” even after the facts. “There was something wrong with his sequence, with his flow of time.” He experienced events as geometric objects viewable from any side: “from the south side (that is the past), or from the east side (that is the present), or from the west side (that is an alternate present), or from the north side (that is the future).” To Sweeny, it “did not matter to him whether a thing had happened yet or not.” His cavalier handling of time later allows him to start six days before the last possible minute when saving his wife from death.

The suspicion that Sweeny was a genius must be “put down firmly, and still more firmly, again and again.” He had too many talents to be a genius: “too much badly focused talent.” He was a “spacious bungler” who “worked approximately in the same medium where other people worked. But where other people were most often straited and restricted, Ennis Sweeny always had plenty of room.” An impresario once said, “Only Enniscorthy Sweeny, certain nations of monsters, some tribes of giants, and the archangels have always sufficient room to work in; and they have this because they bring part of their own space with them.”

Yet consider what he produced. He wrote The Great Depression, a Broadway play “absolutely purgatorial in its power and its passion,” depicting the “coupled hilarity and hellishness of real poverty,” although Sweeny had never been poor or known anyone poor. The play remains “solidly evil and completely cruel. It is totally dishonest. It is consummately depraved. It is completely funny. But surely it has genius.”

Then the Tyrrhene Triptych: Armageddon I, II, and III. “It is possible that Grand Opera was invented, a century and a half before this, to give a mature medium to this great work.” The operas are “great, but horrible”: The laughter contains so much brimstone it “yellows the teeth of all the singers.” Armageddon III, subtitled “What Rotten Blossom Bigger than the World!,” caused ten percent of the opening night audience to “go and destroy themselves.” Sweeny said these works were “scapegoats”: “I did them, and then I drove them out into the wilderness like laden goats. May all the wrath fall upon them and their loads!” But the scapegoat trick backfired: People mistook the facsimiles for reality, and the “Horror-for-the-sake-of-horror” cults grew into millions. See: The Horror of the Silent Radio See: Review of Armageddon II

The suspicion that Sweeny was a saint “required, perhaps, even more putting down” than the genius suspicion. Against his sanctity: his “pursuit and persecution of the few people that he just plain did not like”; his “sometimes excessive grabbiness in money matters”; his “gift of satire and ridicule that stripped away skin and flesh and shattered bones”; and “a ringing half-dozen bawdy ballads” that were “tree-top rotten.” Yet Ennis believed that “anybody who wasn’t a saint had blown it all,” and he never quite blew it himself, “and he never came as close to blowing it as he seemed to.”

But then there are his creations. “Most demons would draw back from them in repugnance.” They are “crammed with ravening superevils.” “Only two persons in all the universes could have composed anything like the Tyrrhene Triptych: the Devil, and Enniscorthy Sweeny. And we are not so sure about the Devil; he just hasn’t the musical or dramatical or cosmic sophistication to bring it to such a level.”

The scapegoat theory offers one explanation of this paradox. Sweeny’s coat of arms contains the Man, the Goat, the Cuttlefish, and the Mushroom Patch, and the Goat is the scapegoat, the sin-carrier. Sweeny claimed his horrifying works were scapegoats driven into the wilderness to carry away the world’s potential sins. “If these things may pass from us, oh Lord, let them pass!” Whether they prevented catastrophe or created it remains the central question. “In spite of his being an usher for all the hellish things, in spite of (on the other hand) his being the kindest person in the world, he didn’t blow it either way. There is surely a mistake somewhere, and maybe he should be given the benefit of the confusion.”

“Enniscorthy Sweeny married the most beautiful and most desired woman in the world.” This was not poetic license: It was literally true, and Sweeny had made it so. “What was a lout like Sweeny doing marrying the most beautiful and the most desired woman in the world?” He explained there were two stages: “Wanting her to be that way. Making her to be the most beautiful and desired woman in the world, that was the first. And then to have her for wife when she was that way, that was the second.”

Mary Margaret McGronsky had been a freckled, pleasant, full-bodied girl before her sudden “prodigious flowering” in her nineteenth year. The neighborhood on West Blackwater Street, where people grew roses and daughters with equal care, understood instantly that “that grinning and gangling red-faced kid, Enniscorthy Sweeny, had brought it about and would continue to bring it about.” He did, for all the rest of her life.

This was not metaphor. A German artist, “one of the greatest artists in the world,” saw “the gegenschein of Mary Margaret from a quarter of the way around the world” and came directly to Blackwater Street, where he stood before her gate and wept. When later she demanded he make her the best opera singer in the world (an impossible feat, harder to fake than beauty), Sweeny warned it might diminish his remaining great works. “Yes, it will,” she said. “But do this for me now.” He did. “Enniscorthy Sweeny, in a manner not at all understood, did bring it about that Mary Margaret McGronsky became the best opera singer in the world ever, in the times that have been, and are, and will be.” Tampering with reality was what was going on.

Being the most beautiful and desired woman in the world has “grievous dangers,” especially when combined with great operatic fame. Five years after her flowering, Mary Margaret had “come down to the reeking bottom of it all.” She was “a burning brand in a noxious fire. She cursed the world and its Lord, and she slipped fatal crystals under her tongue. Then all her flesh crawled with living fire.”

An ocean separated them. No scheduled flights crossed it then, and the fastest ship took five days. Yet Sweeny could “still obtain anything or do anything that he wanted to enough. He did it by his always cavalier handling of time.” He looked at the problem from all sides at once “and took action when the crisis was still to the future for him. So he started six days before the last possible minute.” He snatched her “as a burning brand out of that final fire.” The smell of scorched flesh was real.

After a month of perfection, Sweeny found something “baroque or lop-sided” about it, “on too slight a scale.” So he arranged a trade: “Mary Margaret gave up one part in nine of her bodily beauty and received the equivalent of it in wisdom.” The exchange was literal, transactional, real. She was still, for a while, the most beautiful woman in the world, “but now it was possible that a more beautiful woman might come along. For five years there, that hadn’t been possible.” The narrator describes another sixty-five years of almost perfect amity and pleasure. One of the few returns of the smoke and scorching flesh comes when she sings the damnation role in Armageddon I.

“When Enniscorthy Sweeny was twelve years old he had gone into the Temple to preach. And all who heard him were amazed by his wisdom and understanding.” The Temple was St. Malachy’s Church, a block off Blackwater Street. Ennis was precocious; the other high schoolers were fourteen. At a religious retreat, when the Passionist priest asked if any would speak, Ennis came forward “with a suddenness that was like a tidy spate.”

At first, it was wisdom. “He spoke powerfully and mysteriously.” The nuns were amazed: “He has always spent all of his time looking out of the windows and he never hears when a question is asked him.” One Passionist said, “He is like the young Christ in the Temple.” Another asked, “But would a young Christ be chomping on chewing gum while he poured out his wisdom?”

Then something changed. His wisdom “seemed to be replaced by a hectic sort of power and an ill-balanced rapture.” He became a gawk, a hang-dog clown, an elemental with “trappings of elsewhere on him.” He performed poltergeistic feats: “He caused little birds to fly about in the air and then to explode like firecrackers.” He pointed to the church clock and commanded “Vade Rursum!” and it ran backwards through twenty-four hours. “This is the day that the Angel has stolen,” he announced. “I have stolen a day from the world and hid it.” The retreat master hauled him down, reprimanded him, whacked him thrice. “A twelve-year-old boy, and he had begun to set the world to quaking.”

In November 1910, Doctor Henry Devonian published “Effector Formulae Governing Time and Consensus-Time, with Emphasis on the Saecula Unit” in Mathematics and Cosmology. The interested gentry dismiss it as old, invoking earlier philosophers, but the narrator insists that Devonian’s equations are new and that many of his critics cannot follow them.

Wimbish McDearmott explains this novelty through an analogy with stellar parallax. In his account, Galileo claimed observations that his instruments could not support. McDearmott’s point is that an idea can be suspected long before the equipment exists to establish it. The alleged Galileo episode belongs to McDearmott’s argument within the novel.

McDearmott proposes a biological mutation behind the recent leap in mathematical understanding; Quartermas says he can feel it in himself. Devonian warns that the full implications of his equations could destroy them in about three-quarters of a century unless counteracted. Facing the article is Matthew Woodbine Senior’s optical-illusion drawing: a cherubic boy with a peeling nose who can also appear to be the end of a monstrous tentacle.

Devonian’s formulae revealed that each “Consensus-Time” (each era or saeculum) is mathematically predicated on a single individual. This “One Individual Crux” is not a metaphor but “a mathematical necessity.” He claimed to have identified such pivot-individuals for eight past eras, each “paramount to all happenings in that consensus-time.” Without this person, “there would have been no times and no happenings at all.”

The implications are terrifying: “If the single key individual is withdrawn from the master equation of a particular time, then that equation will collapse, and that time will collapse with it.” There are “apparent vestiges of such lost times or eras that were somehow voided of happenings and so became nonexistent.” Entire histories erased when their crux was removed.

For the present Golden Century, Devonian believed it was either the time of the Parousia (the Second Coming, “the Time of the Final Things, which however will be a continuing final”) or else “the horrifying and hellish reverse-coming, of the Second Coming of the Powers of Hell.” Quartermas proposes attaching amnestic corollaries to the dangerous equations. Devonian, meanwhile, insists that he has included God: as the thirty-seventh element of the General Equation and the forty-fourth of the Particular or Special Equation.

The “Particular Equation” allowed the mathematicians to solve for “the location and the name of the ‘Crux-Individual’ who is the key to our era.” The answer: “a certain sixteen-year-old boy” who “does represent a chasm opening under our feet and plunging us into bottomless—well, oblivion, if we are so fortunate.” His “damned vision” was “clustered about three smoking and spewing mountains, each of them deeper and more sulphurous than the previous one.”

Devonian would name him only privately, to “really interested persons”: “His blood be not upon my hands!” Three Chicago mathematicians (Wimbish McDearmott, Alistar Grogg, and Elton Quartermas) didn’t need to write. They solved the equation themselves. “However the answer was got, it was always the same answer. It was a boy named Enniscorthy Sweeny on West Blackwater Street in Chicago.”

The mathematics revealed something worse: “This boy can make anything whatsoever happen if he desires it strongly enough.” But does he want the abominations? “He protests, over and over again, on his very soul, that he doesn’t. But the relentless mathematics indicate that perhaps he does.” Alistar Grogg explained how shadows work: “Coming events may cast their shadows before them,” Grogg says. His analogy requires a light source on the far side of those coming events. The event grows from its shadow: A ghost of an event can be made solid through the command “Fiat solidus.” Sweeny was saying that incantation for the worst events imaginable.

“Conspiracy, conspiracy! Can good men join in a conspiracy to effect an evil on the chance that it might preclude a greater evil?” The three mathematicians met at the Rotating Vector, an all-night restaurant and piano bar and pool hall where “foundry men, packinghouse workers, pattern makers, printers, sewing-machine girls, railroad men, dray men, police detectives, hotel porters, piano players, livery stable workers, scrub women, and mathematicians” came for “beans and beer, and cigars and conspiracy.”

The murder would be easy. Sweeny rose before dawn to load his ice wagon; the ice house was a block and a half from the Rotating Vector’s back door. “There was always a lot of noise and not very much light in that little half alley.” An ice pick through the ear: It could look accidental. “I hate to kill a young and innocent boy,” Grogg admitted, “and I’m equally reluctant to be killed in turn.”

That reluctance was prophetic. The equations contained the “Protect-Our-Own” corollary, and there existed an organization, “probably unnatural or unhuman,” that might as well be called “Friends of the Catastrophes.” Before they could act, a woman entered the Rotating Vector and shot Alistar Grogg through the head. “Did it hurt you?” someone asked. “Yes. It killed me,” Grogg said, gave a little jerk, and was dead. “It was predictable. It was implicit in the data of the ‘Particular Equation.’” The death fits the corollary, though the woman herself says nothing about belonging to that organization. McDearmott and Quartermas survived, “but they were frightened and confused for the while, perhaps for a year. But they still knew what they had to do. They had to kill the dreamer named Enniscorthy before he dreamed the end of the World.” See: Branagan’s Assignment

This letter was written “after November 1916 when Franz Ferdinand became Emperor,” a date that reveals the story’s alternate timeline. The Archduke who was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, triggering World War I, is here alive and ruling. The Emperor summoned Sweeny to Vienna during performances of Armageddon I at the Burgtheater.

The Emperor calls himself the “Contingent Emperor,” the “Caretaker Emperor,” the “Emperor of the Second Version.” He knows why: “Because you, American Opera Maker, were the first one to think of me in these ways, on your road to thinking of me in still another way.” Sweeny’s opera contains the Emperor’s private nightmares, including his assassination, presented as operatic history. “How did you know that these things would happen? They will not happen, but how did you know that they would?”

The Emperor confesses he did not go to Bosnia in July of “that year” because those nightmares “made a coward out of me.” But Sweeny’s opera is attacking: “your ‘First Version’ is on the attack. It is already occupying low-lying areas in many minds.” The Emperor insists the crux time is “two and a half years in the past, and I am still alive and well.” Sweeny replies: “You are alive and ill,” followed by the question: “Who are you, Emperor, to say that a road can run only one way?” Time can run backwards. “Many a man has died during a flashback. And no Emperor is ever safe. ‘Being Safe’ is the opposite of ‘Being Emperor.’” See: The Good Years and the Silent Radio

Written around 1907 to “My Dear Pumpkin Seed” (probably Mary Margaret), this letter describes “the greatest game that I ever played” and demonstrates how completely Sweeny could bend reality to his wishes. Playing baseball in Blue Island, Illinois, Sweeny achieved the impossible: a grand slam bunt.

First, he had to arrange the proper conditions. Though his team allowed no hits or walks, he manipulated events so Blue Island scored three runs on “the damnedest errors,” setting up a bases-loaded situation in the ninth. He needed four runs to win with something better than a grand slam home run. His own towering hits were kept from being homers by “flukes”: One hit a kite above the fence, got tangled, and drifted back in bounds; another hit a chicken hawk, both dropping back into play.

Then came the bunt down the third base line. A yellow jacket, whose origin Sweeny teasingly leaves unstated, stung the first baseman on the nose, causing him to cross his eyes. The ball hit his head, knocked him cold, and bounced high toward second. Runs poured in. Sweeny scores standing up. Eight opposing players have been injured, and the right fielder and substitutes refuse to bat in the last half of the ninth. Sweeny declares the feat unique. This was not luck. This was Sweeny wanting something “bad enough” and reality complying.

Written around 1911 to a police sergeant friend, this letter records Sweeny’s confrontation with one of his would-be assassins. Sweeny describes Quartermas following and spying on him. When confronted at the Rotating Vector, Quartermas was direct: “I want you dead.”

“Why?” Sweeny asked. “Your dreams are disrupting the world and they are a danger to humanity.” Quartermas says Sweeny either cannot be trusted to stop or cannot stop himself; death is his proposed remedy. Quartermas knows disturbing details of work that Sweeny has not yet made public.

More disturbing: Quartermas knew things from the Armageddon I libretto “that I have not put on paper yet, things that I have not put into words yet but only into music in my mind; he even knows some things of mine that I haven’t thought of yet.” Sweeny realizes: “I believe that if computers were sufficiently well advanced, the whole sequence of the Three Armageddons could be constructed from the mathematics for this time . . . But, now I understand it, computers are sufficiently well advanced. I am such a computer and I am being used for this.”

Written around 1913 to “Moneybags,” this letter reveals Sweeny’s experiments with alternate reality tracks and his discovery that others know about them too. He’d been making money with a “notion”: withdrawing money from an account in one track and depositing it in his equivalent account on this track. He imagines the withdrawal disappearing from the account while the deposit remains.

Moneybags’s father, a banker, had once offered Sweeny a job as a “bank messenger,” but not the ordinary kind. When Sweeny hesitated, the father said: “You’re smart, you’re smart, but you’re not exactly on-the-money smart . . . How can you know so much and guess so little, Ennis?” Moneybags himself had once asked Sweeny to return a letter because “the letterhead was wrong”: It was from “a different track that hasn’t even got this far yet and won’t pass quite by here when it does.”

Sweeny wonders: “What if I work at four different jobs in four different tracks at the same time, and find a way to have all the money come into this track?” The letter suggests an economy of multi-track manipulation that Sweeny is only beginning to understand. He suspects the banking family knows more, but admits that his own schemes keep losing much of their apparent profit.

Written around 1911 to “My Dear Charles,” this letter describes the composition of Armageddon I and reveals that others could hear the music before it was written. Sweeny has finished the first part of his Triptych: “It is wonderful! It is horrible!” He composed it “with a completely detached mind” in his soundproof loft on Loftus Street, without instruments, as pure mental music.

A “grubby genius” orchestrator came to him, having listened to the opera “night after night” in his own mind. He needed a piece of “the snake that twists clear around the world.” This man knew section names Sweeny had only named in his mind, including “The August 1914 Tonalities.” The music seems to reach listeners before they have seen the manuscript, and some sections are known before Sweeny has written them.

The horror of the work is physical: Sweeny wonders “why it does not burst into flames at every movement of it. And sometimes it does.” The paper sheets literally burn. And the work attracts followers: “There are people, some of them young and some of them not so young, who can hardly wait for your next blood-and-fire dream. They are turned in on you and your contrived futures.” The “Horror-for-the-sake-of-horror” cults were forming around an opera not yet performed.

This letter to “Strongheart,” written after January 1919, records what Sweeny calls “my first real failure in the arts.” His comedy Prohibition, a Farce opened at Stabler’s Theatre in New York on January 29, 1919 and closed two nights later. “This hurts me everywhere, in spirit and body and money.”

But Sweeny insists the play wasn’t actually a failure; it was a misunderstanding. He still believes it a very funny comedy. The comedy had an unexpected effect: “The comedy made most of the people who watched it want to run out and get a drink right now.” Sweeny had operated a “Lobby Bar” during those three nights and “did a fantastic business.” But the audiences fled the theater before the first act ended, not because the play was bad, but because it made them desperately thirsty.

The play was a sellout all three nights. “The happy customers who went out and got pickled in the Lobby Bar were truly pleased about the whole thing.” But Sweeny’s backers saw empty seats and closed the show. The effect Sweeny intended has overwhelmed the performance: His spectators become customers at his bar, and his backers close the play despite its sellout audiences.

“A world does not build itself. It is built. It is built knowingly by intelligent persons.” This essay, written for Architecture and Prototype in November 1916, is Sweeny’s cosmogony, his account of how worlds come into being. It begins on a bare globe: “rock earth, slippery shale-in-formation, mud-earth. And jagged diamond-scattered earth. There are ghosts, but no organisms yet.”

Then come the footfalls of Panther: “Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal.” He is “the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge,” the “composite” and “generating force,” the “red-clay which is clay-flesh.” He is also the Dream-Master: “It belches the dreams out of its stomach and they battle for supremacy, whether they shall survive as ‘Worlds,’ or not survive at all.” Panther denies he is a creature: “My belched dreams become creatures as soon as they acquire flesh, but I am a pre-creature.”

Sweeny notes that “at the present time there is a twelve year old boy in Figueras in Spain who paints this topos, this floor of the unformed and the unconscious every day,” a reference to the young Salvador Dalí. The boy paints flat panthers and bearcats “draped limply over the folded and stepped flatness of the land,” their proto-dreams flying through the air with “vulture heads and bat-wings.” This is the primordial arena where worlds are constructed.

Sweeny describes himself as “a newly born or newly wakened worker in these quarries and clay-pits and dream-bogs and new-greening botanical gardens.” He has been set to work by an impulse and a command: “Make Facsimiles!” But the beings around him (“demiurges and archangels and underground-born gnomes”) are all making originals.

A debate ensues about the nature of his work. “A facsimile is always a lie,” says a Tyrrhene-faced demiurge. A troll counters: “This person is supposed to make dreadful facsimiles to ward off dreadful realities. Let him do it! The dreadful reality will come and see the facsimile of itself and say ‘But that is myself. I am already here. There is no purpose in my being here twice.’ Then he will go away.”

But a Para-Angelos gives the darker interpretation: “The dreadful facsimile that this person makes will not ward off a dreadful reality. It will be the origin of that reality. It will be the invention of it. It will turn into that dreadful reality that will gobble up the world.” The facsimile escapes destruction during its vulnerable period by pretending to be merely a scarecrow. “Then, when it is too big to be killed, it kills.” Sweeny asks what he should do. “You have your orders,” they tell him. “Make them then, and be blessed,” says a giant. “Make them then and be damned,” says a dwarf. See: Confessions and Compulsion

“Notions are the beginnings of trends, and these are the small capillary and the great capillary roots and root-veins of new worlds.” Notions are formed by “deliberate and studied connivance,” but “the mystery is how a notion is communicated. Apparently it is sown on the air.” Sweeny claims to be “a master at broadcasting notions, but my theory lags behind my practice.”

He gives an example: A doughnut baker can communicate to his neighborhood that Bear-Claws will be a drag today but Apple-Fritters will be excellent, even when he’s short on Bear-Claws and his Apple-Fritters are underbaked. This is “paramount in every sort of merchandising. It is the basic inventory control.”

But the darker form is the boycott, “that hell-stroke . . . the crudest form of notion-creating.” It is “the notion-made-flesh, but it is always a cancerous flesh. There has never been a good boycott.” Three devils in human skins may speak six words each, and a person is ruined. Twelve words each, and an abomination is elevated. “Nay, the words in neither case need to be spoken at all. They can be merely thought.” Sweeny asks the terrible question: “Am I one of the Boycotters? Am I a devil in human skin?”

This is the most disturbing demonstration of Sweeny’s power. He had a friend named Skantling “who had the lower part of his face slightly broader than the upper part.” The disproportion was “so slight that nobody noticed it.” Sweeny decided to change that.

He photographed Skantling, enlarged the image, hatched it off in small squares, made measurements of the ratios. Then he drew caricatures showing the lower face “very much broader” than reality and left them around the newspaper offices where both worked. “People who knew my friend (his name was Skantling) looked at the caricatures and said ‘What the Hell?’ But they had looked at them.” Their looking “became an activating act.”

Over nine days, Sweeny escalated. He added captions like “Skow-Jaw Skantling wanted for Megagnathis.” And Skantling’s face changed. “the two pictures, there was quite a difference in them,” but also the original picture had changed. The notations didn’t match anymore. Reality was retroactively altering to conform to the caricature. “Who had worked this change in my former friend? Myself? I suppose so. Was it real? It was real enough that it ruined him.” Sweeny concludes: “I believe that I have also been deforming certain events in the world. I make them broader here and narrower there. I deform them out of recognition.”

Sweeny doesn’t call himself a creator, but the name for his type of craftsman, “skaber,” was given by “the same cloudy voice” that commanded “Make Facsimiles.” He only recently learned that “skaber” is Scandinavian for “Creator.” And he recalls that the voice giving his orders had a Scandinavian accent.

Sweeny wonders whether his fictions concern only the end of the Norse gods’ world, and whether that Norse ending might itself be a protective fiction shielding the universal ending. He suspects a Norse god or demiurge behind his orders, but admits that he is not included in the planning.

This is both terrifying and oddly hopeful: If the catastrophe can be channeled into one cultural form, perhaps it can be contained. Perhaps the facsimile absorbs what would otherwise be universal. Or perhaps the Norse version simply determines the aesthetic of the end, the flavor of the brimstone.

Sweeny asks what authority permits changes in the structure of the world. His answer ranges from slight authority to faked authority or none, provided the change is asserted confidently. An honored medieval annalist labels the next year 683 again; his colleagues defer to him. The repeated year acquires successive versions associated with the Goose, Goat, Cuttlefish, and Mushrooms.

The editor of Architecture and Prototype wants Sweeny’s essay handled with moleskin gloves, degaussed, insulated with irony, and printed under Illuminations on the Lighter Side. Sweeny replies that a “Surly Shaper” stands behind the designate-shapers and is not laughing.

Sweeny also hides “hammers,” advantages held in reserve against catastrophe. He inserts conditions into the continuities so that disasters cannot happen without other events first being made to happen or unhappen. His example is Hiram Johnson’s election in 1912: How can a completed election be undone? These are attempted safeguards, and their success remains uncertain. See: The Days That Delayed

“These are the Good Years, this is the Golden Century, these are the Diamond Decades.” Written in February 1924 for Psychosis and Metampsychosis, The Magazine of the Troubled, Sweeny’s essay celebrates peace, prosperity, and a youthfulness that seems to belong to everyone, regardless of age.

Silent Radio is an inward counterpart to the Magic Lantern and Silent Movies. Sweeny recalls that people always knew movies would not remain silent and that radio would eventually talk. The Silent Radio he describes sounds to the inner ear and accompanies life with a drama whose events need not be classified as either actual or imagined.

“It’s the magic emanation and broadcasting of the perennial indwelling drama.” The medium includes the ordinary pleasures and conjugal happiness of the Golden Century, as well as the horror that increasingly occupies its private and collective broadcasts.

Sweeny’s praise of the Golden Century coexists with personal torment: a red dragon in his entrails, a thorn in his flesh, a sword hanging over his head, and assassins around the corners. The thorn recalls Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 12:7; the suspended sword evokes the story of Damocles.

The admirer of Gary’s industrial smoke is Sweeny’s old neighbor, who takes streetcars to South Chicago and Gary to admire the mills. “Oh the Holy Smoke of the Chimneys of Gary!” is the neighbor’s cry. Sweeny extends the joke into an argument for cleaning and undamning the mills while preserving their productive life.

“Smoke is a chemical reaction considered as life experience.” The passage asks for less cinder content without throttling the mills. Its comic enthusiasm for rough, inhabited prosperity contrasts with the destructive fires of the Armageddon visions.

Sweeny identifies two errors in constructing utopias: a bloody ascent whose victims and violence haunt the achievement, and a perfection so grand that people feel strange in it, preserve it as a showplace, and camp outside.

His alternative is to plant the utopia in a third, favorable but imperfect place and proclaim “Utopia if we can keep it.” The proclamation of the Almost Perfect State helps bring it into actuality. This is a worked and inhabited world, full of mills, towns, farms, noise, and roughness.

Its survival is conditional. Sweeny’s repeated insistence that they have arrived at utopia if they do not lose it connects the exuberant account of the Golden Century to the threatening visions on the Silent Radio.

“Why is the silent radio, on some bands of it, always playing horror drama after horror drama?” Its daily horror hours have expanded to as much as three hundred minutes. Private scenarios resemble one another because they also belong to the group unconscious.

Sweeny recalls a childhood neighbor whose invented snakes became increasingly dangerous until one swallowed its maker. Sweeny began making three figurative snakes of his own that day. The second would be nine times as large as the first; the third, eighty-one times as large.

These snakes are his operas. In 1924 he has completed one nonsilent Armageddon opera and is occupied with two others. The first is light-hearted, satirical, and full of anachronistic cannons; the Silent Radio versions are much more horrifying. Sweeny describes them swallowing the world as the boy’s snake swallowed its maker, turning an alleged purgative into a possible source of destruction.

Sweeny’s long catalogue includes the Marne, Verdun, Ypres, Tannenberg, Jutland, Tsingtao, the Isonzo battles, and many other recognizable First World War locations. He calls them actions on the battleground of the group unconscious, while the league cultists insist that the battles actually happened within the previous ten years.

Sweeny claims to have devised the fictional battle names, yet acknowledges that real places bear them. His question is where he obtained them. The passage stages a conflict between his account of invented war and other people’s memories of lived war.

The horror culminates in the aftermath: faces that no longer seem human and a medium that cannot be switched off. “The silent radio has its bad hours. I cannot turn it off. It has no knobs, and I have no hands.”

This chronology spans Sweeny’s birth in 1894 and his death in 1984. Its introduction describes an arrangement of creative influences, world-arranging events, and works. It excludes the Armageddon Variant except for Sweeny’s own creations, claiming that the excluded history has no regular chronology.

The entries mix recognizable publications and discoveries with fictional people and divergent events. Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts is Sweeny’s first reading; Wells’s The War of the Worlds is his second. “The August 1914 Tonalities” appears under 1912, Armageddon I under 1916, and The Great Depression, with its thirteen-year run, under 1929.

Art and world history occupy the same list. The selection invites readers to consider how works help shape a world, without resolving whether Sweeny invents, anticipates, channels, or tries to prevent its catastrophes.

The alternate history becomes explicit in the political entries. Presidents of the United States include Harold Standpipe (who visited seven-year-old Sweeny), Hiram Johnson, Alfred Smith, Bernard Baruch, and Douglas MacArthur, none of whom held that office in our timeline. The technological achievements accelerate impossibly: atomic power conversion by 1940, moon landing in 1961, Mars landing in 1973, Jupiter landing in 1975, Pluto landing in 1977.

Most telling: The 1956 entry records that the U.S. armed forces were disbanded “as no longer needed.” The entry presents peace as sufficiently secure to make armed forces unnecessary. But the chronology also records Armageddon II opening simultaneously in twelve world capitals in 1939, the year World War II began in our reality. The opera depicting the second phase of apocalypse premieres precisely when that apocalypse would have occurred.

The timeline blends real cultural achievements (Wright brothers, Einstein, Gershwin) with Sweeny’s creations, suggesting that his operas are as historically significant as the theory of relativity. In this consensus-time, art shapes reality as directly as science or war.

The chronology’s gaps prepare for Woodbine’s discussion of ambiguities in section VII, where extra outlines and competing answers become features of the world’s sciences and histories.

The Empty Years passage says that from 1964 to 1972 no train of events held majority acceptance. Yet the list still records presidential elections in 1964, 1968, and 1972. Its claim that nothing happened concerns the failure of consensus; it does not simply erase every entry or prove that time itself ceased.

The armed forces are reinstituted in 1983, a year some say was repeated several times. Four entries appear under 1984: Agnes Klingle’s election, Sweeny’s death, the production of Armageddon III at the Megiddo Amphitheater, and “The Situation Worsens.” section XI separately places the opera’s first, secret presentation on the longest day of 1983. The accounts should remain distinct within this unstable chronology.

Matthew Woodbine Junior, publisher of the small Holystone Press, writes this pamphlet in summer 1938 about his experience with a group called the “Armageddors,” or more properly, the World Peace League. He joined a chapter not in his own town of Hicksville but in neighboring Mineola, where he was less well known, fearing the association would hurt his business.

What he found surprised him. The members were “intelligent, sane, informed, and deeply concerned,” not the fanatics he expected. They believed that “the first of the three phases of Horrible Armageddon had already happened, not anciently but quite recently, within the last quarter of a century,” and that “the world was now in desolation and ruin as the aftermath of that Armageddon I.” Their version of events aligned precisely with the libretto of Sweeny’s opera, though none had read it, and few had seen the performance.

The League claims a million active members who believe the fictional war is real and ongoing. They speak of Czechoslovakia as a country and Transylvania as a province as if these places existed. They insist that what everyone else calls peace is actually the devastation following apocalypse. The question Woodbine cannot shake: What if they’re right?

Woodbine calls Devonian’s work a mathematical spoof, but he and his father helped develop it and he still acknowledges its coherence and force. The equations are nonexclusive: Their validity need not exclude other, contrary equations. Sweeny checks and cross-checks as the Crux-Individual. A goat in Turkestan, a cuttlefish in the mid-Pacific, and an Arizona mushroom complex fail the rationality cross-check. See: The One Individual Crux

Woodbine suspects an intrusion by one of the incorporeal devils, whose theoretical mathematics exceeds human competence. He estimates their number at about three hundred billion and writes: “They are the devils, and every devil is a master mathematician.” Four mathematicians who tracked down the particular intruder died when their brains exploded.

Woodbine quotes Devonian: “Two Universes may exist simultaneously in the same place, if one of them is a Fortean Universe.” This permits competing versions to coexist within the novel’s speculative mathematics. It does not identify one stable, unquestioned world from which every other version is merely derived.

Woodbine’s central ambiguity is simultaneous peace and prosperity and a world experiencing three-headed Armageddon. Even a version inhabited by only one person remains, in his argument, a living and authentic version with a chance of becoming the only one.

His examples include devils who believe they won the first cosmic conflict and Titans who believe they defeated the Olympians. Mathematical theory, he says, indicates separations rather than deciding who won. Amnesia suppresses awareness of incompatible histories without forcing those histories out of being.

Woodbine also attacks the World-Wide War’s supposed technology as obsolete or borrowed from old fiction. This is his polemic against the war believers, not an independent historical verdict. His account of multiple histories makes his own confidence difficult to sustain: Remembering a war may be recovery from amnesia or entry into delusion.

More than a thousand rough drafts of confessions exist in Sweeny’s archives, written preparations for his regular sacramental confessions. These reveal a man trapped between opposing forces, uncertain whether his art saves or damns the world.

Sweeny confesses the “sin of unhappiness,” “willful to a strange and unremitting degree.” His confessors are puzzled: How can unhappiness be a sin? But Sweeny insists it is, in his case. He also confesses to “speculations that may be unlawful and harmful.” One inner voice tells him these speculations are “meretricious catharses,” false purgatives that release tension from the world, preventing catastrophe by depicting it. Another voice says the contrary: His visions create catastrophe rather than prevent it.

He is caught between two groups who will kill him. The mathematicians (McDearmott, Quartermas, their successors) will kill him if he continues producing apocalyptic visions. The marshals (Mosco, Tosco, and Rosco, agents of something demonic) will kill him if he stops. He is “fire-ant driven,” compelled by forces he cannot identify to continue work whose moral status he cannot determine. The opposed instructions recall the blessing and condemnation attached to his task in section IV.

Writing around 1927 or 1928 to Strongheart, Sweeny explains his need for $6,000 a month in protection. He is “up to my hairy ears in private detectives and operators.” His honesty, and with it his life, is challenged by what seems a shift or clouding of cosmic categories.

He pays six detectives $1,000 each per month while he lives. He describes them as the generals of six small armies and gives the group the code name Sextus. Three guard him against Grogg, McDearmott, and Quartermas; the other three against Marshals Mosco, Tosco, and Rosco. See: Captain Nemo’s Assignment

The Marshals say their invisible iron collar turns away death blows but can also contract and garrote him. Its spikes leave wounds that Strongheart has seen. These Friends-of-the-Catastrophes protect Sweeny while he follows their implanted timetable and threaten him if he tries to stop. He finances the protection while preparing The Great Depression and seeking publication for Secret Agents Six.

Sweeny’s letter to Pope Kirol I was probably written around 1932. The narrator questions whether it was sent and whether the papal letter it answers ever existed outside Sweeny’s imagination. A papal file records a letter to him, but the record alone does not establish its contents.

In Sweeny’s quotation of the Pope, Kirol credits him with his rise and predicts “the rise and fall of many in Terra Extensa.” Sweeny recalls President Harold Standpipe making a similar declaration when he was seven. He is unsure whether he brought Kirol to office, but claims responsibility for making him choose Kirol rather than Pius to escape a numerological trap.

The Pope’s reported encyclical exposes the rat-killer who promises to dispel rats through art but conceals a rat’s tail: He is really their king. Sweeny accepts the force of this attack on artistic sublimation, then asks whether Kirol realizes that he too may prove to be one of Sweeny’s fictions. The exchange tests both the claimed protection of art and the authority that would forbid its disasters.

Around 1929, Sweeny writes to Captain Nemo about memories or pseudo-memories of service in the World-Wide War. Nemo uses “doughboy,” a word Sweeny claims to have invented for Armageddon I, although Nemo says he has not seen the opera. See: Captain Nemo’s Identity Crisis

Sweeny admits that cults borrow his terminology, but his analyst estimates that his own visions may account for no more than five percent of the war material in the group unconscious. Sweeny then confesses his own overpowering memories of being a doughboy, which he says do not follow the same track as the opera.

The analyst urges them to remember the war even if it did not happen, lest they repeat it nine times over. They must consciously know it did not happen while remembering on a deeper level that it did. The warning keeps both prospective and retrospective catastrophe in play.

Written from Europe around 1936, this letter to Mary Margaret reveals that even Sweeny’s wife has developed pseudo-memories of the fictional war. “You are a crimson-hearted joker . . . don’t drop those shoes that hard! Your last letter to me shook me.”

Several times a year for two dozen years, she has shocked him with “artless, throw-away remarks” about things that never happened. This time she mentioned receiving a letter from him “nineteen years ago” when he was promoted to corporal, during time he supposedly spent in Epernay, France. Sweeny insists that they were together in Chicago that year, as well as the year before and after.

But the psychological necessity is clear: They must remember the Great War as a vivid warning, both to prevent its recurrence and to prevent its having happened in the first place. They must also remember it wasn’t real. Both memories must coexist. “Preserve us in our distinction this day!” The distinction between what happened and what didn’t is becoming harder to maintain, even for the man who created the fiction in the first place.

Branagan is chosen by Shamus Salina, the multilist, saltwater basic computer that matches detectives to assignments. His credentials include police work, occult study, work in asylums, and handling the troublesome newly dead in mortuaries. His assignment is to protect Sweeny from Alistar Grogg. See: Alistar Grogg’s Death

Grogg’s ghost drives Sweeny toward self-destruction, especially in a belt around his grave. Sweeny proposes testing for an eye-of-the-hurricane effect. Once they discover safety close to the grave, they move Grogg’s bones to Sweeny’s house, where Sweeny wires them into a skeleton.

Together Sweeny and Branagan develop a portable version. After eight failures, the ninth locket works: Shavings from every bone, some plasmic essence, and Branagan’s written charms keep Sweeny safely within Grogg’s close-range influence. This remains a holding action requiring daily vigilance, not a final defeat of the ghost.

Sweeny makes Grogg’s skeleton the first member of the Royal Assassins-and-Detectives Club and adds himself and Branagan. Over time the six detectives and their six targets become a household company with Sweeny, watching, threatening, defending, and playing games with one another.

Sweeny suspects that each detective might be the very assassin he guards against, as in Secret Agents Six. Branagan objects: How could he be Grogg when the skeleton sits across the table? “How indeed?” replies Grogg’s blue plasmic brain. Mary Margaret later finds the two increasingly hard to distinguish.

A second possibility is that the six detectives are one person. Flanagan eventually reports their merging as Sextus, the Six-Pack, but describes Sextus variously as a wraith, an embodied caricature, and perhaps Cyrus Manhunt. Sextus himself goes further, claiming to subsume the assassins, Marshals, World, and Devil. These shifting accounts complicate any simple merger.

Captain Nemo’s report begins around 1920. His assignment is to protect Sweeny from Marshal Mosco’s murderous kindness. Nemo suspects that he is a nonorganic web person; his memories are scrubbed between assignments, and he wonders whether Shamus Salina invented him.

Sweeny calls Nemo one of his fictions, and Nemo returns the claim. Yet Nemo has practical abilities that Sweeny lacks: He can see the invisible collar and Mosco’s vulnerable genes. He finally mutates Mosco into a kalo pisicho, subsequently described as a large black tomcat.

The Marshals threaten Sweeny with continued life as well as torture: He must keep supplying Armageddon scripts and may die only after everyone else has died in the catastrophes. Nemo’s mutation diverts Mosco’s violence into caterwauling, although Nemo remains terrified of him.

Nemo describes a nightmare in which warnings cannot be heard. Remo suggests that they are all Sweeny’s fictions, arranged around his private conflict. Meanwhile the second great blow has struck the world, and its inhabitants respond with an indifference that appalls Nemo.

Flanagan records the Drayman’s Alley Murders: thirteen victims over forty years. McDearmott uses blunt instruments, Quartermas strangles with ligatures, and Grogg combines spectral terror with physical attacks. The police identify the perpetrators but cannot construct cases that a court would accept as possible.

Each victim bears Sweeny’s face in death. Flanagan initially describes Sweeny diverting Quartermas toward Ellis Swinton, who already resembles him, but later says that none of the victims resembled Sweeny in life. He also questions whether Sweeny or the Marshals cause the lasting transformation. The report preserves both the inconsistency and the uncertainty about responsibility.

Drugger Eastgrave’s review appears in the Chicago Tribune on February 6, 1940, following the first Chicago presentation of Armageddon II on February 3. The chronology places its opening in twelve capitals in 1939. Eastgrave calls its music the worst on Earth, yet finds it overwhelmingly effective.

He compares the operas’ force to volcanic matter and attributes the world’s corrupting wealth to the catastrophes of which the operas are a cutting edge. The $30 ticket price becomes evidence of that corruption. His account makes musical power more consequential than the story line or conventional artistic merit.

Photographs show departing audiences with Sweeny’s face, and Eastgrave sees it stamped over his own in the mirror. He resigns: “I will be a music critic no longer since they will not allow me to be a man any longer.” The review calls the operas “songs of Nines,” each nine times as powerful as its predecessor.

Brigadier General George Dredgefellow’s “A Square-Headed Answer” appears in the Deactivated Army Review in June 1970. He argues that the world wars did not happen because almost everyone behaves as though they did not.

He subordinates psychological evidence, printed records, military documents, pensions, and nine million affidavits to that supposed behavioral proof. The group unconscious contains mammoth, behemoth, and leviathan figures associated with the Armageddons, each nine times larger than the last. Dredgefellow dismisses them as the unconscious doing its usual monstrous work.

His own memories and wounds undermine his assurance. He says he had to straighten out his beliefs to become a general in the paper army, while an interrupting dialogue challenges the premise that people would repent after catastrophe. He ends by planning war games fourteen years ahead and hoping to retire before them.

Jeremiah Bradford’s sermon is dated, tentatively, to the first passage through 1983. It begins with a collage of biblical language, including the sea of glass mingled with fire and the desire for death that will not come.

Bradford warns that Final Armageddon will occur in 1984 unless people repent. He disputes an old general’s claim that eliminating faulty diplomacy, accident, and irrationality has eliminated war while leaving people free to enjoy sin. Bradford instead treats war as the blossom of their sin.

The sermon ends with a question that echoes the problem of denial throughout the novel: Will a destroyed world behave as though it is destroyed, or remain a casual, unbelieving cinder? The delayed days and Sweeny’s final refuge are taken up in the following section. See: The Days That Delayed

Sweeny has already carved 1894–1984 on his tombstone. He identifies himself with the rabbit pursued by Achilles, here Death, in his version of Zeno’s paradox. The world itself becomes the rabbit, retreating into 1983. In Devonian mathematics, unused alternatives accumulate like the contents of Chinese boxes, making almost another year available as one is exhausted.

Before midyear he produces My Name is Sweeny and I’m in Trouble, a farce identifying him with Everyman. On the longest day of 1983, Armageddon III has its first, secret presentation before more than four thousand people. The following days fail to shorten. One account gives nearly a thousand consecutive days of maximum length; other estimates disagree about the scale of the disturbance.

Official sunrise and sunset times, a comet theory, and finally Ptolemaic Clocks with Epicyclic Compensation offer successive ways of explaining or normalizing the anomaly. The clocks show the hours as they should be, making the persistent impression of maximum daylight appear subjective. The account keeps returning to the difficulty of establishing a common standard.

In the prolonged latter days of 1983, wealth and violence grow together. Discarded new cars clog the streets; corporate officers are flayed for failing to double their corporations’ well-doing. The Non-Restrictive Act allows people to claim salaries of their choice, while officeholders are forced into positions likely to end in their deaths.

Private armies wage an unnamed war. Bombing becomes legal, murders and exterminations are broadcast, and the blood in the streets drowns mice and all but the strongest rats. Furnaces intended for bodies become arenas in which people throw one another to their deaths. Extreme light and noise fail to dispel the world’s felt darkness and dullness.

Sweeny has an All-Category permit allowing him to live beyond fifty, but it can be revoked. Some people call the year 1984 or 1985; officially and popularly it remains 1983. His retreat into a tree makes him an impediment to the approaching end.

Sweeny climbs into a hollow tree and announces that he will not come out alive. The narrator compares him to Odin’s self-sacrifice, the crucified Christ, and a stylite on a pillar. Mary Margaret repeatedly asks him to come down.

Sweeny claims that he has delayed the dreadful year and offered people bright fun in place of murder, but that they have chosen Bloody Armageddon. “I shall light a candle in this tree and it shall not be put out!” he declares, invoking the Book of Jasher. His claims of protection remain part of the novel’s argument about his role.

Ultimate Armageddon arrives, and 1984 is allowed officially to begin. People set Sweeny’s tree on fire. Seven dark spirits sink into the ground; one golden spirit flies away whistling the “Sly Pig Sequence” from Prohibition, a Farce. The novel ends with the world burning and its people behaving as though they scarcely care whether it ends. See: The Ambiguities (Chronology)