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 world 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 "woolly 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 demonstrations that Sweeny could literally 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"—not metaphorically, but actually. 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." This was not healing but reality revision. 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"—not because it didn't happen, but because what happened cannot be believed literally. 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 film maker, 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 whether a thing had happened yet or not." This is not mysticism but the fundamental mechanism of his power—his cavalier handling of time allowed 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. The Great Depression, a Broadway play "absolutely purgatorial in its power and passion," depicting the "coupled hilarity and hellishness of real poverty"—and Sweeny had never been poor, never 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 resolves 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 "just a freckled and pleasant and chunky 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—that is 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 trade made her wise enough to never fall again. And the smoke and scorching flesh returned only when she sang 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. He had trappings of elsewhere on him. He was an errant spirit." 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" in Mathematics and Cosmology, and "after the appearance of this, the intellectual world was never the same again." The gentry responded with the usual defense: "It isn't new"—Plotonius, Lucretius, Aquinas had said similar things. "But these gentrymen were faking it. The statements, equations, and formulae of Doctor Devonian were quite new."

Wimbish McDearmott explained with an analogy to stellar parallax. If Earth moved around the sun, stars should appear to shift against their background from opposite points of Earth's orbit. Galileo's opponents were right that they should shift—and Galileo claimed he measured this. "But he had hypnotized himself and faked his own observations." The angles were too small for contemporary equipment. Similarly, "cosmological-behavioral angles as fine as those used in calculating the 'Effector Formulae' could not have been read with the intellectual equipment available as recently as last year."

But "there has been a quantum jump"—recent mathematics was "so sophisticated that there has to have been a biological mutation in a small group of elite mathematicians to bring them to such new understandings." Elton Quartermas confirmed: "I can feel it in myself." The new equations were "a danger to the world"—they would "destabilize the world in three-quarters of a century if unchecked." The article was accompanied by a drawing: a cherub with a sun-burned, peeling nose—an "optical illusion" that also showed the cherub as "the end of one of the tentacles of a hellish monster that writhed in the background."

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, the Second Coming of the Powers of Hell." The new mutated mathematics could identify which. "These new equations are a danger to the world and must be curbed," Quartermas said. But they could not be curbed—they were already in the world. "God is the thirty-seventh element of the 'General Equation,'" Devonian noted, "and the forty-fourth element of the 'Particular Equation.' How could I make that plainer?"

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 sulfurous 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. All that is needed is a tolerably well-focused light source on the far side." The event grows from its shadow—"first a ghost, then someone will say 'Fiat solidus,' 'Let it be solid,' and it will become a solid event." 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 "'Protect-Their-Own' corollaries"—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 Friends of the Catastrophes had struck first. 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: "No, you are alive and ill. 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—"origin unknown to the unknowing"—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. "So what do I have? A grand slam bunt, that's what. A thing that never happened before in the annals of baseball." 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. Quartermas had been following him for weeks—Sweeny had seen him "three or maybe four hundred times." When confronted at the Rotating Vector, Quartermas was direct: "I want you dead."

"Why?" Sweeny asked. "Because your dreams are disrupting the world. They are a danger to humanity. And you won't stop dreaming them, or you can't stop dreaming them. Only if you are dead will there be a stop to your dreaming." Quartermas revealed he could tune into Sweeny's dreams—"I do it a little bit sometimes. And they make me sick, your dreams. Horribly sick. Only your death can make me well again."

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. "The withdrawal doesn't show up, and the deposit does."

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 entire economy of multi-track manipulation that Sweeny is only beginning to understand—while others, like Moneybags's banking family, have long mastered it.

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—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 dark and twisted thing, 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 was broadcasting itself before Sweeny had even committed it to paper.

The horror of the work is physical: Sweeny wonders "why it doesn't 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. "It is the funniest and most poignant play ever," he claims. 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 failure is telling: even Sweeny's reality-bending powers couldn't make Prohibition funny to people about to live through it. Some things resist even his manipulation.

"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: "He belches the dreams out of his 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. 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—a stumbling, perhaps-fallen angel—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 Formentivity

"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 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.

This leads him to suspect that the holocaustic events in his operas will emerge specifically through a Norse manifestation—channeled into a particular cultural form rather than appearing as universal catastrophe. The voice that commands him may be a Norse god or demiurge. The destruction he creates will have a Nordic character.

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.

"On what authority are world-structure changes made? Sometimes the slightest, faked, or no authority—if accompanied by sufficient assurance." Sweeny gives an example from the low Middle Ages: an honored annalist headed his new scroll "683" on the last day of the year 683. Other annalists protested—the new year should be 684. He insisted: "What I have written, I have written." And so the year 683 repeated.

The editor of Architecture and Prototype instructed Sweeny that his essay must be "handled gently, degaussed, insulated with irony," and printed in the "Illuminations on The Lighter Side" section. The truth about world-construction cannot be presented directly. It must be disguised as whimsy.

Sweeny admits he has hidden tricks throughout his work—"numerous" (Latin for "tricks")—to ensure his ambiguous version remains unassailable. He asks himself: has he written a manual for world-destruction? Or a vaccine against it? Or has he, like the annalist, simply repeated the year—creating a track where catastrophe loops forever, never arriving, always imminent?

"These are the Good Years, the Golden Century, the Diamond Decades. This is the time of grace and of high fiction. And everyone is young." Written in February 1924 for Psychosis and Metempsychosis, this essay celebrates an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity—while hinting at the horror beneath.

Sweeny introduces the concept of "Silent Radio"—an enchanting parallel to Silent Movies. Just as the Magic Lantern gave pictures without sound, the Silent Radio broadcasts sound (and more) without audible signal. "We always knew that the Silent Movies wouldn't stay silent," he writes. "We know that Radio will talk in very few years now." But the Silent Radio—the broadcast of dreams from the collective unconscious—plays constantly to the inner ear.

These are "the days of sunshine and smoke, remembered because they don't happen consciously." The Silent Radio is "the magic emanation and broadcasting of the primordial and subliming drama." It plays the dreams of the age—both its hopes and its horrors. And in this Golden Century, when everything seems perfect, the horror frequency is growing stronger.

Despite celebrating the Golden Age, Sweeny confesses to personal torment: "I have a red dragon in my entrails for all that. I have a thorn in my flesh for all that. I have my associates around me for all that." The biblical echo—Paul's "thorn in the flesh"—suggests something demonic, something that will not leave him.

Yet he finds beauty even in industrial smoke. "Oh the Holy Smoke of the Chimneys of Gary!" He takes streetcars to South Chicago and Gary, Indiana to watch the steel mills. "Smoke is a chemical reaction. Smoke is a life experience." He argues smoke should never be eliminated entirely—"only the more irritating of its cinders"—because it represents productive human life, the "soulfulness" of labor made visible.

This is the paradox of the Golden Age: it contains both the holy smoke of industry and the red dragon of apocalypse. The thorn cannot be removed. The associates—whatever dark spirits attend Sweeny—cannot be dismissed. The Golden Century carries its destruction within it.

Sweeny identifies two classic errors in constructing utopias. First: "arriving at it by such a bloody climb that the stench and gore of the climbing remain, making people uneasy"—the ground cries out, the overthrown return for vengeance, and the utopia is haunted by its birth. Second: "making it so palatially grand that the people feel strange in it"—they keep it as a showplace, camp outside its walls, and eventually lose control of it entirely.

The current Golden Age, Sweeny argues, has avoided both errors. It arrived gradually, organically. It is lived-in rather than displayed. The smoke from chimneys represents comfortable habitation, not oppression. People don't feel like strangers in their own prosperity.

But this very comfort may be the danger. A utopia that feels natural can be destroyed from within—by dreams that broadcast on the Silent Radio, by facsimiles that become realities, by horrors that grow in the collective unconscious while everyone enjoys the Diamond Decades.

"Why does silent radio, why do these outwardly silent and sightless (but inwardly soundy and pictorial) radio dramas of our private and group unconscious, why do they have a daily horror hour that is now something more than three hundred minutes long?" The horror is growing. It has "swallowed the whole world down and swallowed its feet and legs close up to the rump."

Because these dramas emerge from the private unconscious, each person composes their own version. But because they also tap the group unconscious, "the personal scenarios are very much alike." Everyone is dreaming the same nightmare. Sweeny has made one "nonsilent" opera on the Armageddon theme—Armageddon I, which is "light-hearted, satirical"—and works constantly on two others, "the three snakes that are always coiling around me."

But his operas are comedies compared to what plays on the Silent Radio. "The silent radio dramas on this same theme are horrible, horrible, horrible." The collective unconscious is broadcasting something far worse than anything Sweeny has dared to stage. His facsimiles may be attempts to capture and contain what is already playing in every mind.

Sweeny catalogs the battles that play on the Silent Radio: "Tsingtao, Verdun, Jutland and Skagerak"—and dozens more. "Ypres, Marne, Aisne, Argonne, Armentieres, Arras, Artois, Augustovo Forest, Bapaume, Belleau Wood, Bolimov, Brusilov." These are the "flat-thing battles of the mind oceans."

In the story's alternate timeline, World War I never happened—Franz Ferdinand survived, the Golden Century continued unbroken. Yet these battle names exist. They are "fictions"—but fictions that can, "when entered into, become potential and then real." The Silent Radio broadcasts a war that didn't occur in this timeline but exists fully formed in the collective unconscious.

This is the ultimate horror of the Golden Age: beneath its peace, a world war plays continuously in every mind. The battles are "fictional actions" only in the sense that they haven't solidified yet. Someone—perhaps Sweeny himself—might say "Fiat solidus," and the shadows would become flesh. The Diamond Decades rest on a foundation of unmanifested carnage, waiting to be born.

This section presents a timeline spanning ninety years—from Sweeny's birth in 1894 to his death in 1984—but the chronology itself is unstable. It tracks Sweeny's life alongside world events, blending the real and the fictional until the distinction dissolves.

The timeline begins simply enough: 1894, Sweeny born on West Blackwater Street in Chicago. 1896, Hilaire Belloc publishes The Bad Child's Book of Beasts—"Sweeny's first reading." 1898, H.G. Wells publishes The War of the Worlds—"his second reading." But soon the entries become stranger: 1912, Sweeny composes "The August 1914 Tonalities"—music depicting events two years in the future. 1916, Armageddon I opens. 1929, The Great Depression premieres at Stabler's Theatre, "runs for thirteen years."

The chronology treats Sweeny's artistic output as equivalent to world-historical events. His operas appear alongside scientific discoveries, political developments, and technological achievements—because in this reality, they are equally causative. The timeline is not a record of what happened but a diagram of what Sweeny made happen.

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: "1956—U.S. Armed Forces disbanded as no longer needed." The Golden Century has achieved permanent peace. 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.

"Ambiguities are found in all the really credible sciences. Ambiguities are the extra act or lines; they are the extra answer to everything." The chronology contains gaps and contradictions that reveal the nature of consensus-time itself.

From 1964 to 1972, the entries read: "Nothing happened." This is not laziness but ontological fact—"no train-of-events held majority acceptance" during these years. They are called "the Empty Years" or "Years for Rent." When no version of events achieves sufficient belief, time itself becomes vacant. Reality requires consensus to solidify.

The ending is ominous. "1983—Some say year 1983 repeated several times; others say leave it as is." The Armed Forces, disbanded in 1956, are "reinstituted" in 1983. And 1984—the year of Sweeny's death, the year Armageddon III is produced posthumously at Megiddo Amphitheater in Palestine—contains only one entry: "The Situation Worsens." The Golden Century is ending. The facsimiles are becoming solid.

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 I wasn't 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 countries like "Czechoslovakia" and "Transylvania" 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 confesses he was "once taken in" by Doctor Henry Devonian's mathematical equations—the "General Equation" and "Special Equation" that identify Sweeny as the "Crus-Individual" on whom all reality depends. "My father was taken in by it, and so were many good mathematical minds that were on hand." The equations seemed new, convincing, internally coherent. See: The One Individual Crux

Now Woodbine believes the equations are the work of something inhuman. He posits "a mysterious group of superb 'pure mathematicians'" who are "incorporeal" with "limitless mind-range," able to "reverse processes" and "examine concepts from the outside and from the inside." How many such mathematicians exist? "There are about three hundred billion of them (a billion times more than human mathematicians): They are the devils, and every devil is a master mathematician."

Devils, Woodbine explains, are "hardly at all in fine arts"—but they dominate speculative mathematics. The Devonian equations are demonic in origin. And Devonian himself wrote: "Two Universes may exist simultaneously in the same place, if one of them is a Fortean Universe." The Golden Century and the post-apocalyptic wasteland occupy the same coordinates. Which one is the Fortean Universe—the impossible one sustained only by belief?

"The main ambiguity is the simultaneous existence of the two versions of the present: supra-killing peace versus the remnants of three hundred battered hell." Woodbine grapples with how contradictory events can "occupy the same place casually." How do multiple present-times produce simple futures? How is a past fixed? "By illusion, probably. Single-world enclaves accept single pasts; other enclaves, other pasts."

The devils believe they won the prototype Armageddon, "throwing God and the Michael-machines out of centrality." Shadow forms follow the devils everywhere. The Titans believe they whipped the Olympians—shadow forms follow them too. "Mathematically, a centrality and a straited place are simply inversions of each other"—equally valid, equally real.

Woodbine examines the "howling inconsistencies" of the World-Wide War that supposedly began in 1914. Its technology is wrong—"more like 1904 or even 1894 technology, or else projective technology from popular fiction of the turn of the century." The "Iron-Clads" come from H.G. Wells's early stories. This war uses fictional weapons because it may be a fictional war—a facsimile that some consensus-group has made solid. The peace of the Golden Century and the carnage of World War I exist simultaneously, each real to those who believe in it.

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 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, 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. "Make them then, and be blessed. Make them then, and be damned."

Written around 1927 or 1928 to "Dear Strongheart," this letter reveals the paranoid infrastructure Sweeny has built around himself. He needs "$6,000 a month for protection"—an enormous sum—because "my honesty and my life are challenged by a shift or a clouding over of the cosmic categories." He is "up to my hairy ears in private detectives and operators."

Sweeny employs six small armies of private investigators, collectively code-named "Sextus." Each general swears he alone is trustworthy; each warns against the others. The detectives protect him from the mathematicians who want him dead. But they also protect him from the Marshals—who want him alive. See: The Detective-Actuarist Theory

The Marshals would clamp an "invisible iron-collar" around his neck to force him to keep working. If Sweeny tried to stop, "they would lock that invisible iron cellar door again—with me under it." The "Friends-of-the-Catastrophes" organization—"members probably unnatural or unhuman"—exists as a corollary to Devonian's equations. They are "preventing the preventing," ensuring no one stops Sweeny's desolating visions from becoming actuality.

Pope Kirol I—a pope who exists only in this timeline—writes to Sweeny, and Sweeny writes back. The exchange, probably from 1932, reveals the depth of Sweeny's influence over consensus reality.

The Pope had written: "You are the boy to whom I owe it all, my rise and my position, the highest in the world. You are the boy who is destined to bring about the fall of many, and the rise of many." But Kirol also accuses Sweeny: his art of sublimation is a trick. The artist claims to be a healer dispersing potential catastrophe through facsimiles—but really he is "the cat-killer," the "giant rat-king," whose art enforces destruction rather than preventing it.

Sweeny's response is characteristically defiant: "Your Holiness: It pleases me to know that I have a reader, even a fan, so high in the regards of both God and men." He admits forcing the Pope to select the name "Kirol" over "Pius"—a "mind wrestle" to save the Pope from a numerological trap. Even the Pope's name is something Sweeny made happen. Even the Pope is, in some sense, one of Sweeny's fictions.

Written around 1929 to Captain Nemo, one of his private detectives, this letter confronts a disturbing phenomenon: people are developing memories of events that never happened—specifically, memories of fighting in a World-Wide War. See: Captain Nemo's Identity Crisis

"My Dear Nemo: You amaze me... What, have I hired a contaminated person to protect me from the contaminators?" Nemo's report confessed he once believed in the World-Wide War, had "pseudo-memories" of being a soldier—a "doughboy." But "doughboy" is Sweeny's term, invented for the libretto of Armageddon I. Only Sweeny knows what it means; he won't tell anyone. Nemo claims he never saw the opera. So how does he know the word?

The answer: the cults have spread Sweeny's terminology beyond the opera. The fiction is contaminating consensus reality. An analyst suggested they "must remember the war even if it didn't happen"—as admonition, to avoid being "doomed to repeat it once over." The war that never occurred must be remembered vividly, but also remembered as unreal. "High trickery required."

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. "None of that happened," Sweeny insists. "Not any of that."

But the psychological necessity is clear: they must remember the Great War "as vivid vision for admonition and correction, so it won't happen again (or the first time)." 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's report begins with his credentials: chosen by the "Shamus Salina"—a "multilist, saltwater basic computer" that matches detectives to assignments—he has police experience, a Los Angeles degree in occultism, and expertise in "divergent behavior (madness)" from serving in "insane asylums and prestigious mortuaries." His assignment: protect Sweeny from the psychic infestation of Alistar Grogg. See: Alistar Grogg's Death

Grogg is dead—shot through the head at the Rotating Vector decades ago—but death has not ended his campaign. His ghost infests Sweeny's daytime dreams, "driving him towards suicide or self-attracting fatal accidents." Branagan's solution is elegant and disturbing: he creates a portable "eye-of-the-hurricane" for Sweeny to wear. Shavings from every Grogg bone, small quantities of Grogg's "plasmic essence," sealed in a transparent locket that glows green—worn around Sweeny's neck.

The theory: keep Sweeny in "permanent, close-range, safe infestation." If Grogg's ghost is always present in controlled form, it cannot attack from outside. Sweeny now wears his would-be murderer's remains as a protective amulet. The bones themselves are wired into an articulated skeleton that sits in Sweeny's house—the first member of the "Royal Anomalies and Detective Club."

Sweeny employs six detectives: Branagan, Flanagan, Hanagan, and Captains Nemo, Remo, and Hemo. Collectively they are "Sextus, the Six-Pack." Each protects Sweeny from a different threat. But Sweeny has developed a disturbing theory—embedded in one of his fictions, but possibly true: "each of his six detectives is, in ingenious disguise, the same person as the one he guards against."

Branagan considers this. It might be true of the other five—"there's a couple of weird ones there." But how could it be true for him? Grogg is dead. His bones are wired into a skeleton across the table. His blue plasmic spirit perches on the skull. "How indeed?" Branagan asks himself. And yet the theory persists.

The six detectives have merged into a collective identity, meeting in Sweeny's house with Grogg's skeleton presiding. They are the Royal Anomalies and Detective Club—protecting a man who may have created them, from threats that may also be his creations, in a reality that may be entirely his fiction.

Captain Nemo's report begins circa 1920. His assignment: protect Enniscorthy Sweeny from "the murderous kindness of creature Marshal Mosco." But Nemo has a problem: he suspects he is "not human but a 'nonorganic web person'"—possibly an invention of the Shamus Salina computer. He suffers from "Who-am-I?" syndrome due to memory scrubs between cases.

The ontological confusion deepens. "Employer Sweeny says Nemo is one of his fictions. Nemo brags Sweeny is one of his. One must be wrong." Or perhaps both are right—perhaps they are mutual fictions, each dreaming the other into existence.

Marshal Mosco's threat is not death but life. The Marshals—Mosco, Tosco, Rosco—will clamp an iron collar around Sweeny's neck and force him to continue producing apocalyptic visions. He must remain alive "to provide Armageddon scripts until the last person on Earth dies from the terrible wars." The mathematicians want Sweeny dead to save the world. The Marshals want Sweeny alive to destroy it. And Nemo, who may not exist, must protect him from both.

"We are in a nightmare, that's what we are in. And, as is common in nightmares, we scream, and we make no sound." Nemo, being a "web person," has "much more experience with nightmares than even the most hag-ridden human person." They must warn the world that it will be eaten up—and they cannot make the world hear them.

Captain Remo offers an explanation: they can't make the world hear because "all are fictions of Enniscorthy Sweeny; he rigs things to his own private conflict." The detectives, the threats, the warnings, the world itself—all may be Sweeny's creations, arranged for purposes only he understands.

Flanagan's report adds a chilling detail: the "Drayman's Alley Murders." Over forty years, thirteen people were killed—by McDearmott (blunt instrument), Quartermas (stiletto), and Grogg's ghost. Every victim "resembled Sweeny at death (though not in life)." The police had good leads but could never make the cases. "Not faulty police work," Flanagan concludes. "Faulty 'the way things are.'" The mathematicians keep trying to kill Sweeny. They keep killing people who become Sweeny only at the moment of death. Reality itself protects him—or mocks his assassins.

Music critic Drugger Eastgrave reviews Armageddon II for the Chicago Tribune on February 6, 1940—three days after its premiere. His verdict: "supposedly the worst music ever." But quality is beside the point. "It doesn't matter if the music is good, passable, or very bad (which it is). Main thing: it's overwhelming, world-overwhelming."

Eastgrave compares the opera to magma and lava—"good or bad, either can be overwhelming and destroying if it is given sufficient volcanic heat." The "mountainous Armageddon operas" are the source of the world's new, hellish wealth—a "massive money bribery" of the entire human race. Thirty-dollar tickets are symptoms of corruption. The wealth itself is degrading society.

Most disturbing: people leaving the opera have "the Sweeny look" on their faces. They emerge "red" and "cheerfully ugly," as if Sweeny's visage has been stamped onto them. After forty years as a critic, Eastgrave catches his own reflection—and sees the Sweeny look on himself. He quits immediately. "I cannot remain a critic if not allowed to remain fully human." The opera is not just depicting catastrophe; it is transforming its audience into something else.

Brigadier General George Dredgefellow analyzes the evidence for the two World Wars in "A Square-Headed Answer," published in the Deactivated Army Review, June 1970. His conclusion: the wars did not happen.

His reasoning: "First-class evidence (negative): testimony of over four billion inhabitants of Earth who don't believe these wars happened." People don't behave as if they lived through global catastrophe. Second-class evidence—psychology papers, newspaper reports, army records, disability allotments, nine million veteran affidavits—cannot outweigh the behavioral fact. The "war symbols" that appear in the group unconscious (mammoth, behemoth, leviathan—each nine times larger than the last) are the Armageddon beasts from Sweeny's operas, not memories of actual events.

Dredgefellow admits he once had "war memories" himself—but introspective analysis revealed them as "psychosomatic delusions" he's since overcome. His hard-headed conclusion: "The wars could not have happened. The third and greatest war also will not happen." The behavioral clincher remains: people do not act as if they survived apocalypse. Therefore they didn't. Unless, of course, the behavioral evidence is wrong—unless the Golden Century is itself the delusion.

Prophet Jeremiah Bradford preaches on the Final Armageddon, drawing on Revelation: "And I saw, as it were, a sea of glass mingled with fire... men shall seek death and shall not find it." Armageddon III had a secret premiere during the longest day of the year—and something went wrong with time itself.

The days after the summer solstice of 1983 ceased to shorten. "For nearly a thousand days now (they were consecutive days, they were all of maximum length), this should not have been the case." The government weather service began faking sunrise and sunset times. Then came the "Ptolemaic Clocks with Epicyclic Compensation"—manufactured in millions, showing hours as they "should be" through complex epicyclic gears. The popular feeling that days remained at maximum length became merely a "subjective impression" contradicted by official clocks.

Bradford warns that Final Armageddon approaches—"a second destruction by fire," a "rotten blossom... bigger than the globe." An old general had claimed that eliminating the Armageddon operas would eliminate the wars, but Bradford calls this backward causation fallacy. The operas don't cause catastrophe—they are catastrophe's shadow, cast before it. And "the year is subdivided so one never reaches the end (Zeno Paradoxes)." Time itself is stretching to delay the inevitable.

The world in those final days has become literally hellish. "Furnaces on every corner for disposing of bodies; and the stronger would wrestle the weaker into them as a sort of virility kick." Blood in the streets drowns mice. Private murder doubles every week. "Bombing by private groups had become legal." Light levels are kept at four thousand foot-candles, noise over two hundred decibels—"and still it seemed too dark and too quiet."

Overwhelming wealth clogs everything. Streets are impassable from "glossy cars bought and driven once and abandoned." In every corporation's public room, men are flayed alive weekly for failing to double the company's profits. The "Non-Restrictive Act" lets anyone claim any salary from any corporation. People must be "impressed and dragged, sobbing and screaming" to become officers—most will have their "release within a week, their varnished hides nailed up on display."

Sweeny, called "Everyman's Everyman" by Time Stutter magazine, holds a top permit—an "All-Category" permit—to live past fifty. Only special persons have such permits: "labor leaders, comedians, top people in pornography, rock, and media." But top permits "can be terminated easily." The Golden Century has become a nightmare of wealth and murder, and the year 1983 will not end.

"Sweeny, the only rational man left, did what any rational man would do: he climbed into a hole in a hollow tree and announced he would never come out of it alive." Several billion people—"all with instant knowledge of Sweeny moves"—bawled out "Why didn't I think of that!" He was Odin hung in his tree for nine days, sacrifice from himself to himself. He was Christ crucified, "stretched in arm-extended contemplation." He was "Saint Enniscorthy the Stylite"—for a tree is a form of pillar.

Mary Margaret begged him to come down. Sweeny orated: "I shall light a candle in this tree and it shall not be put out! Is this not all written in the Book of Jasher?" He had made the Earth stand still in its orbit, given people the choice between fun and murder—"and they chose murder." Between Bloody Opera and Bloody Armageddon—they chose Armageddon. "Hey, we could have had some bright fun in the world, but you'd rather have a dark fun."

People set his tree on fire. "The old dry tree crested and crowned in horrid flame." Seven dark and smoky spirits of Sweeny jumped out and fell to the ground, then sank through it as if it were water. And one golden spirit flew out and up and away, "whistling the 'Sly Pig Sequence' from Prohibition, A Farce—an old and almost forgotten comedy." That was the earthly end of the old and almost forgotten prestidigitator Enniscorthy Sweeny. The chronology ends: "1984. Ms. Agnes Klingle elected President of the United States. Enniscorthy Sweeny dies. Armageddon III, Opera by Enniscorthy Sweeny, produced in Palestine, Megiddo Amphitheater. The Situation Worsens." See: The Ambiguities (Chronology)