I don't know why it's so difficult to understand: she's “moved on...”, it's “over”, and—what's worse—it was never real so it never existed. Not love, whatever that meant in that context, which was more of an arrangement, though still narrative—not that, but something else, and not the something else but only something Allowing for the Possibility. A promise, he supposed, or maybe an IOU, nearly as good as legal tender.
It was a Promise that passed for a reality, both and all of which comprised the narrative,—if the Love or the Something Else was not real, or never came to be real, or never anythinged to be anything, it still could not be denied that all of these things either happening or not happening comprised a narrative, a narrative which might be called Microwaved Stuffed Animals, or which might be called The Weekend Eschatologist, or Ralph, or Ralph is the True Author of Ralph, or something else entirely—but which must include Kleb that it might continue or exist, might stretch into the past or into the future.
On the last occasion that he'd spoken to Ralph, he'd realized that Ralph was not participating in the narrative as Ralph, but had taken his place, as Kleb; that Kleb, far from being the presumptive author of Ralph—or, for that matter, Ralph,—was, in fact, the true author of Kleb (or Kleb); the claim of the authorship of which was now, in perpetuity, laid to by the pretender Ralph, as the mate of Erika.
Because how else might that narrative, in which Kleb was the principle agent—how else might it continue without Ralph posing as Kleb. And posing adequately efficaciously as to assimilate, and assimilating, thereby, supplanting and relegating to obsolescence the True Author—in which case, who was he; perhaps more importantly, where? Were Ralph to merely “pose” as Kleb for his own amusement, then Kleb might continue to master his own reality, in the conifines of the various Kleb narratives—those involving Liana, those involving Leo, Blakie, Ralph, Erika, whichever you like—but because Erika had, in Kleb's narrative, taken the place of Erika, in relation to a now false Kleb (i.e. Ralph), and was, in a sense, posing as an interpolation of herself, posing as the dreamErika, the one he, Ralph, had seen on the arm of Kleb; whom he had watched through the window, as they lay; whom he had followed, that day—for these reasons Erika (or Erika) had legitimated the Klebship of her Second Mate...
...because who or what could she be other than something Ralph imagined, to then be something shaped and molded in his mind—shaped from before the time they had ever met, maybe shaped before he had ever met Kleb; and then stolen from Kleb—or had she stolen herself?—and forced to be something, -one else for notRalph, who was forced to be someone else (trueKleb) to be with Erika. Because without Kleb there could be no Ralph and Erika, nor a true or false Ralph and/or Erika, nor Rerika, nor whichever you like.
Kleb Is the True Author of Kleb, here partially excerpted, is a chapter from the fourth section of
, a novel forthcoming, by Zak Block
