I had now collected sufficient Things to Do so as to go on sitting in my chair, which was all I desired to do: I had somewhat collected myself.
The sky belched light.
I leaned forward, looked, and half of the hazy stars were erased, gone, done for, hidden behind an invisible tumble of nimbus.
My nerves let themselves down another degree.
I went around the room, emptying an ashtray the night maid had overlooked, fixing myself a glass of hot, powdered coffee.
And back to my chair.
Now, across the parapet, across the well-learned silhouette of buildings opposite, the undersides of clouds were heated up. Their contours showed in brief, stammering flashes of lavender, as if they were gigantic lamps which some celestial electrician was trying to connect with a frayed cord.
At my side, the exhausted curtain came to momentary life—then perished again in the swelter of the room.
Gwen was an image. Whoever she was, I saw what I saw, looking from within to what lay within. Another item for Forbisher-Laroche: Why visit the fille de joie? Because she is more I than She.
Yvonne, then?
I gave the matter my consideration—and half an eye to the approaching weather.
"Blow, blow, thou bitter windThou art not so unkindIn this man's latitude."Hark ye, Sir Bughouse:You don't know anything.
All you know about Yvonne is what you read in the newspaper advertisements.
She is a collection of costly, streamlined surfaces.
An accumulation from high-class department store counters.
And a statistic from a book that has not yet been published owing, doubtless, to pressures from the Neo-Christian-Centrist-Totalitarian Renaissance.
Did you think she was a woman?
She was a dream.
An arrangement of electrons, a mess of mesons, in your cranium, Sir Spatterwit.
There must be blah-diddie-blah-blah (statistics, pal) happy homosexual hours for housewives and houris
ergowe, Wylie, have witnessed Onesuch.What a premise! What a casual conclusion.O Lydian ease!O languorous Lesbos!(O legislators!You left out the ladies!
And our legally innocent Yvonne has homed to Pasadena's passes, also
Healthy, wealthy and wise.)
Must it not be assumed that blah people are happy and blah people are given to such excursions, wherefore blah per centum of the excursionists are happy?
Certainly.But Yvonne?What is she?
Sir Psychologist, Lord Hack, Keeper of the Happy Ending, can you not also hypothesize a hundred different valid denouements?
Certainly.
When the poor, unknown child returns, what Weltschmerz may not seize hold upon her? What nostalgia? Whatfantasy or recollections? What esoteric envies? What odd curiosities? What cooling after the confidences? What illogical new distastes? What unexpected spousely piques? What dither? What clandestine or common experiment with all what unsweet ensuite?
Never congratulate the Fates, emir;
it makes them self-conscious ... undependable.
A point to remember should you ever set down a hundred hours of pseudo-autobiography:
Lessons in Light Lycanthropy: seven essays by Philip Gordon Prismaggot.
Now came thunder, like sounds in the intestines of distant elephant herds; now, my curtain rose as eerily as a medium's table and flopped back to lank alignment with the wall.
I saw the point:
In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that the woman-within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench, attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.
It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of numbers of my gentlemen companions.
Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this situation—this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies her master shuns in conscious male conceit.
If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.
If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate. Hecate County, I mean.
Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:
"The inner natures of all men and women partake ofthe natures of the opposite sex—a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed by modern society (O moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed with the full force of public opinion. What public opinion suppresses, the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society. Nevertheless, were the individualnotequipped with the psychological elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man—for example—may even project on real women, in inverted form, those universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in their lucid monograph—"
But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and acts—rather than in this lack-life lingo of pedagogy—the very gents and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a blowtorch.
When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do not know.
It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.
Themselves—not you.
Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,
was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.
If you are distressed by her,
the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul and see the remarkable tittup going on there.
Lightning struck a graph on the sky.
I sat learning about myself.
If, indeed, the Final Report was due, I might as well review my material. At God's Great Judgment Seat, witnesses who did not bother to notice what was really happening inside themselves—and, of course, prejudiced or dishonest witnesses—will undoubtedly go to the Hotter Hecate.
I thought about Paul for a while and decided it was time for Paul to think about himself.
I thought of Socker Melton and perceived there was no reason, any more, for a single soul to go to any church, save instinct—
which the churches denied thrice whenever they opened their sanctimonious mouths three times.
I thought lovingly of my country
and lovingly of the whole world.
I sent greetings to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Africans.
I wished that I might live to see if the bombs fell
and what the people did afterward.
Then I appreciated that, following any resolution of such affairs—
of bombs or none, airborne plagues or none—
I would wish in this same fashion to live to see
what they did
when a billion starved
when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe
what they did when the metals ran thin—in a century or so
when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of sustaining liberty or order or technology
when the last water under the earth dried up
when the sea thickened
when the moon approached.
Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of—
inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied byTimemagazine.
Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electricfire now diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled like tumbrils in the avenues.
A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a little to escape their nervous abrasion.
This fetid wind depressed me.
My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.
And in this separation I saw more views.
The intellectual, I deplore—scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence.
The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.
The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty—without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names, has turned him into a quack—an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.
The preacher—dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment—the one,true robe for Ascension—is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one.
This is what I believe about them—
and they are what I am:
Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher.
Hoist by my own plutonium petard.
For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there.
I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea,
Touched the Grail—and could not swallow,
Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.
Prophet, maybe.Pilgrim, perhaps.But only inthe intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelicalsenses....Happy?The ego was often happy—his big ego.At Peace?
He had tranquillity where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.
Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.
Still he believed it.The truth shall make ye free.Still he cried out that men are born for freedom.And he died, a prophet without particular honor in thehome town of himself.He shouted:Forever learn the newDown with everything as isSeek God beyond his Holy NamesBehold yourself(Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher)The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and—likeother men—admired them as if they were the fabric of realityand not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness.Well, go away now, Wylie.It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for animproved you or a better somebody to take over the problem.Good night, sweet hypocrite.Dauntless disappointment.Oaf.Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation.I am a contemporary man, I insisted.
Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself.
And I argued:Even if I did this, it would be nothing.What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege.What I said was love, they would call obscene.What I said was truth, they would call nonsense.My hope would bring them but despair.My laughter would wring their panicky tears.My God would also be their Devil.And some of my ideals would seem un-American.They would call my route to understanding a blindlabyrinth.Their scientists would find me emotional.Their priests—cold, analytical, and heartless.
Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions—seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me.
And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.
The storm was upon the city, now. The oncoming cold front had won the battle of the isobars. Lightning hissed and hit some nearby edifice, accompanied by a blast of thunder. The hammer of Thor, the flashbulbs of Zeus flooded the metropolis with pale, stroboscopic light. Buildings quivered under the cannonade. Inside them the millions cowered and crossed themselves or stood admiring at their windows, each, according to his nature, responding to the grandeur of liberation.
The first drops splashed upon my parapet. My curtain stretched like a flag. Papers blew. I shut the window and ran about in the pleasant excitement of the arriving storm, making fast my small interior. The world beyond churned in ecstasies of rain, din, and colored light that showed no more than light's existence. My lamps glowed for a moment a sinister red, and came up again.
I sat there after finishing my little errands, preoccupied with the loud allegory in the street.
The psyche has its climate.
Every burning drought serves by its precise degree to lift the waters of the earth for rains—and floods, too. Every deluge brings fertile substance to the spirit's plains and exposes the rich minerals on its crags. In the cold, the plants rest; in summer, they make ready the ice-resistant seeds. The trick is not—as men believe—to become but a willful rain-maker—endeavoring by rites, fasts, dances, or sleets of solid carbon dioxide to alter the immutable for some hour's advantage. This is failure; whatever such methods steal here must be repaid elsewhere. The great accomplishment of man is to understand the relationships of climate, appreciate them all, adapt his soul to every temporal vicissitude—in the knowledge that whoever is free from pride in this one good or prejudice against that special evil cannot be engulfed, or eroded, or burned alive, or frozen into the sparse tundra of intellect, of asceticism.
He—and he alone—conveys the mutations of consciousness who tends his green valley undismayed by knowing it is the valley of winter shadow. And could he own all the reasoning power of man—could his soul present within him all that women know but cannot say—he would be as God.
After a time the storm somewhat diminished. The city hissed like the embers of a great fire that resists hose and bucket.
Now, I was invaded by that projection of self-pity which Catholics think is love and Protestants believe is duty. I saw Ricky and Karen and my family, all my fond, patient friends—in sorrow. Great tears glistened inside me and their tiny counterparts ran on my cheeks.
No, I cried. Spare me not for myself—I am reconciled; but for them.
I investigated such intricate delicacies in Ricky as I have not attempted to describe here and I saw how sorrow would run through them all; I watched the infinite loyalty of a daughter turned by the slab of a tomb; I saw my family lifting up the load of their one more bereavement and myfriends kicking stones, not selfishly, but for the world they hoped I might someday somehow bring my jot of meaning to.
I paced the muggy flat and cursed.
And more.
I shall not tell you for you already know the sentiments whereby love, and duty, too, are transferred. Only at long, long last I realized how much I, who own nothing but my inner self, had imagined I owned them.
It was an injury I'd done them.
And so one more illusion set aside its mask, at least for that while, that now.
How many there were!
How often I saw them on other countenances; how rarely I lifted them from my own.
Finally, I fell asleep.
An old, old man—sitting in a chair.
PART FIVE
Coda
Coda
Rain teemedin the stone-gray morning.
My little Big Day.
A tepid stew was strained from the colander of heaven and dripped in lachrymose gray juice that steamed on every brick and tile and slate and on the asphalt acreage of the street.
I sent for my drab breakfast. You are familiar with its one element. A cup and a cup and a cup.
I set myself to my last installment. For a while, the inked deletions wavered and ran off the track. I went to the window and watched the rain smoke on my parapet—looked up at the insipid sky—found no one there—and finally turned to the roses which drooped a little in the corner of the room—drooped but glowed—and perfumed every glaucous shadow of the morning with fond recollection. The lines came straighter, after that.
By and by I called Hugo about my ticket.
"Closed in," he said. "They're landing a few planes still—but they've delayed departures. Later, it's supposed to clear—and it'll be cooler. This is the front of a high coming in from Canada."
Closed in.
"Shall I try the evening flight?"
"Sure," I said.
I gave the number of the sanitarium.
"Oh, yes, Mr. Wylie, Mr. Wilson had a comfortable night. He's talking to Dr. Adams, now. I couldn't interrupt. He seems quite cheerful—said if you phoned to tell you he'd call back when he finished his consultation."
I turned over the last page—read, cut one more paragraph, marked the lines on my long tally sheet, counted them, and felt, suddenly, the negative pressure of completion—the vacuum's strain, the sense of deprivation. Work can be addictive—one more self-enchantment of the cortex—another of the infinite autohypnoses. And when the addict's done with it, what comfort is there for his unemployment?
I stacked the many pages, scribbled a note to Harold, and phoned to his office that the manuscript would be ready for his messenger at the desk. A few merry hours and a little excitement for the profligate, dun days of my fellow citizens, God bless and pity them—a vicarious trip beyond the confines of mass production—a description of the flavor of a few of the trees they had cut down.
Bill came for it and carried it to the lobby.
Now, my clothes.
My costume.
Everything was finished
with the possible exception of me.
Rain fell all around the marquee—in a wet, funereal fringe.
The doorman stood in the street beneath his great umbrella, whistling. Two old ladies waited impatiently, jostling each other and batting annoyedly at their pocketbooks. They seemed to expect the whistle to conjure up a yellow taxi from the fourth dimension and because it took Al five minutes to hail an empty, the elder of the two put back her dime in her purse and snapped it with the righteous authoritative sound of a Norn's shears.
"Let's go to Gimbel's first," she said.
But the other wanted to start in Lord and Taylor's.
They whisked away debating this.
And I went soon—through the leaden atmosphere, on the black and slippery pavement.
The people were there in the office ahead of me.
Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.
The nurse was there, too.
It was where we had come in. Where we all do. Where we leave.
I sat, batting the drops from my trouser cuffs, smelling the damp feathers of the anxious poultry.
I found my magazine.
At last
"Mr. Wylie."
It was still a different doctor—a plump little man wearing glasses which took the radiance of his floor lamps as a shield so I could not see his eyes. His neutral hair was cut as short and even as fur.
"I'm glad to make your acquaintance," he said. "Have a cigarette. I've read your books."
I took his cigarette. Inauspicious token.
The condemned man smoked a hearty breakfast.
"Not all of us physicians deserve such a keel-hauling." He laughed at the way I'd rubbed the nose of his trade in its sins and pomposities. This was to show me his nose was immaculate.
"Sure."
He lighted his own and smoked the way doctors often do—like schoolkids with Cubebs.
"Personally, I think it's a shame a man with ability like yours for putting words together should get mixed up in this Jungian stuff."
The place had been done by a decorator—a decorator who saw a surgeon's waiting room as something soothing in ivories and sepia and faint gold. And putting words togetheris just a trick, too; it doesn't involve knowledge or sense—just lucky knack.
I cut a smile in my face for him. "Talk it over, sometime," I said.
He smirked interest in himself. "I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?"
"The poets understood it before Korzybski."
"Very good! Very! Still—"
"—a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken, though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct—"
"I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do. But I still don't see Jung's slant."
How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore to myself that he could sweat me—and all his full waiting room—till Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot. And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation.
I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too—just as Freud sees the id. To Jung—both are continuums of instinct. That's all. Any culture—even the culture of you physical scientists, which is mostly yet to come—rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes. If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee—and Toynbee's error about a churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand Jesus—and what Christianity wasintended to be to people. You can understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about."
"Interesting," he said, and he gave up. There were papers on his desk. "Like to mull it over with you someday." He discarded two or three sheets. "I've got a report on you here somewhere." He found it, finally. "Negative." He glanced at me and chuckled. "Cobb, my associate, was fooled. Told me he was all but sure of carcinoma. The thing—" he read to himself—"is a rather rare lymphatic growth. But two or three mild doses of X-ray will obliterate it. You'll never be able to see the site. Cobb will give you the first treatment straight off. Only take a few minutes. Just hold your mouth open—and shed your troubles." He chuckled again. "Mighty glad to meet you, Wylie. Maybe, someday, you'd come up to Westchester and talk to a little group I'm a member of—"
I said I would, breaking my rule. And that was that.
It happens to millions. The frightful diagnosis, the aching interlude, the laboratory check, reprieve. Till next time. It is one of the you-knows.
Half an hour later I went down to the level of the street. The lobby of this particular medical building was a poorly lighted, sparsely furnished marble sepulcher and along it lay a track of corrugated rubber matting upon which were the coming and going footprints of us all. I sat on a stone bench.
Weakness was for a while my only sensation.
My thoughts ran feebly.
They had given it back to me.
I was getting used to the process.
I should exult—
deliver myself of some noble message, immediately.
I have nothing to offer you but the Four Biles: blood and sweat and tears and W.C.
A doorman appeared from behind a fern that had been handed down from Pharaoh.
"Something funny, Mac?"
"Not very. It's just that I've lost my mind."
"People have lost everything else in this damned hall!"
He went away.
Out in back, I suppose he had a boat to ferry people across the Styx.
Soon I stumbled to the skirling thoroughfare and waved at cabs until one stopped.
Or maybe it was a hearse.
Or maybe it was a singsong boat plying in the rain alongside the doorman's draped dinghy.
Certainly it was occupied by a multitude of people, many of them dead and many of them trollops.
Want Immortal Life?
Want me?
My reaction would come—next week—next month—never.
I'd already had it.
Since Thursday, I had been consumed by my reaction.
This was robust information.
My heart resumed its job.
The infinite, posterior brain relaxed.
The small, frontal analogue took sensible direction.
Our house in Florida would go on building now—for us. The flower-filled patio and the white roof with bunting vines abloom—the cypress bedroom up among the branches of live oaks, melaleucas, orchid trees, and sweet frangipanis—the workroom with books all around, a raised fireplace and a rail to put my feet on while someday, perhaps, I marked the typed pages of the long-projected Explanation. I could write it. I could devote all my time to it: twenty-four thousand dollars were going—not into my estate—but my account.
I spun the Astolat's revolving door.
Ricky stood there—bright omen and good harbinger! Prayer answered and that best conduct I am capable of,rewarded. She wore a violet suit to match the strangest tint of her bejeweled gaze. She wore a hat with a violet feather to joust adversity and make the place for joy. Raindust glittered in her dark curls and the silver in her curls. She was smiling as she signed the register. How much she smiles!
She saw me.
"Darling!"
We kissed casually. We always do. Perhaps we are a little self-conscious in public and this may be because we are not, when we are alone with each other.
I thought she was there in response to the mute messages of the weekend. To go back with me if I wanted to go back—to stay if I wanted to stay. Possibly to shop for a day. But suddenly I could sense the wrongness of that.
"I decided I better fly down to see the doctor," Ricky said. "You won't mind waiting over another day?"
"What's the matter?"
You would have to know Ricky to know all that made up her expression, then. In her eyes was the way she felt about herself, about me; her mouth spoke of courage. "I'm afraid the undulant fever's back."
"No. Please God, no!"
"I think I ought to be checked. The past few days, I've been running a temperature. And the old megrims have begun."
She smiled again.
It was one of her masterpieces.
We were together.
We had our lives....
I patted her. The wings of my spirit began to beat against her pitiable prospect—the racking weeks ahead, the shots and blood tests, clinical examinations, probings and slides and stains, reports, hospitalizations while the doctors observed, sweats, chills, toxic horrors, frets, pains, and bravery summoned every morning from the deep well of her to last another day.
The elevator rose.
"Hell," I said, the best I could say, "we'll get you on the vaccine today. You phone Dr. Frank immediately. And then lie down. I'll unpack you. In a few weeks, you'll be right as rain."
I fumbled my key into the lock and automatically took from the doorclip my accumulation of morning mail and messages. She asked about Paul and I told her the tale.
Afterwards, she went to the phone, dialed, and watched me with loving, apologetic eyes—as if it were her fault she was infected.
While she described to the specialist the symptoms of this new malevolence I went through the mail, stopped at a letter from my lawyer, ripped it open.
Enclosed in it was a note from my accountant. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, he wrote, wanted, on the following Thursday, to go over with me the records pertaining to my income tax declarations for 1945 and 1946. Records in filing cabinets in storage in Miami Beach. Records on high closet shelves in Rushford. Records stored here in the cellar of the Astolat. In suitcases, boxes, portfolios and old trunks. Records they would not be able to check over next Thursday—because it would take a week and cost hundreds of dollars to get them together. They'd be willing to wait the week and they did not care about the cost to me; their interest would be to see if perhaps, after interminable scrutiny of the dollars and cents of forgotten years, they could find any reason to add a few more hundreds, or a thousand, to the taxes already paid.
Were I a businessman, enamored of columns of figures, such a prospect might scarcely have scarred the surface of my attention. I am not. The order was another garnishee of tranquillity—from then until I had assembled the records, held the conferences, and paid up, if any misjudgment were claimed or any disagreement ensued. I felt chained to a tormented system I could forever deplore but never alter. The wasteful exigency closed around me like a jail.
Ricky hung up. I put the letter into my pocket. She would be harassed by it—because I was. Let it wait till some happier time.
"Dr. Frank wants me to come right down," she said.
"Before lunch?"
"I'm not hungry, anyway, dear."
"I'll go with you."
"You stay here and eat!"
"You need somebody along—"
"Nonsense! I'm used to it. I won't hear of your going!"
And so we argued a little and she had her way. She went out alone in the rain with her misery.
There was a message saying that Harold had called.
I phoned back.
His usually calm voice was raised with emotion. "I got word the serial was done and Bob Durfree called before I sent for it. I've got some bad news for you, Phil. They've been dissatisfied with Durfree's editorial policy for quite a while. Over the weekend, the Board met and they've hired a new editor. Serials are out, from now on. I reminded the new editor that the characters in your story belong to them—and you can't sell it anywhere else. He said he was sorry; said he wanted short stories about Cynthia, as usual. But no serials. You know, they never consider a request as a commitment. I'm as sore as I can be! I realize you were counting on the money for your new house. But—can't you change the characters and do it over and let me try it on somebody else? It's a mighty good story!"
Harold is not just my literary representative. He is my friend. I didn't want him to guess how I really felt.
I told him I'd decide later whether to write the serial over or to chuck it. I hung up. Went to the desk. The carbon copy of my summer's work was sitting there, mute and blurry in its box. I took it out and fingered it and wondered how long it would be before I'd get to that sober book which would try to tell what certain men had learned of human instinct and how different it was from what most of the rest of mankind believed.
Quite a while, I thought.
There were other things to do first. A wife to heal, a kid to send to school, a house to finish, taxes to pay, trips to make, furniture to buy.
Maybe a war to fight at some frustrated desk.
But then
the future didn't belong to me, anyway.
It doesn't belong to you.
It belongs to our children and their children; to God—whom I call instinct—whom you may never call or call upon—or whom you may prayerfully confuse with your own good opinion of yourself.
Look and see.
I went down to the Knight's Bar alone.
I was hungry.
(This is one of the marvels of Nature.)
Jay brought a menu.
"Terrible, about your nephew," he said.
"It's all right, now. He'll pull out of it."
"That kind of thinking, I guess, is more than men can stand."
"It's the thinking they don't do that they can't stand."
Jay smiled a little. "Then they aren't any different from the rest of us."
"They aren't. Only—they don't know it." Jay glanced down at the menu. "Sole," I said, "and parsley potatoes Tartar sauce and a baked apple."
My mind flared and guttered over the anticlimaxes of the day. Soon, it commenced to take its ribald revenge.
I sent a message to the neurologists:
Gentlemen:
Yours of the twentieth century received and lack of contents noted. Item. You have cut out hunks of the anterior brains of monkeys and found, after the surgery, they were able to live in the jungle just as well as before. Item. You have hacked out hunks of the posterior cerebral tissue of cats with the result that they lost their instincts: they no longer tended to their kittens, fed them, or defended them. Item. Your colleagues in medicine are getting similar results with human prefrontal lobotomies. And yet—you still deny that man and his works repeat the great pattern of his instincts! You deny that his reason, his image of himself which he alone deems reasonable, is but another reflection of this same pattern in another dimension. In closing, nuts.
I sent a message of truth to the theologists:
Dear Fellow Compulsives:
To insist you know God when you do not know logic or science is hideous. Those who say they know God and yet reject truth, however selectively, are playing atbeingGod. And those men who play they are God, perforce use men as toys. When will you end this dreadful game? Sincerely.
A time will come, I thought, when man's chief passion will be to observe and to learn dispassionately—his passions.
But you won't be there, Mac.
For this reason, I sent a telepathic message to the School for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where—at long last—the professors are assembled to try to find out something to teach:
Persons:
Cease trying to rectify the Bhagavad-Gita by means of the Uncertainty Principle. Try algebra—since you are so much simpler than you think. Query: When will you exchange truths evenly with the Believers? So long.
As I say, I nonwired this missive. I got no answer.
The oscilloscope of my mind rippled sadly. Its little line ran straight, then finally shot up with further inquiry:
Who sees that day is the augury of coming night? And who—looking at the darkened sky—sees it to be the daylightof a trillion suns? Who further sees the great initial in the stars themselves—the F for Freedom that I dreamed of in a dream? Whose brain will abide it all? Who will continue our Quest?
And next, I felt my solitude.
If any man is more alone than I in this society I would know it, for I would have met him in the spaces I inhabit.
True, I've seen a few in my distances. And Ricky goes there with me sometimes—as she must.
In another sense, indeed, the whole company of my contemporaries is with me and I am alone only in knowing it.
For the dignity and purpose we dreamed of in the youth of this century has gone. We do our work. We mind our manners. But our young hope has been dimmed by the predictabilities. Hence we all know how temporary we are, how brief our routines, how probably it is futile to quarry or to breed, to build or to wish, to sell or to instruct, to make these civilized exertions.
Camus' plague is on us; it has been here a long while. We call it materialism.
Progress that excludes Man.
We have no peace of mind.
And here is the question of it that the theologists and the scientists have not yet hit upon:
So long as one man suffers unjustly from his fellows, be he yellow or black or white, there shall be no peace of mind for anybody.
And here is the demonstration:
Whatever Man does that he should not, and knows he should not, and whatever man does not, that he knows he should, becomes the substance of the fear of every man, lest it happen to him in his turn.
Integrity of man to man is not a paltering "ideal"; it is man's most essential ingredient, for it measures his potentialfor continuum in the sufficient space and patient time of God.
Whoever thinks to have peace of mind, these days, is therefore the figment of his own imagination; whoever wants it for himself without thought to others is a criminal.
Only the man-concerned ever knows that fragmented trifle of tranquillity permitted by our noxious times and customs. The rest are dead already in their souls—of science, of religion, of egoistic lust, of a deliberate return to childishness, of every fatal evidence of our plague.
Now a man—the Englishman—opened a newspaper noisily at his table across from me.
This is what I read:
Soon, fifteen million Americans would be organized (voluntarily, they call it) for Civil Defense.
A tenth of us regimented—willingly—for Civil Defense.
(Yet everyone who knows, proclaims there is no defense!)
The men without imagination have spoken.
We shall be ready to police and put out fires, to evacuate and rope off radioactive areas, to deal with gas, bacterial clouds, falling fungi and shots caromed off the moon.
In the name of courage, fifteen million of us will be, if possible, meticulously imbued with the latter-day alarms.
Who says now that we are even a little sane?
For a moment, my mind was blacked out by despair.
But again and still its show went on.
We, who did not have knowledge enough of ourselves to fight, when the time came, for liberty at its source—for freedom of knowledge itself—are day by day losing the rest of our freedom.
It is a working of the great law.
And in what noble names the old tyrant takes us over!
Perhaps, I thought, we may understand in time, or be lucky, and get back a brighter version of the lost principle of freedom. And if not, the quicker we are slaves the better—for the necessity of freedom shall become plain that much the sooner.
I could see the exultant marching of the fifteen million defenders of the indefensible. The burial squads of the Atomic Age are forming. Soon it will be fashionable for women to knit Geiger counters. Two-minute speakers, hastily instructed at the Y.M.C.A. will explain the need for volunteers and tell us what must be done when it is too late to do anything. Boy Scouts will learn to decontaminate the same, old, innocent surfaces. And the prizes at ladies' bridge will have the shape of guided missiles.
A great age to be alive in
while it lasts.
And that is how I began to laugh again.
For God is in His Heaven and all is well with Him.
Now the sun thrust a raffish beam through the clouds and gave to the room a curious, amber glow. All of us sitting there shared this discrete cube of light as fish share the water in an aquarium. And all of us, or nearly all, failed like the fish to penetrate the dimensions of our environs. Whichever way we looked we saw, not the great world outside, but only the image of ourselves. It was the nature of the place, we said; we never noticed that it was our failure to look anywhere save at our side of the glass walls.
This extra light also disclosed a fresh secret of the Knight's Bar. I had thought that the mural horsemen were on their way to Elaine's tower in Astolat. It seems not. Over the weekend the artist had fixed to the wall his final composition, a painting of the Grail, silk-muffled and centered in a rosy halo. It occupied a circular place directly over the bar.
How apt!
The very effort of questing leads most but to a deeper unconsciousness.
This is the moral of Faith—so far.
And the moral of Research—so far.
Why is that so?
Because they go in conceited search of salvation for themselves, or in search of knowledge for what is pompously called its own sake.
Now the Musak took up a suitable accompaniment for my mirth.
Ja-daJa-daJa-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing!Segue into silence, fade-out, and fast iron curtain.
The End