Chapter Nineteen
“In Schrafft's”
This comes from of all things a Captain America comic book, number 432, first published in October of 1994, some four years after the events in question.
One must imagine a blond chick (chick; there is no other word) thumbing for a ride on the side of the road, dressed in the sort of improbable colors that only a shitty four-color process can manage: cobalt blue jeans, a deeply disturbed orange for sweatshirt and matching tennies, a muddy green (slightly darker in hue than that usually reserved for comic book soldiers) —and it's hard to tell if it's supposed to be some sort of jacket, or pullover, or overshirt, or what, but it's there, and it's unbuttoned or unzipped or whatever to what would be a daring degree if not for the orange sweatshirt underneath (or maybe it is a pullover and it's merely cut that way) and the sleeves are rolled up well past her elbows, like only junkies and greasers do (or maybe those are just absurdly thick cuffs on an bizarrely short-sleeved jacket). Her glasses are square, with improbable cornflower frames. She has a gym bag slung over one shoulder, with the word "Espree" on it— misspelled, one presumes, in an attempt to avoid nasty letters from the Esprit company. Not that any company dislikes or eschews product placement anymore, even the unsolicited variety; Esprit would have been far more likely to send a thankful letter than a nasty one. Only the most dimwitted of authors create their own brand names, or those with a Hidden Agenda. You can always spot an important plot point nowadays when you meet up with a brand you've never heard of, that's never graced the fluorescent-lit shelves of your grocery store and is not to be found in any of the venues or pushcarts of the local mall. —An important plot point, or, as we noted, an inept author. We are uncertain which, in this case, since we didn't read much further, and so never noted what became of the Espree bag. —The character is, in the manner of characters trapped in a bad comic book, thinking great expository chunks of thought, like chewing her way through a particularly bland and tasteless breakfast for the regularity all that fiber will afford her, and her cheekbones are spectacularly badly drawn, even for work of this caliber:
"I must be out of my head!
"I should be heading back to Illinois to try to explain to my folks how their honor student managed to get herself expelled...
"...but no, I've got to play Nancy Drew and try to track down the professor who souped up my body and tried to turn me into a poster child for the she-woman boy-hater's club...
"My only clue is an airline ticket purchased by a woman fitting Prof. Wentworth's description to Malapaso, Mexico.
"Here comes a semi. Please take pity on this broiling blonde, mister!
"All right! He's stopping!"
The blonde climbs into the cab of the semi (even as she thinks that last thought-balloon; how disjointed her cognition is, thinking this thought some two minutes or so after the event which undoubtedly generated it, given the average time and distance required for a large semi to brake from sixty or seventy miles per hour to a complete stop, and the average time for a blond co-ed, souped-up body or no, to trudge said average distance, and yet the artwork indicates she's opened the door and set foot on the step, climbing into the cab. —How strange to think, at that precise moment, "All right! He's stopping!") and sits next to the driver, a genial chap with white hair and mustache and a baseball cap, and he, too, wears a similarly strange jacket, though in more of a battleship grey, over what we charitably assume was meant to be a red plaid shirt. Though the art is, as we have noted, rather bad, the artist is not without the skill necessary to call upon time-honored tropes to let us know, deftly, economically, that this is a Good Man; we have nothing to fear from him. His eyes would twinkle warmly if Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black could together combine to manage it. This is an acceptable and even exemplary use of stereotype, since we will never see this chap again in this or any other comic book; his brief appearance here is the only case he can make for himself.
"Don't you know it's not safe to be hitchhiking in this day and age, missy?" he says, and if we did not know him to be a Good Man, his words might well have sinister overtones.
"Yes..." says the blonde, "but I can take care of myself."
We bring this up merely to attempt to provide some sense of perspective. It is, as we have noted, some four years after the events in question. The passage makes references to Illinois and not Minnesota; Mexico and not Utah; an airline ticket rather than a note; hitchhiking rather than a Greyhound bus; a "Prof. Wentworth" rather than, well. Any number of likely suspects. And Mark Gruenwald, of course, made all this up out of whole cloth, or so he believes; and though we know the fact to be that he was inspired by any number of bad movies, bad novels, bad comic books, and unfortunate attitudes concerning men, women, and truck drivers, all received from the culture at large without examination, like strange reflections in a funhouse mirror—or rather, flickering shadows cast on a cave wall where burns a dim and smoky fire, with no attempt made to examine those things which are undoubtedly there, in the smoke and the darkness, casting the shadows, themselves silhouetted, the firelight behind them making their outlines uncertain, hard to grasp; certainly, looking at the shadows is easier. —Still. The check was made out to Gruenwald, after all; not to The Cave, nor The Shadows, nor The Things, nor The Culture At Large; not even to us. He writes because he can; we write because we have to. So it is no great matter to leave him his delusions.
Art is a reflection of life; life, of course, in turn reflects art. Like chickens and eggs, or nature and nurture, there's no hope of telling which came first, or whether it matters. In the end, they're one and the same. (A mathematician, in fact, will claim, topologically speaking, that a chicken and an egg are the same; she cannot tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup, either.) Thus all things are connected, as Dirk Gently taught us; the Principle of Contagion, oldest of the laws of magic, is, indeed, true—though far more complex than we can hope to grasp.
Unnerving, then, the unexpected places where echoes will suddenly sound, or ripples from some long-since-subsided tidal wave will finally lap, quietly, and with little fanfare, ashore. The Japanese, for instance, revere blood types for some obscure reason, treating them as Sun signs in astrology, or, more accurately, the personality types ascribed by the oracular Myers- Briggs test (which, of course, used a group of Minnesotans as its base sample set). It is not uncommon for a person's blood type to be included in an otherwise chirpy introductory email, say, flashed from one palm-top to the next: "Hi! I'm Shinohura, and I'm an AB! You?" —and the blood types of prominent characters in video games are always given, as a cue to what courses of action they might take. There are eight types, then: the four major blood types, A, B, AB, and O, and their Rh-negative counterparts, like Tarot cards reversed. All of which seems unaccountably violent, even fatalistic, to us, as if everyone in Japan were carefully making sure that the relevant information were widely distributed in the event of a sudden and unexpected need for a transfusion. —Such are the vagaries of cultural relativism, where a dead human being can, on the one hand, seem a disastrous, crippling loss and, on the other, to be of little more importance than the sudden snuffing-out of an unusually personable goldfish.
•
Of course, if one takes as read the notion that all is connected, and everything the same, then linkages of all sorts litter the ground, begging to be put together. Why does Brittany, say, have a waterbed? Why does she listen to Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and not some other Butthole Surfers album? Or instead of the Butthole Surfers, why not something by, say, Engelbert Humperdinck, which would (it could be argued) fit her sense of the sublime and the ridiculous? (Neither Momus nor The Divine Comedy had had much of a career yet, in 1990, though both, it must be admitted, while sublimely ridiculous, are in and of themselves too supremely self-conscious to withstand repeated playings in such a context.) And just where did Cecil find his black neck brace, anyway, and where did Christian get his Ethiopian salt shaker? —The answer is not Ethiopia, we can assure you. Some linkages are easily dismissed: why the Narc is named Norbert, for instance (though Ajax, perhaps, is worthy of a moment's contemplation); why Sister Prudence is, indeed, a Sister, though she would never consider taking the vows of the Who-ar of Babylon; and why, exactly, the floor of what was formerly SA Mainline Tank #1 is covered in paper currency; others are not so quickly put aside: Why on earth would Sherlock Holmes be one of the few pop culture references Janis gets? Which may seem elementary to you, perhaps, until you consider that her mental image of Holmes eschewed a deerstalker hat and hunting cloak and dressed as a proper late Victorian gentleman, a sartorial maneuver insisted upon by Jeremy Brett, the last actor to have made a career of playing the character. Said career hit its peak during her disappearance; he died shortly thereafter. Why Murphy Brown, of all things? (One might well ask, Why Dan Quayle? History seems to be doing an equitable job of forgetting both.) Does it mean anything that, some ten years from now—rather, some ten years from the events in question, which, as slippery a concept as it may seem, is itself as close to "now" as makes no never-mind—on a hot, late summer's evening Mark Phillips will feel an astonishing and overwhelming sense of presque vu, and be moved to tears, when he happens to overhear a couplet from a pop song played too loudly in a tricked-out Acura sitting next to him at a stoplight: "When you clean out the hive, does it make you want to cry? Are you still being followed by the Teenage FBI?" He will not know why, himself; the Acura guns its motor and pulls away on thin, flat tires with wide, flashy rims, and though he spends the next few months desultorily searching, he is unable to find the name of the band, the song, or the album, nor does he ever recapture that startling presence, that imminence, or ever learn what it portends. (We know it is "Teenage FBI," of course, by a group from Ohio named Guided by Voices, but we cannot tell him.) And why is Albert at once so very precise and so very unlikable, even in death? Is it, perhaps, genetic?
(We may well be drawn to this line of thought by the stuffed rabbit which sits at the end of the bed, where we type these words into a laptop computer, not onto a thin piece of dirty typing paper, and does it matter that where we are now might well have been a namesake of where we were then, but for the flip of a coin? —It is a scruffy rabbit, though well-loved, and it gazes blankly at us with a dead, glassy eye. It came into our lives some years after, to be sure, but still, some years ago, and yet the coincidence has never before registered; we have, of course, not thought of Herschberg all that often in the intervening years, much as Mark has not [will have not?], despite all that will happen to him there [has already happened?]. Still. This guileless little rabbit, a favorite prey of our brindle cat, now seems quite... ominous? portentous? freighted? Echoes; ripples. Unnerving, as we've said. —Though perhaps it's just the cold medication.)
Anyone can, of course, make a pattern, dark with portents, gleaming with hints of possibility; even from something so mundane as wind-tossed tree branches and shadows, or a pendulum and a golden trumpet. Making a pattern is nothing special, and logic is merely a means of going wrong with confidence; it's how we think, after all. Appraise the world around you and you have, in some fashion, ordered it, patterned it to your liking, remade it in however small a way in your image. ("Ah, love, could you and I with Fate conspire/To smash this sorry scheme of things entire...") It's making a meaningful, useful pattern that's tough, and that's one of the reasons Agatha Christie will always be a perennial bestseller.
All a matter of one's perspective, one might say.
But that is, or at least can be, one of the problems of being a Martian.
•
(You do remember the Martian, don't you? This is a story about, among other things, a Martian.)
•
Helene Smith went there, first.
(This is, we're afraid, something of a digression, as advertised. Bear with us.)
"There," being to Mars. Not the Robinson Mars, or the Bradbury Mars (though she might quite have liked that one, except that English was the lingua franca), not the Wells Mars or the Burroughs Mars or the Marses of Bear or Bova or MacDonald, and not the Mars of Burton or DePalma. In the end, of course, Mars is what you make of it (ask not what it is about Mars, Red Planet, Bringer of War that has so many human societies worship it as a blood-caked, vengeful deity; ask, instead, what it is about humanity); her Mars was made of newspaper columns feverishly entertaining the possibility of life on the Red Planet, as its perihelic approach in the last quarter of the 19th century coincided with an error in translation (from, ironically enough, Italian to English; surely, had French, Queen of languages, been involved, this whole misunderstanding might have been avoided): Giovanni Schiaparelli writes of the streaks of color he sees while observing Mars, naming them "canali," or channels; this is misread by the English and Americans as "canals," and on this slim premise is hung a breathless tale of an ancient civilization striving heroically, against all hope, as their planet turns slowly but inexorably into a desert, to draw the last water from their dying seas to their crumbling, mausoleum-ridden cities in an engineering feat the likes of which the Earth has never seen. (Why ancient? Why a desert, when Flammarion had written not twenty years before, "May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet..."? Mumford, of course, tells us the graveyard is the first sign of cities; it is also the last they leave behind. Still: Why such an air of death, and decadence, and genteel despair? —It is worth noting that Schiaparelli named many landmarks [seas, and canali, but also plains and mountains] after the Classical geography of Hell, but this may have no more to do with it all than the then-recent completion, after much heroic effort, of the Suez Canal through the ancient, mausoleum-haunted deserts of Egypt, or Percival Lowell's choice to build his great observatory in the deserts of Arizona, where the air was clearest.) When Cara Gouget Guzman, a wealthy French widow, tried to foster peace and harmony among the worlds by offering a prize of one hundred thousand francs to the first person to communicate with extraterrestrials, she excluded Mars from consideration; it would prove, she felt, too easy to contact. —Better to try for the shier off-worlders, those tall and blond Venusians, perhaps, or the squat, fungoid Lunarians, or the as-yet unknown creatures which might brave the Great Red Spot just recently discovered on far-off Jupiter. (The Greys of zeta Reticuli and the reptilian Draconids from the stars of the constellation Draco were more shy still, hiding as yet unseen in the wings; we were terribly provincial in those days. —Though one might well remark on the remarkable coincidence, that aliens which come from the constellation Draco are, themselves, draconic, the wise pattern-maker will smile benevolently, or roll his eyes in exasperation, as may be his wont, and explain, patiently, or through gritted teeth, that there is nothing to remark upon; there are no coincidences. Propter hoc, ergo post hoc; the constellation Draco is so named because we have always known that the aliens which come from that quarter of the sky are reptilian —here there be dragons. We have merely chosen to forget.)
We say Helene Smith went there first, but this is, in the end, sheer conjecture on our parts. She herself went nowhere, of course, except the offices of Theodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He was interested in her claims to have been a medium or "channel" (canale, in the Italian spoken just over the Alps) for Marie Antoinette (though her handwriting, when under the influence, in no way resembled the former Queen's, and Smith—which, of course, was not her real name—was more than willing to familiarize her royal chum with the latest contrivances of the Steam Age, so that her messages from Beyond might make reference to telephones and steamships with no evident confusion), and he was astonished to discover that, when put under hypnosis, she did not renounce her claims, but produced more, many more, as if from a bottomless well: She had lived lives in ancient India, and on Mars, and proved still literate in the Martial language when entranced, recording a number of messages in the Martial alphabet (for, in the late Victorian era, the sentient inhabitants of Mars were referred to as often as not as "Martials"). —Today, her curious and lovely curlicue script, which corresponds on a one-for-one basis with the twenty-six characters of the Roman alphabet, can only be found in James Randi's An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, which fact reminded us of a pithy moral, though we cannot find the scrap of paper on which we jotted it down. —The French were delighted to discover that the ancient and advanced language of the Martials was structured identically to their own, which they had always held without peer in grammar or syntax. How nice to find such incontrovertible proof! We can, perhaps, ignore the fact that French was Mlle. Smith's native tongue. The Parisians were more than happy to do so, and marveled at the sketches of Martial fashions she produced: unisex styles, with loose blousy pants and long, embroidered shirts cinched at the waist by broad belts, quite sensible attire for hot, dry days in the desert. (And we see again how advanced the Martians were, how ahead of their time. Unisex styling, almost a hundred years before the advent of the pantsuit, or the burning of bras!)
She was under hypnosis, and incapable of consciously lying, but Flournoy (unlike the French) was never swayed to believe she had actually lived on Mars, or in ancient India, or had had preternatural contact with Marie Antoinette. Instead, he made a crucial distinction: While he did not believe what she said, he believed that she believed. For her part, Smith, who had come to realize Flournoy had been her husband in long-ago India, when she had been Princess Simandini, grew so angry at this perceived betrayal that she demanded a divorce—easily enough granted, as he himself never recognized the marriage, no matter how much she might have believed in it. She never spoke to him again. By the end of her life, Catherine Elise Muller (for that was her real name, if she ever had one) had come to live full-time as of another of her famous past lives, that of the Virgin Mary.
•
Flournoy's slippery concept of the truth, of course, plagues us to this day. (What else could lie behind the undergraduate's favorite exit strategy from an inconvenient relationship? "I love you, but I'm not in love with you." What you believe to be true is as valid as what I believe—unless, of course, your idea of love inhibits mine, much as her idea of Mars subverted his of a rational, logical universe. —No wonder she asked for a divorce!) So much so that, in an attempt to explain how Muller, or Smith, could so fervently have believed what was so patently untrue—or how Virginia Tighe could have so vividly remembered her life as Bridey Murphy of Cork, Ireland when she had never left the continent of North America—some researchers have coined the term "cryptomnesia," for that which we know, but do not know we know, and so must remember in other ways. Virginia Tighe's nurse, when she was an infant, was from Ireland, and told her many stories of the old country; surely it is easier to believe these stories might have permeated the malleable wax of her unformed mind, only to surface later as vivid memories she could not explain, than it is to believe in reincarnation! —Yes, well, sigh the pattern- makers, with a sardonic edge to their grins, it's not called Draco because it looks like a dragon, now, is it? Look at it. Does that loose rope of stars with a noose at the end look like a dragon to you? No, it's Draco because we know the Draconids come from those stars. We just don't want to remember. (Or, says a dissenting voice, they won't let us remember.) But all nod their heads and agree: cryptomnesia; QED. —Thus do the master's tools chip away at the foundations of his very house.
But one should not laugh at the concept of cryptomnesia. Otherwise, one might have to believe a little green man really did climb through George Gregory Hale's window late one night to give him an idea as to how he might build the world's largest reflecting telescope, by far, on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles. Whether or not one chooses to believe, we must believe that he believed; one cannot argue with the enormous reflecting telescopes he built: three of them, two on Mount Wilson and one on Mount Palomar, much larger by far than any previous. —The little green man continued to climb through his window late at night and advise Hale on the quotidian details of running the Mount Wilson observatory until his—Hale's—death, in 1938.
•
We say Catherine Elise Muller went there first, but isn't the lesson to be learned rather that we all might have been there, at one point or another? (Cryptomnesia, perhaps, but what early childhood experiences could possibly have suggested to her what life on Mars was really like? The music critic of Time magazine tells us that the compositions of Phillip Glass sound "like a High Mass given on Mars." How does he know?) We recently began reading a book which purported to outline for us the curious societies springing up across America, support groups for those of us who are "walk-ins," alien entities who have, whether accidentally or with a deliberate agenda (always peaceful, of course, or so they tell us, and why would they lie?) chosen to incarnate themselves as humans on the planet Earth. We were disappointed to learn that the author was not so much a bemused and gregarious skeptic as an enthusiastic fellow-traveler, and we soon put it away, though not without gleaning what entertainment we could, much as a churlish man might kick a dog already lying at his feet, simply because he has nothing better to do. We were amused to discover that the symptoms of being a "walk-in" include a profound feeling of alienation, and were, in fact, remarkably similar to the symptoms of Young People who are Having Problems with Drugs. This might help to explain the rather ambitious estimates of the number of "walk-ins" in the United States alone: some two or three million, in various states of self-awareness and confusion, with perhaps ten times that many still "asleep" to their true selves. Imagine! One in ten of us is from another planet! Does this possibility not fill you with wonder? —Bored, we aimed one last kick at the dog's belly by flipping to the back of the book, where the author's afterword promised to detail his own slow and painful journey to the "admittedly incredulous" realization that he was, in fact, an alien. We were not unrewarded. We can only ask you to imagine the peals of laughter which rang out when we discovered that the first inklings of his profound alienation, his questioning of his very identity, began during his freshman year at a small, private, liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio.
•
We tell you, of course, that he looks like James Dean, except with a ponytail. He could as easily have looked like Humphrey Bogart, or Marilyn Monroe, or, we discovered, upon a recent visit to a frame-and-print shop in a local mall, one of the Three Stooges; but he could never have looked like Christopher Lloyd or Ray Walston. (He wears a ponytail because angels in movies always wear ponytails, and long, dark coats.) We tell you that he saw a pair of hands burying a T-shirt in a circle of light, when we really know that what was shown on that bank of monitors was not something that actually happened, but an isolated moment from an episode of Twin Peaks, glimpsed on a fuzzy, black-and-white television set in the guest house of a farm in Kirtland, Ohio whose ostensible purpose is the breeding of fine Arabian horseflesh. (And yet, it really did happen, or so we are told: Louise did just that, for reasons as yet unknown to her. Does she know, really, and not yet know she knows? —Once more, life imitates art.) The Martian landed in a saucer which resembled the Chrysler Building, which immediately begs the question: was it Gahan Wilson's, or Scott McCloud's? And which, in the end, is the less distressing? (But the only witnesses to this event were a group of stoners, and who believes stoners?)
He moved into an apartment in the Hiawatha Towers and bought a grand piano, the only furniture, and since then his neighbors have heard the unmistakable sound of crunching wood and snapping piano wire at irregular intervals through their infamously thin walls. We would like to state that he was attempting to answer the riddle, How do you sharpen a piano wire? but the answer, of course, is all too simple: You tighten it, a little, and watch the piano-tuner flinch when you hit the key. "Ow," he says. "That's sharp." —No; the Martian was merely dismantling a piano. Was it a metaphor? An allusion? An echo or a ripple? Perhaps, but it is a fact.
It is entirely possible that the exercise with the piano served to distract him, and nothing more, an abstruse form of Martian meditation, or the nearest local equivalent. He is, after all, a Martian, by which signification we know certain things about him, and whence he comes: an old, an ancient world, dying, decadent, obsessed with canals—or canali, which, as we now know, means "channels"—and unimaginably advanced when compared with us. They know more than we do. He, alone (and is he alone? the last of his kind?) knows more than we do: as he stands before what the newspaper advertisement claimed was a "pic. win." and looks out into the lightening night, he knows that Elgin, say, is doing much the same, standing before the window of his cramped single dorm room which looks out on the Roquelaire Quadrangle, his ever-unlit pipe in his hand, the slowly in-growing toenail on the bulbous big toe of his right foot causing a twinge of pain, which he ignores. He mutters, to himself, for no reason he understands, "This is merely the eye." —When Elgin was twelve, he visited his mother's parents in Mobile, Alabama as a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico decided to shunt north instead of west, which forced them to spend a day huddled in the dark hallway in the center of their little post-war tract home, worried about the cat who'd refused to stay inside; when the winds had suddenly ceased, as if the entire world had taken a breath and was holding it, his grandmother had put a hand on his shoulder as if to prevent him from leaping up and running out, though he wasn't about to; he knew, even if he didn't know he knew, that the storm was far from over. "It's the eye," she said. —The cat survived, having hidden Lord knows where (under the garage, with a cat from the house next door; they'd always been suspicious of each other, but now huddled close, out of the rain and the unthinkable winds; they did not budge when the eye trembled overhead, gazing down, but when the last of the winds finally died Sooty, the black cat which belonged to Elgin's grandparents, laid flat her ears and snarled, aiming a swipe at Sherman Fleabody's twitching tail; the immediate danger over, it was now time to return to the old balance of power and mutually assured distrust). Pine needles carpeted the pavement, and branches littered the road, great huge ones that he had to pedal his bicycle around, like the arms of the trees themselves lopped off and left to rot. —So Elgin knows whereof he speaks, even though he doesn't know why it applies there and then, and some weeks later, when the Door shall Open, and the metaphorical eye shall break, he will have forgotten this moment entirely. But the pain, in his toe: he will ignore this, and not trouble the doctor about it, and some years later will limp through the desert heat, sweating, his beard not so much a beard as an unshaven face, and the pain will make him perhaps more terse than he ought to be when he hands out his fliers about the closing of Freedom Ridge. "The government is stealing your money and lying to you," he'll snap, though he knows more flies are caught with honey than with vinegar. —He will long since have abandoned his affected, unlit pipe. He will hold no truck with talk of zeta Reticulans and Draconids eating soldiers under the sand in Dulce, New Mexico, and he already knows enough physics to be able to realize Bob Lazar is full of shit when the time comes; still. He will know there's more to it all than what they tell us; he will have seen it, or part of it, one small sliver of it which will have cracked his head-blind eye once, long ago, not long from now. —He will not have had a job for several years, at least, not the sort of job that provides health insurance enough to cover the outpatient surgery necessary to correct what will be a severely ingrown toe, and the pain of it, and the blood which soaks through his dirty white socks, the impromptu dressings he constructs of toilet paper and kleenex, will cause him to wince, though every now and then, when he isn't thinking, he will smell his toe, his sock, and think, how sweet. Were he not still Elgin, he might reflect that sanctimony and rot both smell sweet. But he will still be (some things never change, so we might take comfort in this), and so he won't.
The Martian knows all this, and more besides, and so we see quite amply demonstrated one of the problems of being a Martian. For the more we know, the less we are able to act. (We wonder if this is not the hidden agenda behind those chirpy public service announcements; we wonder idly, but we wonder. It would be just like them to taunt us with the real meaning by leaving it unsaid: "The more you know..." goes the tagline, after all.) Why else would we choose not to know what we know? —The killer, after all, in the end must not know that his victim is the same being as himself. The better he is at this trick of cryptomnesia, the easier he'll find himself to live with, afterwards.
And so the Martian stands, and knows, and every now and then he drinks a glass of water, or snaps a piano wire, or splinters a lovingly carved sounding board. He missed the previews, and the opening credits, and is human enough to be annoyed by this, like any of us. (Most of us.) Still. He knows enough to understand what's going on, which is his problem. But that's as may be. He knows enough to realize he's made it in time for the rousing close of Act One; whether this is the three-act structure of contemporary movies, the four-act structure of an hour-long television drama (with time for teaser, stinger and commercial breaks, of course) or the five-act structure of a classic tragedy remains to be seen, but there's still time enough, he hopes, to act. The Door will Open Both Ways, of course, which helps, but is, in itself, part of the problem.
•
(The Martian knows all this, or so we tell you. Of course, you could easily choose to believe that he merely believes he knows this, or that what he knows is frangible, fluid; like the specters shown by the Ghost of Christmas Future [as well, the pedant wishes to point out, as Christmas Present], What Might Be, not What is Yet to Come. From our own limited omniscience, we can find nothing to contradict his knowledge, though nothing to confirm it, either. For instance, entering Elgin's name into our favorite search engine, to see what traces, if any, he has left on the infobahn, we turn up a number of tantalizing clues, article spoor and email droppings, the occasional letter to the editors of this or that computer gaming periodical. —Even some indication that he remembers our collegiate hijinx [different, to be sure, we want you to understand, than the events in question] fondly enough to allude to them in a computer game of his own design, and this makes us smile. —But the letters are all two years old or older, articles and games ditto, and friendly but firm daemons bounce our email back to us as undeliverable, when we try to use those old, dried, withered addys. Thus are the limits of our omniscience defined. You might well enter Elgin's name—or, let's be precise, what you believe Elgin's name to be—and come up with quite different results; perhaps he is an investment banker with no time for computer games, who has a passing interest in "black" aircraft and government secrecy, but an utter disdain for "youfers." Perhaps his email is working fine. —But it would not be our Elgin, and so, to us, the exercise is pointless. It pleases us, then, to imagine him high on Freedom Ridge in Nevada, looking out over Groom Lake like Moses into a Dreamland he thinks he once might have seen, but can never enter; much as it has pleased us, though in a different way, to have given him our bad toe.)
•
The Martian stands before his window, looking out into the dawn, and knows all this, and more besides. He hums a pop song that won't be written for some six or seven years yet, every now and then murmuring the lyrics, "Lord, how long did it take you to become famous?" He lifts a glass of lukewarm water from the sill and sips, noisily, and thinks, I drink the clear, tepid liquid, and frowns, where did that come? A memory, I am eight, maybe nine years old, and he shudders and puts the glass down. "After You'd created this fantastic planet, and all the animals that creep about on its surface? Must have taken a million years or more, before anyone even thought," and he snaps a piano wire with an implacable finger, "to give a name to the nameless..." He has a nice enough voice; Huey Lewis now, that is to say, Huey Lewis ten years after, and not Huey Lewis then, which is to say, now.
Several thousand miles away (we are too lazy to get up and unpack the Atlas so as to ascertain the precise number; you may feel free to check it yourself, and scribble it in the margin. The Martian, of course, knows, but we can never remember how to convert kaliae into miles, or kilometers), in what had once been SA Mainline Tank #1, Alastair would like to be thinking about any number of things. How easy it would have been, for instance, to have let them kill Cabot as they wanted, and how hard it had been, and at what expense of political capital (and were he thinking along these lines, he would snort at the idea such a thing could be measured at all, in any meaningful way), to keep them from doing what they wanted, and how he would not have been able to live with himself had he not. He'd like to remind himself of Lao Tzu's "little country," the lighthouse he saw once, so many years ago, whose position he fixed firmly in his mind, and towards which he has been steering ever since. —In fact, he rummages about his desk drawer, looking for the Fields translation, and instead comes up with a different slim volume, blue, and grey, inscribed Nones, 1947-1950, and he thinks, "How many ways Rome can fall," which makes him think, "Semi-carnally?" which, well, which leads him right back to thinking of Albert. His son.
Alastair has done many things throughout his long and checkered life (longer than you might think, looking at him, but not so long as to suggest anything more preternatural than clean living), and among them has been a stint as manager of a dog kennel. When he first heard what others believed about what the Light and the Dark were up to, he laughed, and said derisive things about Dalmatians, and Irish setters, and about Manx cats and their spinal problems. —He has since come to believe what others believe, but that has not shaken his initial impression. Give him a mutt, any day. His grief, then—and it is grief, nonetheless for his not having thought much of Albert, or about him, in the past twenty years—is not for some disastrous, crippling loss, over the unraveling of carefully thought-out schema, over the sudden appearance of a weakness in his castling of rook and king, over the inescapable sundering of a pocket of white stones by a thin wedge of black. Alastair, as he is fond of conceiving it, does not represent either white or black, either chess or Go (or checkers, for that matter). Alastair—and Cabot, and Pokey, and Norbert, and tens of thousands of others, hell, why be modest, we're all in this, in the end, billions of us—is the board underneath, the wood that supports the struggle, scored sometimes with charred black lines, or overlaid with arbitrarily regular mosaics of Light and Dark, and always, always trampled underfoot. —Albert, then, was not the scion of a fabled bloodline, last hope of a beleaguered race, destined to save the Earth—or destroy it. That sort of thing is precisely what Alastair is fighting against. No, Albert had merely been a picky, prickly, disagreeable child who had, as well as Alastair could ascertain, grown into a picky, prickly, disagreeable young man. Which doesn't prevent him from having to fight down a slowly swelling wave of tears; it is always a strange thing, unnatural, for a parent to outlive a child. The report is sketchy—the Gaunt Man's creatures, after all, do not realize they are reporting on the death of the child of their nominal chairbeing—so Alastair is unfamiliar with the details of Albert's last days of life. It would not fill him with rage, or an unslakable thirst for vengeance, or make him pound his desk and growl, "This time, it's personal," to learn that Albert had been murdered by a descendent of Gyorg Herschberg's bizarre charismatic cult which, at the behest of the words of the blazing white angel Yah-Bue- Kie, had fled the religious intolerance of the "Burnt-Over" Territories of upstate New York in the mid-19th century for the relative wilderness of Minnesota, where they could found their own cooperative, communal town, a true Heavenly Paradise on Earth from which to await the final trumpet, the call to the last great battle, Armageddon. Over time, of course, the needs of livestock and grain farming and surviving the harsh, cold winters diluted the impact of Yah-Bue-Kie's words, and there were the inevitable schisms—Margaret Wilson's memorable March of 1903, which led to the founding of neighboring Wilsonsylvania (never incorporated, it was formally annexed by Herschberg in 1947); the ever-pressing Lutheran Problem; the Meh-Neh-Lik Heresy of 1890, which held that Herschbergers—the cult, that is —must stand vigilant for the day that the Great White Horse would ride from the East to save them all. The Meh-Neh-Lik Heresy (named for the blazing white angel whose words inspired young Wentschuer Herschberg to speak out against her grandfather's complacency), ironically enough, would outlive the main cult, surviving today as a secret society of a deputy in the Sheriff's office, a couple of bachelor farmers, and Old Dan Gunner, who runs the feed store on the outskirts of what used to be Wilsonsylvania, and who all keep silver bullets and wooden stakes handy, and have been busy of late: of the unsolved murders that have plagued the Two-County Area (as it's sometimes known, to the chuckling derision of University students from New York, or, for that matter, anywhere else) over the past fifteen years, nine can be laid at their feet, a not inconsiderable majority; a clear mandate from Heaven, or the people, or something. Albert may or may not make the tenth, as it's unknown as yet whether his murder goes unsolved. —Knowing all this, as we have said, would not make Alastair feel anything but more hollow, more resigned. This, too, is precisely what he is fighting against. Laugh all you like at Rodney King for his naive question, or at Morgan Freeman's all-too-conscious echo of it in the dreadful film adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities. Alastair has heard and seen none of this, of course, as it hasn't happened yet. But he would, in the end—as do we—prefer Elvis Costello: "What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?"
So he lets the book fall open in his hand, and, as always,
it does so between pages 32 and 33. And there is the final stark stanza, all
alone at the top of page 33:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
(In the jumbled desk drawer—it is a deep one, and Alastair, who has learned to be scrupulously tidy about so many things, might be forgiven a lapse into clutter, here—along with several other books he keeps not so much for their words as for their talismanic value [to himself alone, please] and the usual mare's nest of pens, pencils, clips and binders, forgotten pads of Post-it notes, and some stray escudos and a ruble or two, is a bottle of pills Brittany would immediately recognize. Alastair will, from time to time, heft the bottle in his hand, much like the gun John Henry Tyler lifts and points at the startlingly beautiful girl who sits on the couch before him, tears shining like flawless crystals in her peerless green eyes. "We're all connected," he's saying, and he's crying, too, but his sobs are ragged, his eyes red, screwed up, his tears are hot and sticky, "everything, it's all connected, get it? So we're all contaminated, dammit, all of us, every last one of us is tainted. Purity is the last thing we can stand." But, in the end, the gun does not go off, and Alastair almost always puts the pills back in the drawer, and when he does take them, he is very careful with the timing and the dosage. —Too much, after all, would give him a heart attack.)
He sighs, and turns back a page. And smiles, in spite of it all. And murmurs aloud, "When she lifted her eyes it was plain that our globular furore, our international rout of sin and apparatus and dying men galore, was not being bothered about." And he wishes he had a beer, to raise in honor of her smile, there on the page, for this, this as much as anything else, is what he's fighting for. —But away with the book, and the smile; here comes the Gaunt Man.
"And then," sings the Martian to himself, "in the blinking of an eye the backlash came. The cynics crowded round saying You didn't even exist." He's unconsciously plucking the song's fetal chords on the piano strings he hasn't yanked loose; though he's been demolishing it a week, there's a startling number of strings left intact. A blankness has trembled across his knowledge, a shiver he knows almost nothing about, any more than an American submariner using active sonar would point it directly at the Soviet sub he's trying to track. (This image, of course, was outmoded even then, but is handy enough for descriptive purposes.) It appeared suddenly, so suddenly he did know something before he could turn away: Oddly enough, it is an image of a goldfish, swimming serenely about its bowl. He is trying not to think about what it might mean. "Oh, fashion is fickle, Lord; You know that more than I do, the backlash always comes no matter what you've done, created the world, given Your Son, or Your difficult third album..."
Dave is himself trying not to think about what it might mean, and is, on the whole, having more luck. (Were you to ask him which came first, the chicken or the egg, he'd laugh and bellow, "The rooster!") If he were to become aware of Alastair's grand designs, he'd chuckle indulgently, and have much to say on the subject of why, perhaps, his cause might seem so effortlessly doomed. The roles we take for ourselves, after all, have power over us; no one who sees himself as a mere gaming board, no matter how romantic it may seem, has any hope of winning, in the end. —Dave would see himself, rather, as one of the players, using white or black pieces as it strikes his fancy, depending upon the game in question. Or a gambler, or kibitzer, with, perhaps, an interest in one side or the other winning this skirmish, or that, but entertained no matter what, and with no more thought given to the colors of the stones than to the colors of the hems of the player's cuffs. One has two hands, after all; why not serve with both? Why tie one behind the back? —A generous, even empowering vision, to be sure, but Dave is also aware of the limits of the roles one assigns to oneself. Every now and then, on a night like tonight, say, the bonds are burst, the pieces fly with wills of their own, one's hands lash out, left and right, with no care as to what they might hit. Best then to think of other things, to sit at home with a blanket to pull over one's head, to ride it out until it's day again, and one can go and lounge in the sun with the players, and drink beer, and tell jokes, and win or lose, it matters not.
So Dave meanders through the brightly lit halls of his ancestral home and every now and then crunches down a spoonful of instant coffee. He is smart enough to know better than to try to sleep tonight, for last night, and the night before, he dreamed of the tree back home where strips of cloth, but also rags and even plastic bags, in this day and age, are tied to placate restless spirits, to secure them against the machinations of witches. If he dreams of it a third night, it will become an omen, and that's the last thing he wants. —He muses about other things: It is becoming clear to him that the Albanian agent presents, perhaps, rather more of a problem than he'd first thought. It has been remarked, of course, that Dave has not been in the States for very long; he is, as yet, unused to how certain topics are best broached, how certain concepts are conceived, how different, in the end, the manners and mores may be. For instance: Where Dave had been raised, it would never have done to let a Soulless One wander about the village, frightening the children, strolling about the market, souring the milk. But here, there was not only a mathematics professor utterly bereft of soul, strutting about as plain as day for anyone with eyes to see, but an English professor who had been dead, completely dead, for at least two years now. And still taught classes! Was it considered impolite to complain of the smell? — But it is slowly (too slowly, perhaps, you might feel, but Dave is making his way as best he can, and were you in his bare feet, could you have done any better?) becoming clear to Dave that, perhaps, no one hereabout has eyes to see—or, if they do, those eyes are looking elsewhere. It is quite possible that no one knows of the soulless mathematics professor, the dead English professor, the deputy who has so very clearly thrown his lot in with the pure, blazing white light, the FBI agent who has so very clearly thrown his lot the other way. —And if this is the case, it therefore follows that Cecil (and the others, yes, even the FBI) might well have been unaware that the Albanian agent was, as Dave had thought must be obvious to all, a blood-drinker, a foul and loathsome beast that must, nonetheless, be tolerated. —Some years from now, in a sweltering heat rather more humid than that which will bake a limping Elgin in his Army fatigues and ill-considered black T-shirt and khaki hat, Dave will be gazing down upon an old and skeletal man hiding from the sun in the shadow of a reed hut. The old man has been a blood-drinker for many years, but Dave will have arrived too late, once again; the thirst, proving too much, will have driven the old man to drink from a sickly young woman with two dull children and a third on the way, and the virus will have taken hold, spawning from his belly into his own resurgent bloodstream like the century shrimp who hatch and mate furiously and lay eggs and die by the billions when the once-in-a-hundred-years rain turns the great dust bowls of the Kalahari into sandy, muddy, shallow seas. It works much more quickly upon blood-drinkers; already, a type of fungus found only in the cloacae of kites will have grown behind his dusty ears, and the sunlight reflected from the bits of unmuddied chrome on the Land Rover in the square will be enough to burn him, a little, but the old man is too proud to hide away in the dark like the dying animal he is. —And though he will be too late, again, Dave once more will do what he can, which is to sit beside the old man and speak to him, and though their conversation will be nothing more than the usual daily pleasantries, it will nonetheless prove a rare wonder to the old man, for it will be in his native tongue, which no white man will ever have spoken to him before. —Perhaps, thinks Dave, I should let Cecil know about the Albanian. Tomorrow, though; tomorrow. Which is practically today! And so, too, today, perhaps, he should make sure that Sheriff Little Bear knows just what it is she keeps in the upper left drawer of her desk, and how very powerful it is. (Though surely she does know. She must. Mustn't she?) A new resolution: He will no longer assume quite so many things, but will ask more questions, and point more things out to those who might have missed them. Dave thoughtfully chews another spoonful of instant coffee. How wonderful, that something so bitter, so unpleasant, so effective should be wrapped up in a brightly colored glass jar and sold to any who wish to buy it!
"And the Lord said," sings the Martian, lifting the glass of water again to wash the bitter, unpleasant, effective taste out of his mouth, "don't ask Me, I have no idea." He bends over and picks up two of the piano's keys from the scarred linoleum: one white, one black. The white one is the larger, the more numerous, the stately, regular progression; the black smaller, outnumbered, staggering, but the more nuanced, the sharp or flat variations of the upright, normal notes. Two keys. Perhaps this is the answer? Not to think of pieces, or a board, or a game at all, but of a piano? Himself, sitting behind it, playing it, white and black keys alike?
He looks over the wreckage, the shattered sounding board, the splintered legs, the snapped wires coiling every which way like dangerous split ends, and he raises an eyebrow in an expression which graces the walls of thousands upon thousands of dorm rooms across the country. —Perhaps he can get another piano. (How did he get this one? He cannot remember. Even his omniscience is, in some things, limited.) Something else will have to be done, and soon. For what happens when the game is up? The pieces, put lovingly away, the board tucked into a closet to gather dust (ochre dust, he thinks, and frowns), the keyboard closed and the piano wheeled off-stage. Might it not be better to thump one's fists onto the table this time, sweep the pieces from the board, bring both hands, right and left, crashing down onto the keys, leap up from the bench, and storm off in mid-recital amidst the discordant echoes? —Better to leave it interrupted and unfinished, to let things go as they might, on their own? What becomes of a metaphor carried out to its logical conclusion?
The Martian looks over the wreckage of his piano, hangs his head in his hands, and whispers the last few words to himself: "All I know how to do, is how to hide... How to hide, and disappear..." He is walking back from the Arb, his trench coat wet, though he knows not how —He is dulled with drugs but in great pain and, remembering the sudden flash of bright white lights, the sound, so much louder than he'd expected, he wonders what the fuck he was thinking, even as he wonders if a fetus will, in the end, prove important enough to rate as "one." (We feel compelled to point out that one must consider the provenance of the prophecy, and in whose eyes this would be proved.) —He is dulled with drugs but in great pain, and, remembering the sudden flash of insight, still wishes nothing more than that he could scratch his shoulder even as he is walking back from the Arb, the hem of his housecoat wet, a bunny slipper long gone, turned up at the crime scene with a note about its neck, the bunny's dead, of course, of course, all the bunnies are fucking dead, they're all dead, Dave, everybody's dead, Dave, everybody's dead. —He is giggling, even as a headache begins. The Martian is giggling. "So teach me," he sings, hoarsely, "the secret... of Your... immaculate... obscurity..." —He sings quietly, but still someone pounds the wall, demanding silence: "Do you mind! We're trying to sleep!"
•
Which came first, chicken, or egg? Major, or minor? Helene Smith, or Catherine Elise Muller? (Or Princess Simandini, or James Dean?) Reflection and shadow, water and wave, nature and nurture, teller and tale, white and black, yin and yang, Light and Dark—all, in the end, are one and the same. All is connected, and so all is tainted. Contaminated. Purity is, when all is said and done, something not a one of us can bear. —All snarks are boojums, you see. (Or, we wonder, should it be, perhaps, "booji"?)
•
"Booji," said Doc Shriever, waking from an extraordinarily bad dream with a foul taste in his mouth. He hacked up a thinly clotted string of brown spittle into the crusted bowl kept by the bed for just this purpose (though on the far side, where a casual visitor wouldn't see it peering through the doorway, and it certainly had never been there when the Missus was alive; then, he hadn't been coughing quite so badly when she was alive, had he?). His first chore of the morning accomplished, he tipped out the first Basic of the morning and lit it, waving out the kitchen match and dropping it into the bowl even as he sucked down the nasty, wonderful cloud of nicotine. Then he opened the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out the bottle of Maker's Mark and the last unbroken white china cup from the Missus's prized sake set they'd brought back from that one sweet trip to Japan, along with the queer little daruma dolls and the kimono she'd had framed and hung in the living room. —Nippon, of course, as she'd insisted on calling it, ever after. The bourbon followed the smoke down a parallel pipe, and he sat back in bed, scratching his pale and spotted chest absently, rumbling the last little bits of phlegm around in his throat, leaning over to scrub a brief snowfall of dandruff from his white mustache onto the old, yellowed blanket. Booji? Where the hell had that come from?
In the drawer (which is not so deep, but is quite as cluttered) next to the spot up front which he kept clear for the bottle and the cup was a piece of paper, blue-lined, college-ruled, carelessly folded in quarters, stained a greasy yellow there, and there. He didn't have to pick it up and unfold it and read it, not again; he had the words by heart, much as he wished he hadn't. "Put off the heresy of Menelik!" it said. "Embrace the truth of Ya Bu Kie!"
He knew just enough to know it was better, perhaps, not to have let those hotshots of Sheriff Little Bear's get hold of it. No telling what madness might have erupted. Let sleeping dogs lie, especially if they look like they're about to wake up; things were crazy enough as it was.
"Getting too old for this shit," he rumbled, pouring some more Maker's Mark into his cup. —It's never a smart idea to skimp on breakfast, after all.
•
At that precise moment, the first helicopter was setting down on the county airstrip, not far past Gunner's Feed Store, out on State Route 32.
•