Gigi struggled in the vestibule with a stepladder, much beyond her strength to haul. She wanted the high storage bins opened. Corde took over. You wouldn’t have believed how spacious those bins were. They contained boxes and boxes of stuff. “All this was kept for Minna,” said Gigi, and she was determined that Minna should have a full inventory, every last doily and cake fork accounted for. Since condolence calls were taken in the dining room, and the parlor was not private enough, the boxes were opened in Minna’s room. So out came old letters, diaries, Turkish trays in beaten metal, damask linens, tongs and snuffers, a cut-glass fruit dish, a fifteenth-century treatise in Latin, printed in Germany, a monastic accounts book in Greek sewn with waxed thread which was snarled into lumps, a small Gallé vase, a box of table silver, carved screens, prints and drawings, and also coins and trinkets. No article of real value could leave the country. Everything had to be appraised and taxed. “National treasures” would be confiscated. Now and then Minna came in and looked at these relics, Gigi identifying the photographs. “This is our great-uncle Boulent, who was a trigonometry teacher in Thessalonike.” Corde was fascinated by the objects that came out of the boxes. Gigi made Oriental gestures to express their value, circling and stirring with her finger. She wrote on a piece of paper, “I shall show which objects must reach Chicago.” She then tore up the note and put a match to it in the ashtray. With top-secret significance, she touched the Gallé vase. Next, the cut-glass fruit dish. It was diamond-shaped and narrow and Corde didn’t himself much like it, a foolish elaborate object, but that was neither here nor there. She put her finger also on a small Roman landscape in watercolors. “Yes, but how do we pull this off?” said Corde. Gigi tapped him on the breast. She had great confidence in him. Wasn’t he a dean? Didn’t he contribute to national magazines? The Ambassador sent for him, limousines came to the door.
Corde persuaded Minna to come out into the air for half an hour. Helping her into her fleece-lined brown leather coat, he was aware of her thinness—the structural Minna, what you would see on X-ray film, came through. In the sunlight her face was as white as meringue. A small hollow had formed just below her underlip. That was where the grief control seemed concentrated. He couldn’t help but think of his own mother, the wasted mummy look of her last days, the big furious stare she would turn on you. He told Minna, “I hope Gigi doesn’t get too serious about the relics she’s collected.”
“My mother hid them away, and I don’t want those bastards to take them.”
“We may have to pay to get them out.”
“The appraisal will be unreal. And with what money?”
“I’ll come up with the money. What I really wanted to talk about was going home.”
“I can’t, right away.”
“We’d better, for all kinds of reasons. There isn’t much of December left. The new term starts soon. Besides, there’s the time at Mount Palomar they’re going to reserve for you.”
Corde knew what he was doing. Professionally Minna was superconscientious. Nothing was allowed to interfere with duties. Mostly it amused him that this beautiful and elegant woman should behave like a schoolgirl, with satchel and pencil box. When she was getting ready to set out for the day, he sometimes joked with her. “Got your compass and protractor? Your apple for teacher?” Together with her big fragrant purse, a bag of scientific books and papers was slung over her shoulder—ten times more stuff than she needed. But occasionally the gold-star-pupil bit did get him down, and she was cross with him, interpreting his irritation as disrespect for her profession. It had nothing to do with that. She put in a ten-hour day, never missed a visiting lecturer, a departmental seminar. Her tutorials, rehearsed far into the night, must have been like concerts. What he minded was her fanatical absorption. He often had dinner waiting for her, and towards seven o’clock began to listen for the sound of the key in the lock. A lady wrapped up in astronomy going about Chicago after dark? She gave him (it was absurd!) wifely anxieties. But now (manipulative, but it was justifiable) he was using the astronomy to get her back to Chicago.
“Of course we’ve got to leave,” she said. “But I have to make sure first that Gigi is protected. This isn’t even her legal address. The apartment is in Mother’s name. Can I let the old girl be put out in the street?”
“It’s not a matter of streets. I assumed anyway that we’d bring her to the States.”
“I’m glad you assumed it, but that takes time.”
“If there’s a lease in Valeria’s name, you must have inherited it.”
“Who knows what kind of law they have here. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Whatever it may cost—fees, payoffs—that part is easy. Isn’t there a lawyer in the family?”
“More than one.”
“It’s all going to take months. Let somebody dependable take charge right away. We can’t—you can’t do it.”
“In good time,” she said. She didn’t want him to push, she was resentful.
“As soon as possible. I don’t think you should stay. Also I can see that Gigi is winding up to make a big deal out of the glassware, coins, icons, Latin books….”
“It was against the law. Those objects should have been declared. My mother hid them for me.”
“Hundreds of thousands of people are hiding glassware, or watches like my Christmas present.”
“Maybe, but it’s still risky. Mother understood how to do things like this. Gigi will never manage. I’m afraid she’ll get into trouble. Besides, Gigi sees herself carrying out Valeria’s wishes. She wants me to see everything so she can be in the clear. So there can’t be recriminations later. She feels responsible.”
“All right. Yes. I can see that. I don’t think you care all that much about these items. You don’t want the enemy to get them. I assume the officials grab the valuable ones for themselves. As for Gigi’s outwitting them, that’s just fantasy. And she wants me to get the relics out. That’s more fantasy.”
“Are you sure your journalist friend doesn’t travel on a diplomatic passport?”
“We’ve already gone into that. He couldn’t. Newspapermen can’t be government agents. Compromising. Terrible idea, especially for a superstar. He might as well be working for the CIA. You can see that.”
“He might have good advice, though, if he’s as smart as I gather he is.”
They walked silent for a while. The street was gray. The piled earthquake rubble smelled moldy, even though refrigerating December checked the decay. Corde found himself looking for the rat silhouettes in the street, flattened like weathercocks by traffic.
He had counted on the good effects of air; his purpose had been to get Minna away from the telephone. A thankless role, the solicitous sensible husband. He was accused of manipulating her. He read this in her brown eyes, plain enough. To invoke the new term and Mount Palomar was manipulative, but the aim was to bring her home. His helpfulness rejected, he felt a touch resentful. She was unjust to him. But then, look—“unjust”! Such childish pedantry was a sign that he, too, was dog tired.
She said, “What were you and your friend Spangler talking about yesterday?”
“I think our theme was which of us had done the right thing during the last forty years. Or if either of us had done anything right. We …”
But Minna didn’t let him continue. She said, “I don’t really want to talk about him.”
“Let’s not, then.”
“Albert, I feel absolutely torn to pieces.”
“Of course. You are.”
“Can you help me to deal with this a little? You’re an impartial person, sometimes, and a pretty good psychologist. You won’t be judgmental if I tell you. I wake up in the night, and everything good in my life seems to have leaked away. It’s not just temporary. I feel as if it can never come back. It’s black in the room, and even blacker and worse outside. It goes on and on and on, out there. I’m mourning my mother but I also feel terrible things about her. I’m horribly angry. Can you tell me …?”
What an innocent person! She did stars; human matters were her husband’s field. Some division of labor! And swamped with death he was supposed to bail out with a kitchen cup of psychology. His round face crowned with felt hat looked down into her face, which was not only as white as meringue but as finely lined (December daylight was unsparing). What was the case? Her loved and admired mother (how could you not admire an omnipotent Roman matron) had assigned her daughter, for safety, to the physical universe—not exactly the mysterium tremendum; that was religion. But science! Science would save her from evil. The old woman protected Minna from the police state. She endured ostracism, she fought the officials, and she finally got her daughter out of the country. But this powerful protection was gone. And now Valeria’s disappearance had to be accounted for. Where was the strength on which Minna had always depended? In short, mortal weakness, perplexity, grief—the whole human claim. Minna hadn’t made the moves frequently made by scientists to disown this claim: “Don’t bother me with this ephemeral stuff—wives, kids, diapers, death.” She was too innocent for that. So she turned to her husband for help. She loved him. And as soon as she asked for help the strength drained out of him. But he had only himself to blame for that, because he had taken human matters for his province. Neither more nor less. He was justified to Minna the scientist as Albert the human husband. He said, “I may not be able to tell you much.”
“But you think about these things all the time. I watch you doing it.”
“Then let’s see … Why do you suppose you feel so angry?”
“On the plane I was frightened that we mightn’t get here in time. But the truth is that I didn’t actually believe she was going to die.”
“I follow that. You thought Valeria had all the strength there was. I mentioned in London that she was falling down.”
“I remember. But I couldn’t take it in. You’ll say this is crazy, but—this is a confession—my mother gave me her word that she’d live to be ninety.”
“How could anybody do that?”
“Don’t ask me—I’ll tell you what happened. The one time my mother came to the U.S., we went to see Pablo Casals at Marlboro, ninety years old, rehearsing an orchestra. We were both terribly impressed, especially Mother. Here was this ancient man, he was shrunk together in a single piece, no waist and no neck. He had to sit down to conduct. He scolded. But how strong he still was in music. If you understand me. Now, there was a girl in the orchestra who played the clarinet, and she was about nineteen. He stopped the music and said to her, ‘Can’t you get more life into it?’ Then Mother and I looked at each other. And when we were leaving the shed—that outdoor hall—she said, ‘Why shouldn’t I do that, too—live to be his age?’ It was put as a joke, but it was serious underneath.”
“It would have been better to keep it a joke. But you took it as a promise.”
She nodded. “I see I must have.”
“So when I warned you that she was slipping, you brushed it off. Your mother kept her word.”
He was about to say, “That’s like believing in magic,” but he refrained. For one thing, everybody followed magical practices of some sort—he could identify a few of his own. And then, too, you didn’t reveal to such a woman how cleverly you observed her. She was as intelligent—phenomenally intelligent—as she was childlike. The boundaries between intellect and the rest meandered so intricately that you could never guess when you were about to trespass, when words addressed to the child might be intercepted by a mind more powerful than yours. So the Dean stared at his wife. It was incomprehensible that Valeria should give such a daughter the sort of promise (about death!) you made to a kid, and that the learned daughter should hold her to it. This was Alice in Wonderland: “Drink Me.” Mature, highly serious women entering into such an agreement. And it had twelve years more to run. During this time Minna was to get on with her astronomy, equally safe from the decadent West and the decadent East. But Minna now told all, this was a confession. Ah, the poor things, poor ladies! They made him think of one of Rilke’s letters: “Je suis un enfant qui ne voudrait autour que des enfances encore plus adultes.” The mother, in this case the more adult child, promised not to desert her daughter, and this promise was also to have kept Valeria alive. But the best she could do was to hang in there until Minna arrived from Chicago.
“I wasn’t old enough to feel it when my father died. I was sad because everybody else was. But my mother’s death is really horrible—being a corpse, and cremated, and tomorrow the cemetery. I can’t accept it. And it’s even worse to be angry, it’s horrible. Not like a grown woman. I feel vicious.” White, pinched, Minna was scarcely breathing, and her outraged eyes went back and forth across his face. He put his arm about her waist, but the gesture had to be withdrawn. She didn’t want it. She stood too rigid. He then tried to warm his hand in the square pocket of his overcoat.
He said, “I remember being sore, too, feeling abandoned when my own mother died. I was just an adolescent, of course. But … I’m not the wise psychologist type. Psychology is out of my line. I even dislike it.”
What he was thinking was that Minna’s demand was for Valeria. She wanted her mother, and it was impossible to replace Valeria. That was beyond him, beyond any husband. True he had gotten into the habit of attempting whatever Minna needed. He no longer asked whether this suited him, whether he was risking his dignity by pushing a cart in the supermarket, reading recipes, peeling potatoes. Magic practices, yes. But minor ones. But he was no magician; far from it. What he had to offer was active sympathy. Active sympathy should be enough. Why wasn’t it! There was a touch of anger in him over this, but the anger was even worse than the inadequacy. He understood, in form, what he should do. The heart of the trouble was in the form.
Minna was saying, “All these days we haven’t had time to talk. I realize that you’re very upset, too, and brooding in the room. I used to think you didn’t mind sitting, being by yourself, that you were naturally a quiet person.”
“Ready to become a stay-at-home.”
“In spite of what people said about you.”
“What people said. You listen too much. They said I had raised a lot of hell. Much they know.”
“I’m not criticizing, Albert, just reflecting.”
Minna marrying Dean Corde: a superclear mind had made a dreamer’s match.
She said, “You turned out to be a much more emotional and strange person than I ever expected.”
He accepted this, nodding his head. But he wasn’t nodding wisely, he was nodding from ignorance. You couldn’t fathom Minna’s conceptions of strange and normal because she was so astronomical. The hours she spent with you, dear heart, were hours among the galaxies. But she came back from space. There was her mother, and there was her husband to come back for. It was something like Eros and Psyche in reverse. Picturing himself as Psyche, Corde agreed that it was probably better for Eros not to turn on the light. (The Dean was only now discovering how many important things he had neglected to think about.) He was certainly not the man she had supposed she was marrying. Luckily she hadn’t made a serious mistake. She had chosen a husband who intended to love her, meant to love her. Yes, she took some pride in having given the marriage due consideration. The truth was that she had done the right thing in spite of it. We knew all kinds of things but not the ones we needed most to know. Modern achievements, the Dean believed, jets, skyscrapers, high technology, were a tremendous drain on intelligence, more particularly on powers of judgment and most of all on private judgment. You could see it in every face, how the depleted wits fought their losing battle with death. Faces told you this. He had learned this from his own face, and he confirmed the discovery by daily observations.
He wasn’t merely sorry for his wife, he was horrified. It wasn’t only that she was white and drawn but that her features were set in anger, and a kind of accusation. Her mouth was drawn down at one corner and the contraction gave her an expression of face he had learned to dread. He decided, I’d damn well better get her out of here. I never saw anybody go down so fast. This is ruining her.
She thought he was nodding in agreement, and he did agree about being deceptively quiet. He was quiet because he had made so many bad mistakes; he had his work cut out for him, thinking them over. That was the quiet part. He was also misleadingly domestic. She had never noticed how many household duties he took on—the groceries, cooking, vacuuming, washing windows, making beds. He did all this by way of encouraging or conjuring her to change her ways. Let’s have a household. Let’s not eat frozen TV dinners. But she herself was misleading. It was because people said such things about the wicked Dean that she was attracted to him. She wanted to marry a wickedly experienced but faithful man, a reformed SOB, a chastened chaser, now a gentle husband; and she got what she wanted, all the benefits of his oddity and then some. Earlier women, her unknown rivals, had been defeated. She could believe that she had reformed him. He was even a husband who grieved when she was grieving. He felt like a pity-weirdo. Everything moved him, came back to him amplified, disproportionate, moved him too much, reached him too loudly, was accompanied by overtones of anger. There was some sort of struggle going on. She said she wasn’t criticizing, only reflecting, but he couldn’t believe that You’re supposed to know—you tell me. That was how he interpreted the contracted corner of her mouth.
“So you were angry with your mother?” She went back to that.
“It’s supposed to be normal, not a sign that there’s no love but just the reverse. But I guess the clinicians would say it wasn’t the kind of love we’d feel if we were everything we should be. Well, that’s standard psychiatry.” To himself he added, That’s what bothers me about it.
Now what was the position? The position was that Corde had accepted responsibility for keeping his wife posted on sublunary matters. She did boundless space, his beat was terra firma. A crazy assignment, but he enjoyed it most of the time. He liked the fact that she, who had grown up in a Communist country, should have to be told by her American husband who Dzerzhinsky was, or Zinoviev. He had done his homework in Paris while writing on Tsvetayeva. He had done a piece also on Boris Souvarine, so he could describe postrevolutionary Russia. What, never heard of Zinoviev and Kamenev? Nobody had told her about the Moscow trials. “You’ll have to fill me in.” She wondered whether her father had been aware of Stalin’s crimes. She even began to look into Corde’s books and to ask, “Who was this Madame Kollontai?” Or, “Tell me about Chicherin.” He would say, “Why clutter your mind?” However, it was pleasant at dinner to draw Chicherin for her or to explain what Harry Hopkins had done or describe the members of the brain trust. She was beautifully innocent, a classic case. She also laughed at jokes too old to be told to anybody else. She adored jokes. And when she asked him for the spellings or definitions of words and he gave them in his deep voice without raising his goggled face from the newspaper, she would say, “You’re my walking, talking reference book. I don’t need to touch a dictionary.” But grief, death, these were not your ordinary sublunary subjects. Here he was no authority. Minna was critical, she was angry. What was the point of telling him now that he was not the husband she had thought she was marrying? Was she referring to his Chicago pieces and the fulminations they had touched off? She disliked noise, disorder, notoriety, any publicity. Was this what she referred to? Only a remote possibility, but it all had to be considered, for now that Valeria was dead and she had only him, Corde, to depend upon, total revaluation was inevitable. So, then, who was this man? What have we here? He tried, himself, to see what we had. An elderly person, extensively bald, not well proportioned (Mason was contemptuous of his legs), sexually disreputable; counter, spare and strange maybe, but not in the complimentary sense. And then there was the moral side of things to consider. And the mental, too. Besides, Valeria had had a different sort of husband in mind for her daughter, a younger man, a physicist or chemist, with whom she would have had more in common. Somewhat painful, all this. Although Valeria had changed her opinion; she had come around. And what would a chemist son-in-law have told her on her deathbed—something more scientific, positive, intelligent?
Anyway he was now being reviewed da capo by his wife, whom death had put in a rage. He had to submit to it. But since she was going over him so closely, as if seeing him as she had never seen him before, it might be worthwhile to say something useful, or enlightening. What else was there to do in the circumstances? Speak up!
Here goes, however mistaken, was what he said to himself.
She was, in fact, asking him a question just then: “What does that mean, If we were everything we should be’?”
“As matters are, people feel free to plug in and plug out,” he said. “Whatever it is, or whoever it is, contact can be cut at will. They can pull out the plug when they’ve had enough of it, or of him, or of her. It’s an easy option. It’s the most seductive one. You learn to keep your humanity to yourself, the one who appreciates it best.”
“I see….”
What was it that she saw? She was far from pleased with what he said.
“Of course you see. It’s the position of autonomy and detachment, a kind of sovereignty we’re all schooled in. The sovereignty of atoms—that is, of human beings who see themselves as atoms of intelligent separateness. But all that has been said over and over. Like, how schizoid the modern personality is. The atrophy of feelings. The whole bit. There’s what’s-his-name—Fairbairn. And Jung before him comparing the civilized psyche to a tapeworm. Identical segments, on and on. Crazy and also boring, forever and ever. This goes back to the first axiom of nihilism—the highest values losing their value.”
“Why do you think you should tell me this now, Albert?”
“It might be useful to take an overall view. Then you mightn’t blame yourself too much for not feeling as you should about Valeria.”
“What comfort is it to hear that everybody is some kind of schizophrenic tapeworm? Why bring me out in the cold to tell me this? For my own good, I suppose.”
It was no ordinary outburst. She was tigerish, glittering with rage. Her altered face, all bones, turned against him.
“This might not have been the moment,” he said.
“I tell you how horrible my mother’s death is, and the way you comfort me is to say everything is monstrous. You make me a speech. And it’s a speech I’ve heard more than once.”
“It wasn’t what you needed. I shouldn’t have. The only excuse is that I’m convinced it’s central. That’s where the real struggle for existence is. But you’re right. A lecture … it was out of place.”
“You lecture me. You lecture. I could make you these speeches now. You even put it into your Harper’s article, about Plato’s Cave, and the Antichrist.”
He made a gesture of self-defense—it was minimal. He said, “That’s not quite it. There’s an old book by Stead called If Christ Came to Chicago, and what I said was that Chicago looked as if the Antichrist already had descended on it.”
“I tell you you lecture about plugs and tapeworms and those sovereign, or whatever it is, human atoms, and how capitalism is the best because it fits this emptiness best, and is politically the safest, for horrible reasons, and so on. I’m tired of hearing it.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were following so closely. I didn’t realize that I said so much about it. I’ll stop it.”
“I heard you all right, Albert. Against my will. I don’t want to hear more of it today.”
“Yes, yes, I was wrong.”
Her rage now began to fade. The glitter passed off. She said, “It’s probably your kind of affection. Besides … now you couldn’t do much anyway.”
“Yes, that was the general idea, but obtuse.”
Now she relented altogether. She said, “I understand you’re in an emotional state yourself, and you haven’t had anybody to talk to except your pal the journalist, and that probably wasn’t very satisfactory.”
“I suppose we’d better go home. Walking is unpleasant at this time of the evening.”
Subdued by his failure with her, he considered how he might do better. It was worse than nothing to be so elementary on such a subject, to misjudge his wife’s feelings, to sound like a high-class educated dummy. Academic baby talk. Either you went into it with the full power of your mind or you let it alone.
They had walked as far as the boulevard when they turned back. Lecturing, speechifying, emotional states, she said. Spangler had used different terms—crisis, catastrophe, apocalypse. They concluded, each from his own standpoint, that he was seriously off base, out of line. Naturally, he suspected this himself. He half agreed with Mason senior—almost half. Men like Mason senior went to business. Business was law, engineering, advertising, insurance, banking, merchandising, stockbroking, politicking. Mason senior was proud of his strength in the La Salle Street jungle. Bunk, thought contentious Corde. Those were not animals fighting honorably for survival, they were money maniacs, they were deeply perverted, corrupt. No jungle, more like a garbage dump. Leave Darwin out of this. But—calming himself—these Mason types belonged fully to the life of the country, spoke its language, thought its thoughts, did its work. If he, Corde, was different, the difference wasn’t altogether to his credit. So Mason senior believed. Corde’s answer was that he made no claim to be different. He was like everybody else, but not as everybody else conceived it. His own sense of the way things were had a strong claim on him, and he thought that if he sacrificed that sense—its truth—he sacrificed himself. Chicago was the material habitat of this sense of his, which was, in turn, the source of his description of Chicago. Did this signify that he did not belong to the life of the country? Not if the spirit of the times was in us by nature. We all belonged. Something very wrong here. He pursued the matter further, probably still feeling the painful reverberations of his obtuseness with his wife. To belong fully to the life of the country gave one strength, but why should these others, in their strength, demand that one’s own sense of existence (poetry, if you like) be dismissed with contempt? Because they were, after all, not strong? A tempting answer, but perhaps too easy. A critical lady looking at one of Whistler’s paintings said, “I don’t see things as you do.” The artist said, “No, ma’am, but don’t you wish you could?” A delicious snub but again too easy. The struggle was not the artist’s struggle with the vulgar. That was pure nineteenth century. Things were now far worse than that.
Corde thought that he wasn’t advanced enough to be the artist of this singular demanding sense of his. In fact he had always tried to set it aside, but it was there, he couldn’t get rid of it, and as he grew older it gained strength and he had to give ground. It seemed to have come into the world with him. What, for example, did he know about Dewey Spangler? Well, he knew his eyes, his teeth, his arms, the form of his body, its doughnut odor; the beard was new but that was knowledge at first sight. That vividness of beard, nostrils, breath, tone, was real knowledge. Knowledge? It was even captivity. In the same way he knew his sister Elfrida, the narrow dark head, the estuary hips, the feminized fragrance of tobacco mixed with skin odors. In the case of a Maxie Detillion the vividness was unwanted, repugnant, but nothing could be done, it was there nevertheless, impossible to fend off. With Minna the reality was even more intimate—fingernails, cheeks, breasts, even the imprint of stockings and of shoe straps on the insteps of her dear feet when she was undressing. Himself, too, he knew with a variant of the same oddity—as, for instance, the eyes and other holes and openings of his head, the countersunk entrance of his ears and the avidity expressed by the dilation of his Huguenot-Irish nostrils, the face that started at the base of the hairy throat and rose, open, to the top of his crown. Plus all the curiosities and passions that went with being Albert Corde. This organic, constitutional, sensory oddity, in which Albert Corde’s soul had a lifelong freehold, must be grasped as knowledge. He wandered what reality was if it wasn’t this, or what you were “losing” by death, if not this. If it was only the literal world that was taken from you the loss was not great. Literal! What you didn’t pass through your soul didn’t even exist, that was what made the literal literal. Thus he had taken it upon himself to pass Chicago through his own soul. A mass of data, terrible, murderous. It was no easy matter to put such things through. But there was no other way for reality to happen. Reality didn’t exist “out there.” It began to be real only when the soul found its underlying truth. In generalities there was no coherence—none. The generality-mind, the habit of mind that governed the world, had no force of coherence, it was dissociative. It divided because it was, itself, divided. Hence the schizophrenia, which was moral and aesthetic as well as analytical. Then along came Albert Corde in diffident persistence, but wildly turned on, putting himself on record. “But don’t you see …!” He couldn’t help summarizing to himself what he should have said to Minna.
He would moreover have said (they were now rising in the small china-closet elevator—there was no harm in these unspoken ideas, and when all this was over she might be willing to let her husband tell her his thoughts), he would have told Minna, “I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one’s life, every other frame would be death. It goes so fast we’re not aware of it. Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can’t even begin to know what’s happening.”