PART THREE

59. He ceased to bathe, to shave or groom himself

I have followed suit.

No, my conclusion-jumping examiners, not from neglect inspired by a personal despair. I have never been happier. I admit that when I awoke from the pill-produced sleep looked forward to in note 58 above, I was in no wise concerned with vanity or hygiene, that I did not bother to change the clothing I’d collapsed in or so much as touch my toothbrush, but got on to my aunt Rosario Fuertes and begged her to come at once, so that I might cleanse my brain of certain foul thoughts and images in the clear stream of historical research; but after hearing her description of my father’s state and her gratuitous comment that I too appeared somewhat unkempt, I resolved to imitate his action purposefully, as a Stanislavskian aid to understanding and relating his condition. Fellow scholars will, I am sure, find a report on this experiment of interest.

I no longer pay attention to what day it is, but five days or so have, I believe, gone by. This afternoon when I sat down to begin composing Chapter 12, I found my fingernails a little long for typing and, therefore, clipped them, but I have made no other concessions. I perform no physical exertion, but the temperature in Tinieblas varies this time of year between seventy-six and eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, with the humidity above ninety percent, and while my personal odor is no longer discernible to me, a wrinkling of Arnulfa’s nose this morning suggests that it grows ripe. My beard is thick, or feels thick at any rate (I no longer consult mirrors). Although I note no important sores or ulcers, a ubiquitous and constant itch envelops all my person, and certain sectors have been scratched quite raw. These are the chief physical consequences. Mentally, I have developed an intense sympathy for the subject of this dissertation, my father, León Fuertes. Not only have I clearly imagines my father’s essays in self-degradation; I have relived them, both while interviewing sources and in dreams. The reader is better placed than I to judge the quality of Chapter 12, but I anticipate success with it, an anticipation that seems to me borne out already in my work tonight. I have produced a quantity of pages. Quality control appears good. If I can manage to maintain this standard to the completion of the chapter, I may then permit myself a rinse and change of clothes.

My aunt Rosario Fuertes was not so much the source for Chapter 12 as a source of sources, the more important of whom will be duly credited in future notes, but I must continue to acknowledge her assistance, which is both material and moral. I should have had a frightful time scrounging up data without her, and she has been an unchecked fount of comfort and encouragement, particularly at those times—and there were many—when I suffered my father’s debased state acutely. She has not (and I thank her for it) made any reference to my personal life.

My personal life has, in fact, withered away most reassuringly now that other humans no longer infest my environs. I burned without opening the letter that my wife left when she collected her effects. I dismantled the doorbell; the telephone remains ripped from its cord. I have authorized Arnulfa to sleep home in La Cuenca, have given her a check for five hundred inchados, which ought to last for months, and have told her she need come only in the mornings to bring me food and make a thermos of coffee. She is the only living person whom I see, and that (I calculate) for no more than a few minutes per month. I suffer no interruptions, nor any obligation to maintain an artificial schedule. I work until exhausted, then collapse and dream about my father. Since the dreams are, I believe, as valuable as formal interviews of spirits, I waste no time at all. I have become a machine for researching and recording history, The facilities of Learning may be more elaborate but I doubt that they are more congenial than the ones I now enjoy, and my one complaint about my current situation is that it prevents my letting a certain whore know how agreeable it is.

60. Patrons

Good Works maintains a record of residents of this world who give assistance to their fellow human beings—not (as is sometimes superstitiously believed) in order to reward philanthropists with time off from such sentences in Victim as they may someday have to serve, but as an aid to recruitment.

Works is chronically under strength, and it is believed that those who have done good works in this world may be likely prospects; hence the file. Guardian Spirits, who spend much of their time in this world, are expected to contribute data to this file, and although my aunt Rosario was not assigned as León Fuertes’ Guardian Spirit until after he had emerged from vagabondage, she nonetheless managed to identify half a dozen of his patrons. Four of these—Mrs. Tunafish and Messrs Finnegan, Abrhams-Hoof, and Ross—are now resident in the next world. They were kind enough to visit me and furnish information concerning León Fuertes’ bumhood. Their help is herewith gratefully acknowledged, along with that of Miss Dosby, who is still in this world but who is able to communicate with spirits and who recalled her contact with León Fuertes for my aunt Rosario, who then related it to me.

A certain sluttish former English major would no doubt cancer herself with envy should she learn I spent an hour in the company of Winfield S. Finnegan. The jade in question idolizes him, but for the wrong reasons, romanticizing his utterly bungled life and paying slight attention to his art. “Death” has not withered his handsome features, nor boozing staled his boyish charm. He was touchingly touched that I both knew and enjoyed his work, insisted on reading a portion of my own, and praised it. (Or so, in any case, I took his comments. He took this dissertation for a novel and referred to spirit scholarship as “marvelous imagination,” but I put that down to his being tight.) Upon arriving in the next world, Mr. Finnegan entered Drink, which he describes to me as a virtually infinite region of taverns, bars, cantinas, bistros, beer halls, alehouses, wineshops, cocktail lounges, gin mills, and saloons, where bartenders are always in good humor and every round is on the house, where one never gets hangovers, or d.t.’s, or the shakes, and one’s liver’s warranted against cirrhosis. I am thus happy to report that this gentleman, who despite the self-inflicted torments of his life brought pleasure to so many, has found his paradise.

Group Captain Richard Abrhams-Hoof, D.S.O., O.B.E., credits his brief encounter with León Fuertes not only for the consummation of his amour for Miss Withers but also for part of his success as a pursuit pilot. The fatalism engendered in him when he saw my father stood him in good stead in that profession. Abrhams-Hoof returned to England with an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He joined the Royal Air Force immediately thereafter, completed pilot training in time to fly sorties over Dunkirk, and distinguished himself in the Battle of Britain, the defense of Malta, and many other campaigns. He gained twenty-six confirmed victories and was himself shot down four times, each time parachuting safely. At war’s end, having earned the rank and decorations noted above, he went to work for De Quincey Flight Machines, Ltd., as a designer and test pilot. He was cindered from this world in September, 1947, while trying (against government restrictions) to break the sound barrier in a De Quincey Apparition. On reaching the next world, Captain Abrhams-Hoof spent most of his time in Risk and, as a consequence, served several short terms in Victim. Upon his latest release ten months ago, he applied for Transmigration and has been advised that he will shortly return to this world as a seagull.

Barney Ross, who is now a coach in Sport, added to my knowledge of that activity. Sport, like its sister activity, Games, involves a good amount of rivalry but (as prior researches had led me to expect) stresses amateurism in its pristine and highest sense, participation out of love. In illustration, Ross cited the case of Mr. Vincent Lombardi, whose application for Sport was rejected with the following notation: “In Astral Sport, winning isn’t very much at all. Suggest applicant consider War.” Sport offers elaborate facilities for every type of athletic endeavor and provides instruction for those interested. Participants are graded to insure fair competition. Umpires are provided and spectators allowed. But there is very little formal structure. Hall of Fame Baseball, for example, is played in a magnificent stadium before huge crowds, yet proceeds as on a sandlot, with stars like Ruth and Robinson choosing up sides in an impromptu fashion from among such luminaries of the diamond as have happened to show up that day. According to Ross, my father, León Fuertes, dropped by Sport regularly between his concerts to work out, and is rumored to have considered applying for a transfer into that activity. Would he had done so, instead of seeking empty thrills in Risk!

61. Dr. Felix Heilanstalt

Sig’s dad, of course, who else?

“What a marvelous coincidence!” Dr. Heilanstalt is the kind of gringo who sixty years ago would have said, “Bully!” He entered my room rather as Stanley must have entered Livingstone’s mud hut.

“I was in these parts only two weeks ago,” he went on enthusiastically, “looking in on my son Sigmund. He can’t see or hear me, won’t even let himself recall the dreams I visit him in, but I like to keep an eye on him. Needs watching too, I’m afraid. Seems to have got himself mixed up with someone’s wife. At least she refers to a husband. What he’d call poetic license, I guess, but a fellow could get shot doing that in one of these Latin countries. Well, anyway, I noticed the name Camilo Fuertes on a list of phone numbers taped to his wall, and I wondered whether it might be any relation to a patient I had many years ago, a very memorable patient, but thought no, that would be too coincidental. Now I learn that you’re León Fuertes’ son. Simply marvelous!”

You, perspicacious examiners, will appreciate that while I knew the doctor had saved my father’s life (and thus made possible my own), I found it something less than marvelous to owe so large a debt of gratitude to anyone named Heilanstalt. It was, besides, even less marvelous to consider that my esteemed visitor had glimpsed his spawn at roguer with my spouse, that he had no doubt watched close up and licked his chops. But a scholar must not let personal considerations divert his search for knowledge. Dr. Heilanstalt had information germane to my inquiry. I therefore suppressed my emotions; that is, I bit my lip and let him tell his story, which I have now refigured in my text above. Take note then, if you will, of my exemplary devotion to historical investigation, of my heroic preservation of a scholarly demeanor, observe as well the even-handed treatment I have accorded one who, although my father’s savior, is nonetheless my injurer’s father. (And if it seem immodest in me that I draw express attention to these my little excellences, remember that there are morons loose in every walk of life, perhaps even in the history department of a third-rate university, and that morons cannot be counted on to see things for themselves. It is a hard thing for an original mind to hang pendant on the judgment of mediocrities, if not of morons. He cannot help but fear from time to time that his discoveries may, for their originality, be condemned as lunatic ravings. He may, hence, be permitted to point out some of his accomplishments.)

Dr. Heilanstalt remembered León Fuertes with great clarity and not only informed me fully about his accident and his recovery, but also gave me a glimpse of his posthumous career.

“I saw his debut,” the doctor told me, “his first appearance in a leading role. His name rang no bell, and I’d never have recognized him as the dilapidated bum I almost lost except that he was singing Rodolfo in La Bohème, the very opera my wife and I were on our way home from the night he stepped in front of our car. I had that uneasy déjà vu feeling from the moment the curtain went up, and during the last act it clicked. I went backstage after the performance —which, by the way, was terrific! A voice as lyrical as Bjoerling’s and as robust as Gigli’s! Well, anyway, I went backstage and introduced myself. His dressing room was packed. I mean I had to fight my way through people backed up to the stage door, and not just anybody either. The composer was there himself, refusing to let your father call him ‘maestro’ and saying it was as though he’d heard his music for the first time! That from Puccini! Imagine it! There was a new star in the firmament that night, no doubt about it. That has been clear from the fourth phrase of his first-act aria, and don’t think your father didn’t know it. He sat there on a corner of his dressing table with a silk robe draped over his shoulders—I’m sure he’d taken time to get his shirt ruffles to poke out just right—with his makeup smeared by kisses from the like s of Duse and Galli-Curci, sipping tea out of a glass and making falsely modest chitchat in all the languages of Western Europe. It was every bit as much of a performance as the one he’d just given out on stage. Well, when I’d finally pushed close enough to be received, when at last I’d got his attention and introduced myself, he made a great show of not recalling who I was-which was the tip-off that he knew at once—and then laid his head to one side and nodded, smiling.

“ ‘Ah, yes, the good doctor,’ he said in English, a language he hadn’t spoken a word of when I knew him in New York. ‘Do you still go about knocking people down to fill your hospital?’

“I didn’t bold it against him. I’ve been a star myself. One year, when the A.M.A. had its convention in New York, about a hundred doctors came over to see me work. I performed thirty-two major operations without a break, including one that had never been done successfully before, and when I finished that one, I looked up at the theater and pulled off my mask and invited any skeptics to come back for breakfast with the patient the next morning. Oh, yes, I know how it is to be in the limelight. I have no hard feelings against your father, and I hadn’t any then. But I must say I had the most terrific urge to remind him that he hadn’t always been so goddamn cocky.”

Dr. Heilanstalt also told me something of his own astral existence and, in so doing, furnished me knowledge of the next world that, I think, merits inclusion in this note:

The Astral Plane is not a particularly happy place for a great surgeon. It lacks even the grossly overrated “death” we know of here, while such bodies as are issued to the participants in activities that require them are replaced whole in the advent of malfunction. Medicine is not even offered as separate activity. There is a medical adjunct to Learning, to be sure, but it is directed entirely toward research, with the participants advancing the results of their experiments for possible projection into the minds of earthly physicians. Reception offers a psychoanalytic counseling service to help new arrivals accustom themselves to their surroundings; Selection gives similar help toward choosing activities. Prorogation maintains a psychiatric clinic for dejected rejects and others who after having been accepted in an activity cannot adapt and have to be released. Part of Torture is set up as a hospital, and one finds a few former sawbones there. But the only place in the next world where a surgeon can come close to practicing his art is in War. In War each army fights a nine-campaign “season,” each campaign lasting for from three months to a year. Since no new bodies are issued until after the Championship each decade, surgeons are in demand to ease the torments of the fallen and to patch them up for the next battle or the next campaign. Each army has its medical service.

It is understandable, however, that despite Dr. Heilanstalt’s devotion to his calling, he did not choose to practice it in War. He arrived in the next world directly from a field hospital in the Ardennes where he’d been operating under fire for more than sixteen hours when an .88 shell came through the tent roof and, as he put it, “that was that.” “That” was the termination of three years of military service, and he’d had his fill of battle. Etching had been one of his earthly hobbies, and so he spent ten years in Graphic Arts, He had talent, but not enough for greatness. Then he did neurological research in Learning, working on the links between psychiatry and physiology, but an aseptically pure life of the mind bored him. He is now on leave from his laboratory and engaged in private philosophical investigations to prepare himself for a project in the New Activities branch of Astral Administration.

“The great deficiency in the other world,” says Dr. Heilanstalt, “is that it nowhere provides the most acute experience of this one: holding precious, perishable life—your own or someone else’s, it doesn’t matter—in your hands. Risk, War, Flirtation, Learning all have their excitements, but they don’t give that life-or-death sensation. I’m going to set up an activity which provides that. I don’t know yet what it will be. I’ve only certain vague ideas at present. But I’m going to establish that activity or transmigrate back here—as a rat or a sand flea if that’s all that’s open. And when I’ve set it up, I’ll enroll as a charter participant!”

62. One may imagine

I, on the other hand, need not. I am informed by spirits. My Guardian Spirit, moved always by love, scans the far reaches of the Astral Plane to find me sources, and at my call they come at light-speed to me, and empty up the past into my ears. About me a city of deaf and blind idiots sleeps crushed under the sodden tropic night, while to this room are come the great and small of the vast world beyond, for all must heed the summons of my gift; and should they prove coy or stubborn, reticent to speak me what they know, I have the power to unlock their hearts and spill the truth before me.

Purblind and spirit-deaf examiners, you may imagine. If you possess imagination, use it. Raise the words from my page and flesh them with imagination. Imagining’s the best that you can hope for, lacking second sight. You may imagine, therefore. I need not.

When Edna Scallop blushed hypocritically and set her equine teeth and would not tell me what there was between her and my father, I feared for a brief moment I might have to fall back on imagination; but then I moved as though drawn by an iron hand to my night table, and looked down in the mess of objects there, and in the crystal of my unwound watch I saw it all. When Braquemard Fauconnier tried to wrap his swinishness in euphemisms, I looked at the bare wall above his head and saw a film of his “romance” with León. He lounged limply in my lawn chair, flapping his spongy lip—garrulous, evasive, breaking off every second phrase with a “Dear boy, I scarcely have to give the gory details”—and no, he scarcely had to: they were all there before me. His putrid memories spilled up across the wall. No, my examiners, I need not imagine. I can see.

I have to look, though. I put down what I see in words, and you may, if you choose, imagine it to life, but first I have to look. To see, one has to look, Professor Lilywhite. One must not look away, dear Dr. Grimes. And I have looked on horrors.

Hypocrite examiners, the human heart is not a pretty thing when looked in very deeply, I have looked on the abominations of degenerates, and seen myself and you in every frame.

You too might see if you could dare to look.

63. Great Faggots of Art and Letters

There are none.

Your faggot is a full-time invert. He lives for his narcissistic gropes, for the flirtations that precede them, for the self-pity and defilement they provoke.

Art involves the whole human being. Letters too levies demands. The world does not suffer people to become great artists or great writers while living for a rival occupation.

Some faggots tiptoe in the vestibules of art and letters; they do not penetrate the inner sancta. Certain great artists and great writers have copulated with their own sex, but none were faggots.

Proust was a great poet who went to bed with other men. He was not a faggot.

Wilde was a wit of genius with a flair for dramatic structure. He might have been a great writer, but he chose faggothood instead. Overweening faggotry drove him to prison, where he renounced faggotdom and all its works and wrote a nearly great poem.

V. is a flaming faggot and a polemicist for faggotism and other unwholesome causes. Because V.’s literary dabblings are blended faggotly out of sophistication and vulgarity, they have sold well. Because reviewers fear the faggotine cruelty of his ripostes, some of his work has been unjustly lauded. Because his faggatoid presence has slimed the TV screen on numerous occasions, his name is a familiar (if not household) word, like “vomit.” His work is, nonetheless, entirely mediocre. Mediocrity is about the highest point a faggot can attain in art or letters.

Life is compounded out of yang and yin, animus and anima, masculine and feminine. No human can work greatness anywhere, except these opposites be balanced in his spirit. But that has nothing at all to do with how one employs the orifices and projections of one’s body. Shakespeare and Sappho wrote great poems, but not by buggery or tribadism—any more than Wagner wrote great music by swiving other people’s wives. The argument used everywhere by faggots to justly faggotism and recruit converts—to wit, that great artists and great writers have been faggots and, hence, that faggotry’s the path to beauty —is false. Faggotry leads nowhere. Faggothood is (pardon me) a cul-de-sac.

64. Bottom

This world is not especially well-organized, but neither is it entirely random. Patterns and correspondences exist (e.g., the yang-yin correspondence mentioned in note 63 above). There is a general correspondence of order and disorder, one of whose particular manifestations involves human joy and suffering. I do not mean there is a perfect balance. Disorder is more common than order (as thermodynamic lawyers will understand); suffering is more probable than joy. A clear relationship obtains, however. It may be expressed in various metaphors, of which one from tourism pleases me at present.

No one can travel to the heights whose psychic passport is not visa’d for the bottom. It is not strictly true (although it is the usual procedure) that one must travel to the bottom either before or after visiting the heights; swift, painless “death” may cancel one’s booking. It is certainly not true that those who tour the bottom automatically receive permission to visit the heights; many more descend than ever climb. What is true is that the mental-spiritual equipment one needs to scale the heights serves very well (or better) for speleologizing to the bottom; that when one accepts or fashions climbing gear, he is outfitting himself for a descent; and that if he so much as asks to glance at a brochure of the heights, he is booking himself a voyage to the bottom.

Most of humanity prefer—like you, pusillanimous examiners—to live suspended in between, in mediocrity.

The bottom is a region of the heart-mind-spirit. You are not there if you don’t know you’re there. Or you’ve not been if, upon subsequent reflection, you do not realize that you’ve been. To live out of the sun in a muggy room strewn with roached cheese rinds—to go unbathed, unshaved, ungroomed; to spend long hours in the company of loathsome ghosts like Dédé-le-julot—that is faintly unpleasant but not nearly bottom. To contemplate a loved parent’s degradation; to watch him (and, by sympathy, yourself) star in an interminable pornographic film of which each scene is more disgusting than the one before it—that’s a bit worse but is still leagues above bottom. To live each filthy incident yourself, first in your dreams, then when it’s time to put the matter down on paper—that is still worse but is not bottom either. All that is mere occupational inconvenience: the grime on a mechanic’s fingers, the spike wounds on a second baseman’s shins.

Bottom is, for example, when your richly furnished and well-cared-for mind becomes a recreation hall for rowdy spirits; when any ill-mannered ghost with nothing else to do can tramp in and yell his head off; when it is not only impossible to keep them out or keep them quiet, but when you cannot even prevent them from rough-housing, from staging free-for-alls and dionysiac dances, from leaping about exposing their private parts, from scrawling obscene slogans on the walls, from pissing on the rug, from taking a quick dump in a neat corner. Bottom is when your carefully nurtured gifts betray you—not just for the odd hour or a day or two, but on and on and on. Bottom is when professional tormentors mew about helping you and then send goons to ram you in a strait jacket, so that you cannot even hit your head against the wall to knock the spirits out. Bottom is a bit different for each different person, but that, innocent examiners, is a very fair example.

Travelers to the bottom who return therefrom possess a certain toughness. (I have heard that some pick up humility as well but I cannot comment personally on that rumor.) Handle them with care, O my examiners. You will know them when you see them. And do not think you have much knowledge of this world until you have seen bottom.

65. Ancestors

I have now bad the pleasure of meeting all my known ancestors, saving only my grandfather Dr. Azael Burlando. Rosalba, Raquel, and Rosenda Fuertes visited me here a week or so ago in the company of my aunt Rosario and informed me on the incidents recounted in the last four paragraphs of Chapter 12. They also gave me a full account of my father’s state of soul when he hit bottom, for spirits have no trouble discerning the thoughts of those residents of this world to whom they are bound by ties of blood or love. Then, when I began doing research on León Fuertes’ efforts toward self-reclamation, I contacted Generals Isidro Bodega, Epifanio Mojón, and Feliciano Luna and, with my aunt Rosario’s help, brought them here also. They told me of their dream appearance to León and claimed credit for setting him on the right path.

It is not true that ancestors are universally preoccupied with their descendants’ progress in this world. Many spirits have no family feeling at all. Others are busy with their own affairs. It is, however, not uncommon for an ancestor to take an interest in the earthly life of a particular descendant, and this phenomenon has given rise to superstitions and (in some sectors of the Orient especially) even religions. My father, León Fuertes, was a special case. For Rosalba, Raquel, and Rosenda he represented the potential fulfillment of a dream, an obsession, a destiny. Generals Bodega, Mojón, and Luna recognized him as the most promising of all their progeny and hoped he might do them honor. León was, therefore, the beneficiary of more than ordinary ancestral concern, attention, and guidance.

General Luna, for instance, accompanied my father during portions of his journey across the Sahara Desert, encouraging him and reminding him of the example he, General Luna, had set during the cruel marches of our civil wars. Luna was an important source for Chapter 13, returning here alone on three subsequent occasions to tell me of León’s desert ordeal and to give me in passing much gratuitous commentary on his careers in this world and the next.

After his “death” by hanging, Luna applied for War but was turned down. Five of the six Western League armies were at the time under strength and actively recruiting, but none would take Feliciano Luna. His courage, his horsemanship, and his martial skills were undisputed, but his contempt for authority and his unconventional approach to warfare disqualified him for service with a regular formation. None of the commanders felt he could be trusted with a squadron or a troop: he seemed unlikely to stay where he was placed but liable, rather, to go swanning off on his own at any moment. He was willing to serve in the ranks, yet it was feared that one with such an independent attitude would be an evil influence on other soldiers. Disgusted at being turned away from the only activity that meant anything to him, Luna entered Drink—only to be expelled almost at once for demolishing a couple of cantinas and terrorizing fellow participants. For fifty years he blundered from activity to activity—Murder, Torture, Risk, Victim (where he fell into the hands of former victims whom he’d murdered and tortured). Then, while visiting this world in connection with his concern for his grandson León Fuertes, he had a chance to watch combat in Libya. This experience so provoked him to nostalgia that he applied for War again.

General Luna was drafted into the ranks of the Golden Horde of the Eastern League (Tamerlane the Great Commanding), an outfit which, according to Western League warriors (e.g., Sergeant Ned Cod), resembles more a rabble than an army but which is nonetheless respected. Luna so distinguished himself during his first “season” that at the start of his second the commander gave him about a thousand of the most unruly soldiers in the army, men no one else could handle, and simply turned him loose. It would be an understatement to say that General Feliciano Luna is a contented spirit. He told me personally that he would let himself be hanged a thousand times to achieve his present happiness.

Generals Bodega and Mojón likewise traveled frequently to this world in order to guide León Fuertes. Their attentions did not come, however, until sometime after his desert journey, so I shall recall them at convenient moments later on.

As scholars will perforce be interested in (not to say gape-mouthed with fascination over) my research method and its efficacy, I here permit myself to point out the ease with which I now summon and debrief spirit informants. A glance at note 5 above will remind the reader of certain difficulties I experienced earlier this year in contacting General Luna. Now I get through at once without the slightest interference and, unless he happens to be in the thick of fighting, can have him at my side at once, gabbing away in the most cooperative manner imaginable. So goes it with the others I have need of. Nor do I have much trouble with spirits barging in uncalled. Padre Celso was an uninvited visitor, but there was never any question as to which of us was in command. He did not speak till he was spoken to, and when he began to be a nuisance, I whistled him off. Perron came at my bidding but then hung around, yet I was able to get rid of him through a psychological application of jujitsu strategy. When ignoring him did no good, I simply went the way he pulled me. He’s not bothered me since. Surely I have come a long way from the terrible days (see note 64) when spirits used me. For all practical purposes, am now in complete control.

I must admit I am a little less successful with living human beings, not that dominating other people is my ambition. A certain strumpet was by earlier. I had supposed she’d left Tinieblas, but perhaps a certain hack has taken her in. Or she may dream of worming back in here. That, at least, seemed the purpose of her trans-portal whinings, for she claimed to be concerned over my welfare, She rapped at the door like Poe’s raven for a good five minutes, and when at length I could bear the sound no longer and went to shoo the intruder off, she heard my footfalls and squeaked, “Camilo?” I of course said nothing, but she whined for a few moments nonetheless. In fact, she was still whining when I retreated to my bathroom and wadded toilet paper in my ears.

My aunt Rosario, who came by a bit later, chid me for my conduct, called it cowardly, in fact, and in defense I said that if I’d let the whore in or even spoken to her, I might have become violent.

“That would have been healthier,” answered Rosario. Like all the Fuertes women, she is riddled with romanticism.

In any case, I do not care to control my fellow humans. It is enough that I be isolated from them. And since in that I have succeeded perfectly, the above-mentioned incident alone excepted, my work goes swimmingly.

A final word on my ancestors. I think I shall have them all together for a reunion one of these days—the generals, the genetrixes, Rebeca, and my mother. Perhaps my father and Dr. Burlando will be given dispensation to attend. My doctoring would be a fit occasion. I doubt that Sunburst University has ever had such a distinguished group of visitors at its commencement exercises, but I promise you, Professor Lilywhite, dear Dr. Crimes, that I shall bring them to campus for the ceremony when my Ph.D. is awarded.

66. A bus

Buses are the main means of public transport in the Republic of Tinieblas. Until recently the capital and its environs were serviced by three private bus companies and a good number of free-lance drivers with their own heavily mortgaged vehicles. The Revolutionary Government has driven two of the companies out of business and has established in their place a state-owned Surface Transport Authority. One private company (which happens to have retained General Manduco’s brother Mangu as a public relations consultant) remains in operation. There are, besides, the free lances.

These last have been in the habit for as long as I can recall of decorating their conveyances with art- and/or sloganwork. The stern of such a bus may display a sylvan scene or a beachscape or, more usually, a portrait. Dr. Ernesto Guevara, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., General Feliciano Luna, President León Fuertes, Señor César E. Sancudo, and Jesus of Nazareth are among the personages thus honored. A representative sample of slogans (translated from the Spanish) follows:

“LOVE IS KEEPING YOUR DISTANCE.”

“YOU LEFT ME—I’LL GET EVEN.”

“OUR FLAG IN THE RESERVATION” (above Señor Sancudo’s portrait).

“HE ASKED FOR LIBERTY—THEY GAVE HIM DEATH” (scrolled beside Dr. King).

Such embellishments contribute to the generally colorful character of Tinieblan life but rarely attract much notice. Now they have become a cause célèbre. Nothing has appeared in the state-controlled mass media of communication but, according to Arnulfa, who recounted it to me, the following incident is known to all the capital:

Two days ago a bus was seen on Via Venezuela bearing a likeness of Padre Celso Labrador. It was observed by many people; it occasioned great amazement and not a little comment on the courage or insanity of the owner-driver on whose bus it was displayed, for the whole subject of Padre Celso and his disappearance is now strongly taboo’d. In due course it attracted the attention of two members of the Civil Guard in a patrol truck. They waved the offending bus to the curb and arrested its driver. When he asked what was the matter, they dragged him to the rear of his vehicle and, each seizing a handful of his hair, shoved his face into the portrait. When he professed total surprise at the existence of the portrait and protested hysterically that he had not caused it to be painted on his bus, the arresting officers first took the precaution of placing handcuffs on him, then beat him unconscious with their truncheons. During this pageant of law in action, the debarked passengers and a small crowd which had formed observed the following phenomena: (1) The slogan “FORGIVE THEM FATHER FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO” appeared ballooned as in a comic strip above the portrait; (2) The portrait wept palpable, wet tears, which flowed down the paneling, dripped to the ground, and collected in small puddles. The driver was carted off, but the portrait kept on weeping. A few minutes later a truckload of guardias arrived to disperse the crowd and arrest three or four of them. A sergeant boarded the bus and drove it to Guard Headquarters, presumably as evidence. The portrait wept all the way.

It would appear a certain spirit has chosen a bus as the instrument to make his presence felt here. Since the reader of this dissertation cannot fail to have developed an ardent interest in spirits, I include this example of their strange powers and bizarre acts.

67. He walked

It was never a question of reenacting León Fuertes’ fearful journey. The author of this history does not claim to be a man of action. He is not so presumptuous as to believe he could survive an entire trans-Sahara passage. He merely wished as a scholar to make the gap between him and his subject a bit narrower. The grant-pampered darlings of the academia establishment can afford jet accommodations to Brussels and rental cars from there to Waterloo. They can fit out grand expeditions, and hire planes to retrace the route of a Xenophon or a Perry. The author of this work is not thus funded. Therefore, he walked.

When my researches into my father’s life had reached the point where he decided to join General Leclerc, I made the following preparations: I had Arnulfa buy me some soda biscuits, some tinned beef, and a few packages of dates, then gave her two weeks off; I dug from my trunk the Boy Scout knapsack that my freshman-year roommate, Preston Twill, abandoned when he dropped out of college and packed it with the above-mentioned provisions, a wine bottle full of water, and a blanket; I went about this apartment pulling the furniture out to the center of each room but this one; I advised my spirit informants that I would be on a diurnal schedule until further notice and rearranged my appointments with them accordingly. At first light the next morning I set out.

My route ran east along the hall from my bedroom-study doorway to the room slept in until recently by a trollop of my acquaintance. It circumnavigated that room, reentered the hall, and proceeded eastward again into the living room, whose perimeter it followed north, then east, then south, in a great half circle. It then describes a tight one-hundred-eighty-degree left turn and continued through the doorway of the kitchen and around it, north, then east, then south, then west, back to the doorway. Here it swung left again one hundred eighty degrees into the dinette and ran east along the dinette-kitchen wall, south along the east wall of the apartment, and then west, a direction that it followed, hugging the south wall of the apartment, past the front door, across the wide entrance of the living room, into the hall again, and back to my bedroom doorway. It was one hundred twenty-seven paces long. Marching at an easy yet purposeful gait, I covered it in one minute fifteen seconds.

Figuring my pace at seventy centimeters, the total length of this circuit is eighty-eight point nine meters, eighty-nine for roundness. Considering I maintained a steady pace—and I strove to do so—I completed forty-eight circuits each hour, but let us for safety’s sake reduce this to forty-five. My average speed was, then, four and five one-thousandths kilometers per hour, for roundness simply four. I marched from daybreak till full dark, so that, allowing for infrequent and brief rests and a reasonably long noon break, I covered at least forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) per day. I remained on March until my sources had informed me fully about my father’s entire journey from Touggourt to Fort-Lamy, and since this took the best part of a fortnight, I traveled something over four hundred kilometers—about the distance, Floridian examiners, from Miami Beach to Disney World.

I slept on the floor. I refilled my water bottle only in the evening. My food ran out before the reports of my informants had brought León Fuertes to his destination, and I marched for two days on an empty stomach. Privations of thirst and hunger, while nowhere near what my father suffered, contributed signally, I think, to the success of my journey.

My informants were, besides General Feliciano Luna, my aunt Rosario Fuertes, who by fall, 1940, had become my father’s Guardian Spirit, Dr. Escolástico Grillo, who, as the reader of my text will see, accompanied my father in the desert from time to time, and a German-born former noncommissioned officer of the French Foreign Legion who refused to reveal his name (and, hence, can receive only this maimed acknowledgment) but who was with the Legion party that found my father wandering on the Grand Erg Oriental and saved his life. They responded to my queries with long monologues, which I gathered up en route and noted down during rest periods. In this way I learned the details of my father’s journey, and of his state of mind and spirit during it.

I was also interested in learning what I could about the character of the Sahara. Thus, on my second day of travel, after the ex-legionary had told me of my father’s brush with “death,” I asked him to stay on awhile and tell me about the desert. He talked straight through my noon break while I lay resting on the floor, munching a few dates and sipping at my water bottle, and then, perhaps an hour later, as I tramped round and round, listening to him relive his years under that pitiless sun, a phenomenon occurred whose mechanism I don’t understand but whose effect was clear enough. This apartment brightened as if a hundred banks of klieg lights in its ceiling were being slowly dimmed up to full power. An immense weight of dry heat fell onto my shoulders, and the air around me became a furnace breath. I staggered, then pushed on, but scarcely had I completed my circuit when the furniture melted away, and the tiling of the floor crumbled to sand, and the walls and ceiling dissolved onto an endless vista of scorched sand and sky.

I marched on, my head down, my eyes narrowed to slits against the glare. I marched, and the voice of my ghostly legionnaire droned on. Soon I could no longer grasp what he was saying. It took all my concentration just to put one foot before the other. Then it seemed he’d left me there alone, but at length, hours later, when I collapsed gasping to the sand and lay crushed on that fiery plain, I saw him standing over me in his blue uniform and white kepi. He smiled down at me bitterly and nodded.

“Tu as compris maintenant, mon gars? Tu commences peut-être à comprendre maintenant?”

It may be that he hypnotized me, or that I hypnotized myself. It may be—and I tend toward this view—that my spirit moved onto the Astral Plane and telepathed sensations to my body. I leave the how and why to any specialists who are interested; the what is all I need for my history. For eight or so days more I traveled under similar conditions, and though a week has passed since I stopped walking, the skin of my face is still blistered and peeling.

At night my apartment recomposed itself around me. The tap was there for me to drink at and fill my water bottle. I could hear cars passing in the street below, and rain slapping in the courtyard. But by day, after I’d made a dozen or so circuits, the Afric sun would explode above me like a million flash bulbs, and the walls would disappear, etc. I was soon well enough acclimated to question and listen to informants, but like my father I struggled over sand and rock. Like him I reeled now and then with heatstroke. Like his my lips parched and cracked. For a few days only—I claim no great feat of endurance—but long enough to understand.

No one can understand what he has not lived in one way or another. No one can recount to others what he does not understand. Those who presume on other people’s patience to relate them histories must make their little journeys of exploration. Those who would rather sit at ease at home should choose another occupation.

Patient examiners, I hope you find Chapter 13 illuminating. I walked a portion of the Sahara Desert to gather data for it. In any case, regardless of your evaluation, I am happy to have had means to make the trip.

68. His solitude grew oppressive

Although he had great powers of concentration and took consequent pride in mastering his mind, in keeping it at all times at close rein and aimed in the direction of his choice’ he discovered himself one midnight slumped forward with his forehead pressed against his typewriter while his mind ambled loosely in a field it chose itself. His mind chose to imagine (or perhaps recall) nights which thickened like sheltering walls about him and a loved woman while he drank the nectar and the poison of her breath. Often they said imperishable things on nights which opened back onto infinite spaces while he breathed the perfume of her blood. The woman turned out to be a harlot, and yet his mind persisted in recalling (or perhaps imagining) such nights.

Then his solitude grew oppressive. He tried to call some spirit, any spirit, to converse with him, but his mind pranced and reared and refused to turn in that direction. He tried to think of going out. For months now he hadn’t cared to think of going out, but now his solitude grew fearfully oppressive, and he tried to think of rising from his desk, of walking to the door and opening it, of hurrying along dark, silent streets to someplace where there were other people. His mind refused to turn that way, however. His mind moved on through nights sultry with vows, with perfumes, with infinite kisses.

Therefore he raised his head and brought his forehead smartly down on the corner of the key guard of his typewriter. He repeated this procedure several times, first with the spasmodic urgency of despair, later deliberately, to make sure his mind learned its lesson. When, at length, he sat back in his chair, he found the plastic key guard cracked and a flange of it pushed down so that it impeded typing, but after he removed this piece and chucked it into a corner, the machine functioned serviceably. More important, his mind was now perfectly obedient and his solitude no longer in any way oppressive.

69. His face

Lo, where it comes again!

While en route here this morning, Arnulfa herself beheld the face of Padre Celso Labrador blazoned in living color below the rear window of a bus abandoned in Avenida Bolívar.

She at once got down from the bus she was riding in and went to inspect. The face was long-locked, auburn-bearded, sad-smiled, and delicately dripped with blood from forehead scratches—in short, exactly as I saw it in this room and have described it in these notes. The slogan “GET THEE BEHIND ME GENGHIS” floated beside it in a balloon arrowed to its mouth.

A member of the crowd that was collecting, a self-confessed former passenger on the iconized bus, announced with great unease to everyone in hearing that as the bus flowed slowly with the morning traffic, a newsboy had bicycled by the driver’s window and shouted in that he was “wearing the padre!”—whereupon the driver yanked the hand brake, switched the motor off, leaped to the street, dashed round, gaped at the face, and then, pausing only to unscrew the license plate with a coin, fled into an alley.

This tale was punctuated by a howl of sirens, and Arnulfa too made herself scarce, but one may assume the Civil Guard removed the offending and subversive vehicle, and probably a few citizens as well.

70. The French African Army

For a history of this formation during World War II, see Pierre Darcourt, Armée d’Afrique: La revanche des drapeaux (Éditions de la Table Ronde, Paris, 1972). The author is entirely sympathetic to his subject. He scrounges excuses for the deafness of most commanders to de Gaulle’s “call to honor.” As his subtitle suggests, he is not much interested in those units whose flags needed no revenge: e.g., the 13th Half Brigade of the Foreign Legion, which never paid a rnoment’s fealty to the Vichy regime and which won France her first laurels of the war at Bir Hakeim. And he waves the tricouleur in great swaths throughout, but all these are minor carpings. M. Darcourt provides detailed and reliable information on the campaigns germane to this history, and I gratefully acknowledge his assistance.

I acquired a copy of Armée d’Afrique in 1973. I was particularly pleased to find that it includes a preface by General Aimé de Goislard de Monsabert, León Fuertes’ divisional commander at Cassino, and enough references by name to soldiers, noncoms, and company-grade officers killed in action for me to develop many knowledgeable sources from it. I read it with great interest, making extensive notes of instruction to myself inside it. I valued it so highly that when I returned here at the end of last year I did not trust it to the freight company that shipped my trunk and crates of other books or the handlers who stowed my suitcase on the airplane, but carried it on my person. Imagine, then, my rage and anguish when, on having completed the text and notes of Chapter 13 and begun in-depth research for the period of León Fuertes’ military service, I discovered that my precious book had been carried off—inadvertently, no doubt, but what solace was that?—by a baggage to whom I furnished bed, board, and affection until recently!

There was no question of my ordering another copy out from Paris: that would take months. I might either proceed as best I could without the book, or approach the tramp and sue for its return.

I admit that I was tempted toward the latter course of action. You, my examiners, know well what sacrifices I am prepared to make for scholarship and for this history. I have proved myself ready to give my sanity; I would give my life itself if that were called for. If there be a more dedicated investigator on earth or in the next world, point him out to me, and I shall study his example. Till you do that, though, I rest content with the strength of my commitment to the advancement of knowledge. Yes, I was tempted; but I did not yield. Not even science is so valuable that one ought pawn his honor for it. I cursed the bitch at length, and then pressed on without the benefit of published sources.

Four years’ cohabitation with me must have put the shadow of an edge on her dull telepathic sense. At midmorning the next day, while I was sleeping, she stopped by and gave the book to Arnulfa, saying she had just discovered it among the belongings she removed from here some weeks ago. On opening it that night, I was unable to avoid noticing the following note of hers to me scrawled on the flyleaf:

Please let me see you. I’m sorry I hurt you, I love you and you need me.

I ripped the page from tile book and burned it, but her screed was already grafted to my memory. I reproduce it here on the odd chance that the reader may be interested in the presumptuousness of sluts. How can she conceive herself capable of having hurt me? With which foul words does she define the notion love so as to lower it enough for her to claim feeling it? And what delusion moves her to think I need her, her of all the millions on this earth and in the other world?

Surely the presumptuousness of sluts is an infinite commodity, whose stock exceeds all inventory.

71. General Isidro Bodega

Isidro Bodega was born in San Juan de Puerto Rico in 1780, the son of a Spanish officer and a Creole woman. He was commissioned an ensign in the Spanish Army in 1797. During twenty-four years of garrison service in New Spain he was at all times the perfect martinet, impeccably uniformed, preternaturally grave, steeped in the arcana of moribund traditions, and attentive to the last punctilio of military form. Woe to the soldier who found himself a centimeter out of dress with his formation when Isidro Bodega was inspecting! God’s mercy on the junior officer who traduced the least significant of regulations while serving under Bodega’s command. In all the history of standing armies there was never an officer who went more closely by the book.

In 1819 Bodega was posted to the colony of Tinieblas, breveted to colonel, and put in charge of the plaza at Otán. Two years later, when Tinieblans rose for independence and the Otán barracks were approached by a few dozen ill-armed ranchers and field hands, Isidro Bodega discovered he was a complete physical coward and experienced what Saint Paul called “conversion” and Dr. I. P. Pavlov the “ultra-paradoxical phase.” He surrendered at once, went over to the rebels, and henceforth until his “death” nearly three decades later adhered invariably to the path of least resistance.

Bodega epilogued his capitulation with some florid discourse on the rights of man; it was in the insurgents’ interest to exaggerate their strength. The news was therefore broadcast through the land that the royal colors had been struck in the face of overwhelming material and moral force. Thus presented, Bodega’s act set an example for the commanders of other garrisons, and he claimed and got credit for the painless character of our nation’s birth. Simón Mocoso made him Captain General of the Tinieblan Army (the ancestor of our present Civil Guard), a post he held until his “death.” Under Bodega’s command, this force maintained a level of indiscipline and slovenliness remarkable even in Central America.

In Chapter 1 I have classed Bodega with the “uniformed gorillocrats” who from time to time have occupied our Presidential Palace. I shall not revise this characterization, but now that I have met the man in person and heard his story from his own lips, I must qualify it. It is true that in 1830 Bodega deposed President Julio Canino in a bloodless coup and became President himself—but only because Canino had so bungled the state’s finances as to put in jeopardy the value of some considerable land holdings Bodega had accumulated. It is true Bodega continued to wear uniforms, but he did not make violence the basic principle of his administration. It is, further, true that during Bodega’s eighteen years in the Palace no legislature was called to session and no opposition tolerated, but Bodega was himself neither cruel nor crazed for power. He recruited a cabinet of energetic, avaricious foreigners and put the country in their hands, allowing them to steal freely so long as they ran their ministries efficiently. Among them was an East Prussian Junker, the Minister of justice, a man whose mere presence radiated such severity and terror that he was able to keep order and suppress dissent without killing hardly anyone. Bodega rarely intervened in the administration of government and comported himself more like a hereditary monarch than a usurping dictator.

After his “death” Bodega entered Gastronomy, an activity grossly defamed in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto VI). The slimy filth with which the poet lines the third circle of his imaginary hell comes from his own mind, not from Gastronomy, which has always maintained the highest sanitary standards, while his harping on gluttony is exaggerated (though not entirely out of place), for Gastronomy caters more to the gourmet than to the gourmand. I gather from Bodega’s account that Gastronomy is organized along the lines of Drink: an infinity of restaurants offers every conceivable kind of fare and national dish, as well as astral specialities unknown in this world, save in superstitions such as Homer’s blather about nectar and ambrosia. Whereas no food is served in Drink, however, Gastronomes enjoy fine wines of this and other-worldly vintage, as well as a wide variety of digestive liqueurs.

When León Fuertes was assigned from L Force to the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, General Bodega took leave of absence from Gastronomy and wangled a temporary appointment in Guardian Spirits, the better to watch over his now partially-reclaimed descendant. He was with León constantly from July, 1943, until January, 1944. No one knows more about this period of my father’s life, and no one could possibly be a more cooperative informant General Bodega was the chief source for Chapter 14.

As occultists have long known the spirit often takes French leave from the body during sleep. Actual visits to the Astral Plane by the spirits of those still resident in this world are rare, but not at all impossible to bring off with the active aid of Guardian Spirits. (Cf. Dante, who made dream visits to the next world in the company of Virgil and Beatrice Portinari. His mind was so warped by religious prejudice and overrigid toilet training that he saw nothing as it was, but for a poet’s vision to be thus distorted is no great calamity, as the beauty of his Comedy attests. As a scholar, I have no pretensions to “bel stilo,” much less to reverberating themal consonances, or architectonic symmetries, or cunningly interset Chinese boxes of metaphor, but I do achieve a little accuracy.) Nightly, General Bodega whisked León Fuertes to the Astral Plane, specifically to the drill grounds of War, which he had obtained permission to use; though since no military man ever tells a subordinate more than he needs to know for his immediate mission, my father never realized where he was and thought the whole business merely a series of dreams.

In midwifing the birth of León Fuertes, soldier, General Bodega reverted to his pre-Otán personality and drew effectively on his quarter century of experience as a regular officer in the army of a world power. The training facilities of War are, as the reader may imagine, extensive and excellent. War’s refusal to countenance firearms (see note 27) posed no insurmountable problems. For marksmanship practice General Bodega put León on the longbow range with a rifle borrowed from The Hunt, and a dagger was lashed to this for bayonet training.

72. The Battle of Cassino

There are dozens of books, dozens and dozens, that treat or touch upon the Battle of Cassino, and I, incredulous examiners, have read them all. I have consumed the self-serving memoirs of the opposing commanders, Kesselring and Clark, and shuddered at their tastelessness. (The one claims moral superiority over the Allies—imagine a German general capable of that!—because the latter bombed the monastery; the other attempts to justify his turn toward Rome, a maneuver which enabled him to get his picture in the newspapers as the “liberator” of the Holy City but which allowed his enemy to escape intact and thus vitiated the sacrifices of his soldiers.) I have choked down immense dry chunks of the official histories of this and that nation’s war participation (e.g., The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War, Volume I) and gobbled up saucy unofficial paeans to national valor (e.g., L’épopée française en Italie). And I have devoured works on the Battle itself, munching with relish—on two of them: Dominick Graham, Cassino (New York, 1971) and Fred Majdalany, Cassino: Portrait of a Battle (London). The first has marvelous maps—the second (by a former company commander) gives the feel of the Battle. For the part played by French forces at Cassino, see Darcourt, op. cit. (pp. 117-191), on whom I have relied to supplement spirit sources. Merci mille fois, cher M. Darcourt!

73. Sangar

I built one in the living room ten days ago to specifications given me by General Bodega. I used books, of course, not rocks, and roofed it with a blanket, not a poncho, but it served excellently well to summon up the ambience of campaigning in the Abruzzi. I conducted my informant interviews inside it; inside it I consulted published works. I slept inside it also, fully clothed except for footwear. When I had retraced my father’s life up to the eve of his baptism of fire, I carried my typewriter in from my desk and, setting it on the floor, sat down before it, half inside and half outside my sangar. In this manner, evocative perhaps of Ernie Pyle, I composed Chapter 14.

Nothing untoward occurred until after I had brought León into Italy with his division. Then, as I was describing the physical aspect of the positions round Cassino, I looked up from the keyboard and saw not the wall of my apartment and the Judas-windowed door but the rubbled slopes of the Rapido Valley and the enemy-held massifs beyond. I have stayed here to do these notes and can regard the same vista when I care to. Now that I have begun my battle and am ready to commit León Fuertes’ unit, I think I shall keep my base here for the duration of the fight for Belvedere.

74. A force

“Some sinister force” erased eighteen minutes of signal from a magnetic recording of a conversation held on 20th June, 1972, in the office of the Honorable Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States. Such is the view put forward by General Alexander Haig (any relation, one wonders, to dunderhead Sir Douglas?), White House Chief of Staff, but despite the relatively high esteem in which General Haig is held, his theory had not gained a wide acceptance.

“No mystic force but a pack of counterrevolutionary jackals” is responsible for the appearance of images of Padre Celso Labrador on a number of Ciudad Tinieblas buses. That is the dogma delivered ex cathedra crudelitatis by Colonel Atila Guadaña, Security Chief of the Tinieblan Civil Guard and Minister of Justice, and despite the fear and loathing Guadaña’s name inspires, I am sure that his opinion is accepted by most educated people.

Yet General Haig is right, and Colonel Guadaña wrong.

Because the whole matter of relations between this world and the other is of the highest order of significance; because it nonetheless receives the shabbiest possible treatment by the academic community; because it is a crucial factor in the preparation of this dissertation; and because the author is one of the very few trained investigators to consider it, I shall now speak briefly to the question of astral forces that impinge upon this world. My points of departure are the events that prompted General Haig’s and Colonel Guadaña’s statements. My immediate authority is General Epifanio Mojón, participant in the Astral Activity of Polities and member of the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair. General Mojón, who will be the major source for Chapter 15, was with me earlier this evening. We fell to a discussion of the Case of the Beautified Buses, moved from there to the general question of spirit intervention into this world, caromed thence to what General Mojón called the “Nixon Imbroglio” (which has evidently dumped as foul if not as big a mess on his side of the grave as on ours), and so touched on the force referred to by General Haig, whose nature and aim I shall consider first.

As students of his career may readily imagine, Richard Nixon pledged unconsciously for Resentment and Revenge while still an adolescent. This pledge was closely analogous to Padre Celso’s pledge for Justice and mine for Learning: it furnished Mr. Nixon a reason for existence on this planet and animated all his days henceforward. Most mysteries surrounding Mr. Nixon’s actions and positions are at once cleared up when one considers that his spirit has been pledged to Resentment and Revenge almost constantly for the last fifty years.

I say “almost” because on 31st March, 1968, Mr. Nixon broke his pledge.

Let me make it clear that Mr. Nixon did not lightly repudiate the principles of Resentment and Revenge, which had inspired his whole adult life and which are the only principles he has ever known. He broke his pledge only under psychic torment as intense as the physical torment under which Padre Celso broke his pledge (see note 50). When President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek another term, Mr. Nixon saw his hope of being President of the United States within his reach again. He felt compelled to make sure he would grasp it. As this compulsion was unbearable, he yielded to it. He made a deal with the Office of Terrestrial Recruitment (see note 18). As soon as he did so, his pledge was dissolved, for the deal Mr. Nixon made committed him to service in another activity.

A negotiation between a fellow as ingenious as E. A. Poe (for he was the recruiter; the job seems to appeal to former poets) and one as devious as Mr. Nixon deserves a monograph of its own, but I’ve no time at present for that sort of research. All I could learn from General Mojón, who remembered it from his committee’s dossier on Mr. Nixon, was that the haggling was fierce and that the final agreement provided as follows: Astral Activities would insure that the Democratic presidential nomination went to Hubert Humphrey (the only man in the United States whom Mr. Nixon felt he had a decent chance of beating) and would throw in a riot at the National Convention; Mr. Nixon would serve thirty-seven years and seven months in Victim following his “death.” The agreement led directly to Mr. Nixon’s electoral victory. The breaking of his pledge to Resentment and Revenge accounted for the so-called new Nixon that bloomed briefly during the campaign.

Even before he took office, in fact within an hour of his certification by the Electoral College, Mr. Nixon began trying to sneak out of his commitment. I cannot describe his machinations, which I gather were as dreary as any he ever pulled on residents of this world; I can say only that they failed. The time for plea bargaining had passed, and the Director of Astral Activities does not grant executive clemency to enlistees who cash their bonuses. Then, on the night of his first inauguration, Mr. Nixon received a visit from another representative of the dark side of North American polities, his former Senate colleague Joe McCarthy, a very junior assistant to the Chairman of the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair. The committee, McCarthy said, and its chairman, Josef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, had long had an eye on Mr. Nixon. Interest was yet greater now that he was President of the United States. If Mr. Nixon would work with the committee, its counsel would show him a perfectly legal way to avoid serving time in Victim. For once Mr. Nixon did not haggle.

Committee counsel had discovered an old regulation which permits spirits assigned to Victim to be surrogated for by their spouses. (Cf. the Alcestis-Admetus myth, which is based on this provision.) Mr. Nixon wormed through this loophole. General Mojón could not tell me if Mrs. Nixon knew what she was signing, but she signed. Free now of posthumous obligations, Mr. Nixon reaffirmed his pledge to Resentment and Revenge and was welcomed back as swiftly as Padre Celso was to justice (see note 51). His dedication to this bifurcated activity has been evident since his first days in the White House, while certain melancholy episodes of his presidency were inspired by the committee.

No one can accuse me of gringophilia, but I always give credit where it’s due. The United States has fostered and maintained certain institutions that support the principle of human freedom. These are great barriers to the spread of terror and despair, and the committee, quite understandably, would like them crushed. You may judge for yourselves, Time-saving Professor Lilywhite and tube-fed Dr. Grimes, whether Mr. Nixon has been helpful in this regard. It is enough for me to say that the committee thinks so. It went to some trouble to acquire Mr. Nixon’s cooperation; it has gone to a great deal more to prolong it—or rather to prolong its usefulness, since there is clearly little value in the cooperation of a demagistratured pol.

General Mojón was emphatic that the committee had nothing at all to do with dispatching burglars to the Watergate, but at its first session after their arrest the committee voted unanimously to help Mr. Nixon wriggle off the hook again, and authorized the chairman to bear news of this decision to Mr. Nixon personally, as earnest of the committee’s firm support. A meeting between the President of the United States and the Chairman of the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair thus took place in the Oval Office on 20th June, 1972. The Chairman arrived while the President was in conference with Mr. H. R. Haldeman, who was dismissed until the meeting ended, about a quarter of an hour later. General Mojón does not know what was discussed—the expression of the committee’s support aside—but thinks a purge of dissidents may have been mentioned since the Chairman has great fondness for and experience with this tactic, but he has firsthand knowledge of the rage with which the Chairman greeted news (divulged nearly a year later) that his and his interpreter’s voices had been bugged. More was involved than the personal slight—though the Chairman is acutely sensitive to slights and does not suffer them kindly. Were it to become public knowledge that he was in jovial alliance with a President of the United States, even such a President as Richard Nixon, the cult of his personality, already gravely damaged since his “death,” might be destroyed entirely, while the position of his followers in this world, all of them enthusiastic spreaders of despair and terror, would be severely weakened. The most infuriating part was that the Chairman had to go on supporting Mr. Nixon anyway, Mr. Nixon could be counted on to go public with a distorted version of the meeting if the committee withdrew its aid and comfort.

The Chairman’s entire wrath fell on poor Joe McCarthy—though, characteristically, he gave McCarthy no inkling of his fall from favor till too late. He praised McCarthy before the whole committee, beamed on McCarthy like a proud uncle, declared that McCarthy had suspected Richard Nixon from the first and had given confidential warning not to trust him. This wasn’t so, but the Chairman had McCarthy himself believing it within a minute. Who was McCarthy to dispute the Chairman’s views? Who was McCarthy to turn down promotion or refuse the holiday in Drink the Chairman offered? There, of course, two of the Chairman’s secret agents made themselves his buddies, sang smutty songs with him, laughed at his gross jokes, and, finally, waltzed him, reeling, over to Risk and conned him into a disastrous wager. He is now serving a thousand-year sentence in Victim.

Besides this, the only action the Chairman felt he could take was to destroy the evidence of his visit to the White House. That way, if Mr. Nixon tried to publicize the meeting, it would be his word against the Chairman’s-a pretty fair contest in credibility. The “sinister force,” then, to which General Alexander Haig referred was a beam of thought waves from the Chairman of the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair, which demagnetized that portion of the tape whereon his chat with Richard Nixon was recorded. I doubt that General Haig acknowledges the existence of another world, much less comprehends its workings. I take his reference to the “force” as an accidental hit smack in the bull’s eye such as a blind man might make once in a million shots.

Let us proceed now to our second illustration:

Not all extraterrestrial forces are sinister. All spirits—saving those in Victim and those who, like my grandfather Dr. Azael Burlando, have been singled out for isolation (see note 18)—can visit this world and communicate with receptive people here, thus sometimes gaining influence with them. Spirits may as well exert subliminal persuasion on residents of this world who cannot consciously perceive them: e.g., on the Mayor of Chicago, Illinois, and on members of his police force. Besides this, since thought waves are a form of electromagnetic energy, they can be focused in a beam, thereby to exert physical force upon material. A very, very few residents of this world possess is power. I, alas, do not. The Directorate of Astral Activities encourages the cultivation of this power, pampers spirits who have it, and dissuades them from cycling back here. Such spirits can pick up the thought waves of others, amplify them, focus them, etc. Politics is not the only Astral Activity to which such spirits seek assignment. Justice has some as well.

As I at once suspected (see note 66), Padre Celso Labrador is responsible (through the good offices of a gifted Justice colleague) for the images of him that continue to appear on buses in this capital. More, he is going about it in a very energetic fashion. There were several sightings during the past week, all on private buses as before, and now he is branching out. Yesterday afternoon he embellished a bus belonging to the Surface Transport Authority.

According to Arnulfa, who heard of it by rumorphone, and veiledly confirmed by today’s Diario de la Bahia, a large, state-owned, and spankingnew bus was transfigured with an emblem of the padre as it passed along Calle Saturnino Aguila between Civil Guard Headquarters and Bondadosa Prison. Padre Celso displayed himself full length, resplendent in a white cassock and brandishing a bloody sword. The legend “RENDER UNTO GENGHIS THAT WHICH IS GENGHIS’S” appeared in the customary dialogue balloon.

In the first official mention of this sort of occurrence, the newspaper (a government slave like all the others) carried the statement by Colonel Guadaña paraphrased earlier in this note, and went on to say that the driver of the bus had been arrested and was being questioned (question extraordinaire, I fear). Neither the colonel nor the reporter told what happened; they merely alluded to a display of subversive propaganda by counterrevolutionary conspirators. The article held, however, that “the conspiracy is probably of foreign inspiration, considering the advanced technology employed to make the treacherous and blasphemous exhibit appear at a precise moment,” and closed in the expectation that Colonel Guadaña would soon “have all the traitors under lock and key, and at the disposal of the people’s revolutionary justice.”

According to General Mojón, Padre Celso’s intent is to discredit the Manduco regime. This has caused no slight concern among the members of General Mojón’s committee. A subcommittee on which General Mojón serves is seeking means to make Padre Celso cease and desist.

The point, in any case, is that forces from the next world intervene in this one, in a variety of ways, for a variety of motives. Unfortunately, hardly anyone is studying this intervention, despite its critical effect upon events. No support is offered for such study. Such study is actively opposed by the academic establishment and often punished cruelly by those responsible for what is called “mental health.” The depressing result is that our civilization knows less about spirit intervention than did the ancients, who saw it for the natural process that it is. No one put Plutarch in a strait jacket for describing the apparition Marcus Brutus saw at Abydos and at Philippi, but I know the risks I run just hinting at Stalin’s role in the Watergate cover-up and mentioning his spirit’s presence in the White House.

75. General Epifanio Mojón

The most repugnant of all my ancestors, a man who enlisted his one potentially redeeming quality, determination, in the service of human suffering.

Existence filled my great-great-grandfather—and no doubt fills him still—with a great terror. He has managed to conceal it, even from himself, by immersing himself in violence and cruelty. This cost him his humanity, which he paid out in installments over a period of years. Let it be noted that he never wavered when a payment came due, but what else can be said for one who traded his capacity to connect with other human beings for the knack of finding strength and safety in creating victims?

Perhaps I might discover something else if General Mojón would present himself to me in a less disgusting aspect. I don’t demand the trim youthfulness he put on when he accompanied my father in the assault on Belvedere, but I do wish he’d choose a mean between that and what he wears when he comes here. To me General Mojón shows himself as he looked near the end of his earthly life: bloated; decayed; a jaw slack and slavering like an old hyena’s; a complexion like a half-cooked flapjack that in the act of being turned has slithered from the pan onto the grease-splashed stove and lies bunched there, displaying its yellow-white, pocked, oozy face—so perfectly repulsive, all in all, that when he was hung up in the bay on a cross designed for one of his own victims, neither the sharks nor the buzzards would touch a morsel of him. He seems content with his appearance. No doubt it harmonizes with that of his fellow committeemen. But it is all I can do to keep from glancing away, or gagging.

He is a valuable informant, though, and as such worth the nausea. And the weight of his contempt, for he regards me as one might a shoe sole that has blundered into fresh dog droppings. He does not hold with the life of contemplation, and as for the word, thinks its only fit employment is in false witness. He was, besides, most disappointed in my father, whom he hoped to mold into a despot after his own model, and detests León’s being memorialized in this dissertation. He can’t avoid testifying—a resident of this world with my strength of mind and my connections can subpoena just about any spirit—but his volubility is, I suspect, motivated by an urge to scare me. In this he succeeded, both in his discourse and in some “special effects” through which he gave me a personal taste of battle (for this, see my next note).

General Mojón took such relish in transmitting me the horrors of combat that I asked him why he did not choose War as his Astral Activity. He dismissed it as “a game for babies.” Astral warriors suffer no permanent mutilations and know no fear of “death.” Astral battles produce no civilian casualties, disfigure and debase no women and children, destroy no painfully constructed institutions of civilized life. And astral armies have no artillery.

“War without cannon is for babies!” General Mojón declared, and then glowingly described the effect of chain shot on massed infantry when fired at a range of fifty meters. He is happy to note that terrestrial artillerymen can now achieve an improved grapeshot result with the so-called beehive round, which General Mojón observed while accompanying my brother, Carlos, in Vietnam, and he finds napalm marvelous—except that, as with high explosive, the men who actually deliver it don’t get to watch what it does to human flesh. He’d come too far by the time he “died,” he said, to play around with swords and arrows. His present position affords him the chance to provoke modern wars, whose weapons produce truly spectacular abominations and whose participants feel mortal, trouser-fouling terror most of the time.

76. The pandemonic din of battle

I have heard it in this room, amazed examiners! I have smelled cordite. I have felt the reverberations of shellbursts. I have seen tracers arching through the air. I have tasted the fear and exhilaration of battle.

I have watched comrades shot to pieces, and enemies fall at my hand. I have been to war.

Let me say at once that I claim no credit for this experience. I built my sangar and lived in it and in this way put myself a little in the mood of mountain warfare, but when it came to flesh-and-bone knowledge of combat, I was a passive subject in an experiment by General Epifanio Mojón. I judge the experience to have been of inestimable value in the preparation of Chapter 15, and yet I wish I had never had it— not because it was painful—though painful it surely was—but because it entailed some suffering on my father’s part, which I knew nothing of at the time but which I fain would have spared him.

After General Mojón had described the fording of the Rapido River and the pre-dawn vigil of the tirailleur battalions, he began relating the first stages of the action: the opening bombardment, the German s’ off-balance response, the commitment of assault companies. But when he reached the point where Colonel Roux ordered a general attack, he broke off: Had I the guts to go to war myself?

I asked him what he meant, and he replied he meant just what he said: Was I man enough to get my knowledge at first hand, to take part myself instead of merely listening in case and safety to a story?

How could I manage that? I wondered, and he said how didn’t matter, yes or no was enough. If I said yes, he’d try to take me to Cassino. If he could do it, and if I survived, he’d explain later. If I said no … He snorted in disgust.

Honored examiners, I accepted at once. I had no need to prove my courage to the likes of Epifanio Mojón. Nor did I feel the kind of solipsistic yen to find out how I’d do that drives so many peace-loving young fellows into combat. But I will run any risk and explore any avenue to gather information germane to my investigations.

General Mojón told me he’d be back the following evening and disappeared. I busied myself studying Darcourt’s account of the engagement (op. cit., pp. 130-149). The next night I went into battle.

But I had best describe what General Mojón had in mind:

Human beings (like all animals) possess organs sensitive to such external events as light, sound, heat, pressure, etc. The responses of these organs are coded electro-chemically and transmitted to an analog computing instrument which organizes and records them. The organizing/analyzing process may provoke such internal events as the secretion of hormones and their flow into the bloodstream, which in turn provoke further internal events (e.g., changes in the rate of pulse, breathing, and metabolism. Messages relating to these secondary internal events are fed back into the computer, which organizes and records them. Poets call these messages emotions. The record of perceptions may be played back.

It is now helpful to consider certain metallic devices that correspond roughly to the protoplasmic organs I have referred to. A combination TV-sound recorder, for example, may he equipped with a camera and an impedance microphone. As such, this machine senses light and sound waves, codes perceptions of them electronically, records these perceptions on magnetic tape, and (when hooked up to a suitable receiver) plays them back. Two recorders may also be linked together, so that a recording made by one may be transmitted to and recorded by the other. For such an operation no sensing devices, no camera eye or microphone car, are necessary. Such an operation may, moreover, be performed, say, thirty years and eight thousand kilometers from the time and place of the original recording. Barring deterioration of the tape, the second recording is as sharp as the original.

What General Mojón had in mind was to retrieve from my father’s memory the complete record of his experiences and emotions during the first twelve hours of the fight for Colle Belvedere, and to feed this record directly into my brain, so that I should see, hear, taste, smell, feel, think, suffer, and exult exactly as my father had. The technique of such retrieval and transmission was developed by a team of medical researchers formerly citizens of Germany, now participants in Torture. At the time it was performed with me, the operation had been tried successfully (if that is in fact the correct word) with a number of spirits from Victim, but never with a resident of this world.

During experiments conducted in Torture, the supposed witchmaster Urbain Grandier, the attempted regicide Robert Damiens, and the sodomite lover of King Edward II, Hugh Despenser, were put in deep hypnosis and caused to relive their executions, which experiences were simultaneously transmitted to a representative sample of subjects. So effective is the process in reproducing in one individual sensations and emotions felt by another that when Despenser relived the moment when his generative organ was seized in pincers and sliced off, a female subject who was the beneficiary of this experience displayed a most convincing agony, although she had never possessed an organ of that sort herself.

There is, of course, no reason why this process need be used only for tormentive purposes. It might give paralytics the thrills of Olympic competition, allow the blind to study history of art, and let the deaf hear Mozart. It might put stay-at-homes in moon capsules, or “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” And it might close the gulf between the sexes, permitting men to know childbirth and women to know fatherbood, as well, of course, as to participate in sexual congress from each other’s points of view (as, in fact, León and Rosario were able to do without the help of Nazi doctors—see Chapter 11). General Mojón’s experiment with me is a case in point. Whatever his motive in arranging it and despite its being somewhat unpleasant—especially with regard to side effects (of which more later)—the experience not only enlarged my own consciousness but contributed to the advancement of human knowledge. I can only hope my father, who after all was neither consulted nor rewarded, did not mind too much reliving his first day of combat.

But I learned all these particulars only after my pilgrimage to Belvedere, When General Mojón ordered me to stop my cars with cotton, blindfold myself, and lie down on my bed, I had to overcome considerable trepidations. I lay there in great unease for about half an hour while he wrangled with technicians on the Astral Plane. I could get only his side of the communication, and it scarcely calmed me to hear him bark, “Come in, Torture; Torture, come in!” every few minutes when whoever he was on to left him, no doubt to supervise some detail of the preparations. Nor did I receive any warning whatsoever, unless one might count Mojón’s satisfied grunt just before my father’s mind juiced into mine. All at once I lay soaked and shivering on rough stones, peering into icy darkness, charged with adrenaline, thinking in French.

But let me be accurate: I was not Camilo Fuertes, candidate for the Ph.D. degree in history. I was León Fuertes, corporal, 3rd Squad, 4th Section, 11th Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs. I did not ask myself: What’s going on? Where am I? I knew exactly what was going on and where I was. A regimental attack was going on, and I was on the west bank of the Rapido River waiting for dawn and the assault. And though I knew that, I did not say to myself: Keep your eyes open; note everything you can and remember it so you can write it down accurately later. I had no thought at all of writing history. I didn’t even think that the battle I was about to take part in might be mentioned in history books someday, though I suppose this is not an uncommon thought among soldiers. I make this point because there is no such thing as a Camilo Fuertes who is not concerned with history. Camilo Fuertes had, therefore, ceased to exist. The analog computing organ containing the program of Camilo Fuertes’ identity was temporarily filled to the last neuron with impulses from León Fuertes’ memory.

What I experienced during the next twelve hours is described in text above. Mental and physical stress, fear of “death,” joy in murder, rage at the enemy, and grief for slaughtered comrades: it is all there. Because I experienced it personally, because I was León Fuertes for that period, I found some difficulty in using the third person. I marvel, in fact, at the pomposity of folks like Caesar and de Gaulle, who can relate their experiences as though they had occurred to someone else. I had no trouble at all, on the other hand, recalling what had happened. My problem, rather, was weeding out details that, however interesting in themselves, did not really demand inclusion in this dissertation. Chapter 15 would, otherwise, have grown monstrously long.

Worse than the actual experience of battle—which, as the reader will take note, had its rewards for León—was its aftermath. General Mojón’s experiment continued beyond the occupation of the German positions on Crest 718 (which I have judged the natural point to end Chapter 15) and included the lull thereafter and the German counterattack (which I shall tell in the first pages of Chapter 16). It ended at dusk with the repulse of that attack, so I did not have to spend the night on the mountain under rain and fire, but I hardly think that would have been a greater ordeal than what I actually went through and must describe here as a caveat to others. The process of direct brain-to-brain transfer of experience may, after all, be taken up by other activities besides Torture and someday offered to the public of this world to provide people the kind of consciousness-expanding benefits I have touched on earlier in this note. Potential consumers must be aware of its side effects.

At the conclusion of the experiment I had no knowledge who or where I was. General Mojón did not stay on to ease me out of it. I woke up, as it were, blindfolded, with my ears stopped. On removing these sense mufflers, I found myself in an unfamiliar room dressed in unfamiliar clothing. I went to a mirror (for the first time, by the way, since the evening described in note 57) and saw an unfamiliar face. In short, I suffered total amnesia, a frightful state, concerned examiners, quite frightful.

I do not know how long it lasted. It might have gone on much longer than it did, but that Arnulfa’s arrival brought me out of it. I had the presence of mind not to go flailing about wildly, not to turn everything upside down hunting for some identity document or rush out in the street for help. I lay down on the living room couch in the pool of warm sunlight from the courtyard, waiting for my heart to stop pounding and my breathing to calm. This had more or less occurred when Arnulfa, who had forgot her key, rang the doorbell and called out, “Don Camilo!” That brought me to myself, and I got up and let her in.

But my first thought, one that took me an unconscionably long time to overcome and pummel from my brain, was that I was mad. The battle experiences I’d got from my father rushed back to me along with my identity, and I believed them and the events that preceded them—my conversation with General Mojón, for example—hallucinations. I thought I was insane and desperately in need of help. This delusion has possessed me from time to time in the past. While in its grip I see nothing clearly and consider the whole world of spirits merely the figment of my diseased imagination. Compassionate examiners, this is a hideous condition. Hideous, hideous, hideous.

Next, I decided I’d been dreaming, or nightmaring rather. Luckily enough, I was able to reach this decision fairly quickly, perhaps in as short a time as twenty minutes, though it seemed longer, for I was at the point of suicide, and to one who believes the next world only a figment, suicide is a serious affair. I put the matter of spirits aside for the moment and decided I had grown myself a great, rearing nightmare by thinking too precisely on my father and the Battle of Cassino. This too was unpleasant, though nothing like what I’d just been through, since I felt I might be tempted to draw on what I now considered dream visions for this dissertation, and that would be a most unscholarly predicament to fall into.

Only after a long while was I able to put my universe back together crumb by crumb, to bring myself back to a belief in the reality of General Mojón’s spirit and its responsibility for my voyage into the maelstrom of war. Only then did I sleep, and for some days afterward I remained shaken. I need scarcely say that when General Mojón showed up that evening for our scheduled interview, I demanded and received a full explanation, and gave him a stern tongue-lashing for tricking me into causing my father inconvenience.

I caution others to consider these side effects before participating in brain-to-brain transfer of perceptions. Perhaps the process will be improved to eliminate them. Perhaps they would not have occurred had the experiment been conducted out of some other activity than Torture, which is, unfortunately, the only activity that has the process as yet. Certainly the process is a valuable investigative aid. Certainly it has contributed to the preparation of this dissertation, both with regard to Chapter 15 and in furnishing me firsthand background information on my father’s war that will no doubt be helpful in Chapter 16. Certainly it is the best means of researching my particular subject, given the lamentable reality that my father is presently held incommunicado in Victim. And certainly it might be of benefit to others. But one must take note of the side effects.

For my part, I can bear them. I’m no romantic seeking thrills and chills, but I can endure what others have endured, if it be in the advancement of knowledge. Where others have gone I too must journey, to bring the story back for those too busy or too weak to make the trip. As for side effects and other mental risks, I accept them. I did not fight at Ayacucho, or in our civil wars, or with Sandino in Nicaragua, or in Europe with the French, or in Vietnam, but no one can say I have less courage than the others of my line.

I will not harm others, though. I have told General Mojón to have his brilliant troupe of Dachau grads consult my father if they hope to run another brain-to-brain between their world and mine. Or find another subject; I won’t take part in any more of them unless my father knows what’s going on and freely consents. I am not quite so dedicated to “science” as the “physicians” of Auschwitz and Treblinka. I will suffer a bit myself, but not torment others. For all I know, the process may be worse for my father than it was for me, and he’s suffering enough without my causing him pain.

Peace and mercy on him. I pray he may forgive me.

77. To guard against pernicious thought

The Government has begun assigning members of the Policía Urbana de Seguridad (PUS) to ride the buses.

These are not real cops but rather an auxiliary goonhood recruited earlier this year to supplement the more formal organs of repression. PUS agents are picked from the pool of minor criminals secreted by the slum quarters of the capital, the sort who mug old ladies in the narrow streets around the public market. They receive no training, wear no uniforms, and possess no qualifications beyond their bullies’ readiness to brutalize the peaceful and defenseless and their thieves’ loyalty to the regime. Their mission, as stated officially, is “to protect the state against counter-revolution and subversion.” In practice this translates to such prodigies of national defense as apprehending (and in the process roughing up) a fishmonger who chanced to wrap a sea bass he’d just sold in a piece of newspaper bearing the photo of General Genghis Manduco, Chief of the Tinieblan State and Maximum Leader of the Tinieblan Revolution. The poor sap got two years, one for lèse-autorité and one for counter-revolution; his housewife customer, charged as an accessory before the fact, was absolved in reward for giving evidence.

These heroes, as I say, are being randomly assigned to ride the buses, in imitation, it would seem, of the anti-hijack guards put on board aircraft in the United States a few years back. No one is worried about buses’ being hijacked, of course, but rumor has it—and rumor is the only reliable means of mass communication in this country—that the Government is at its wit’s end to stop the displays arranged by Padre Celso Labrador, or at least neutralize their effect.

These displays have become more frequent and more variegated. Arnulfa saw one that, from her description, seems to have resembled the seven-headed beast of Revelation. Each head was in the likeness of an officer of Manduco’s junta, and the design was topped with the scrolled legend: “HE THAT LEADETH INTO CAPTIVITY SHALL GO INTO CAPTIVITY—HE THAT KILLETH WITH THE SWORD MUST BE KILLED WITH THE SWORD.” Another, which she heard of at second or third hand, depicted a number of high government officials. They had loathsome insect bodies and flew across the whole side of one of the huge new buses, and the phrase “FOR THEY COVERED THE FACE OF THE WHOLE LAND SO THAT THE LAND WAS DARKENED” was written beneath them in Day-Glo colors.

All the painters and graphic artists in the country have supposedly been put under arrest. The Civil Guard is on alert. The members of the Junta are said to be diarrhetic with worry. But relief may be at hand. According to General Mojón, the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair has entered negotiations with representatives from Justice, and has proposed (as of yesterday, 7th August, 1974) to cut off aid to Richard Nixon in return for a moritorium on the anti-Manduco campaign. Justice wants Mr. Nixon out of office very badly and will probably go along, though they are dragging the palaver out to let the padre get a few more licks in.

He makes a point of hitting buses with PUS agents on board. The agents console themselves by trying to guard against pernicious thought. They wonder out loud whether the bus they’re in is destined for decoration and arrest anyone who seems to look forward to such an event. They spout wisecracks about the situation and arrest people who smile. And should the padre strike, they arrest those who fail to make a convincing show of righteous indignation. The result has been that few bus riders have trouble finding seats these days and that they proceed to their destinations in mute solemnity.

78. His squad

I was able to interview only one member of the squad my father, León Fuertes, led at Belvedere.

Dax, Djemal, Boulala, and El Haoui have all recycled to this world, Dax doing so at once, a not uncommon course of action with those who “die” in young adulthood. His memory was cleansed and his spirit sent back to this world before the end of 1944. (Memory erasure is, by the way, standard operating procedure’ with all recycling spirits, but it is sometimes partially botched; hence the intimations of immortality and vague remembrance of past states experienced by some residents of this world.)

Djemal chose Getting and Spending and was there for three-plus years. Upon the establishment of Israel (May, 1948), he applied to be recycled there, and his spirit was put into one of the first embryos conceived in that country.

Boulala and El Haoui entered Warrior’s Repose (also called Houri and so referred to on the application forms of female spirits). It is this activity that was described to Mahomet by a spirit named Gabriel and that forms the basis of that “Paradise” mentioned profusely throughout the Koran (see particularly Chapters XLIV, LV, and LVI).

Because he maintained prolonged contact with a single spirit source, Mahomet picked up a great deal of detailed information about a narrow spectrum of the next world. Besides Warrior’s Repose/Houri, he knew only certain aspects of Victim, which he calls the Pit in his suras. What he knew, however, he knew well. The gardens, fountains, fruit trees; the tasty viands and the wine which leaves no hangover; the shady oases and soft carpets; the rich silks and fine brocades, are all depicted with great accuracy by the Prophet, while the houris are as “smooth and lovely” as he says they are. He erred only in holding that the activity is restricted to pious Muslims, and that the houris exist merely for male delectation.

Warrior’s Repose/Houri is designed to accommodate not only hedonistic male spirits but also those female spirits whose idea of how to spend eternity is to be around hardy, possessive males—a rather widespread female dream, Steinem, Millett, Friedan, et al. to the contrary notwithstanding. (The mirror-image activity, Courtly Love, is offered for male spirits who enjoy paying elaborate and more or less chaste homage to females, and female spirits who enjoy collecting same.) The entrance requirements are: for males, valor; for females, virtue. The experience of millennia has shown a four-to-one ratio of fair to brave satisfying to all parties. No one becomes a houri save by choice; no one need remain a houri an hour longer than she desires—though, of course, an abrupt exit may entail a period of inactivity in Prorogation. In confecting his “Paradise” out of the information he received from Gabriel, Mahomet may have been influenced by his own fantasies. Or he may have distorted purposely to play on the male chauvinism of his neighbors; he was trying to establish a religion, after all. He knew nothing, moreover, of Courtly Love, where the ratio of knight-troubadour to lady is likewise four to one. He certainly knew nothing of Amazonia, whose participants are exclusively female (as those in War are male), though not particularly violent. Viewed clearly and in panorama, the next world is neither male-supremacist nor female-supremacist.

As followers of Islam, Boulala and El Haoui expected to be received in Mahomet’s “Paradise.” Warrior’s Repose/Houri did not disappoint them. At length, though, they tired of case and pleasure and asked to be recycled. It is an interesting irony that El Haoui’s spirit happened to be put back into an Arab body and that his new avatar fought in the late Mideast hostilities against a unit commanded by the reincarnation of his old messmate Djemal, an accountant from Tel Aviv named Kalish, who holds a reserve captaincy in the Israeli tank corps.

Barelli is in Contemplation. He does not care to recall his war experience, and I did not press to bring him here.

Joseph-Marie Reveil, the soldier who presciently gave León Fuertes his telephone jeton memento for safekeeping, “died” of wounds during the sixth day of 3rd Battalion’s ordeal on Belvedere. He was accepted in Learning and spent ten years there reading sociology, a branch of knowledge he had been studying at the Sorbonne when Hitler marched on France. He then entered Astral Administration and is now an official in Reception. Reveil was able to supplement General Mojón’s account of the bayonet charge led by Sublieutenant Bouakkaz and the chaotic fighting between Crests 718 and 862. He was instrumental in obtaining information on his former squadmates who have returned to this world, and background information on Warrior’s Repose/ Houri.

Reveil was on duty when León Fuertes arrived in the next world. My father recognized him at once and told him that he had preserved his telephone jeton religiously, that he had taken it back to France with him on his state visit and shown it to General de Gaulle, and that he had had it on his person when he was assassinated. I have no way of authenticating this story. I cannot recall ever having seen a jeton among the effects—gold penknife, keys, loose change—my father would empty from his pockets to his night table before taking siesta, but then I didn’t know jetons existed until I visited France in summer, 1968. I might have seen it a hundred times and thought it an odd coin. I am not about to bother the ghost of Charles de Gaulle over it.

I suspect my father made the whole tale up. He had no idea what the next world held in store, and lo! he came upon a former subordinate in a post of some authority. It would have been most like him to concoct an ingratiating fable, and get on Reveil’s good side straightaway.

79. Then the days and nights fell together

During the composition of Chapter 15 I began to have extremely vivid war dreams—not replays of perceptions picked up from my father’s memory but original variations on themes from films and books. I would kill or be killed time and again, and these dreams were interspersed with visits from men who perished round Cassino. None of them knew my father; none was even from a French unit. They had got wind of someone interested in the battle, and they flocked to my sleeping ear and poured it full of strife. A Scots sergeant major told me how his outfit was annihilated during a night attack across the crests, whole platoons careering over precipices in the dark. A trooper of the Liebstandarten Adolf Hitler Division (Waffen S.S.) described the aerial bombardinents he went through and then turned green with terror when I mentioned the French forces, for a Moroccan goumier had taken both his ears for keepsakes as he lay dying. There were Gurkhas and Poles, who knew no language I could understand and who tried to explain their “deaths” in gesture, and a gigantic Texan who returned regularly to complain of being blown in two by a short round from his own artillery. One cannot banish spirits from one’s dreams, and I was usually too fatigued to wake myself. My sleep was stewed in violence.

When awake I recalled my father’s experiences and listened to General Mojón, arid when ever I looked up from my typewriter, whenever I turned my face from my informant’s, I saw the massif of Belvedere looming before me and would huddle back instinctively into my sangar. I had no surcease from combat day or night.

Then the days and nights fell together and were confused in stress and anguish, and memories and dreams and visions merged, and thought and fancy spilled into each other, and present fused with past and here with there, and this world and the next mixed roughly, arid there was no more conscious order in my mind.

The demon war possessed me, pious examiners, and wrote most of these last two chapters.

80. Self-indulgence

My aunt Rosario, who is the source for the final portions of Chapter 16, described León Fuertes’ reflections during his mountaintop clarity in such a manner as to imply that I am a selfish person, thus prompting the following dialogue, which I reproduce for the sidelight it sheds on the problems of researching this dissertation:

“Is it self-indulgence to do what I am in this world to do, despite all obstacles?”

“No, Camilo. Everyone owes loyalty to his destiny, though if the obstacles are human, it’s nice to use some care when getting round them.”

“Is it self-indulgence to refuse to tell the high and mighty they are right when I know they’re wrong?”

“No. There’s room between self-indulgence and self-privation, and everyone owes himself his truth, though it isn’t always necessary to tell someone who’s wrong that he’s a moron.”

“Well, then; I stand acquitted.”

“Really. Isn’t it selfish to refuge in your mission and your truth, to use them as means to evade responsibility?”

“I am an order-bringer! I help make this world make sense! That’s what I do here, day and night, week in, week out! Do I take holidays? Do I cut corners on my research? Do I fake my data? Evade responsibility? Me? You must be joking!”

“I’m not talking about your work, Camilo. I’m talking about other people.”

“I have nothing to do with other people.”

My aunt Rosario smiled softly. “That’s what I mean, dear.”

“Mean what? I no longer conduct relations with living human beings. I have given that up—except for Arnulfa, of course, whom I pay well and treat decently. As I receive none of the benefits of contact with living humans, I incur no responsibilities toward them. Ergo, I evade none.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Camilo. Even someone who’s totally alone is responsible to others. He is obliged to give and ask pardon. Your father learned that alone on Belvedere.”

“Well. Give pardon. That I can do. Once and for all, since I have taken steps and will receive no more offenses. All right. Those who have offended me already, all but two, I pardon! I shall give pardon to Dr. Emil Vertilanz as soon as he begs me for it with suitable groveling to my scholarship in any recognized learned journal. As for the other, she I would gladly pardon here and now, except her offense is unpardonable. As for asking pardon, I have not offended anyone enough for that, and since I no longer am involved with living humans, cannot offend any in the future.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Camilo.”

“In my relationships with spirits I give rather more liberally of myself than wisdom would recommend. I heard the padre out, for example, though I was extremely busy. I gave him several footnotes in my dissertation, though it was by no means clear at the time that his material would be germane. Any fair accounting of my dealings with residents of this world and yours will show a credit balance on my side.”

“Accounting! Footnotes! Do you think your father would have given footnotes?”

“My father, dear Aunt Rosario, would have been unable to see the fellow in the first place. Or having by chance seen him, would have been unable to believe him real. This world is so organized—or ill organized—that the gift of action is distinct from the gift of insight, on all the deep important levels anyway. Besides, my father—whom I nonetheless respect and love—was himself self-indulgent, as he realized, as you report, and as I have learned independently.”

“You don’t know his whole story yet.”

“No. I do not. So suppose we get on with it.”

“I’m not going to go on, Camilo, if you refuse to learn. And I don’t mean learn what happened at such a place on such and such a date. Your father’s life means something! Oh, you’re probably capable of getting the meaning down on paper without its registering in your mind or making any impact on your life, but I won’t be a party to that kind of futility! Gift of insight, oof! You can’t see anything that counts!”

And so I had to beg her to forgive my defects, to bear with my deficiencies. I had to cajole. I had to promise I would try to see. I had to mean it too, because there’s no fooling spirits. At length she consented to continue—more out of family feeling, she said, than any hope that I’d “develop morally.”

Tenured crotalids—are you there, Emil?—and other serpents in the groves of academe will observe that my research method is no “easy way,” that I should scarcely use it were my motive comfort, that it can be a thousand times more trying than the conventional techniques of scholarly investigation. Documents do not bother people with personal criticisms. Published works do not threaten to disappear unless placated. Archives do not enjoin those who consult them to “moral development.” And records do not utter ominous predictions.

“lt’s the hard way for you, I fear, Camilo.” My aunt Rosario’s sad smile put lead into her words. “Your father had to learn by pain. It’s clear you’ll have to also. Or worse, you may never learn at all.”

PART FOUR

81. Back from the “dead”

I have been over to the next world and come back.

I have come back to this dissertation after an unexpected, bitter interruption. But since it and the journey it provoked both came to good, and since they touch upon the matter of this essay, I shall tell of them.

I have not come back to Tinieblas. As my text brings my father home to his country, my luck finds me in exile.

Good luck and salutary exile, let me say at once. My body, which was within a hair of going out of business, is recuperating in agreeable surroundings. My spirit is doing famously.

Dr. Esclepio Varón, President of the Republic of Costaguana, has villa’d me in the provincial capital of Cricamaña. Its site is high, its air is pure, its sun is brilliant. Its skies are cloudless, its days pleasant, its nights cool. And since its suburbs have spread back onto the hillside, the terrace where I sit now, with my typewriter set before me on a wrought-iron, glass-topped table, affords me an admirable vista of the pink-roofed town and the romantically chasm’d peaks beyond.

Costaguanans and their guests are, furthermore, presently enjoying one of the intervals of peace that come now and again to human societies like the entr’actes in Titus Androicus. That alone would be enough to soothe my spirit, but the circumstances that separated me from this dissertation enabled me to gather all the data I shall need to finish it, and brought other precious benefits besides. I am, then, in the most high and palmy state of spiritual well-being, a well-being whose overtones, I trust, will reverberate symphonically through this essay from here on.

I spent somewhat over three months in the next world, most of that time in the close company of my father, León Fuertes. The subject of this history is the main source for its concluding chapters.

82. Roaring

It began with a roaring at my door, roaring and pounding. These were necessary to attract my notice. I was in trance. I had decided that I was growing too dependent on my aunt Rosario for contacting spirit informants, and I was trying on my own to reach someone who knew my father during his postwar days in Paris. The roaring of my name, punctuated by heavy thumps, pierced my concentration and brought me to the door. I opened it and found Sig Heilanstalt.

“Liz is in jail!”

I shall not picture his disheveled aspect or his distracted stare. I shall not gloss on his anxiety, seven parts fear, I judge, and three embarrassment. Nor shall I try to reproduce his words, which tumbled forth in a most disordered and ill-dressed array for one who earns his bread by use of language. The gist of what he told me after I motioned him inside is as follows:

My wife, Elizabeth, had undertaken to retype an outline and draft portions of the book that Sig was writing. She was supposed to lunch with him that noon and bring the work along. She did not show up. After having waited for over an hour, Sig went to the pension where she had been living since ceasing to reside with me. Her car was there; she wasn’t. Her landlady, a full-time snoop like most of the profession, told Sig Liz had gone out a little after midday, had tried without success to start her car, and had then boarded a bus headed downtown. Sig at once feared the worst, for while he was waiting in the restaurant, a fellow had rushed in, ordered a double gin, swigged it at gulp, and then announced that round the corner, on the main thoroughfare, in front of the Pelf Bank and opposite El Opulento, a bus had bloomed with an exceedingly uncomplimentary caricature of General Manduco, and that the PUS had taken everyone on board.

It took Sig the rest of the afternoon to prove his fears well grounded. The Officer of the Day at Civil Guard Headquarters advised him that if he really wanted to know who was behind bars, he could quite easily be put there himself for an extended stay. The United States Ambassador to Tinieblas declined to see him. The First Secretary of the Embassy kept him waiting half an hour, then couldn’t fit him in. The Second Secretary kept him waiting, then referred him to the Political Officer; who kept him waiting, then referred him to the Consul General; who kept, him waiting, then referred him to the Deputy Sub-Assistant Junior Vice-Consul. This seersuckered pippin maintained all the traditions of sloth, pusillanimity, and unconcern for private citizens that the State Department has formed over the years: it did not appear that Mrs. Fuertes was on register with the Consulate; it could not be clearly established that she was a US citizen; it had not been proved that she was under arrest; it would not do to pester the Tinieblans without firm information; it was not certain there was cause for action at this time; it would get Mr. Heilanstalt nowhere to raise his voice or become violent. Sig had been calling Liz’s boardinghouse at fifteen-minute intervals, had been recalling his own treatment at Guard hands (see note l), had been imagining what might happen to her if she was in their power and if someone who knew English looked at the material she was carrying. His mind was not working clearly. Only after he was hustled to the street by two Marines did he think of the British Ambassador.

Forewarned examiners, if ever you are in trouble whilst abroad and unless you are employed by the United Rapine Company or International Piracy and Pillage, waste not your precious time appealing to your own foreign service: go to the British. Sir Henry received Sig cordially, remembered him and Liz from the tennis morning describes in note 13, got him a whisky, heard him out, picked up the telephone, called the Foreign Ministry, and asked in the polite yet iron voice we wogs know and respect if Mrs. Elizabeth Cleaver Fuertes was under arrest. The reply came in about ten minutes: a woman who called herself Miss Elizabeth Cleaver was being held strictly incommunicado on suspicion of counterrevolutionary terrorism and subversion. Sir Henry promised to do what he could. Sig decided I had best be told.

I listened without expression. It wasn’t up to me to put in little comments, to give out soothing smiles and understanding nods, or otherwise to make things easy for him. If he found it painful to face me, so much the better. He could send the bill to his greedy gonads, and maybe pass up someone else’s wife. On the other hand, I didn’t abuse him either. When he had finished, I asked him if he had his car downstairs. He said yes, and began asking what I had in mind. I motioned him to wait, went inside, undressed, bathed, shaved, and put en clean clothes. Then I wrapped the manuscript of this dissertation in the dust cover of my typewriter, stuffed it in my briefcase, and carried it out into the living room.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get her out, of course. Come on”

83. This may at first glance seem a strange design

Attentive examiners, you will have detected a certain bitterness en my part toward my wife, Elizabeth. You will have decided that this bitterness was not entirely unjustified. You will have determined that in Tinieblas, as it is ruled at present, concern for human rights is hazardous to health. You will have divined that I am not a man of action. And you will have deduced that no one could have blamed me—a solitary, private individual—had I left it to the embassies to get Liz—a faithless wife—out of jail. Why, then, you may demand, did I act?

I confess that when I came to ask myself that question, I was as baffled as you are. And observe that I acted first, considered only later, that I resolved to act when I heard Sig’s first phrase and that from then on I thought only of tactics, with the result that by the time he finished speaking I had formed my plan. Well, then, when I did come to consider—and I shall soon describe the cleverly wrought contemplatorium furnished me by the Tinieblan Revolutionary Government through its Ministry of Justice —I was baffled, and could do no more than ascribe myself a number of possible motives. One was pride: Liz bore the name Fuertes, after all, worthily or not, and while I could put up with General Manduco’s regime so long as it confined itself to theft and murder, locking a Fuertes up was going too far. Another was envy: there went Padre Celso and his colleagues from Justice producing open-air spectaculars, getting all kinds of attention, while I rotted away in isolation, without the merest notice for my labors. Or I may have acted out of anger. Not anger at the tyrants: anger at Liz and Sig for having compounded the offense of cuckoldry with the more heinous crime of interrupting me at work; anger at my father for having made a stupid bet and thus exacerbated all my problems; anger at my aunt Rosario for having helped me and, thereby, made me so dependent on her that I had to hear (if not to heed) her good advice; and great anger at myself for being Camilo Fuertes in the first place: Sig’s phrase may have worked as an escape valve, opening a low-resistance path on which my anger could flow out. Laziness was yet another possibility. I’ve nothing against action, and action in the cause of justice cannot be disparaged, but there’s no getting round the fact that action is a thousand times easier than the mind-wrenching toil of making this world mean something. Cervantes was more diligent than Don Quixote. Shakespeare worked harder than all his English monarchs rolled in one. I might have been too lazy to go on wrestling with the forces of disorder when circumstance brought an alternative my conscience could accept.

Liz believes I acted out of love, and she is welcome to that theory, but I hardly think love was involved. It seems to me I was entirely innocent of that impulse at the time, and even now know it but slenderly.

Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, or some combination of these were, then, as far as I could ascertain, my motives.

I think it, though, a great mistake to delve too deeply into human motivation. Things get more and more unpleasant as one descends. My action was correct and timely. Leave it at that.

84. With heart aflutter

Don’t think, however, simplicistic examiners, that I’d become a hero—in other words, that I’d lost the faculty of imagination. I wouldn’t have wrapped my manuscript up, would I? and taken it along if I hadn’t imagined some potential trouble. At that point I imagined the Civil Guard might search my place and seize my papers, but the closer Sig and I got to Civil Guard Headquarters, the more uneasy my imaginings became. I began to imagine defects in my plan, which (I blush to confess) had seemed quite sound at first devising. I began to imagine consequences of those defects which went beyond mere search and seizure. As we rolled briskly along Avenida de la Bahia, I began imagining myself as passive participant in a Civil Guard World Series, and I imagined my body—which had served me well for nearly a quarter of a century and for which during that time I had developed some affection—bashed and broken, tumbling from the side port of a helicopter down to the same dark and silent bay across which I could now glimpse the running lights of distant vessels. These imaginings brought me a great unease, and with it the novel urge to leap from Sig’s car at the first stoplight and mingle with other humans—the young toughs in undershirts who lounged against parked cars in the street that led up to Plaza Bolívar, the laborers who sat swigging beer in the glow of storefronts. I might even have yielded to this urge, the urge to be with other people and be safe, but that as we entered the plaza, Sig began attempting to apologize for having horned me.

“Some women fuck dogs,” I interrupted. “Others, they say, fuck donkeys. The Arabian Nights, with which, as you know, my wife is familiar, has several stories about women who fuck apes or chimpanzees. Kinsey and Pomeroy devote a portion of their report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female to what they call ‘animal contacts.’ I find the subject tiresome.”

“Camilo …”

“When you have let me out, go to the main gate of Fort Shafter. Wait there till someone comes. If no one comes by morning, try to get some action out of your embassy. I’m leaving this manuscript with you. Give it to Liz if she comes and I don’t.”

“Camilo …”

“Please shut up.”

I herewith acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Mr. Sigmund Heilanstalt for providing me sufficient fresh rage to dispel my fearful imaginings temporarily. Thank you, Sig. You may now exit this dissertation and my life.

I soon began imagining again, however. When I got out onto the pavement in front of Guard Headquarters, opposite La Bondadosa Prison, my imagination was steaming at flank speed into murky waters. It was, then, with heart aflutter that I climbed the steps, entered the building, identified myself to the Officer of the Day as León Fuertes’ son, and told him in tones of authority that I knew who was behind the bus pictures and would be happy to relate that information to Colonel Atila Guadaña.

85. A gallant officer

Stick a title before a fellow’s name and you cannot avoid prejudicing people toward him, one way or another. When an English-speaking person hears the phrase “The Honorable,” for example, he is immediately, invariably, and virtually convinced that the name which follows it belongs to a swindling poltroon. The title “Licenciado “ (taken by lawyers) works about the same on Spanish-speakers. On the other hand, in most areas of the world a man before whose name the title “Colonel” marches has a lot going for him.

The word itself has a good forthright pedigree: by colonnello out of colonna, the strong and steady column, the unwavering pillar, to which weighty matters may be trusted, on which one can depend. When the word entered military service, it was assigned to the officer who led the first company of an infantry column, and it retains the notion of front-line responsibility: a colonel is the highest-ranking officer who may be expected to go into battle with his troops.

And what a wealth of noble associations the word evokes! Colonel T. E. Lawrence, a scholar and a historian, as well as a consummate guerrilla leader, a man gifted with both pen and sword, and one of the few authentic heroes of this century of anonymous mass slaughter. Faulkner’s Colonel Bayard Sartoris, an epitome of aristocratic valor. García Marquez’s Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a paragon of integrity in peace and war. The “Colonel Bogey March,” the most stirring of all military airs. The Battle of Colonel, one of the most brilliant of modern naval actions. Such associations exalt the title “Colonel” above most others, and if Colonels Blimp and Sanders appear to drag it down—well, the first conveys bluff heartiness as well as stupidity, the second good cheer as well as commercialism. People tend, therefore, to be favorably prejudiced toward colonels.

Most everywhere, that is, except Tinieblas. Our colonels are so base and venal; so utterly without the merest shred of martial virtue; so completely given over to arrogance, that all the honor men of other countries have conferred upon the title “Colonel” is, for Tinieblans, totally befouled, to the point where Major Dorindo Azote, a brave and decent officer, refused repeatedly to take promotion even to lieutenant colonel. In Atila Guadaña all the qualities of a Tinieblan colonel achieved their full development.

He is about forty years old, short, stocky, but not fat. His eyes resemble the stagnant pools that form in shell holes on a bombarded no man’s land. He had evidently been at some party or another when the Officer of the Day contacted him and had not bothered to change into uniform, and in his electric blue mod-style suit, his garish necktie, and his elevator shoes he looked the gangster he is—not an important gangster; an auxiliary goon destined to be rubbed out early in reel two when the boss goes semilegit and disposes of his now superfluous muscle. He greeted me with a reptilian attempt at affability, professing admiration for my father and complimenting me on my civic spirit for volunteering information vital to the state, but when I advised him that my declaration was contingent on the release of my estranged wife, unjustly arrested and more unjustly held, he straightaway displayed his bully’s nature.

“We can beat it out of you! We can squeeze it out of your nuts!”

With this last, Colonel Guadaña crushed an imaginary pair of testicles in each fist and flung them in my face, but I was not particularly intimidated. In the first place, he had dashed directly to headquarters, indicating extreme eagerness to hear what I had to say and confirming the strength of my hand. Then, too, during the twenty minutes I had been waiting for him in the Deputy Commandant’s office, “protected” by an armed sergeant but in no way abused, I had composed myself. I had, I told myself, already survived imprisonment and torture at the Fasholt Clinic, imprisonment on an openended term and torture by people who were restrained by no morality at all, since they thought they were helping me. I had walked four hundred kilometers across the Sahara Desert. I had been under artillery, mortar, and small arms fire at the Battle of Cassino. I was a veteran of the Bottom (see note 64). A certain tingle of fear was, perhaps, proper under the circumstances, but it was ridiculous for a man who had been through what I had to lose his self-control. In this manner I brainwashed myself into an aplomb worthy of the most unimaginative dolt conceivable, but the main ingredient of my marvelous sang-froid was supplied by Guadaña himself. He was so contemptibly clownish that I could not truly believe he actually held power among men and thus was-able to translate his threats to action. I knew it intellectually, but not in my flesh.

Sheltered examiners, intellect is not to be disprized, but it is a poor guide indeed to the dark places of the human spirit. You can read or hear all you want about the oafs who direct most nations, but you will be hard put to believe in them until they have their fingers round your throat, or other parts. Even then you are liable to think them only figments from a nightmare, and that is how they make it to the top. Few take them seriously until they’ve mashed the nuts off of entire populations, and then, as soon as they’ve left this world and the shrieking subsides, people start giggling at them and their kind again. The sergeant had saluted him and clomped his heels and barked, “Mi Colonel!” The Officer of the Day had addressed him as “Ministro.” But it was beyond me to believe an excretion like Guadaña might actually possess authority, even in the military establishment of a Tinieblas, even in an encampment of baboons. That is the chief reason why I was able to confront him calmly and, once he’d stopped shouting, to instruct him (via the Socratic method) in the deficiencies of torture as an information-gathering technique.

Didn’t torture make some victims angry and thus retard responses?

Didn’t torture inadvertently silence others permanently before they had contributed everything they might?

Didn’t torture move most people to an altogether unreliable volubility? Wouldn’t people say anything if tortured long enough? Wasn’t it common practice for the torturer to continue, just to be on the safe side or simply out of zeal, after the victim had screamed “That’s all I know!”—with the resulting production of a mass of fantasy that actually obscured the truth?

Didn’t his duty as a minister of state require him to pass up personal pleasure once in a while? Wasn’t this just such an occasion—an overriding problem and an informant who was willing to solve it for a very minor consideration?

Wouldn’t it be irresponsible of him to waste time torturing me—for I would make every effort to resist—when the state could have my information in ten minutes?

Wouldn’t he probably decide to let my estranged wife go anyway, when the U.S. Consul showed up tomorrow morning?

Mightn’t it be inconvenient for the government to torture the son of a popular ex-president, who had told several hundred people where he was going and why?

It was, I think, much less the substance of these rhetorical questions than the tone in which I delivered them that impressed Guadaña. He was accustomed to having people quake before him, and I, for the reasons given above, did not. I spoke as one might to a clever twelve-year-old who one is sure will get the point sooner or later. And, then, I gave him some very tasty bait at the end.

“If you are bluffing …”

“Of course, of course. If I’m bluffing, I’ll still be here, and you can torture me to your heart’s content. You can play baseball with me the way you did with Padre Celso.”

He snapped it up greedily. What did I know about Padre Celso? How did I know it? Who had told me? Where was the leak?

“I know everything. The pitcher was Sergeant Evaristo Tranca. The batting order was … But why don’t you give the order for my wife’s release? Have her driven to the gate at Fort Shafter. Give her the number of this office so she can let me know when she’s arrived. While we’re waiting for her to get there, I’ll tell you all about Padre Celso. Then when she’s safe in the Reservation, I’ll tell you about the buses. The two go together, as you have probably suspected.”

It took quite a bit longer than ten minutes. Close to an hour passed between the time Guadaña wrote out an order and sent it over to the prison and the time Liz’s call came, but for Guadaña it passed quickly. I gave him the whole story of Padre Celso’s abduction and murder, in greater detail, I believe, than he’d had from Major Empulgueras’s report, and he was astonished with the scope of my knowledge. He was also entertained. He clapped his hands when I describes Private Calimba’s circuit swat (see note 50) and shook his head mournfully at the final out (note 52). And he was on pins and needles to discover who my source was. I had come to the matter of the carton filled with rocks when the phone rang. Guadaña took it, then, after a moment, passed it to me.

“Camilo?”

“Are you in the Reservation?”

“Yes, but what about you?”

“Put Sig on so I can be certain.” She might, of course, be just across the street with a pistol at her head.

As soon as I heard Sig’s voice, I passed the phone back to Guadaña. “Thank you, Colonel. Now let me tell you about the buses.”

86. The truth lacks realism

I was not to meet my father for another two weeks or so, but when I did meet him and when, in the course of our conversations, he related me the incident of the Agudo suit and repeated the phrase he had originally made to Carlos Gavilán, I was prepared to accept it without question, The plain, unvarnished truth rarely convinces. Quite often it sounds preposterous.

I ought to have known as much without having to observe the truth’s effect on Colonel Atila Guadaña. I ought to have composed a careful fake. But I am by nature honest, and I had lived too long out of the company of living people to know that while honesty is surely the best policy for preserving the spirit, it is often disastrous when it comes to saving one’s poor skin.

I need not reproduce my declaration to Colonel Guadaña. The pertinent information regarding psychokinetic astral intervention in this world is set forth at length in note 75. My statement was a paraphrase of that. Guadaña interrupted me early on in the mistaken inference that both Justice and the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair are terrestrial organizations. I set him straight, and he kept silent from then on, regarding me steadily, his mouth open, his tongue lolling on his lower lip, his head nodding slowly. I finished by assuring him that the Revolutionary Government had little cause for concern over the bus incidents, as they would cease shortly as a result of an agreement between Justice and the Committee. Those being held in relation to the incidents might be released. The incidents were of entirely astral origin.

“You heard all this from General Epifanio Mojón?”

“Exactly.”

“President Mojón? The one who died a hundred years ago?”

“One hundred fourteen years, to be precise.”

“And the business about the priest?”

“From Padre Celso himself.”

“And he’s dead too?”

“He is no longer a resident of this world.”

“And this is what you came down here to tell me? This is what I traded a prisoner for?”

“It is exactly what I promised. You and the government now know who is behind the bus pictures. You also know, and can take heart from it, that they will cease quite soon.”

Colonel Atila Guadaña nodded his head slowly. Then he leaned forward, seized the telephone receiver, which was the nearest blunt instrument to hand, and brought it down with great force on the thin casing of my invaluable brain.

87. Apolonio Varón

My patron’s father and, like him, one of the rare specimens of decency in the Costaguanan political zoo.

Varón senior distinguished himself in opposition. As a professor at the University of Chuchaganga, he offered philosophical opposition to the idea of Latin American unity, arguing that so long as there were twenty-odd presidents, the oil and mining companies would be unable to buy them all and exploitation might remain bearable. As head of the Liberal Democratic Party, he gave political opposition to the dictator General Dionisio Huevas Pandilla, by whom he was imprisoned, tortured into signing a false confession, and arraigned at a show trial. When no Costaguanan lawyer dared defend him, León Fuertes took his case and won him an acquittal, saving his life. His son Esclepio has now returned the favor by saving mine.

After Huevas fell from power, Apolonio Varón was elected President of Costaguana. He was assassinated by nitro bomb some twelve or fourteen minutes after taking the oath of office. Then rioting broke out, and General Huevas seized power and reimposed his tyranny, and the Costaguanans suffered through ten years of violence and repression.

I know, I know, weary examiners. This part of the world is a mess. But are things really that much better in Gringoland? Don’t your good guys get bumped off pretty regularly? Aren’t your bad guys pretty repulsive too? Turn up your noses at Greaseballia if you feel like it, but have you had a whiff of your own politics lately?

88. Walls

Two floors below ground in La Bondadosa Prison, the corridor between the stairs and the interrogation chamber is set with six iron doors. Behind each door is a cavity two feet wide and fifteen inches high that reaches back six feet into the foundation of the prison. Tiny louvered slits allow a little dank air to seep into the cavities while keeping out the light, which is too feeble and browbeaten down there anyway to make much of a try at getting in. The cavities abound with insect life of both the scuttling-scavenging and creeping-bloodsucking varieties.

These cavities are the most exclusive lodgings provided by the Ministry of justice anywhere in Tinieblas. Special guests are stuffed into them head-first, face-up, and naked. The operation resembles the loading of a heavy artillery piece. Guards swing the guest into the breach and ram him home, the floor of the cavity being more or less lubricated by fungoid slime and by material left on it either by the previous occupant or by the guest himself if he has already spent some time inside and is returning from an interrogation session. The door is then slammed—on the guest’s ankles if he hasn’t yet learned to squidge himself in quickly or if interrogation has left him incapable of speedy movement. The door is slammed and slammed until it shuts. When it does, the guest is so snuggly cased around with walls that he is, in effect, part of the masonry of the building.

I was not prepared for this experience. The cavities are nowhere described in the civics texts assigned in our secondary schools, nor are they so much as mentioned in the brochures put out by the Ministry of Tourism. Like most law-abiding citizens, I had never bothered to inform myself about our institutions of social control, which I assumed were reserved for that mysterious, quasi-human species Other People. Then, too, I was dazed from the clocking Colonel Guadaña had given me and from the shock of being “naked to mine enemies.” I was thrust into that cavity in a state of utter, screaming panic—the same state, I imagine, as when I was first thrust into this world.

There I was, stripped to the skin, being prodded by yelling guards down a dimly-lit corridor two storeys below ground, and all at once the lead guard flung open a door in the wall, and the others seized me and lifted me and stuffed me in.

“Aaaaaaaaaaah!”

“In you go, asshole!”

Head and shoulders. Torso. Then they hold your knees straight, one on each leg, and push against your heels. Pure terror. Not even the most fragmentary, disconnected thoughts. You scarcely feel your head hit the far wall or hear the door slam shut. You hardly notice that a roach has dropped from the ceiling into your open, screaming mouth. You are kicking your legs just as wildly, mindlessly, and uselessly as he is.

People are accustomed, not without some cause, to consider the so-called underdeveloped countries inefficient, yet at the risk of sounding chauvinistic I here take the liberty of pointing out the speed and economy with which the Tinieblan Ministry of justice is able to transform a human being—e.g., a gifted, disciplined, superbly educated, and inordinately proud young man—into a bug.

Not permanently, at least not in my case. I descended to bughood, then rose, and then descended once again. I attained an animal awareness that my holemates were swarming all over me—pardonably, it seems to me at present since I had slid in on them without a by-your-leave, but nonetheless hideously. Later on I learned to clasp my genitals with one hand and brush my face with the other and to bear being infested and bitten in the remaining regions of my body, but my original reaction was to rub myself spastically wherever I could reach. Then I realized that the door was shut, that it would never again open, that I was never coming out, and that the entire prison was resting on my chest, pressing down so that I couldn’t breath, and I began to scream again and thrash against the walls in a total absence of mental and physical control.

But pardon me, long-suffering examiners. You’re not enjoying this. I can see you now, sitting in your clean and spacious offices, or in your no less comfy and spotless homes, pursing your lips in displeasure. Why, you surely wonder, should you have to read this sort of thing? What use is it to you? You will never break the law, and there will never be a tyranny in your marvelous country, so no one will ever bury you in a putrid prison hole. That’s for the Other People. And besides, you know those Other People are accustomed to abuse, that they don’t really mind it all that badly; although certain weaklings among them, Camilo Fuertes, for example, will squeal and squirm and soil themselves in a most disgusting fashion and then, long after the event, insist on nauseating decent folk with exaggerated accounts of their sufferings. All such stories must, you say, be exaggerated since their authors survived to tell them.

Well, perspicacious examiners, I shall grant a smidgen of your point. Perhaps I have painted the scene in tints a bit too somber. The place I was in—they call them “coffins” in La Bondadosa Prison—was a hideous, black, filthy place scarcely fit for the vermin that lived there by election. It certainly maximized a number of human antipathies, some built-in, some acquired through acculturation, such as fear of the dark, revulsion at slimy creeping things, hatred of filth, and horror of being constricted. It was, thus, frightfully unsuited for the retention of human dignity. But it had its silver lining. In my panicky thrashings I chanced to strike my forehead crisply on the stone, and having done so once, as it were fortuitously, I swung it up into the stone again, and then again, drawing down cleansing pain, and I repeated this maneuver deliberately until at length I grew calm. I was not, you see, completely helpless. My “coffin” left me free to knock some of the anguish out of me.

(You don’t get that kind of freedom in a strait jacket, by the way. In a strait jacket, you can’t move at all. You can’t rake your cheeks with your fingernails or pound your temples with your fists, and the walls are far away and, in any case, padded. On the other hand, a strait jacket protects your nakedness while it constricts you. In every terrestrial endeavor, even stripping folks of their humanity, each expedient, however worthy in and of itself, drags a defect along with it.)

I lay, then, naked on dank stone, entombed by walls and crept over by vermin, yet calmed by a restorative dose of pain.

Indulgent examiners, please bear with me. I know your tastes, but this is the closest I can come to an up-beat ending for this note.

89. My mother

My mother visited me last night while I was sleeping. She is greatly relieved that I have found such comfortable refuge and that my health is sufficiently restored for me to work, She is also pleased with Chapter 18 as I outlined it to her. Much of the material I had from her own lips either while she was in this world or after her “death” by heart cancer in 1966. Much I observed myself during my childhood. The rest comes from my father.

My mother was by my side during most of my stay in prison, but I couldn’t hear her voice. This was my fault, not hers, Her delicate spirit descended into the bowels of Bondadosa Prison to find and comfort me. She grieved beside me in my “coffin,” but I had denied her.

As soon as I calmed myself, I tried to beam my mind out to the Astral Plane, but I couldn’t concentrate. My mind fluttered weakly against the walls. If only I had been able to fling it up out of the pit! Other captives less practiced than I have done so and saved themselves, but shock had disabled me. I waited expectantly for the arrival of my Guardian Spirit. Then I despaired. My mother and my aunt Rosario and my grandmother Rebeca were all searching for me. My mind would have regained strength after a time. But I despaired. I gave myself up to self-pity. I judged myself abandoned by my gift and by my Guardian Spirit. I wept as though this and my imprisonment were universal calamities.

That was my diminished state when they took me for interrogation. I sat naked on a stool in a large, bare room, surrounded by guards and officers. Colonel Guadaña presided. The others regarded him with admiration, deference, and respect—similar, I suppose, to the treatment accorded Dr. Felix Heilanstalt by the personnel of his operating theater and visiting physicians (see note 61). My position was that of an object on which the master would now exercise his skill.

Colonel Guadaña said that while the extent of my criminality was not yet known, two counts were already clear: I had betrayed the Tinieblan state by obtaining the release of detained person on false pretense; I had personally insulted a minister. If there was one thing he had learned during his career, it was that corpses do not talk. Did I still maintain that I had received information from the corpse of Padre Celso Labrador?

I said I had received it from his spirit, not his corpse. I sat with my hands over my privates, shivering, though the room wasn’t cold. My statement sounded far-fetched even to my own ears. Such was my depression and despair that I no longer believed anything with much conviction.

Colonel Guadaña nodded and said, “Go ahead!”

I was seized at my legs and shoulders. A guard rushed forward holding a long-handled ball-peen hammer. He knelt down, grabbed my left ankle, and, snapping his wrist, brought the hammer down on my little toe, mashing it flat against the cement floor.

It was so fast I didn’t even scream. I was so shocked I hardly felt it. They released me. I looked down at my foot. It didn’t seem to belong to me, certainly not that red mush there at the corner. Then I grimaced, and moaned a little.

“Good,” said Colonel Guadaña. “Now I’ll ask you again. If you give the wrong answer, he’ll do exactly the same thing to your prick.”

Fear net, alarmed examiners. I didn’t wait for that. I didn’t even wait for him to put the question. I answered, and I did not answer wrong. I denied the human spirit. I denied the next world. I denied my gift. I denied all mystical experience, all nonmaterialist philosophy, and all the gods from Adonai to Zoroaster. I denied transmigration, metempsychosis, and every concept of immortality that had come to my attention over years of study. I denied ESP, PSI, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, and the entire science of parapsychology. I kept on babbling denials until Colonel Guadaña told me I could stop, and I did so not from any commitment to physical love or the life of this world as symbolized in reproduction or my own manhood—which might have been redeeming reasons—but from simple fear of pain and mutilation.

How’s that for efficiency, jingoist examiners? It had taken your supershrinks weeks to drag me to “reality,” and even then I came with tongue in cheek, yet the Tinieblan Minister of Justice snapped me out of my delusions in a matter of minutes, without using expensive apparatus either, and my cure was complete. I knew Colonel Guadaña meant what he said, and I answered with equal sincerity. Every syllable of my answer came from the bottom of my heart.

Then he wanted to know where I had learned the details of Padre Celso’s “death,” and I was stumped. Where had I learned them? All I knew for sure was where I hadn’t learned them. I hadn’t learned them from any spirit. There were no such things as spirits. Corpses don’t talk. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and no quote marks either. Fortunately, he gave me a hint. I had heard about it from a member of the Civil Guard, hadn’t I?

Oh, yes! Oh, yes! That was it!

From one of the men who’d been in the district headquarters cellar that night, correct?

Yes! Yes!

Well, then, who was it?

I wanted another hint, just to be sure I didn’t answer wrong, but I thought I saw him begin to glance in the direction of the fellow with the hammer, so I said the first name that came to mind: Calimba, Juan Calimba.

Then he wanted to know where and when and why, so I made up a trip to Belém and a stop-off at a cantina and a drunken Juan Calimba and some paragraphs of realistic dialogue. There was no end to the efficiency of the Tinieblan Ministry of justice and its chief officer: now they had transformed a historian into a hack novelist.

Next he asked me what I knew about the buses.

I told him I knew nothing, that I had pretended to know to get Liz out of jail, but I saw from his face that this was the wrong answer, so I said it was a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. I was the leader. No! The real leaders were foreigners. No! The leader was Alejandro Sancudo, the constitutional president whom Manduco had thrown out. He was in league with the Galactic Fruit Company, and I was in their pay. The counter-revolutionary propaganda was flashed onto the buses by laser beam from an orbiting satellite. It was worked by remote control from an underground bunker near Miami. Yes, yes, I would write it all down! If they would just give me a pencil and some paper!

When they put me back into my “coffin,” my sentiments were those expressed in the lines:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Home at last, where no one could get at me with a hammer! It was fitting that I lie in my own excrement and be companied by vermin, my next of kin. It is proper that the dead be buried.

Access to Learning is contingent on commitment to the truth, so my enlistment had been revoked—and my life emptied of purpose. I no longer believed in anything, so I could not hear my mother’s voice when she came to me. all I could hear, in fact, was my own whimpering.

I thought I had touched bottom before. Ha!

90. Departure

I can’t say how long I stayed there. The door was opened three or four times, but I don’t know at what intervals. I would scrunch back as far as I could get and shield my face from the light and lie quivering as someone pushed in a piece of bread and a plastic cup of water. When the door had closed and I had calmed again, I would drink the water. I didn’t eat.

I didn’t think either. Electroencephalography tells us that the fetal mind is active, and my mind may have been active in that way. Freud and others claim to recall intrauterine experiences—and such claims argue a form of fetal thought—but they are probably kidding themselves, if not us, Before my interrogation I spent some time considering the motives that had led me from the refuge of my work into action, then prison. Immediately afterward I considered both the shame of having thrown away everything that gave my life some meaning and the satisfaction of being in my hole, but quite soon my thought processes shut down. So long as the door was shut, I was at peace.

They had to drag me out by main strength. I pressed my palms against the ceiling and dug my fingernails into the stone, and, weak as I was, it took two of them, one pulling on each foot, to drag me out. On reflection, I don’t think my resistance was based solely on fear. The light was odious. That hole was as much my home as if I had burrowed it myself. I belonged there, not in the sight of people. A moldered corpse might, if it could, resist in the same fashion when dug up.

They dragged me to the small room beside the interrogation chamber where I had written my confession. I wouldn’t walk but didn’t struggle, and they each grabbed me by a bicep and a wrist and dragged me along the floor, grunting with the exertion. They put me on a stool beside the table. I sat there with my head bowed and my hands dangling between my knees.

After a while Colonel Guadaña came in alone. He was in uniform and carried a fiber attaché case, which he put down on the table and opened. When he looked at me, my head drooped again.

“Your confession has been typed. Also corrected. Look at me when I speak to you! It now includes your accomplices. Many members of ex-President Sancudo’s family and party were also involved, isn’t that so? Initial each page and sign it in the indicated place. You may also read it if you care to, but that isn’t necessary.”

He took a folder from his case and doubled the cover back. There was a sheaf of papers clipped inside. He held the whole thing forward toward me.

“The injury to your foot will be attended. You will be transferred to a regular cell and given the regular prison diet. Look at me when I’m speaking!” I raised my head a little and held out my hand for the folder. He took a pen out of his case and held it forth.

“Initial each page and sign at the place indicated.” He smiled as I took the pen.

Cherished examiners, he ought to have denied himself that smile. He ought, in fact, to have left me in my burrow. I was at peace there and would have caused no trouble. He might have had the papers handed in; I would have signed them. If, later on, he needed testimony from me at a trial, he might have run a phone down to my hole; I would have said whatever was required. Instead the fool had me dragged out. Instead the fool allowed himself to smile in confidence and satisfaction. I had seen an identical expression on the face of Dr. Elias Fafnir four years before. When I made the connection, I experienced what Saint Paul called “conversion” and Dr. I. P. Pavlov the “ultra-paradoxical phase.”

I had always resented the slightest annoyance on the fringes of my life. I would not suffer even those closest to me to bother me. I would not put up with the society of people who did not make a positive contribution to my private purpose. I tried—most usually with perfect success—to ignore the sufferings of others. I turned a blind eye to the tyrant in my country and the poacher in my home so that the delicious happiness I found in study might not be disturbed. Then, when that happiness was stripped from me, I made no murmur. I threw away the purpose of my life and was content in a foul hole. Now, though, all those responses were reversed. I no longer cared about protecting what I had. True enough, I had quite little. I lacked even a rag to cover me. I still had my life and youth, however, but I no longer cared about protecting them. I now cared about other things. I didn’t want others to end up where I was. I didn’t like Colonel Guadaña ‘s face. And—this was the main thing—my “confession” simply wasn’t true. I pulled it from the folder and tore it first in halves and then in quarters. As soon as I had done so, I saw my mother and my aunt Rosario and my grandmother Rebeca standing at my right hand, weeping.

“You are a moron,” I said to Colonel Guadaña.

“Take him inside!” he screamed, but as the guards laid hands on me, he screamed, “No! I’ll send him there myself!”

He stepped from behind the table, drew back against the wall, and then ran toward me, howling, “Penalty!” and aimed a kick at my face. His boot caught me just under the chin. I flew backward off the stool. My butt hit. My head snapped back and smashed on the stone floor with a sound like a melon dropped from a good height. My spirit left my body.

91. Reception

It requires but little thought to comprehend the problems faced by Astral Reception. Spirits arrive ceaselessly and in great numbers from every corner of this world. The immense majority are at once bewildered and scared out of their wits. The first step, therefore, is to put them somewhat at their ease.

When this world was but sparsely populated and the “death” roll relatively small, each new arrival was met personally, often by someone from his own tribe or village. Later, participants in Creative Arts were asked to design an area whose very ambience might tranquilize arriving spirits and dispose them favorably to the next world. Motifs from terrestrial nature were drawn on; a sylvan-pastoral set was conceived and fashioned. It served quite handsomely until about two thousand years ago, when a group of artists, architects, and artisans, all of them reared in cities, sold the Director on a renovation along urban lines: gold-paved boulevards, alabaster palaces, pearly gates, the whole schmeer. In this design Reception was the subject of numerous visions by residents of this world and became the basis for a popular notion of the Christian heaven, Urbs Syon Aurea, Jerusalem the Golden—just as its earlier décor had given men the notion of Elysian Fields. Like everything of any note done anywhere, this renovation was criticized, particularly during the last two centuries by spirits associated while in this life with the Romantic Movement, More importantly, the Director of Astral Activities and his staff noted growing nostalgia on the part of residents of this world for the disappearing natural environment. In consequence it was determined that an urban setting no longer provided Reception the most tranquilizing surroundings possible and a second renovation was ordered under the general direction of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Richard Wagner, and Walt Disney. The new facilities had been in operation for about five months when I arrived in the Beyond.

Spirits emerge from the swirling darkness between this world and the next onto a vast cloud prairie pavilioned at wide intervals in pastel-tinted silks which float in place, weightless and unbuoyed. A perpetually dawn sky domes over head; a calm sea shimmers in the distance. Faint breezes bear the strains of the Performing Arts First Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus rendering such works as Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as well as works unheard in this world, new works composed expressly for Reception by Bach Verdi, Wagner himself, and others. I have never known and cannot imagine a more inspiring audio-visual experience.

I arrived, of course, in the company of my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt. At first I felt a deep reluctance to leave the vicinity of my body, which lay in the subcellar of La Bondadosa Prison, bleeding desultorily from its ears and gaped at in annoyance by Colonel Atila Guadaña, but my three female companions were in a great rush to be gone from that place of groom, and so, after a moment, I fled with them up through the stone floors of the prison, into the night sky, and out across the gulf between the worlds of flesh and spirit. I had cause for relief at leaving this world behind. I knew a great deal, most of it good, about where I was headed. And how could I be worried or distraught, wrapped as I was in the love of those three ladies? But even the most wretched ghost—alone, untimely torn out of an easy life, all ignorant, and gibbering in terror—must surely feel calmed and uplifted emerging on that bright, harmonious scene. I stared about, wide-eyed. My three companions smiled at me and at each other, taking joy in my childlike wonder. And all about us streamed a multitude of spirits at once newly “dead” and newly “born.”

A breeze bore us to the nearest pavilion, which was staffed, my aunt Rosario told me, with guides trained in Good Works. Their function is to discover the language of each arriving spirit, to see each on the breeze conveyor to the appropriate pavilion, and generally to dispense care and loving kindness. They wear flag emblems or native costume and are unfailingly tender to new arrivals, many of whom importune them in panicky shouts and wailings, despite the soothing light that flows through the translucent silks above. Special guides collect the spirits of unaccompanied infants and children, who go on to an extension pavilion of Childhood staffed with senior participants from Parent. Debilitated spirits, those too worn out or maimed by their life here to face the future for a time, are sent to a rest pavilion run by personnel of Sleep.

The several hundred orientation pavilions, each of which functions in a separate language, differ in size but not in form—this according to an acquaintance of my grandmother Rebeca’s whom we met in the Spanish-speaking pavilion, which is about ten hectares in area. The cloud floor is dotted all over with low circular platforms on which musicians and other artists perform, inducing new arrivals to collect about them. Every so often the entertainment at one or another platform ceases, and an official of Reception delivers a little lecture on the organization of the next world. The reader of these notes will already possess more information than is contained in this orientation, which merely covers basics: One’s life in the next world is not determined by one’s life in this one. The cardinal principle of astral existence is individual freedom. A fresh start is available for all who wish one, or continuity for those who prefer that. Every human activity is offered. One or another may be fully occupied and fulfillment hence deferred, but time is plentiful. Recyclement into terrestrial existence is a possible option. One may look in on loved ones still on earth. The individual is limited only by his or her talents, directed only by his or her interests. Facilities for self-improvement are abundant. Personal counseling is provided. Above all, there is nothing to fear. Spirits may move on to their first interview as they desire. The lecturer steps down; entertainment resumes.

My alert examiners will have remarked the contrast between the haphazard fashion in which one enters this world and the orderliness of Reception. Despite the constant influx of spirits, there is no confusion, no sense of urgency. Accordingly, I lingered to chat, via Rebeca’s interpretation, with her acquaintance, a Chinese acrobat whom she had met the year before in a Performing Arts mime class and who had been entertaining new arrivals since the opening of Reception’s present facilities. He had worked in many of the pavilions, the largest of which, he said, was devoted to the English language since Chinese speakers were handled according to dialect. The best audiences were in the children’s pavilion. He and his troupe had done so well there that they had been picked to play an extended gig in Childhood beginning shortly. It was not until I saw the respect he paid my grandmother that I realized what a very great star she has already become. I commented on this to her as we moved toward the interviewing area, and she shrugged with the charming false modesty common to primas.

“I’ve had some good roles, and Ling is a sweet boy. But you should have seen how they all fawned over your father. He was the real star of the family, and he threw it all away!”

There were, it seemed, about a thousand interviewers on duty, each at a teleprinter console. We found one, an Argentine by his accent, who had no queue of spirits waiting for him but only a single interviewee, to whom he was explaining the procedure for applying to activities, all of which is handled in Selection. As we waited, my mother pointed out a device resembling a napkin ring mounted on a rod and wondered what it was for: there had been nothing like it in the old Reception halls when she passed through eight years before. My aunt Rosario, who as a Guardian Spirit had been briefed on the new facilities before they opened, explained it as an identifier.

Every spirit, she said, is separate and distinct. The Directorate maintains a file on each, entering each incarnation. Formerly, Reception officials took the arriving spirit’s current name and birth data, but there were always mix ups, most of them created by spirits who refused to trust the basic orientation and who, fearing dispatch into some sort of hell, gave false information.

“Now you pass through the ring, and the central computer picks up identifying data and prints out a record of your avatars and any other pertinent information.”

I had no trouble passing through when my turn came. I merely aimed at the ring and whooshed through without a trace of constriction. The teleprinter began to thump at once and went on for above a minute. When it had stopped, the Argentine turned up the paper and tore it off.

I learned I had had four incarnations prior to this one, three of them male and two of these scholars of sorts. Then he came to current data.

“Fuertes, Camilo. Tinieblan. Student. Born 1950.”

I nodded.

“You hold a confirmed admission to Learning … revoked … hmm … reconfirmed today.” He looked up and smiled. “Congratulations, Señor Fuertes! Learning is a marvelous activity. I hope to go there myself someday. It’s, uh, rather an honor to have a confirmed admission waiting for one. You may report there immediately if you wish, though you may care to pass by Selection to get an idea of what Learning’s like.”

“I have an idea. But I don’t think I’ll go straight on. There’s another activity I’d like to spend some time in first.”

He blinked. “Really? That’s odd. It says here you made an unconscious application to Learning more than a decade back. I don’t—”

At that point a red light began flashing on his console. The teleprinter thumped again. “Hold on,” he said. “There’s something …”

He read the new print-out without removing it from the machine and pressed a button on his console. “Señor Fuertes. I’m afraid you’re going to have to see my supervisor.”

92. What had happened

What had happened, disconcerted examiners, was that my body had continued functioning. Did you perhaps assume that when my head meloned onto the stone floor of Bondadosa Prison, when my spirit jumped out, my body had quit functioning? I confess I had assumed as much myself, though you would have made no such assumption had you read Note 81 with care. Did you then, having made one false assumption, further assume that since I have returned to this world and resumed work on this dissertation—which, by the way, I shall soon come to Sunburst to defend—I am presently a reincarnation of myself? If so, you are more foolish than I thought. No one is ever incarnated twice in the same avatar. That goes for Jesus of Nazareth along with everyone else. His spirit has been reincarnated twice since the Crucifixion, once as the Dominican lay brother Martín de Porres (1579-1639, canonized 1962), presently as a nurse in Bangladesh. His spirit continues to serve Good Works in both worlds. But none of his avatars, not even the most famous of them, will ever be replayed. I journeyed to the next world and returned, still as Camilo Fuertes, but that was because my body stayed in business.

I’ve said a lot about the spirit, all of it worth saying in this materialistic age, but I intend no denigration of the body, certainly not of the particular body my spirit lodges in at present. If any of my statements in these notes imply such disrespect, I herewith disavow them! The body is a marvelous contraption—not built to last, unfortunately, but that’s the great part of its charm. The whole excitement of this life is in the tensions generated when your immortal spirit has to ride about in your flower-fragile, disposable flesh frame. Those people with a talent for this life—and I don’t claim to be among them—manage to keep the tensions nicely balanced. The spirit mustn’t truckle to the flesh, but mustn’t be a despot either. Therefore, among the several reforms I have resolved to institute since tripping to the Beyond—most of which, nosy examiners, are none of your concern—is to allow my body greater participation in my life.

How forlorn my body looked sprawled on the prison floor! How arrogant of my spirit to lead it into bondage and abuse, and then bail out as soon as things looked bleak! True enough, I did feel a great reluctance to abandon the poor forked thing entirely, and herein I was reacting normally, for while the spirit is often jarred from the body when the latter is badly injured, it will rarely range very far away until the body quits. And my body is no quitter. It lay ostensibly inert. It seemed shrunken, as lifeless bodies do. I was specially struck by the tininess of my private parts—which are of perfectly acceptable dimensions, snickering examiners; perfectly acceptable, let me assure you (and your wife, Dr. Grimes, and your daughter, Professor Lilywhite, if they are reading!), but which appeared at that moment to have shriveled almost to nothingness. Despite appearances, however, my body hadn’t quit. My heart was pumping, my lungs bellowsing, my brain sending electro-chemical dispatches—all very weakly, it is true, but nonetheless courageously, since it was getting no aid or comfort from my spirit. I can only say in partial exculpation that I should never have left its vicinity but that my mother, grandmother, and aunt wished to be off.

And how bravely it hung in through all those months! How handsomely it is recuperating now! It will be sound as a barrel in a week or two, nothing the worse for the whole miserable experience (saving, of course, the absence of a toe, which had to be snipped off). I shall have it playing tennis inside the month. I have already had it up on my good wife for a prance—doctor’s advice he damned!—whereat it performed most nobly, taking all the jumps without a wheeze. At this instant it is generously repaying me in pleasure for being allowed to soak the sunshine of this terrace. Denigrate the body? Never again! Certainly not this one. This is a very fine body. I shall not see its like in a dozen incarnations.

My body, then, remained in business, as the central computer of Astral Records had divined and verified. I learned later, after my return to earth, that at about the time I entered the first pavilion of Reception, my body was being bustled toward San Bruno Hospital, for while I might be a boon to the Tinieblan Revolutionary Government as a confessed subversive, I would be a headache to it as a corpse. This was because my wife, Elizabeth (whose own excellent body reclines, basted in Coppertone, a few feet from me now), raised a heady stink over her arrest and my imprisonment through her congressman uncle (Justin C. Cleaver, Rep., N.Y.); because the wire services transposed the story into Spanish and flashed it back to Central America; because President Esclepio Varón read it, remarked my name, and ordered his ambassador in Ciudad Tinieblas to make inquiries—all of which had been going on while I was in La Bondadosa, though of course I had no inkling of it. So the Tinieblan Revolutionary Government couldn’t afford to garbage me. So my body was getting help to stay in business. So the Argentine interviewer’s supervisor was put out.

“You shouldn’t have come here in the first place,” she told me. “You should go back at once!”

She was a large, strongly-lung’d woman, imposing at first sight in her dawn-pink double-breasted Chief Receptionist’s uniform, but quite evidently a product of the seniority (as opposed to the merit) system of promotion. This problem didn’t come up in the old days, she declared. She’d been with Reception for seven centuries, and for most of that time one had known when a spirit arrived that its avatar was done with and the work of processing it wouldn’t go to waste. In the old days if a spirit was knocked out of its body, it either jumped right back inside or lost its avatar, but nowadays terrestrial doctors had the gall to keep spiritless bodies functioning for years. Spirits, of course, wouldn’t reenter grossly damaged bodies and would in the end tire of hanging round them, would take off for Reception, would demand their right to select activities, always reserving their right to zoom back into their earthly bodies should these improve in status. Records got botched. A pernicious mood of disorder and uncertainty was engendered. And the morale of hard. working personnel in Reception and Selection inevitably suffered, since for all they knew, the effort put in on processing might be entirely wasted. She went on as if the whole science of medicine had been concocted as a personal affront to her. “As for you, your case is outrageous! You haven’t been moping round a hospital for months, watching them drip plasma or whatever into your body! You ran off like a coward! You must go back at once and stay near your body till life is gone from it for good!”

She might have bulldozed a more diffident person. Or one less resolute. I felt a strong nostalgia for my body, and when I learned it was still functioning, the feeling deepened. Furthermore, though for all I knew my body was still in Bondadosa Prison, the course of action I’d resolved on was hardly less scary than returning there. But I am neither diffident nor irresolute. You have gleaned that much by now, dear examiners, if you have any wit at all, and that overbearing Chief Receptionist was not denied a demonstration of my character. I thanked her for advising me of my rights, I bowed to her with exaggerated gallantry and plucked the print-out from her trembling hand. I took my mother’s and my grandmother’s arms, beamed at Rosario, and said, “Lead on to Selection, won’t you, Auntie.” And with that the four of us breezed off.

93. Selection

The numberless pavilions of Selection range by the shore of that same placid sea which I saw glimmering far off when I first entered the next world. The adjective “numberless” is accurate enough. They extend left and right from the exits of Reception in a convincing illusion of infinity, and I met no one who could tell me exactly how many of them there are.

Each activity, Victim alone excepted, maintains a pavilion, the largest of the ones I saw being that of Astral Service. It floats immediately opposite the entranceway and is about a kilometer in diameter. Each pavilion contains exhibition areas with displays representing what the particular activity involves. According to my mother, these are exceedingly well done, and many new arrivals spend months visiting them, much more like tourists at a world’s fair than prospective applicants. I could readily believe this last, for the crowds were fantastic. At least ten thousand spirits packed the open mall before the War pavilion watching a company of ceremonial guards from one of the Eastern League armies relieve a company from the Western League, while the queue at the Orgies and Abominations pavilion coiled entirely around it. The conveyors were similarly congested. We took the upper one, which branches left from the entrance, putting the pavilions on our right, and were at once sardined in a press of spirits, most of whom were jabbering excitedly in a babel of tongues. Recognizing English, I struck up a conversation with a Negro family of five from Alabama, who had been whisked into the next world together by a tornado nearly a year earlier and who had spent the whole time since wandering about Selection, “just seeing the sights,” as the mother put it. The father advised me not to miss the Childhood pavilion, “where they let you try on a kid’s body,” at which his children of course sneered.

“I may take that as an activity,” he went on. “Before, when I was working, I used to say I’d like to sleep for a thousand years, and you can do that if you want. I might end up taking a job with the government. They’re all white-collar jobs, and they train you, The hardest part is making up your mind.”

His son, a lad of about fourteen, took loud issue with him here: “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to join up with Hannibal and fight the honkies! “

He dragged them off to the War pavilion, which his mother said they’d already seen five times. I would have liked to browse in the pavilions also, but my resolution drew me on.

Each pavilion has inscription areas where spirits who are considering applying can have their inquiries answered in depth and their qualifications assessed. The Performing Arts pavilion, for example, has several small theaters, Rebeca said, and she has visited it two or three times to help audition dancers. But no spirit may enter an inscription area until he has had at least one general counseling session, and every twelfth pavilion is staffed with Selection personnel for this purpose. We got down at the first one we came to.

All through Reception and so far into Selection I had been making inquiries of my three lovely companions and listening to their answers and explanations, but now, as we were waiting for one of the Spanish-speaking counselors to be free to see me, my mother asked me a question: “Why don’t you want to go to Learning, Camilito? What activity is it you want to enroll in first?”

I smiled at her. I could see by her strained expression that she was already divining my thoughts. Rebeca and Rosario also looked at me in anticipation, and I put my arms out to include all three, surely the three most charming ladies who ever showered their affection and concern on one poor fellow.

“I have to see my father,” I said softly. “I have to go to Victim for a while.”

They set up a wall of protest. I would be lost. Was I as foolish as my father? Hadn’t I suffered enough already?

I replied, smiling. I told my mother that I hoped to find, not lose myself, and Rebeca that while I didn’t understand my father’s wager, I knew he was no fool. To Rosario I said I had decided to take her advice, which I thanked her for giving, and that in my case, if not in all cases, suffering seemed to be an incidental charge to the business of becoming human.

“I must see him. I made the decision the instant we left earth. It may be, also, that he needs me, or would at least be cheered by seeing me.”

My mother nodded, weeping, and my aunt Rosario said I was a man, and though my grandmother Rebeca snorted and said men were all fools, ninnies, or worse, she looked at me with respect.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve enough Burlando blood in you to trick them, I suppose. But you ought to think it over carefully all the same.”

That was the interviewer’s caution, He would neither ask nor question my motives for choosing Victim. Most newly-arrived spirits assumed the Astral Plane included some place of suffering. Few had any urge to go there. None whom he had interviewed in his near century of service possessed such definite information about it as did I. If I wanted Victim, so be it. He did wish, however, to point out that the minimum voluntary commitment was seven years. I might, of course, return to my earthly body at any time so long as it remained in operation, but he felt morally bound to give me a few caveats. My body might cease to function at any time. Even if I returned to it, it would surely cease to function someday, at which time I would have to serve out the remaining portion of my sentence. I had no hope whatsoever of confounding astral regulations on that score, and should not take my grandfather’s experience as a precedent. (At this he flapped the elaborate print-out concerning me that his computer had thumped out and stared at me gravely.) Above all, he wished to warn me that Victim was not a place of recreation. Its inclusion among the Astral Activities was justified only because the general plan demanded that all human activities be offered. In the course of his training as a counselor he had visited Victim’s confinement facility and had seen victims in use at several activities. He personally would do anything in reason to avoid sharing the victim’s lot. I ought to think it over with great care.

I asked him if I would be able to spend time with my father, and he replied that which activities victims were dispatched to was a matter of hazard but that they were free to move about the confinement facility during recuperation periods. I told him my mind was made up, and he produced commitment forms, advising me that for a voluntary commitment, three witnesses were required.

Human life, my examiners, takes meaning only through the acts of human beings. I wished to give my life this meaning: that seven years of suffering count lightly beside the hope of true illumination. I craved to receive the past from my father’s lips so that I might return self-reliant to the present. The world to come showed me the way. The witnesses were at hand. I had the will, I signed.

94. My father

Human examiners, perhaps your spirit has at one time or another been weighted down with care or sorrow, or with weariness of life. Most humans know such heaviness now and then, and when it is truly grave, the human spirit can in no wise soar or range about as normally it’s able. Burdened and crushed, the spirit can but drag on. Such heaviness is infused into every spirit when he arrives in Victim, and that is why he may be taken out for use in this or that activity with slight concern lest he escape. Poured full of sorrow, care, and weariness, he wants but to sprawl immobile, and when he has to move his inclination is to creep. It’s best, though, to summon strength and go erect. There’s less risk of self-pity in that posture, and self-pity can corrode a spirit utterly. Those were my first pointers on victimhood, given me in the outer lock by a mad Russian on his second stretch.

From Selection I was teleported at light-speed across the vast expanses of the Astral Plane into the processing rooms of Victim. There my identity was cheeked and my spirit leadened. Then I was dropped into the outer lock, a horizontal cylinder some thirty meters long and about the diameter of a railway car. The great central confinement pen of Victim is ringed by three magnetic fields, and victims are locked in and out of it in lots of one hundred.

There was one other inside, sitting at the far end from me near the door to the first inner lock, and when I had crawled over to him, he addressed me first in Russian, then in German, then in French. I answered to the latter, and he asked how and why I’d come.

He had a broad, flat face with Tartar cheekbones and narrow eyes—a hard case indeed, I thought—but when I’d finished my brief story, he grinned fraternally, showing a wide glitter of white teeth, and welcomed me. Victim, he said, got deal-makers, gamblers, and madmen volunteers, the latter being either freaks or dreamers. The dreamers were the most valuable of all. I was clearly one, and so was he.

“I came in through Risk,” he went on, “but don’t let that confuse you. There are personal dreamers such as you and universal dreamers. I have a universal dream.”

His dream was nothing less than the permanent abolishment of cruelty, which, along with love, is the basic quality of the human spirit. That dream had driven him back to Victim for his second hundred-year term.

He was Prince Alexei Borisovich Sukasin, an ancestor, I think, of Rebeca’s seducer (see Chapter 2). He had been to bed with the Czaritza Catherine II, though that was no special distinction, considering the number of other Guards officers who could claim as much. Between his inheritance and her gifts he had owned over five thousand serfs, whom he abused in a manner extraordinary even in those despotic times. He had served with Suvorov against Pugachev’s rebellion, slaughtering innumerable Cossacks—women and children, prisoners and wounded, as well as armed combatants. He had lived without remorse and “died” without repentance, and had continued in the same fashion after reaching the next world.

He joined War, the only activity, he judged, fitting for a man of his class, but found it tame and, whenever he got leave, gambled his spirit for sojourns in crueler activities. Risk, he explained, is open to all and offers the chance to visit activities or to switch permanently without going through the time-consuming and uncertain transfer process. One receives credit up to a century in Victim and plays against the house at roulette or chemin de fer or craps.

“At first I won. I spent my leaves in Rape or Murder.” He paused, letting this sink in, before abandoning himself again to the slavic passion for breastbaring. “Then I lost my stake and was sent here.”

In Victim he became converted and developed his dream.

“After you’ve been raped or murdered once or twice, you invariably develop one of two attitudes. Either you resolve to pass the favor on to someone else—and there are many former victims in the activities of cruelty—or you resolve never to be cruel again yourself. I have gone a step further. I have resolved to see cruelty eradicated from both chambers of the universe.”

The people in justice, he said, spent all their energy trying to reform life on earth and thus wasted their efforts. The problem resided in the Astral Plane’s devotion to human freedom. People were allowed to become torturers and victims.

“Freedom must be abolished,” Prince Alexei declared, “if cruelty is to disappear.”

The victims were as much to blame as anyone else. Victims inspired cruelty in others, and everyone who entered Victim did so by choice. The gamblers in Risk secretly longed for victimhood, though few realized it. Victim and Risk would have to be abolished, along with Murder, Rape, Resentment and Revenge, Insult and Abuse, Orgies and Abominations, etc. And since cruelty was learned on earth, as he knew from experience, recyclement would have to be abolished and life on earth allowed to cease.

“The practice of sending spirits back there must be abolished. They must not be put back, even into plants. Plants evolved into animals and animals into humans, and every human has some cruelty in him. No form of life on earth must be permitted.”

I suggested that love also might be learned on earth as well as cruelty. If so, he answered, we would have to learn to do with out it.

“We must have no more cruelty!”

After serving his sentence, Prince Alexei made no effort to select another activity but remained in Prorogation, agitating the spirits there to make a revolution and move the next world from the principle of free choice. The authorities in no way interfered with him, for he received no support. Everyone was perfectly content with how the next world is arranged. In the end his obsession drove him to Risk with the idea of wagering another hundred years and running it up to a large enough sum to buy every last spirit out of Victim.

“Let the torturers torture themselves. Let the murderers murder each other.”

He lost everything on the first spin of the wheel.

I pointed out to him that without free choice and its consequences he would never have experienced conversion or conceived his dream, much less had hope of realizing it, but he said that didn’t matter any longer. Now that one spirit had glimpsed the solution to the problem, freedom might very well be abolished.

“I know you personal dreamers. You hope to improve, or even save yourselves. You think of a million tiny increments. One person. Another person. With me, it’s everything or nothing. When these hundred years are up, I’ll go back and try again. Sooner or later I’ll get lucky.”

He went on about a roulette system he was attempting to perfect, and had managed to get me thoroughly confused over it when the door at the far end of the lock opened and a triple file of victims began trudging in. They wore the bodies issued to them for their tours of torment and moved very slowly, some helping each other along. Prince Alexei explained to me in a whisper that it was a point of honor among victims to bring one’s body in oneself, and he went on to give me the advice mentioned in the first paragraph of this note.

We rose as the first rank approached, led on by two guards, and as we did to the fellow on the right, who was all streamed in blood with twenty trenched gashes on his head, groaned and fell forward. I jumped to catch him, but one of the guards pushed me roughly back.

“Hands off him, pig!” Sukasin shouted. “You can’t abuse us here! Learn your rights, Fuertes,” he said to me. “Ill treatment’s not allowed in the confinement.”

At this the one who’d fallen looked up at me, amazed. Then the spirit stepped from the wounded body, and it was my turn for amazement.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I am the father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of.”

And I answered: “It was your spirit, Father, that compelled me here.”

Well-read examiners, Homer and Virgil are misinformed. Ghosts can embrace each other. Shades can make that abrazo which the hispanic culture offers as the most profound form of greeting. We stood in each other’s arms until those near us jostled us. Then my father pushed me gently back.

“Welcome to the pit, Camilo. I’m glad and sad to see you. But we’ll talk later.” He bent and took the wrists of the body he’d been wearing. “Here. Help me lug these guts inside.”

The guards had swung the door open. I took the body’s ankles and trudged behind my father into the next lock and toward the central pen of Victim.

95. Good fortune

I spent three months in Victim. During that time I held the dirty end of the stick in most of the activities of cruelty. These notes are not the place to give the details, but I will say (by way of furnishing a rough idea) that my least disagreeable assignment was to Insult and Abuse, where I wore a deformed dwarfsbody and did degrading things all day while people laughed and pointed. The worst was a “water cure” in Torture, from which I was unable to bring my body back. In short, I got a ninety-day dip into a concentrate of misery, and I can look forward to another six years and nine months of the same at some time in the future. Nevertheless, I do not regret my enlistment. On the contrary, I regard it as a piece of great good fortune.

Careful readers of these notes will have remarked that I am endowed with a normal human capacity for cruelty. A little victimhood and the expectation of a good deal more to come has made me most reluctant to exercise this capacity. Some victims envy their tormentors and crave to replace them. My reaction was a limitless contempt. Cruelty, moreover, taps the same source of energy as love, so that curtailing your capacity for one augments your capacity for the other. This is, of course, no secret. Some people seem to know it from birth. Others find it out more or less naturally. I had to go to Victim to learn it, but it is a good lesson to come by, late or soon, no matter in how stern a school.

The same reader will, likewise, have noticed that I have certain pretensions to knowledge. Yet suffering of one kind or another makes up a great portion of what goes on in the universe, and I knew little of it hitherto. My pretensions are a little less outlandish for the experience of victimhood.

But my enlistment in Victim was fortunate mainly in that it put me in my father’s company.

Few terms are batted about so remorselessly these days as “generation gap.” Because this world changes ceaselessly, fathers and sons are fated to be somewhat separated by their experience. Because this world is changing swiftly now, the “gap” is now wider than usual. But I was separated from my father physically. He was blown into the next world before I had much chance to grow apart from him emotionally. So while my coevals moaned of the defects in their all-too-palpable pops, my complaint—never voiced aloud—was that my perfect father had been vaporized. I didn’t envy those coevals: their fathers, as I met them in flesh or in description, weren’t worth having around. I suspect they envied me, but I also suspect it is relatively easy to feel filial piety for an honorable absent father, a shipwrecked hero like Telemachus’s father, for example, or a murdered hero like Hamlet’s and mine. In any case I was, am, and will stay a loving son. Adoring dependence gave way to an inchoate sense of loss, which has now given way to understanding. The object of unquestioning adulation has become the object of compassionate respect. Those interested in father-son conflict must seek elsewhere. Perhaps a certain novelist might treat the theme were he to biograph his medical old man, but I lack experience of it and use no imagination.

A thousand times during the years between his “death” and our meeting in Victim I longed to see my father. As I grew, so did that longing. With what pleasure and profit, for example, I might have discussed my studies with him! I made his life and times the subject of -my first important researches. And the reader knows how distressing it was for me that his spirit remained unreachable. On his side, success and fame had insulated him against my calls, but having come to Victim, he regretted that. Our three months together were no disappointment. A “gap” may separate you and your kids, unfortunate examiners, but not me and my father. It is the vanity and self-indulgence of both generations, I think, that keeps the famous “gap” unbridged, and there is nothing like victimhood to make one scrap petty considerations. We stood together in adversity. I heard the story of his mature years (retold in text above) and his speculations on the universe (see note 99). I told him of my own triumphs and disasters. Our spirits looked on each other in all their human strength and frailty. What else befell me was a small price for such good fortune.

96. Not obsessed with politics

The experience of centuries has revealed certain truths about the value of political influence. Those who lack it are generally bound to obey the law, work for a living, and pay taxes. For those who have it, on the other hand, these bonds relax. For some they dissolve entirely. To the extent that one possesses political influence, furthermore, one is able without sacrifice to help one’s friends and without risk to hurt one’s enemies. One is, therefore, gratified in proportion to one’s political influence with the baboonish presentment of one’s countrymen’s and women’s buttocks, metaphorically or physically, as the case and taste may be. Political influence is, hence, a valuable commodity.

The value varies, though, in different times and climes. Some societies allocate countervailing value to artistic talent, commercial acumen, martial courage, intellectual brilliance, scholarly erudition, technological expertise, or religious piety. In the Republic of Tinieblas, however, the market for these commodities is chronically depressed, so that those few Tinieblans who cultivate them to any degree of quality commonly export them elsewhere. The market for political influence is correspondingly firm and bullish. The manufacture and sale of political influence is the chief national industry. The acquisition of political influence is the favorite occupation. Speculation in political influence is the most common vice.

Considering the paucity of its population and the brevity of its history, Tinieblas has produced a surprising number of hypnotic demagogues, wily intriguers, and other masters of the manipulative skills. But ability aside, rare is the Tinieblan so poor in spirit as to doubt himself supremely gifted for a political career—as rare as the Italian who admits to being tone-deaf, or the Semite who confesses that he has no head for trade. Be he never so brutish, never so innocent alike of mother wit and formal education, your Tinieblan can envision himself President of the Republic, directing the nation to wealth and global puissance and meanwhile disposing of joyous support from an immense majority. Politics is the national art.

Tinieblan housewives do not gossip about who goes to bed with whom; they gossip about who goes to bed with which members of the government. When young Tinieblans couple up at parties, their ardent whispering is likely choked with ideology, not endearments. And while Tinieblas still enjoyed freedom of speech, one might on almost any evening hear Tinieblan schoolboys deliver up in public squares orations worthy in sonority and emptiness, in sophistry and outright bleeding falsehood, of a national convention in the United States. Political discourse is the national literature.

Like food in France, drink in Sweden, suffering in Russia, and fratricide in Ireland, politics is the Tinieblan national obsession. For polities doctors neglect their patients, merchants their businesses, students their studies, wives their husbands, and husbands their concubines. Our land now seethes with discontent, not so much because jails are full and larders empty, but because, under the fecearchy imposed upon it, politics is the private amusement of Genghis Manduco and a few smaller lumps.

My father did not share the national obsession, He was able to find gratification in the other possibilities of life. He had the energy and talent to flesh his private dreams; he needed no public stage to act them out on. That is why he was able to use power without abusing it.

“The problem with power,” he told me, “is that the people most likely to get it are the people most likely to abuse it.”

We lay in the central pen of Victim, which you may get an idea of, inquisitive examiners, by imagining a tire tube about a kilometer thick and thirty kilometers in circumference, with twelve valves (the sets of locks) projecting from the outer wall. A little ways off Adolf Hitler (Who is in Victim as a result of a deal made with a recruiter after the Munich Putsch) stood ranting about what he meant to do when his term was up and he transferred to Politics and the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair.

“Take a poor devil like that,” my father continued, gesturing at Adolf. “Impotent. jumble-headed. Talentless. Utterly incapable of any private joy, be it physical or intellectual or emotional. Hideously deprived and hideously frightened. Too loathsome to give anybody pleasure. Too cowardly to inflict pain on his own. Too empty to find fulfillment in a solitary thing like art. His existence is constant pain and isolation. For a fellow like that, politics is the only hope. He can get a faint impression of being alive by manipulating others into doing great, dramatic things, things he can’t do himself or paint pictures of. And because politics is his only hope, he is never distracted from it, not even for an instant. He can’t even perceive the things that distract others from the pursuit of power, things like love or pleasure or intellectual curiosity. With that kind of single-minded concentration, he’s more likely than most to reach power. And the monomania that is his chief advantage over others in obtaining power makes him incapable of using power moderately once he gets it.

“Hitler’s an extreme case, but you can guide by him. Private joys are best. People who miss out on them need public platforms. The people who want power most are the most likely to get it, and the most liable to misuse it once they do. Perhaps a society might be created where happy, balanced men were sentenced to short terms in public office. That would be something new.”

97. Karl Marx

German-Jewish fantast (1818-1883).

An heir to the Romantic Movement and a forebear of science fiction, Marx was (along with Sigmund Freud) the greatest German novelist of the nineteenth century. Like Freud and many other geniuses, however, Marx misunderstood his gift. He believed himself to be a political economist. An equally deluded world has taken him at his own word.

Marx’s work has the appealing dignity of such huge and useless constructs as the pyramids. Read properly, it emerges as an immense prose epic. The heroine is called History, the hero Proletariat, They endure a long and tormented separation, but finally marry and live happily ever after.

Marx’s chief contribution to philosophy is found in the following phrase (the reference for which I’ve lost): “The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.” (See notes 20, 68, and 88.)

After his “death,” Marx managed to unite his conscious drive to manipulate men with his unconscious drive to amuse them. After wandering from activity to activity for some six decades, he, applied for Sex Change and Return. His spirit now inhabits the body of an employee of a massage parlor on Eighth Avenue near Forty-fourth Street in New York City.

98. Love and jealousy are mutually exclusive

This will be vigorously contested by those who shop their attitudes from such flea markets of the emotions as pop fiction, TV serial drama, and the periodicals subscribed to by beauty parlors, and who consequently hold love to be the cause of jealousy. The best criticism and statement of this view is found in Shakespeare, who creates a great booby, makes jealousy flog love from his large but cheaply-furnished heart, and then has him claim to have “lov’d not wisely, but too well.” Othello speaks with the sincerity of boobyhood and loves himself excellently well throughout, but his love for Desdemona is on the run early in Act III.

Similarly, garbage brains believe that jealousy can be a cause of love: viz., the many real-life and staged dramas whose plots turn on an attempt by A to engender or revive love in B by flirting with C; that jealousy constitutes proof of love; and, conversely, that absence of jealousy argues absence of love. I have of late tried to wean my wife from this rancid dogma—strange in her, since she had glimpsed the true relationship between love and jealousy earlier (see note 54).

“You were really jealous, weren’t you?” she purred to me happily last night. Since the light was out, I couldn’t see the canary feathers on her chops, but I could hear them plainly enough.

I grunted assent.

She snuggled. “You must really love me.”

“Right and wrong. I love you now. I didn’t love you in the slightest then. My jealousy proves that.”

I went on to point out that jealousy depends on the territorial instinct common in man and other animals and that it involves classing a fellow human as a piece of property, a chattel, which one does not wish alienated or used by others. Jealousy is an inflammation of the possessive, not the affective urge. It assumes rights of ownership and thereby debases its object from a person to a thing. It concerns itself with the enforcement of those assumed rights, frequently by violent means. But although rights of ownership are written into the marriage contract—“to have and to hold”—they have nothing to do with loving or cherishing. Love is concern for another, not for oneself and one’s rights. Therefore, insofar as one loves, one cannot feel jealous, while insofar as one feels jealous, one does not love.

My wife fell asleep somewhere during the course of this exposition, as she often does when I attempt serious conversation after dark, but that does not in any way reduce the force of my argument. My current freedom from jealousy is not due to my wife’s current fidelity—or, to be prudent, to the appearance thereof. That jealousy can invent a “cause” is shown in note 23. My capacity for love has recently been augmented (see note 95); hence I am no longer particularly given to jealousy.

My mother, Soledad Fuertes, was and is wholly committed to love; hence she was and is unable to feel the slightest twinge of jealousy, hence her reaction to the incident described in text above.

99. The universe owes us nothing

The statement implies a view of the universe, but since my father, León Fuertes, did not work that view out in detail until after his “death,” I cannot properly present it in my text. However, since it bears on his earthly life, which is the subject of this dissertation, it merits mention in these notes.

My father’s position may be called ecological stoicism: ecological because he saw the universe as a single, integrated system (which is, of course, what the etymology of the word “universe” implies); stoicism because he accepted it. His attitude toward Victim, for example, was an expression of this view.

“Don’t wallow, but accept,” he told me once soon after my arrival. We had been sent to Oppressor with a hundred or so others, as black slaves on a replica of a Louisiana cane plantation. Participants rode in among us, flogging us as we toiled. “Don’t try to enjoy being a victim. But accept it. Bear it. Learn from it.”

This attitude contrasted on the one hand with the oh-yes-please-flog-me mewlings of some, and on the other with Herr Hitler’s alternating threats and pleas for mercy. Similarly, the philosophical position from which it grew contrasted with positions of partial or total rejection. Hitler, for example, endorsed flogging but objected to being on the sharp end of the whip. Prince Alexei, in the manner of true revolutionaries, was ready to scrap everything to eliminate cruelty, which he perceived as a defect. Each, in his way, lacked a sense of unity.

My father spoke to me during one of our recuperation periods about the difficulty of reaching and keeping this sense. Victims lay staring at the vaulted ceiling, or crept about whining, or yammered of escape and vengeance, or tried in one way or another to absent their thoughts. A few meters off, a little Jew named Levitski stood with his eyes closed, his chin tucked to his chest, his left arm crooked, his right arm sawing. up and down. He had been concertmaster of an orchestra in Poland and had entered the next world via the chimney of one of Herr Hitler’s camps. He’d had a place in a Performing Arts chamber ensemble but had tried to gamble his way into Idyll and had lost. Now he spent his recuperation periods playing Mozart on an imaginary Stradivarius.

“What else?” he said to us once. “A real Strad I never touched, but why not dream first class?”

Farther off, Herr Kafka entertained a group of German -speakers with a story. They sat around him belching out gasps of laughter, though some of the women dabbed their eyes too now and then. He had volunteered for Victim—to be near his characters, he said—and seemed so perfectly at home I was unable to imagine he had ever known a different manner of existence.

“Consciousness,” my father said, “is a bamboozling mechanism. It fosters the delusion that we are in the universe, not of it. I spent almost my entire life on earth considering myself a separate, independent entity. But we and everything else are woven into the whole. During my last weeks on earth I began to sense this. When I came over into this world, I lost that sense of unity. Applause crushed it from me. Now, here in Victim, I have regained it.

“Consciousness,” he went on, “operates by organizing perceptions into separate categories. It invents conceptual tools like ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘now’ and ‘then,’ which work like dividers in a notebook. These divisions are imaginary and arbitrary. They have the same kind of reality as Levitski’s fiddle. It helps him get along, so he imagines it. It might as well be a Guarneri as a Strad; matter of taste. Levitski couldn’t endure Victim without his fiddle. People couldn’t think consciously without their dividers. The trouble is it’s hard to realize that they’re arbitrary figments. Most people believe the universe is set up in neat divisions according to the way they organize their perceptions. I bathed in that error for most of my life on earth, and dove back into it as soon as I came to this world. I lived by the principle of separation, mainly the principle of the separate self. I’m over it now, hopefully for good.”

On another occasion he went further, this time in the vestibule of Insult and Abuse while we were waiting to be called, for we lost no chance to converse. “There is a universal mind,” he declared. “I don’t mean it resides in one person or personage, such as the Director—who, by the way, doesn’t direct as much as He thinks he does. It is everywhere.

“I’m not being mystical. I’ve no talent for mysticism. If I ever had one, I wrecked it by exclusive cultivation of intellect, which is the trick of separating. Consider half a hectare of our Tinieblan jungle. Hundreds of thousands of species, millions for all I know—I’m no biologist—interact in balance with each other and with things like dirt and sunlight, which may or may not be living depending on how you define life. That half-hectare system regulates itself maintains all kinds of balances. An oxygen-CO2 balance in the air, a balance of nitrogen and other chemicals in the soil, a population balance among the species. And when we split the half hectare away for consideration, we were being arbitrary. The system encompasses the entire earth, and the sun too, of course, and all the stars, and this world of spirit, which is apparently distinct from the world of matter, but only apparently. Everything is connected. The segments we may choose to discern as separate—you, me, this kind of animal, that kind of flower—are interwoven. The universe is an integral, self-regulating system, and where one finds control, the concept ‘mind’ is perfectly applicable.”

And again, at yet another time: “The universe regulates itself through what—from an individual point of view—appears to be gross waste. One female of a certain kind of beetle pumps out enough eggs during her short life to reproduce herself a hundred thousand times. Her fecundity is balanced by the equally profuse appetite of a certain kind of wasp, who likes to eat beetle larvae. This sort of thing offends our sense of separateness. Why do it that way? What about all those individual beetles potentially present in the gobbled larvae? Continuity and balance are achieved through profusion—profuse generation and profuse destruction—or so the individual point of view judges. Seen close up in nature, this way of doing things provokes disgust. Recognized in human life (which we like to separate from nature), it provokes horror. How many eggs produced in a human ovary, or sperm cells in a human testis? Each a potential human. Each human a potential victim. Each human inevitably a victim—of a germ culture, or an animal, or another human, or himself. Millions turned out, millions knocked off. What a waste! Horror!

“The horror has given rise to some charming dreams of economy, such as two people happy in a garden for ever and ever, if only they obey the rules. More recently it has given rise to vigorous action. Stamp out disease! Stamp out this kind of insect! Stamp out that category of people! Which upsets balances but scarcely reduces ‘waste.’ But there is no waste. The individual viewpoint is wrong because the sense of separateness is a delusion. The universe is an inseparable whole. It has no obligations to those segments of it which imagine themselves separate, nor owes them any explanations. It doesn’t care if we accept it or not, but I think acceptance is the wisest attitude.”

My father’s view included an ecology of the spirit. As the body maintained balance or homeostasis by fluctuating between hunger and satiety, the spirit, he held, fluctuated between assertion and acceptance. In some spirits the swings were small, in others quite pronounced. These last went through a cycle which has been describes as follows: pride to error to suffering to humility to wisdom to mastery to pride, etc. The most common descriptions of this cycle were poetical. They usually focused only on a portion of it: pride to suffering, for example (Oedipus Tyrannus), or humility to mastery (Oedipus at Colonus). In practice, though, the cycle was continual.

“I made two complete circuits during my life on earth,” my father told me. “And since I left earth I’ve made two-thirds of another. Well-balanced spirits like your mother scarcely vary at all.

“What interests me,” he continued, “is that the swings are self-corrective. Near the end of my life I went through a period of suffering. Then, when I learned I was going to ‘die’—and I thought that was the end of everything—I came to an acceptance and, with it, to the full use of my powers. When I passed over into this world, I exercised that mastery in art and won such acclaim that I came to consider myself the center of the universe. Which is ridiculous but not uncommon. The separate self is, as I’ve said, an illusion, and the center of the universe is everywhere. Anyway, I felt that way about myself and spent my time adorning my magnificence, to the neglect of those who cared for me, including—please pardon me, Camilo—you. But applause can be as boring as anything else. Fame too grows tiresome. So I went to Risk. And every time I played, I won. And every time I won, I grew more bored, and then went back again and upped the stakes. Until one day I made a truly crazy bet, and lost it, and came here to Victim.

“We see this all the time and wonder why. Some conjure up an ‘urge for self-destruction’ to explain it, but that’s too limited a view. What you have here is a self-corrective mechanism at work, a built-in balancing device, a homeostatic governor on the spirit. Its function might be stated in the form of a law: When you gain, you lose; when you lose, you gain.”

I said that this coincided with discoveries I had made in the basement of La Bondadosa Prison, and he laughed and nodded.

“What great ‘discoveries’ we make! The law I’ve just ‘discovered’ was published two millennia ago: ‘First shall be last; and the last shall be first.’ And there are earlier though slightly different formulations: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’ Also: ‘Wisdom comes only through suffering.’ The mechanism of spiritual balance was discovered long ago. The problem is almost everyone has to rediscover it for himself and then try to remember it.”

He looked at me soberly. “Your mother was born wise, Camilo. Oh, I had a merry time, on earth and in this world too, but I only got glimpses of the secret. She knew it from the first and lives by it. And you know what I’m hoping?” Here he grinned. “I’m hoping that a hundred years in Victim may teach me something. I’m hoping I can halt these crazy swings. Maybe after a hundred years here I’ll be ready for Love.”

100. Back

After I had been in Victim for about two and a half months, my father urged me to return to earth and my body.

“It’s not that I want my biography written,” he said. “And we both know you’ll have to come back here in a few years anyway. But I think you ought to finish your earthly avatar. You’ve learned things here and in La Bondadosa that can be put to good use on earth. And if you can manage to remember that you’ve got six-plus years of victimhood ahead of you, you might have a very profitable life. Awareness of suffering ahead sharpens the lessons of suffering past.”

I might have added that I had left an important relationship in a very poor state of disarray and ought to do something to recompose it, but I was in no need of convincing. I hadn’t progressed nearly so far as my father in accepting Victim, and there had never been any danger of my enjoying it. All I had been waiting for was his leave to go and the completion of my researches. As these were nearly done, I advised a guard the next time we were taken out that I had a body functioning on earth and wished to exercise my right to return to it.

Spirits who choose assignment as guards in Victim have, I should say, about the same level of intelligence as their counterparts in earthly confinement facilities, and not one whit more compassion. “No one gets out of here till his time is up,” was the reply. “Move it on!”

Sensitive examiners, you will appreciate my apprehension. I hadn’t truly missed earth and my body until I had cause to believe I might never return to them. I hadn’t truly felt the weight of victimhood till then. But I had my father beside me and made a show of self-control for him.

“You’re not the Director, are you?” I said coldly. “He makes the rules, not you. Check with your superiors.”

“Don’t tell me my job, victim. I’ll check if I feel like it. Move it on!”

But if guards are sullen, stupid creatures in both houses of this bicameral universe, they are also slaves of rule. It took two weeks for my release to come through, but my release came.

I took leave of my father in an outer lock. He was bound for Resentment and Revenge with a lot of fifty, all wearing tall, sturdy blond bodies, all dressed in jackboots and black uniforms-ersatz Nazis to be thrown in among a horde of vengeful Jews.

“About an average tour,” he said. “I’ll bring this hulk back under my own power. Remember me, and this place, Camilo.”

We embraced then, and it was I who wept, though my suffering was over for a time.

Above, in the processing room, my spirit was lightened. Then I sped to the twin exit portals of the Astral Plane.

I stopped first in Prorogation to see my mother, but an official there told me she had passed through to Love.

“There was never any doubt of her acceptance,” he said. “A case of waiting for a vacancy, someone recycling back.”

I pray my father may join her there someday.

It was nightfall when I reached Tinieblas. The streets were already nearly deserted. Sirens wailed hysterically along the Via Venezuela. Lit by floodlights, the six-storey portrait of General Genghis Manduco loomed against the façade of the university Law Faculty like the effigy of a pagan deity.

The prison wing of San Bruno Hospital was packed with smashed bodies, but none of them was mine. I flew about the hospital searching, but could find my body nowhere. I feared I’d come too late, that my body had failed and been buried, that I would have to return to Victim with my avatar unfinished. Then I heard two nurses talking about a patient in a coma whom the President of Costaguana was taking out by plane.

The light-blue Costaguanan Air Force transport was already airborne from Monteseguro when I reached it, banking high into the west, where a faint glow of sunset glimmered. Inside I found my body right enough, strapped down and plugged with tubes and needles, tended by a doctor and two nurses, watched over by lovely, sad-eyed Liz. The briefcase in which I’d stuffed the manuscript of this dissertation lay on the floor beside her. There are all kinds of loyalty, and some kinds mean more than others.

I confess to a sentimental urge to stay and watch that scene, but my earthly life looked to be potentially too pleasant to take any more chances with. I slipped inside, felt at once deathly cold, and then may have lost consciousness. I heard one of the nurses say, “His eyelids fluttered.” I tried to open them but couldn’t. I lay absolutely still, awake but with my eyes closed, unable to remember anything. Then memory returned, though everything that touched upon the next world seemed only a dream, a vision, a fantasy.

At length I managed to open my eyes and saw Liz looking down at me. She straightaway called for the doctor and then began to weep and laugh at once, and there occurred such a general bustling about that I felt powerfully like closing my eyes again and sleeping for a while. I held onto my strength, however, though being back in my injured body had brought me a great feebleness, and when things had calmed and Liz was bending over me again, I decided to see if I could speak. After a few tries I was able to ask her pardon.

The End of the Dissertation

January, 1971—September, 1974