AND SO—I WAS betrayed. Not that I hadn’t half expected it. No adventure of the soul is without betrayal; it is part of the stickiness which holds the soul in space. The small ones I had practiced on my own part, the mild lies I had scattered everywhere—birdseed for those left at home, chicken feed for those on ahead, and a little fruitening gardenseed for myself—would never have been enough. It took a betrayal in the highest, and by others, to make me admit that my adventure was of the soul as well as of the body. Though I meant to be human, not martyr. And though perhaps not as pioneer as I had fancied—and forced at present still to work at it—that hope is still high. All during the hours of my oration, I could hear privately—and with what astonishment, delight and giddy laughter!—my own gradual advances in that direction, but tone, or even the double consciousness, is not enough. When I heard, outside the doors I had in a way helped to seal, that long, thrilling whistle-cry from home, I had a moment’s falter—my allegiance went to them, and when they entered, all my pride. At the moment of perfection, when all down the aisles a One leaning with a one made such a cloister of couples as must each have a flame-glass window to itself in the legend—my allegiance was, I truly believe, to the world of worlds that shall come, among worlds. And when I saw the band of my colleagues, never, to be sure, of that close order here called “friends,” but nevertheless a band; when I saw them turn tail—ah, what a dollop of bitterness it takes to be human! When I saw the doors open, as no doubt everywhere there were opening what had taken so much secret labor to seal—I was already human enough to be surprised. And when they vanished through them, leaving me behind, the patsy, to take the rap, to be the fall guy—oh I knew all your names for those of you who are too heavy with innocence to fly with the angels—then my allegiance went over forever, to you. Where, with the exercise of an occasional ingenuity, it has remained.
They do not trust you; there it is, in a nutshell likely never to be anything but a nutshell. They never have. Often and often it was argued me, even among my own cohorts, that we would do no better than the Christians had at bringing you to true ellipsis, whereas my part and theirs—to earn a permanent place here—would be the easiest of falls. “Let them emigrate,” they said, “but of course not as they are; let them be refugees to the nth.” How they had laughed to hear I had a name! “Always naming, they are!” a chorus of us said. “Always predicting new particles, too!” And “Oh marvelous!” sang the chorus on another groove. “Oh smashing! Let them come as particles or not at all.”
It was only their bit of fun, I had thought at the time. I thought they already understood, as I had, that if it was We who had the distance, it was you who had the perspective, and that names of all sorts were only your vain effort to tick off the one little particle, not a pi-meson, not even an Omega minus, which made you human. And now I should never be able to tell them; or now perhaps, having seen you and leaned toward it, they were understandably frightened to smell what I already knew—that this one particle, which would never be named, came from the Beyond. It takes all kinds—your own sages are always hinting it.
And so I watched them, my kind, running, and I watched yours, and considered where I was. Only minutes back, at the very point when all our maneuvers had seemed at perfection, I had called for a mouth, in a carnal loss of control that was jolly unrefined; I could have my own guilts and humiliations too therefore, if betrayal were not presently enough. Or could save these for later. I watched Jack running, after having heard from me as much as I could spare and then a little over—and was this human of me? How many times, in the years to come, I should have to ask that! And in the grace of providence, or effort, or in the doom of both—be able to. I shouldn’t expect to haunt him, Jack, unless I was very lonely—a word whose meaning I had learned by watching him. He had had all that he could bear, and if I could bear more, it must be because I wasn’t human yet.
After him, the little secretary came peeping out from wherever in the wings she’d disappeared to, and tiptoed, wide-eyed and scared, to within a few paces of me, where she set down the tape recorder, then knelt so thoughtfully—but just out of reach—to start it going. Then she too ran. At the door, she blew me a kiss. At the door—though I had my back turned by now and didn’t see him—I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that at the door, he looked back. But I was confused now, and too tired to consider whether chivalry kept me at my post, or chargin—or tired muscles. Humanity never comes evenly. I would sit a bit. And there might be no more answer than this to much of human conduct. Some of us run; some stay.
Then I turned, from the depths of his chair. “Shadows?” I called after him. He was gone. But I sat in wonder. This is our last scream, before the crater. Here, it was my first.
And so, my long soliloquy was finished. But this had been the formal one, hero that I had been; now I had one for myself. Everybody here is a hero at least for a day—the day on which he is born; and then forever, in the long night, all are heroes there. I looked out upon you until you were gone, all of you soon to lie, with your shields, in your slumber. But before then, in the between of those two poles, you are ordinary people, of the commonest betrayals, and with your own heroisms to make. I meant to be ordinary, and I had a few thoughts for myself on this, as even the unheroic do.
Now, meditating back there in the cottage in that summer lamasery of one member, as the violet passage of the hours was succeeded by the white, I had learned to watch all the equinoxes of the day. This is very important, though I do not mean to sound wise. And I do not know whether wisdom comes of it. But, when after my long sojourn, I was carried out of there, it was mysteries I was giddy with. I had never lived with mystery before. Your rooms were chock-full of them. So it was mysteries, not conclusions, that I presented myself with now.
They know their own queerness, I thought—meaning you. They understand that, by the one thin particle, they are born into the beyond. I shall become one of them, as—slowly into their vortex—so do I. And in this adventure, perhaps the appendages of the body, which I have all this time been so fixed on, need not antedate those of the soul. By nature, I am a virtuoso of images; by these I will plod on, but this time in their same danger—that my shadows, unlike my body, will not last my time. But consider that this too must have a bearing on what—to one in want of it—is of all their possessions, the sum. For consider not their death, but the manner of it. Everybody who dies here is a person. Everybody who has ever died here, has been a person. Repeat it, repeat it—for they have a repetition, they have a beat here also, and this is what they mean here when they say “the people.” Everybody who dies here is a person. And nobody has ever known how it comes about.
The tape flapped, somewhere along in my reveries, and after a while, the machine ran down. That stops the recording! I thought, meaning forever, though of course I was wrong. But it did bring practical considerations once more to mind. And my mind was—somehow to go underground, yet remain among you. At first, my thought was to stay there in the neighborhood, where I knew the basements, and indeed there I did stay, until enough of the old pallor and intangibility overcame me, making me fit again to travel. Then, finding that I could travel safely in almost any weather except snow—when memory brought tints which were unsafe—I left the Ramapo, at least for many voyages to come. I had no wish to haunt the people there, who as it was—though they might no longer believe in what they had seen—would never again know for sure what object here might not have its images, or whether every object in their universe might not be a Trojan horse. Besides, there were not people enough, in just a valley and a mountain range, for my purposes. And what were, were too refined.
Think of me then, as in many public places—under the George Washington Bridge perhaps, by dawnlight, counting the first cars. Or listening to the radio that whines on happily in Filipino, in a whisky-box squatter town. Or watching all the diseases of Asia, and the buboes of gladness too. I often look in mirrors. I watch the babies always, for hints. Think of me wherever protoplasm really carbuncles, or shrinks or swells, or even dies. And as in private places also, for sometimes I am a beast in chambers, groaning moonward, like yourselves. One day, on that day when the hands and the feet, and the sex and even the full face finally come upon me—then at that point, I shall no doubt remember the shadows of my old home as celestial ones. And at that point—I shall be human. Humanity never comes evenly. Until then, I am an envoy, which has so many meanings and all of them rightful—an ambassador and a deputy, a dedication, a poem. Until then, think of me as where the people are—as you think of yourselves.
And say a blessing for all those in a state of between.
One night, after many wanderings which do not cease, I found myself on a small footpath, a meander, which if I wished, I could count as a place where I had been born, though I have many such places now. I was used now to there being no line of demarcation between the happening and the brooding; wherever there is difference, such a two must meld. I could see, to the south, a view. The views of your planet are from all sides, really, but for simplicity’s sake let us say that it was only from the south. I saw what I now knew. I saw the great wallows of light between cities and their parks, between the park and the field and the desert, and on all, cherished as if within a wild sea, the closeness of the starved.
And I said to myself the old lesson for messiahs, that I now say to you. What is humane? The small distance. What is wild? The mortal weight. Wherever there is difference, there—is morality. Where there is brute death, there love flits, the shy observer. I had my feelings now, those mysterious pains which held them to living. And I said a blessing for all those who live in mystery. The wilderness was all before me—and I was glad that I had come.