The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (17 page)

Kirsten and I looked at each other. I saw Kirsten's lips move but I heard no sound. Heaven only knows what she was saying and thinking at that moment, as she witnessed Tim shoot down his career and life out of conviction—more properly, lack of conviction: faith in the Savior.

The problem for Kirsten was, simply, that she could not see the problem. To her, Tim's dilemma was a phantom dilemma, manufactured for bookish reasons. According to her reasoning, he had the option to shed the problem any time he saw fit; her analysis was, simply, that Tim had become restive in his job as bishop and wanted to move on; asserting a loss of faith in Christ was his way of justifying his career move. Since it was a stupid career move, she did not approve. After all, she gained so very much from his status; as she had said, Tim was not thinking about her: he thought only of himself.

"Dr. Garret is highly recommended," Tim said, almost in a plaintive voice, as if appealing to one or the other of us for support.

"Tim," I said, "I really think—"

"You think with your crotch," Kirsten said.

"What?" I said.

"You heard me. I know about your little conversations, that you two have, after I go to bed. When you're alone. And I know you've been meeting."

"Meeting what?" I said.

"Each other,"

"Christ," I said.

"'Christ,'" Kirsten echoed. "Always Christ. Always the summoning of the Almighty Son of God to justify your selfishness and what you're up to. I find it disgusting; I find both of you disgusting." To Tim she said, "I know you visited her goddamn record store last week."

"To buy an album," Tim said. "Of
Fidelio
."

"You could have gotten it here in the City," Kirsten said. "Or I could have picked it up for you."

Tim said, "I wanted to see what she had—"

"She doesn't have anything I don't have," Kirsten said.

"The
Missa Solemnis,
" Tim said faintly; he seemed dazed; appealing to me, he said, "Can you reason with her?"

"I can reason with myself," Kirsten said. "I can reason out exactly what's going on."

"You better knock off taking those downers, Kirsten," I said.

"And you better stop turning on five times a day." Her look carried such furious hate that I could not credit my senses. "You smoke enough grass to—" She broke off. "More than the San Francisco Police Department uses in a month. I'm sorry; I'm not feeling well. Excuse me." She walked into the bedroom; the door shut silently after her. We could hear her stirring around. Then we heard her go into the bathroom; water ran: she was taking a pill, probably a barbiturate.

To Tim, who stood inert and amazed, I said, "Barbiturates cause that kind of personality change. It's the pills talking, not her."

"I think—" He rallied. "I really want to fly down to Santa Barbara and see Dr. Garret. Do you think it's the fact that she's a woman?"

"Kirsten?" I said. "Or Garret?"

"Garret. I could swear it was a man; I just now noticed the first name. I may have gotten it wrong. Maybe that's what's upsetting her. She'll calm down. We'll go together. Dr. Mason said that Dr. Garret is elderly and infirm and semiretired, so she won't pose any threat to Kirsten, once she sees her."

To change the subject, I said, "Did you play the
Missa Solemnis
that I sold you?"

"No," Tim said vaguely. "I haven't had time."

"It's not the best recording," I said. "Columbia uses a peculiar microphone placement; they have microphones scattered around throughout the orchestra, with the idea of bringing out the individual instruments. The idea is good, but it does away with hall ambiance."

"It bothers her that I'm stepping down," Tim said. "As bishop."

"You should think about it longer," I said. "Before you do it. Are you sure it's this medium that you want to consult? Isn't there someone in the church you go to when you have a spiritual crisis?"

"I will be consulting Jeff. The medium acts as a passive agent, much in the fashion that a telephone acts." He went on, then, to explain how misunderstood mediums are; I half-listened, neither impressed nor caring. Kirsten's hostility had upset me, even though I had become used to it; this amounted to more than her chronic bitchiness. I can tell a red freak when I see one, I said to myself. The personality change, the hair-trigger response. The paranoia. She is crapping out on us, I said to myself. She is going down the drain. Worse, she is not going down the drain alone; her nails are dug deep in us and we go perforce along. Shit. This is just dreadful; a man like Tim Archer should not have to put up with this.
I
should not have to.

Kirsten opened the bedroom door. "Come in here," she said to Tim.

"I will in a minute," Tim said.

"You will come in here now."

I said, "I'll take off."

"No," Tim said, "you will not take off. I have further things to discuss with you. Is it your contention that I should not step down as bishop? When my book comes out about Jeff, I will have to step down. The church will not allow me to publish a controversial book of that sort. It is too radical for them; put another way, they are too reactionary for it. It is ahead of its time and they are behind the times. There is no difference between my stand on this issue and my stand on the Vietnam War; I bucked the Establishment on that, and I should—theoretically—be able to buck the Establishment on the issue of life beyond the grave, but with the war I have support from the youth of America. But in this matter, I have support from no one."

Kirsten said, "You have my support but that doesn't matter to you."

"I mean public support. The support of those in power, those who control human minds, unfortunately."

"My support means nothing to you," Kirsten repeated.

"It means everything to me," Tim said. "I could not—I would not—have dared to write the book without you; I would not even have
believed
without you. It is you who gives me my strength. My capacity to understand. And from Jeff, when we have contacted him, I will learn about Jesus Christ one way or another. I will learn if the Zadokite Documents do, in fact, indicate that Jesus spoke only secondhand of what he had been taught ... or possibly Jeff will tell me that Christ is with him, or he with Christ, in the other world, the upper realm, where we all go eventually, where he is now, reaching across to us as best he can, God bless him."

I said, "You see this business with Jeff, then, as a sort of opportunity. To clear up your doubts one way or another about the meaning of the Zadokite—"

"I think I have made that clear," Tim interrupted, peevishly. "That is why it is so crucial. To talk to him."

How strange, I thought. To use his son—make calculated use of his dead son—to determine an historical issue. But it is more than an historical issue: it is Tim Archer's entire corpus of faith, the summation, for him, of belief itself. Belief or the falling away of belief. What is at stake here is belief versus nihilism ... for Tim to lose Christ is for Tim to lose everything. And he has lost Christ; his statements to Bill that night may have been Tim's last defense of the fortress before that fortress fell. It may have fallen then, or perhaps before then; Tim argued from memory, as if from a page. A written speech spread out before him, as when, in the celebration of the Last Supper, he reads from the Book of Common Prayer.

The son, his son, my husband, subordinated to an intellectual matter—I could never, myself, view it that way. This amounts to a depersonalization of Jeff Archer; he is converted into an instrument, a device for learning; why, he is converted into a talking book! Like all these books that Tim forever reaches for, especially in moments of crisis. Everything worth knowing can be found in a book; conversely, if Jeff is important he is important not as a person but as a book; it is books for books' sakes then, not knowledge, even, for the sake of knowledge. The book is the reality. For Tim to love and appreciate his son, he must—as impossible as this may seem—he must regard him as a kind of book. The universe to Tim Archer is one great set of reference books from which he picks and chooses as his restless mind veers on, always seeking the new, always turning away from the old; it is the very opposite of that passage from
Faust
that he read; Tim has not found the moment where he says, "
Stay";
it is still fleeing from him, still in motion.

And I am not much different, I realized; I, who graduated from the English Department at U.C. Berkeley—Tim and I are of a kind. Had it not been the final canto of Dante's
Commedia
that struck off my identity when I first read it that day when I was in school? Canto Thirty-three of
Paradiso,
for me the culmination, where Dante says:

"
I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze
Into one volume bound by love, the same
That the universe holds scattered through its maze.
Substance and accidents, and their modes, became
As if fused together, all in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple flame.
"

The superb Laurence Binyon translation; and then C. H. Grandgent comments on this passage:

"God is the Book of the Universe."

To which another commentator—I forget which one—said, "This is a Platonist notion." Platonist or otherwise, this is the sequences of words that framed me, that made me what I am: this is
my
source, this vision and report, this view of final things. I do not call myself a Christian but I cannot forget this view, this wonder. I remember the night I read that final canto of
Paradiso,
read it—truly read it—for the first time; I had that infected tooth and I hurt hideously, unbearably, so I sat up all night drinking bourbon—straight—and reading Dante, and at nine
A.M.
the next day I drove to the dentist's without phoning, without an appointment, showed up with tears dripping down my face, demanding that Dr. Davidson do something for me ... which he did. So that final canto is deeply impressed onto and into me; it is associated with terrible pain, and pain that went on for hours, into the night, so there was no one to talk to; and out of that I came to fathom the ultimate things in my own way, not a formal or official way but a way nonetheless.

"
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
"

Or however it goes. Aeschylus? I forget, now. One of the three of them who wrote the tragedies.

Which means that I can say with all truthfulness that for me the moment of greatest understanding in which I knew spiritual reality at last came in connection with emergency root-canal irrigation, two hours in the dentist chair. And twelve hours drinking bourbon—bad bourbon at that—and simply reading Dante without listening to the stereo or eating—there was no way I could eat—and suffering, and it was all worth it; I will never forget it.
I am no different, then, from Timothy Archer.
To me, too, books are real and alive; the voices of human beings issue forth from them and compel my assent, the way God compels our assent to the world, as Tim said. When you have been in that much distress, you are not going to forget what you did and saw and thought and read that night; I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing; I read and I remember; I did not read
Howard the Duck
or
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
or
Snatch Comix
that night; I read Dante's
Commedia,
from
Inferno
through
Purgatorio,
until at last I arrived in the three colored rings of light ... and the time was nine
A.M.
and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson's office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast, not even coffee, and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist's receptionist.

So for me in a certain unusual way—for certain unusual reasons—books and reality are fused; they join through one incident, one night of my life: my intellectual life and my practical life came together—nothing is more real than a badly infected tooth—and having done so they never completely came apart again. If I believed in God, I would say that he showed me something that night; he showed me the totality: pain, physical pain, drop by drop, and then, this being his dreadful grace, there came understanding ... and what did I understand? That it is
all
real; the abscessed tooth and the root-canal irrigation, and, no less and no more:

"
Three circles from its substance now appeared,
Of three colors, and each an equal whole.
"

That was Dante's vision of God as the Trinity. Most people when they try to read the
Commedia
get bogged down in
Inferno
and suppose his vision to be that of a chamber of horrors: people head up in shit; people head down in shit; and a lake of ice (suggesting Arabic influences; that is the Muslim hell), but this is only the beginning of the journey; it is how it starts. I read the
Commedia
through to the end that night and then shot up the street for Dr. Davidson's office, and was never the same again. I never changed back into what I had previously been. So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the
vision
of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own. The pain and the crying and the sweating and stinking and cheap Jim Beam Bourbon was my
Inferno
and it wasn't imaginary; what I read bore the label "Paradiso" and
Paradiso
it was. This is the triumph of Dante's vision: that all the realms are real, none less than the others, none more than the others. And they blend into each other, by means of what Bill would call "gradual increments," which is indeed the proper term. There is a harmony in this because, like automobiles of today in contrast to autos of the Thirties, no sharp break exists.