The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (22 page)

I said, "I'll tell him."

"It will finish him off," Tim said. "No, maybe it won't. He may be stronger than we give him credit for. He could see through all that nonsense about Jeff coming back."

"You get to tell the truth," I said, "when you're schizophrenic."

"Then more people should be schizophrenic. What is this, a matter of the emperor's new clothes? You knew, too, but you didn't say."

I said, "It's not a matter of knowing. It has to do with evaluation."

"But you never believed it."

After a pause, I said, "I'm not sure."

"Kirsten is dead," Tim said, "because we believed in nonsense. Both of us. And we believed because we wanted to believe. I have not that motive now."

"Guess not."

"If we had ruthlessly faced the truth, Kirsten would be alive now. All I can hope is to put an end to it here and now ... and accompany her at some later date. Garret and Mason could see that Kirsten was sick. They took advantage of a sick, disturbed woman and now she's dead. I hold them responsible." He paused and then said, "I had been attempting to get Kirsten to go into the hospital for drug detox. I have several friends who're in that field, here in San Francisco. I was well aware of her addiction and I knew that only professionals could help her. I had to go through this myself, as you know ... with alcohol."

I said nothing; I merely drove.

"It's too late to stop the book," Tim said.

"Couldn't you phone your editor and—"

"The book is their property now."

I said, "They're a totally reputable publishing house. They would listen to you if you instructed them to withdraw the book."

"They've sent out promotional prepublication material. They've circulated bound galleys and Xerox copies of the manuscript. What I'll do—" Tim pondered. "I'll write another book. That tells about Kirsten's death and my reevaluation of the occult. That's the best avenue for me to pursue."

"I think you should withdraw
Here, Tyrant Death.
"

His mind, however, had been made up; he shook his head vigorously. "No; it should be allowed to come out as planned. I've had years of experience with these matters; you should face up to your own folly—my own, I am referring to, of course—and then, after you've faced up to it, set about correcting it. My next book will be that correction."

"How much was the advance?"

Glancing swiftly at me, Tim said, "Not much, considering its sales potential. Ten thousand on my signing the contract; then another ten thousand when I delivered the completed manuscript to them. And there will be a final ten thousand when the book is released."

"Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Half to himself, reflecting, Tim said, "I think I'll add a dedication to it. A dedication to Kirsten. In memoriam. And say a few things about my feelings for her."

"You could dedicate it to both of them," I said. "Both Jeff and Kirsten. And say, 'But for the grace of God—'"

"Very appropriate," Tim said.

"Add me and Bill," I said. "While you're at it. We're part of this movie."

"'Movie'?"

"A Berkeley expression. Only it's not a movie; it's the opera
Wozzeck
by Alban Berg. They all die except the little boy riding his wooden horse."

"I'll have to phone in the dedication," Tim said. "The galleys are already back in New York, corrected."

"She finished, then? Her job?"

"Yes," he said, vaguely.

"Did she do it right? After all, she wasn't feeling too well."

"I assume she did it correctly; I didn't look them over."

"You're going to have a Mass said for her, aren't you?" I said. "At Grace?"

"Oh, yes. That's one of the reasons I'm—"

"I think you should get Kiss," I said. "It's a group, a very highly thought of rock group. After all, you had been planning a rock mass anyhow."

"Did she like Kiss?"

"Second only to Sha Na Na," I said.

"Then we should get Sha Na Na," Tim said.

We drove for a time in silence.

"The Patti Smith Group," I said suddenly.

"Let me ask you," Tim said, "about several things regarding Kirsten."

"I am here to answer any question," I said.

"At the service, I want to read poems that she loved. Can you give me the names of a few?" He got from his coat pocket a notebook and gold pen; holding them, he waited.

"There is a very beautiful poem about a snake," I said, "by D. H. Lawrence. She loved it. Don't ask me to quote it; I can't quote it just now. I'm sorry." I shut my eyes, trying not to cry.

A
T THE SERVICE
, Bishop Timothy Archer read the D. H. Lawrence poem about the snake; he read it wonderfully and I saw how moved the people were, although not many mourners had shown up. Not that many people knew Kirsten Lundborg. I kept seeking to locate her son Bill somewhere in the cathedral.

When I had phoned him to tell him the news, he had showed little response. I think he foresaw it. At this time, the hospital and the house of many slammers held no power over him; Bill had earned his freedom to walk around or to paint cars or whatever he did. However he currently amused himself in his earnest fashion.

The cobwebs departed Bishop Archer's mind when Kirsten killed herself, so, it would seem, her death had served a useful purpose, although a purpose unequal to our loss. It amazes me: the sobering power of human death. It outweighs all words, all arguments; it is the ultimate force. It coerces your attention and your time. And it leaves you changed.

How Tim could derive strength from death—the death of a person he loved—baffled me; I could not fathom it, but this was the sort of quality in him that made him good: good at his job, good as a human being. The worse things got, the stronger he became; he did not like death but he did not fear it. He comprehended it—once the cobwebs left. He had tried out the bullshit solution of'séances and superstition and that hadn't worked; it simply brought on more death. So now he shifted gears and tried out being rational. He had a profound motive: his own life had been placed on the line, like bait. Bait to tempt what the ancients called "a sinister fate," meaning premature death, death before its time.

The thinkers of antiquity did not regard death per se as evil, because death comes to all; what they correctly perceived as evil was premature death, death coming before the person could complete his work. Lopped off, as it were, before ripe, a hard, green little apple that death took and then tossed away, as being of no interest—even to death.

Bishop Archer had by no means completed his work and by no means did he intend to be lopped off, severed from life. He now correctly perceived himself sliding by degrees into the fate that had overtaken Wallenstein: first the superstition and credulity, then run through with a halberd by an otherwise historically undistinguished English captain named Walter Devereux (Wallenstein had pleaded in vain for quarter; when the halberd is in the foe's hand, it is usually too late to plead for quarter). At that final instant Wallenstein, roused from sleep, had probably also been roused from his mental stupor; I would guess that the swift realization came to him as the enemy soldiers broke into his bedroom that all the astrological charts and all the horoscopes in the world had been of no use to him, for he had not foreseen this, and was caught. The difference between Wallenstein and Tim, however, was great and crucial. First, Tim had the advantage of Wallenstein's example; Tim got to see where folly led great men. Second, Tim was fundamentally a realist, for all his double-domed, educated flow of twaddle. Tim had entered the world with a wary eye, a keen sense of what benefited him and what worked to his disadvantage. At the moment of Kirsten's death he had cannily destroyed part of her suicide note; no fool he, and he had been able—amazingly—to conceal their relationship from the media and from the Episcopal Church itself (it all came out later, of course, but by then Tim was dead and probably did not care).

How an essentially pragmatic—even, it could be argued, opportunistic—man could involve himself in so much self-defeating nonsense is, of course, amazing, but even the nonsense had a sort of utility in the larger economy of Tim's life. Tim did not wish to be bound by the formal strictures of his role; he did not really define himself as a bishop any more than he had previously let himself be defined as an attorney. He was a man, and he thought of himself that way; not a "man" in the sense of "male person," but "man" in the sense of human being who lived in many areas and spread out into a variety of vectors. In his college days, he had learned much from his study of the Renaissance; once he had told me that in no way had the Renaissance overthrown or abolished the Medieval world:
the Renaissance had fulfilled it,
whatever T. S. Eliot might imagine to the contrary.

Take, for example, (Tim had said to me) Dante's
Commedia.
Clearly, in terms of brute date of composition, the
Commedia
emanated from the Middle Ages; it summed up the Medieval worldview absolutely: its greatest crown. And yet (although many critics will not agree) the
Commedia
has a vast span of vision that in no way can be bipolarized to, say, the view of Michelangelo, who, in fact, drew heavily on the
Commedia
for his Sistine Chapel ceiling. Tim saw Christianity reaching its climax in the Renaissance; he did not view that moment in history as the ancient world revived and overpowering the Middle Ages, the Christian Ages; the Renaissance was not the triumph of the old pagan world over faith but, rather, the final and fullest flowering of faith, specifically the Christian faith; therefore, Tim reasoned, the well-known Renaissance man (who knew something about everything, who was, to use the correct term, a polymath) was the ideal Christian, at home in this world and in the next: a perfect blend of matter and spirit, matter divinized, as it were. Matter transformed but still matter. The two realms, this and the next, brought back together, as they had been joined before the Fall.

This ideal Tim intended to capture for himself, to make it his own. The complete person, he reasoned, does not lock himself into his job, no matter how exalted that job. A cobbler who views himself only as one who repairs shoes is circumscribing himself viciously; a bishop, by the same reasoning, must therefore enter regions occupied by the whole man. One of these regions consisted of that of sexuality. Although the general opinion ran contrary to this, Tim did not care, nor did he yield. He knew what was apt for the Renaissance man and he knew that he himself constituted that man in all his authenticity.

That this trying out of every possible idea to see if it would fit finally destroyed Tim Archer can't be disputed. He tried out too many ideas, picked them up, examined them, used them for a while and then discarded them ... some of the ideas, however, as if possessing a life of their own, came back around the far side of the barn and got him. That is history; this is an historical fact. Tim is dead. The ideas did not work. They got him off the ground and then betrayed him and attacked him; they dumped him, in a sense, before he could dump them. One thing, however, could not be obscured: Tim Archer could tell when he was locked in a life-and-death struggle and, upon perceiving this, he assumed the posture of grim defense. He did not—just as he had said to me the day Kirsten died—surrender. Fate, to get Tim Archer, would have to run him through: Tim would never run himself through. He would not collude with retributive fate, once he spotted it and what it was up to. He had done that, now: discerned retributive fate, seeking him. He neither fled nor cooperated. He stood and fought and, in that stance, died. But he died hard, which is to say, he died hitting back. Fate had to murder him.

And, while fate figured out how to accomplish this, Tim's quick brain was totally engaged in sidestepping through every mental gymnastic move possible that which perhaps held in it the force of the inevitable. This is probably what we mean by the term "fate"; were it not inevitable, we would not employ that term; we would, instead, speak of bad luck. We would talk about accidents. With fate there is no accident; there is intent. And there is relentless intent, closing in from all directions at once, as if the person's very universe is shrinking. Finally, it holds nothing but him and his sinister destiny. He is programmed against his will to succumb, and, in his efforts to thrash himself free, he succumbs even faster, from fatigue and despair. Fate wins, then, no matter what.

A lot of this Tim himself told me. He had studied up on the topic as part of his Christian education. The ancient world had seen the coming into existence of the Greco-Roman Mystery Religions, which were dedicated to overcoming fate by patching the worshipper into a god beyond the planetary spheres, a god capable of short-circuiting the "astral influences," as it had been called in those days. We ourselves, now, speak of the DNA death-strip and the psychological-script learned from, modeled on, other, previous people, friends and parents. It is the same thing; it is determinism killing you no matter what you do. Some power outside of you must enter and alter the situation; you cannot do it for yourself, for the programming causes you to perform the act that will destroy you; the act is performed with the idea that it will save you, whereas, in point of fact, it delivers you over to the very doom you wish to evade.

Tim knew all this. It didn't help him. But he did his best; he tried.

Practical men do not do what Jeff did and Kirsten did; practical men fight that drift because it is a romantic drift, a weakness. It is learned passivity; it is learned giving up. Tim could ignore his son's death as unique—reasoning that no contagion was involved—but when Kirsten went the same way, Tim had to change his mind, return to Jeff's death and reappraise it. He saw in it, now, the origins of later disaster, and he saw that disaster shaping up for himself. This caused him immediately to jettison all the claptrap notions that he had picked up beginning with Jeff's death, all the weird and shabby ideas associated with the occult, to borrow Menotti's apt phrase. Tim suddenly realized that he had seated himself at the table in Mme. Flora's parlor, for the purpose of contacting the spirits—for the purpose, really, of delivering himself over to folly. He now did what characterized him throughout his life: he abandoned that route and sought another; he dumped that malicious cargo and reached around for something more stable, more durable and sound, to replace it. If the ship is to be saved, cargo must sometimes be flung overboard; when something is jettisoned, it is dumped calculatedly—heaved away, to float off, leaving the ship intact. This moment only comes when the ship is in trouble, as Tim now was. Dr. Garret had pronounced doom on both himself and Kirsten, beginning with Kirsten. The first prophecy had come true. He could expect, then, to be next. These are emergency procedures. They are employed by the desperate and the smart. Tim was both. And out of necessity. Tim knew the difference between the ship (which was not expendable) and the cargo (which was). He viewed himself as the ship. He viewed his faith in spirits, in his son's return from the next world, as cargo. This clear distinction was his advantage, inasmuch as he could discern it. Throwing away his beliefs did not compromise him, nor did it vitiate him. And there existed a slight chance that it might save him.