The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (7 page)

Tim said, "I was just curious. This is an area I know nothing about. Does any of you have an opinion about Marc Bolan?"

"He's dead," I said. "You're talking about T.Rex."

"Marc Bolan is dead?" Jeff said. He looked amazed.

"I could be wrong," I said. "I suggest Ray Davies. He writes the Kinks' stuff. He's very good."

"Would you look into it for me?" Tim said, speaking both to Jeff and me.

"I wouldn't know how to go about doing that," I said.

Kirsten said quietly, "I'll take care of it."

"You could get Paul Kantner and Gracie Slick," I said. "They just live over at Bolinas in Marin County."

"I know," Kirsten said, nodding placidly and with the air of total confidence.

Bullshit, I thought. You don't even know who I'm talking about. Already you're in charge, just from being set up in this apartment. It isn't even that much of an apartment.

Tim said, "I would like Janis Joplin to sing at Grace."

"She died in 1970," I said.

"Then whom do you recommend in her place?" Tim asked. He waited expectantly.

"'In Janis Joplin's place,'" I said. "'In Janis Joplin's place.' I'll have to think that over. I really can't come up with a name off the top of my head. That will take some time."

Kirsten regarded me with a mixture of expressions. Mostly disapproval. "I think what she's trying to say," Kirsten said, "is that no one can or ever will take Joplin's place."

"Where would I get one of her records?" Tim said.

"At a record store," Jeff said.

"Would you do that for me?" his father said.

"Jeff and I have all her records," I said. "There aren't that many. We'll bring them over,"

"Ralph McTell," Kirsten said.

"I want all these suggestions written down," Tim said. "A rock mass at Grace Cathedral is going to attract a good deal of attention."

I thought: There is no such person as Ralph McTell. From across the room Kirsten smiled at me, a complicated smile. She had me; I couldn't be sure one way or another.

"He's on the Paramount label," Kirsten said. Her smile increased.

"I had really hoped to get Janis Joplin," Tim said, half to himself. He seemed puzzled. "They were playing a song with her—perhaps she didn't write it—on the car radio this morning. She's black, isn't she?"

"She is white," Jeff said, "and she is dead."

"I hope somebody is writing this down," Tim said.

My husband's emotional involvement with Kirsten Lundborg did not begin at one particular moment on a certain day, at least so far as I could discern. Initially, he maintained that Kirsten was good for the bishop; she had enough practical realism to keep both of them anchored, not floating endlessly upward. It is necessary, in evaluating these things, to distinguish your awareness from that of which you are aware. I can say when I noticed it but that is all I can say.

Considering her age, Kirsten still managed to emit tolerable amounts of sexually stimulating waves. That was how Jeff saw her. From my standpoint she remained an older female friend who now, by virtue of her relationship with Bishop Archer, outranked me. The degree of erotic provocativeness in a woman has no interest for me; I do not swing both ways, as the expression goes. Nor for me is it a threat. Until, of course, my own husband is involved. But the problem is with him, then.

While I worked at the law office and candle shop, seeing to it that drug dealers got out of trouble as fast as they got in, Jeff bothered his head with a series of extension courses at the University of California. We in Northern California had not quite reached the point of offering survey courses in how to compose your own mantras; that belonged to the Southland, totally despised by everyone in the Bay Area. Jeff had enrolled in a serious project: tracing the ills of modern Europe back to the Thirty Years War which had devastated Germany (circa 1648), caused the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and culminated in the rise of Nazism and Hitler's Third Reich. Above and beyond the courses pertaining to this, Jeff now advanced his own theory as to the root of it all. Upon reading Schiller's
Wallenstein Trilogy,
Jeff leaped to the intuitive insight that had the great general not gotten involved with astrology the imperial cause would have triumphed, and, as a result, World War Two would never have come into being.

The third play in Schiller's trilogy,
The Death of Wallenstein,
profoundly affected my husband. He regarded the play as equal to any of Shakespeare's and a whole lot better than most. Moreover, no one had read it—at least insofar as he could tell—except himself. To him, Wallenstein loomed as one of the ultimate enigmas of Western history. Jeff noted that Hitler, like Wallenstein, relied in times of crisis on the occult rather than on reason. In Jeff's view this all added up to something significant, but he could not fathom just what. Hitler and Wallenstein had had so many traits in common—Jeff maintained—that the resemblance bordered on the uncanny. Both were great but eccentric generals and both had utterly wrecked Germany. Jeff hoped to do a paper on the coincidences, extracting from the evidence the conclusion that the abandoning of Christianity for the occult opened the door to universal ruin. Jesus and Simon Magus (as Jeff saw it) stood as the bipolarities, absolute and distinct.

I couldn't have cared less.

You see, this is what going to school forever and ever does to you. While I slaved away at the law office and candle shop, Jeff read everything in the U.C. Berkeley Library on, for instance, the Battle of Lützen (November 16, 1632) at which time and place Wallenstein's fortunes were decided. Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden, died at Lützen, but the Swedes won anyhow. The real significance of this victory lay, of course, in the fact that at no time again would the Catholic powers be in a position to crush the Protestant cause. Jeff, however, viewed it all in terms of Wallenstein. He reread and reread Schiller's trilogy and tried to reconstruct from it—and from more accurate historical accounts—the precise moment when Wallenstein lost touch with reality.

"It's like with Hitler," Jeff said to me. "Can you say he was always crazy? Can you say he was crazy at all? And if he was crazy but not always crazy, when did he become crazy and what caused him to become crazy? Why should a successful man who holds really an enormous amount of power, a staggering amount of power, power to determine human history—why should he drift off like that? Okay; with Hitler it was probably paranoid schizophrenia and those injections that quack doctor was giving him. But neither factor was involved in Wallenstein's case."

Kirsten, being Norwegian, took a sympathetic interest in Jeff's preoccupation with Gustavus Adolphus' campaign into Central Europe. In between telling Swede jokes she revealed great pride in the role that the great Protestant King had played in the Thirty Years War. Also, she knew something about all this, which I did not. Both she and Jeff agreed that the Thirty Years War had been, up until World War One, the most dreadful war since the Huns sacked Rome. Germany had been reduced to cannibalism. Soldiers on both sides had regularly skewered bodies and roasted them. Jeff's reference books hinted at even more abominations too dreadful to detail. Everything connected with that period in time and place had been dreadful.

"We are still paying the price today," Jeff said, "for that war."

"Yeah, I guess it really was dreadful," I said, seated by myself in a corner of our living room reading a current issue of
Howard the Duck.

Jeff said, "I don't think you're particularly interested."

Glancing up, I said, "I get tired from bailing out heroin dealers. I'm always the one they send over to the bail bondsman. I'm sorry if I don't take the Thirty Years War as seriously as you and Kirsten do."

"Everything hinges on the Thirty Years War. And the Thirty Years War hinged on Wallenstein."

"What are you going to do when they go to England? Your father and Kirsten."

He stared at me.

"She's going, too. She told me. They've got that agency set up, Focus Center, where she's his agent or whatever."

"Jesus Christ," Jeff said bitterly.

I went back to reading
Howard the Duck.
It was the episode where space people turn Howard the Duck into Richard Nixon. Reciprocally, Richard Nixon grows feathers while addressing the nation on network TV. Likewise the top brass at the Pentagon.

"And they're going to be gone how long?" Jeff said.

"Until Tim figures out the meaning of the Zadokite Documents and how they pertain to Christianity."

"Shit," Jeff said.

"What's 'Q'?" I said.

"'Q,'" Jeff echoed.

"Tim said that preliminary reports, based on fragmentary translations of some documents—"

"'Q' is the hypothetical source for the Synoptics." His voice was brutal and rough.

"What are the Synoptics?"

"The first three Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke. They supposedly come from one source, probably Aramaic. Nobody's ever been able to prove it."

"Well," I said, "Tim told me on the phone the other night while you were in class that the translators in London think that the Zadokite Documents contain—not just Q—but the material Q is based on. They're not sure. Tim sounded more excited than I ever heard him sound before."

"But the Zadokite Documents date from two hundred years before Christ."

"That's probably why he was so excited."

Jeff said, "I want to go along."

"You can't," I said.

"Why not?" Raising his voice, he said, "Why don't I get to go if she gets to go? I'm his son!"

"He's straining the Bishop's Discretionary Fund as it is. They're going to be staying several months; it's going to cost a whole lot."

Jeff walked out of the living room. I continued reading. After a time, I realized I was hearing a strange sound; I lowered my copy of
Howard the Duck
and listened.

In the kitchen, in the darkness, by himself, my husband was crying.

One of the strangest and most perplexing accounts I ever read concerning my husband's suicide was that he, Jeff Archer, Bishop Timothy Archer's son, killed himself because he was afraid he was a homosexual. Some book written a number of years after his death—after all three of them had died—mangled the facts so thoroughly that, when you had finished reading it (I don't even remember the title or who wrote it) you knew less about Jeff and Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg than before you started. It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.

Jeff held two mutually exclusive views toward his father's mistress. On the one hand she sexually stimulated him, so he felt strongly but wickedly attracted to her. On the other hand he loathed her and hated her and resented her for—he supposed—replacing him in terms of Tim's interest and affections.

But it did not end even there ... although I didn't discern the rest until years had passed. Beyond and above being jealous of Kirsten, he was jealous of—well, Jeff had it all screwed up; I can't really untangle it. One has to bear in mind the special problems in being the son of a man whose picture has appeared on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
and who gets interviewed by David Frost, shows up on the Johnny Carson program, gets political cartoons in major newspapers devoted to him—what in Christ's name do
you
do, as the son?

For one week Jeff joined them in England, and regarding that week I know little; Jeff came back mute and withdrawn, and that was when he headed for the hotel room in which he shot himself in the face one late night. I am not going to go into my feelings about that as a way of killing yourself. It did bring the bishop back from London within a matter of hours, which, in a certain sense, the suicide was all about.

In a very real sense, it also had to do with Q, or rather the source of Q, now referred to in the newspaper articles as U.Q., which is
Ur-Quelle
in German: Original Source. Behind Q lay the
Ur-Quelle,
and this is what led Timothy Archer to London and several months in a hotel with his mistress, ostensibly his business agent and general secretary.

No one had ever expected the documents behind Q to reappear in the world; no one had known that U.Q. existed. Since I am not a Christian—and never will be, after the deaths of the people I loved—I am not now and was not then particularly interested, but I suppose it is theologically important, especially so inasmuch as the date assigned to U.Q. is two hundred years before the time of Jesus.

W
HAT I REMEMBER
most, in the first newspaper articles to come out, the first intimation we had, anybody beyond the translators had, that this was an even more important find than the Qumran scrolls, was (the articles said) a particular Hebrew noun. They spell it two different ways; sometimes it showed up as
anokhi
and sometimes
anochi.

The word shows up in Exodus, chapter twenty, verse two. This is a terribly moving and important section of the Torah, for here God Himself speaks, and he says:

"
I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
"

The first Hebrew word is
anokhi
or
anochi
and it means "I"—as in "I am the Lord thy God." Jeff showed me what the official Jewish commentary is on this part of the Torah:

"The God adored by Judaism is not an impersonal Force, an It, whether spoken of as 'Nature' or 'World-Reason.' The God of Israel is the Source not only of power and life, but of consciousness, personality, moral purpose and ethical action."

Even for me, a non-Christian—or I should say a non-Jew, I guess—this shakes me; I am touched and changed; I am not the same. What is expressed here, Jeff explained to me, is, in this single word, one letter of the English alphabet, the unique self-consciousness of God: