Adrift in the Noösphere (24 page)

“No meaning? Not exactly,” he said. “Look, Flake—hey, you don't mind me calling you that, do you?”

I smiled primly. “Not so long as you share
that
flake with me.”

He tore me off a hot fat piece of fish, wrapped one end in a double thickness of paper to save my fingers, and passed it over.

“All right, Flake, can you sit still for my two minute lecture on the meaning of meaning?”

I shrugged, nibbling shark. It was sweet and delicious.

“Okay, the starting point is that everyone gets everything arse backwards because they're always facing the wrong way. I mean the philosophers, the theologians, the anthropocists, the fucking quantum holists, everyone except for a handful of old-fashioned semioticians. And even they squibbed when it came to the jump.”

“Oh dear.” I pushed back the brim of my hat and gazed across the Pacific ocean. Sea gulls circled, trying to snatch our fries. “Sorry, this reminds me of Valentine and the great truth of Harmonic Resonance.” The comparison, risen unbidden, made me shudder. Deems watched me. He did not put his arm around me, which was wise at that moment.

“Yes,” he said, “we all think we're the first and only ones to understand the secret of the universe. I was always suspicious of people who thought they knew it all. I loved to take the mickey out of the bastards.” He sighed. “I'd still be running about like a perpetual adolescent if the Harvesters hadn't told me what's what.”

“And what
is
what?”

A lolloping dog ran past, spraying us with sand. I threw him a cooling chip, and he missed it. What was his notion of the good life? This, surely. And what did his doggy mind imagine was the meaning of the world? But we were not doggies. We made our own chips and beer and polluted our own beaches and cleaned them up if we felt like it.

“Look at the words we use when we ask the most poignant questions, Flake,” my father said. “When your mother abducted you and ran off to the States, I raved and flailed and ranted.
Why
? I screamed. Why did this happen to me? I flew to America and tried to find you, and nobody would tell me, and then the fucking guru went to ground with all his witless devotees, taking you and your mother with him, and I had to come back to Australia, and then I was snatched for three weeks by the Harvesters— Christ, it sounds like a bloody soap opera! Well, I ranted and flailed, when they brought me back, and spent a lot of time screaming,
Why
? And when your mother was killed and they told you she'd died in a car crash, you probably ran about asking Why, why, why?”

“I was five years old,” I told Deems. “Of course I did.”

“Okay, what's the common element here? Three different strokes of ill fortune, and we keeping asking Why? But that's a question that is only appropriately addressed to an intention. Do you see what I mean? Why had Margaret stolen you to America? I've thought about this a lot, Angel—”

“Rosa,” I said.

He gulped, and his eyes misted.

“Rosa, I was a typical male of my era. Well, not typical, but even so. And your mother was a confused but strong woman, and she wasn't going to put up with my bullshit. Of course she had to go away. It wasn't me, precisely—it was all of us, our stupid culture, the way we find meaning in attachment to our kids.... She thought Zelda and I were stealing you away from her, and she was probably right.”

“I don't even remember Zelda,” I said in a grainy tone.

“You'll meet her tonight, she's looking forward enormously to seeing you. But the point is, I wasn't asking for those sorts of answers. I wanted to know Why is the universe doing this to me? Why has the plan of my life—the central plan of the universe, after all—why has it gone so unfairly off the rails? I'm the hero of this fucking movie, right? How dare the extras screw with my happy ending?”

“I suppose we all put ourself in the main role,” I conceded, because that's what he wanted me to agree to. But I didn't, not really. My response to disappointment and pain and, indeed, intolerable torment had been to shrink myself, to split my soul into the colors of the rainbow and hide most of the hues in darkness. That's why I've been able to construct this history of my father and my mother and myself, don't you see? I'm the perfect biographer. I have no self. I'm anyone's. I'm anyone.

“Actors spend a lot of time obsessing about Why questions,” Deems said. “Motivation. ‘What's my character's motivation?' They're looking for a few simple codes, cues to the impulses and behavioral channels of the personality they're about to impersonate. And it's not so strange or hard to do that, because evolution built our brains to perform exactly that function. It's why people love stories.”

“We've evolved to be actors?” I stared at him. “I think you've been living in Los Angeles too long.”

Deems laughed gustily. “You're Margaret's daughter all right.” We both stared at the horizon for a time. “If you're a horse,” he said then, patiently, “your DNA built you to graze in a herd, and avoid lions. If you're a lion, your DNA built you to hunt horses in the company of a small squadron of other lions. In both cases, you need an internal model of social life—your own, and your prey's or predator's. When a horse sees the grass sway, it's a considerable benefit if she asks herself horsily, Why did that happen? What's its meaning? Lion or wind? Sniff sniff. Freak, shit, Lion! Lion! Meaning starts by interpreting as deliberate codes the lumpy happenstances of the world.”

I mused on this. “It's the other way round, isn't it? We interpret the meaning that's there. I mean, if a Chinese translator interprets my words from English, she's got to start by understanding my meaning and sort of...carry it over to the other language?”

“Okay, both processes entail each other. The grass means food to our horsie, and its motion might mean danger, because our horsie means food to the lions. So the nutritive values and the possibility of lions are both there in the grass, I guess, before any act of interpretation takes place. But you can't say they have any meaning, in that exact sense, unless the horse is there to start with. Meaning is not pre-existent; it emerges.”

Some Aussie bravos were taking to the frothy water in gaudy wetsuits, clambering on to windsurfers. We watched their antics. Their play was as meaningless, as arbitrary, as open to an inpouring of significance as a whale sounding, as the Budd Hopkins Guardians on my father's Los Angeles' walls. For the surfers, its meaning was the joy of sinew and muscle and eye doing their stuff, the body's balance sustained against the chaotic turbulence of the sea. I sighed.

“I mentioned two other cases,” Deems said. “My three-week abduction, and your mother's death. Why did they happen? What was the meaning?”

I sent him a sidelong glance. “Well, I don't even know if it did happen. Your disappearance. Sorry.”

He gazed back without expression. “It doesn't matter, you see. Call it a metaphor, if you like.”

I was relieved. “All right.”

“The answer is, there is no meaning to either event—in the usual, human-centered sense. Something happens, okay. A tree falls over in the forest. All sorts of factors led up to that event—the rain has weakened the soil, the tree's DNA program has closed down its growth cycle so it's gone rotten inside, the wind has picked up because of the accidental arrangement of snow and cloud halfway around the world. So it's all explicable, down to the level of atoms if you had time enough to track it all. But it's not part of any plan. And if you happen to be walking under the tree at that moment and it squashes you flat, all we can say is—‘shit happens'.”

“Or: don't walk under trees. That might be one meaning.”

“A meaning we read into the sad event, sure. We don't draw it out, we put it in. That's what our brains are good at—making up stories, scripts, schemata. The cognitive scientists have a whole batch of words for this stuff. All of it boils down to one hard fact: we love to write the universe into a text, and then to interpret it as if someone else had written it. That's okay. Horses do it, lions do it, the birds and bees do it.” He grinned wickedly. “It's only when we start to fetishize our little knack that it goes crazy and cancerous and eats us up from the inside. We start
looking
for meaning everywhere, forgetting that
we're
the ones who
put
it there.”

It was getting chilly, and I felt sorry for those guys out there on their windsurfers. But then nobody was forcing them to do it. We stood up and stretched, shook sand off the blanket by holding one corner of it each, handed the folded bundle to one of Daimon's patient bodyguards who took it back to the car. In the froth at the edge of the sea I noticed two or three limp, diaphanous jellyfish. I bent down to stir them with my finger, and drew back in disgust. They were condoms, washing about in the sandy foam.

“Daimon, this sounds like the crappy New Age solipsism I grew up with. ‘You create your own universe.' I'm sorry, but that's the worst kind of hypocrisy.”

“No, no,” my father said placidly, placing his big-toed feet carefully in someone else's line of footsteps in the sand. He had to hop a little. “All we create is our own meaning. The world, other people, our own inaccessible inward systems—all of that provides the building materials, and the landscape for the architect to work in. But the meaning we end up with is a construct of our minds. It has no necessary connection to the actual priorities of the universe.”

“Which are?”

He laughed softly. “Which have nothing to do with us, I'm sorry to say.”

“With us human beings? Benjamin said you don't believe people have souls. Is that what he meant?”

“We
produce
souls,” my father said. “Cows produce methane when they fart, and destroy the ozone layer. Radioactive decay deep inside the Earth produces thermal plumes that cause volcanoes. We produce fetuses with souls. If they're lucky, they die in time. Or the gray doctors come down and harvest them.”

I heard all this with the greatest disquiet, understanding none of it yet. It was too soon, and luckily Deems changed the topic to my own life, the confused and miserable tale of my tragical history with and without my mother.

xii.

Later we drove up to the great house when Zelda lived, and I met the rest of my family. My step-mother looked pretty good for a woman nearing seventy. They gave me a fine guest room overlooking the sea, and I slept with the window open for the first time in years. Waves hushed at the foot of the cliff. I dreamed of condoms, and small things squirming, and woke screaming in the strange space of the room.

xiii.

A month later, Deems had vanished again. He hasn't come back. His devotees assure me that he has been taken to some finer realm—Mars, perhaps, where he thought his visage had been shaped like an icon gazing at the stars, or the center of the Earth, or to some alternative dimension. How can I know what to believe? Does it matter? There is no text of the universe outside our inscription of its glyphs, and no meaning beyond our free interpretation. My father, true to his own analysis, or perhaps flying in its face, affected to despise biographies, to detest movies and novels and stories of every kind. “Fiction is the gossip of those who don't get out much, Rosa,” he told me, a week before he disappeared, “purveyed by those who don't get out at all.” Whether or not we have souls and an afterlife is the kind of question, perhaps the kind of fiction, one should abandon at the departure lounge into adulthood, I now see. I live a quiet life of satisfactory despair. Sometimes I dream of my mother, but just as often I confuse her with Katie, recalling only Mom's heavy Southern drawl. Zelda and I run the household, hardly an arduous duty, waiting for Daimon's return, and the Scionetics heavies grow more bizarre with each year but dutifully top up our swollen bank accounts. Benjamin and I have two healthy babies. Neither of them, to the best of our knowledge, has been abducted by the Harvesters. I float in the huge tub, scrubbing at my pale flesh, and dream of great dark eyes in pale swollen skulls, and tell myself again and again the story of Deems and Margaret and my beloved Benjamin and all the sweet burdens of time.

xiv.

The Starseed Signals received by Dr. Leary and Wayne Benner in Folsom Prison, in July-August, 1973, tell us that it is time for “life on Earth to leave the planetary womb and learn to walk through the stars.” Life on this planet is now at the halfway point, having produced “nervous systems capable of communicating with and returning to the Galactic Network” where our Interstellar Parents await us. Mankind is about to discover “the key to immortality in the chemical structure of the genetic code.. the scripture of life.” At this time, the signals invite us, the “voyage home is possible.... Mutate! Come home in glory.”

Brad Steiger,
The Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the

Transformation of Man
, 1976

He hovers, curled in upon himself like a great balding, wrinkled fetus. It's the usual hazy nowhere under pale ribbed metal. Cupped by buoyancy, rocking airborne above dull convexity, he dreams his lucid dreams. All the cycles of metabolism flow as before, his chest expands and contracts in the mechanical bellows of breath. At the edge of awareness, hiding or at least refusing to disclose themselves there in the shadows, the gray Harvesters peer with their unblinking gaze. All about and through him is the humming rapid motion of a billion molecular probes at his trillion synapses. Without waking, without sleeping, he is aware of this prosaic violation.

“Take me back,” he tells them through lips too heavy to open. His voice is blurred and hopelessly distorted, lost in the anechoic void, but he knows that they hear him by other than vocal means.

Klar-2 speaks to him through dark wraparound eyes. You must stay with us this time. We will take you to a city all of gold, where the leaves of the tree are for the healing of all nations.