Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (12 page)

He had come into the house one day and the downstairs apartment door had been open. Somebody might have just run out. In the back of the hall—in full view though, not under the stairs—were two figures tangled up with each other. Rex and Calla. The girl was in a long skirt as usual and she seemed to be down on all fours, squawking and struggling as if she had been pushed. The skirt was thrown up over her head, she was half trapped and muffled in its cloth. Mr. Lougheed saw no more than a crescent of spongy flesh, her hindquarters, and that quickly covered by the boy, mounting. Awareness of Mr. Lougheed's presence was presumably what caused him to let out a yap—of glee as well as amazement—and to fall forward so that both he and the girl collapsed, their essential connection probably broken for the time being; their voices joined, however, in laughter that seemed to Mr. Lougheed not only unashamed but full of derision. He was apparently the one to be laughed at, for having witnessed, for being shocked at, their copulation.

He was not shocked, he wished to tell them. When a boy going to school, to what was called the Stone School on the Fifth Line of Killop Township, he had been part of the paying audience of a show put on by one of the Brewer boys and his younger sister. It took place in the entryway to the
boys' toilet, a foul place. It was not simulated. Nobody needed to think they had invented this business.

But if not shocked, what was he? His heart pounded, he felt a gloomy congestion in his head. In his own room, he had to sit down. Their laughter would be heard by him for some time. He imagined their hairy parts driving together, with independent swollen ferocity and squashing noises, ending in that laughter. Like animals. No, he took that back. Animals went about their business without calling attention to it, and with gravity. What he objected to, he had said to Eugene, what he objected to in this generation, if that was what it was, was that they could not do a thing without showing off. Why all this yawping about everything, he asked. They could not grow a carrot without congratulating themselves on it.

For example. There was a little store on the way downtown that he had got into the habit of visiting because he liked the sight of the bins along the sidewalk, filled with lumpy vegetables with a bit of the dirt still clinging to them. These reminded him of the vegetables in the stores when he was a child, and in the cellar of his own house. But the young people in the store, with their long wild hair and Indian headbands and their costumes of striped overalls and underwear with holes (what was that but a costume? No farmer in his right mind, no matter how poor, would appear in town in such a get-up), and their lilting, pious discussions of gardening and food, had disturbed him so much that he had stopped going in. They took too much praise on themselves. Bread had been baked before, turnips had been harvested before. This was artificial, in some way it was more artificial than the supermarkets.

“I think they're more boring than artificial,” Eugene said reasonably. “Like early Christians. They would have been boring.”

“They won't last. Their farming will fail.”

“Possibly. But some people build their practical lives on a philosophy and are very successful. Hutterites. Mennonites.”

“They have a different mentality,” said Mr. Lougheed. He was not unaware of how he sounded—stubborn, querulous, old.

Now, when Eugene came all the way out of his meditating he stood up and stretched himself and asked if Mr. Lougheed would like some tea. Mr. Lougheed said yes. Eugene plugged in the electric kettle and moved about the room tidying things up. His room was neatly kept. He slept on a mattress on the floor, but he put sheets on it and the sheets were clean, he took them to the laundromat. His books were on plank-and-brick shelves or stacked on the floor and windowsills. He had hundreds of books, nearly all paperbacks, they were the chief thing in the room. Mr. Lougheed often gazed at their titles, with a sense of awe and futility.
From Heidegger to Kant
. He knew who Kant was of course though he had never read anything by him, only about him in
The Story of Philosophy
. He might once have known who Heidegger was but he didn't know now. He had not gone to college. In his day you did not have to go to college to become a druggist, you just had to serve an apprenticeship, as he had done with his uncle. But later on he had gone through a period of serious reading. Nothing like this, though. He knew enough to recognize the names, that was all. Meister Eckhart. Simon Weil. Teilhard de Chardin. Loren Eiseley. Respected names. Luminous names. And the thing was that Eugene had not just collected these books, planning to read through them all someday. No. He had read them. Eugene had read virtually everything there was to read on these most important, these most demanding subjects. Philosophy. Religion. Mysticism. Psychology. Science. Eugene was twenty-eight years old and it was safe to say that he had spent the last twenty years of his life reading. He had degrees. He had won scholarships and prizes. All of which he
scorned, or at least dismissed, with a kind of apology. He had done little spates of teaching, but no other steady work, it seemed. At some point there had been a breakdown, a lengthy crisis from which he still, perhaps, believed himself to be recovering. Yes, he had the air of someone who gauges and guards his convalescence. He was deliberate, even in his supple movements, his light-heartedness. He wore his hair like a medieval page boy's. His hair and his eyes shone, soft and foxy, reddish brown. He had a little mustache, which did not help him look his age.

“I heard this business about the walking on water,” said Mr. Lougheed, attempting to take a jocular tone.

“Honey?” said Eugene, and slid a large dollop of it into Mr. Lougheed's tea.

Mr. Lougheed, who liked his tea without sweetening, absently accepted a spoon.

“I didn't credit it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Eugene.

“I said you wouldn't be that big a fool.”

“You were wrong.”

Both were smiling. Mr. Lougheed's smile was thin but hopeful, tactical. Eugene's was frank and kind. And yet—what was that frankness? It was not natural, it was achieved. Eugene, who knew about military history and mysticism and astronomy and biology, who could discuss Indian art (either Indians) or the art of poisoning, who could have made a fortune in the days of quiz shows as Mr. Lougheed had once said to him (Eugene laughing and saying thank God for the good of his soul such days were past)—Eugene in all the ordinary movements and exchanges of life was an achievement, in the face of something he did not mention. His breakdown? His bursting knowledge? His understanding?

“Well I don't know if I took this up wrong,” Mr. Lougheed said. “I understood the proposition was walking on water.”

“That's it.”

“And what is the purpose of this?”

“The purpose is walking on water. If that is possible. Do you think it is?”

For that Mr. Lougheed could not find an answer.

“It's some kind of joke?”

“It could be,” said Eugene, and still so brightly. “A serious kind of joke.”

Mr. Lougheed's eyes had strayed to a shelf of another kind of books Eugene read, which did not seem to him to tie in too readily with the first kind. These books were by and about people who made prophecies, they were about astral bodies and psychic experiences and supernatural powers and every kind of hoax or magic, if that was what you wanted to call it. Mr. Lougheed had even borrowed some of these books, as he did others, from Eugene, but he was not able to read them. Incredulity clogged his brain. Using a word out of his own youth, he told Eugene that all this had him stumped. He could not believe Eugene took it seriously, even when he heard Eugene say so.

A little while after the incident in the downstairs hall Mr. Lougheed had come home one day and found a sign painted on his door. It was something like a flower, with thin red petals, inexpertly painted, and black petals in between, tapering the wrong way. A red circle in the middle and a black circle, black hole, inside that. He touched the paint and found that it was wet, but not very wet, they had paints nowadays that dried in no time. He called Eugene out to take a look at it.

“That's nothing,” Eugene said. “At least it's nothing to worry about. I don't recognize it. It's just something they made up.”

Mr. Lougheed was a minute or two picking up the meaning of this.

“It's not a sign,” Eugene said.

“Sign,” said Mr. Lougheed.

“Like a spell. There's a difference between this and a real sign, just as there would be a difference between a piece of gibberish and a real spell, though they might sound equally like gibberish to the uninitiated.”

“I wasn't worried about it being a—sign,” said Mr. Lougheed, collecting himself. “Is that what you mean, some kind of magic sign? I was worried about them defacing my door. They have no business being up here and no business painting on my door.”

“Well I guess they thought it was a joke. Or they might have done it on a dare. They're very childish—Rex and Calla are incredibly childish. Rover only looks childish, he is something of a mystery. He may have an old soul.”

Mr. Lougheed was not interested in the age of Rover's soul. He was interested in, dumbfounded by, the possibility that such a thing, a sign on a door, could have real meaning for someone who was not a total fool. “Do you,” he said in a voice of irrepressible intense curiosity, “would you, be alarmed by a sign on your door? Would you believe that such a thing could have a real effect?”

“Absolutely.”

“That is almost impossible for me to believe,” said Mr. Lougheed. He thought, sighed, and said more firmly, “That is impossible for me to believe.”

“Impasse,” said Eugene agreeably.

Mr. Lougheed thought that he should have realized then, he should have realized the extent of this kind of thinking, and he would not be taken aback now.

“The world that we accept—you know, external reality,” Eugene was saying comfortably, “is nothing like so fixed as we have been led to believe. It responds to more methods of control than we are conditioned to accept.” When expounding something to Mr. Lougheed he was apt to talk in these eager and modulated sentences. When he talked to the trio downstairs he used a language sufficiently broken, tranced, and vague to communicate with them, apparently,
on something close to their own level. “Its so-called laws are not final. The law you are thinking of says that a body like this”—he tapped Mr. Lougheed's shoulder—“cannot move on top of water because it cannot attain weightlessness.”

Still it could be a joke.

“You believe that certain people have walked on hot coals and not received any burns on their skin?”

“I've read about it.”

“It's commonplace. You've seen pictures? You believe it?”

“It looks like it.”

“But their feet are made of flesh and covered with skin which according to all we know should burn? Now doesn't it seem that we have to admit that the mind can work in some way to control matter to the extent that some laws no longer apply?”

“I'd like to see it control the law of gravity.”

“It has. It has. People have been able to rise by their own will several inches off the ground.”

“Until I see with my own eyes that wastepaper basket rise and float over my head,” said Mr. Lougheed with absolute conviction—though trying to stay good-humored—“I will believe nothing of the kind.”

“Road to Emmaus,” said Eugene.

He even knew the Bible. He was the only person under forty that Mr. Lougheed had come across who did. Not counting Jehovah's Witnesses.

“A wastepaper basket cannot control its own being, it cannot utilize energy. However if a person capable of utilizing a certain kind of energy were sitting where you are now—”

He went on to talk about a woman in Russia who could pull heavy furniture across the room without bothering to touch it. The power was in her solar plexus, she said.

“But what makes you think,” said Mr. Lougheed,
“that you have these powers? That you can utilize energy or stop the flow of gravity or whatever?”

“If I could stop anything it would be for the minutest space of time. Seconds only. I am nothing but a neophyte. But it would be enough to make people think. Also I am interested in leaving the body. I have never been able to leave this body.”

“You have to make sure you can get back in.”

“People can. People have. Someday it may be something we learn, just like skating. Now suppose I step out on the water and my apparent body—
this
body—sinks down like a stone, there is a possibility that my
other
body will rise, and I will be able to look down into the water and watch myself.”

“Watch yourself drown,” said Mr. Lougheed. Eugene laughed, but not quite reassuringly.

The thing Mr. Lougheed wanted to know was, what was behind this? Something was behind it, some game or mockery he did not grasp. If Calla or Rex had talked like this—assuming they could talk, at such length—he would have suspected nothing. With Eugene simple-mindedness had to be a trick, and if it had really taken hold it was somehow even more of a trick.

“So the purpose of this is to give people a jolt, so to speak? To make them doubt their senses?”

“It might do that.”

“How did you get yourself into it?”

“It did start almost as a joke. I was talking to those two ladies—you know, the sisters—the blind one and the other one, I don't know their names—”

“I know which ones.”

Eugene would chat with old people, he was a favorite with them; they saw him as a gentle ambassador from the terrible land of youth.

“We were discussing things like this and I said it was
a possibility. It has been done, in fact, walking on water. Recently, I mean. They said would I be willing to try it myself and I said yes.”