The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (27 page)

Through the winter, no matter the weather, Malthusian walked. I remember watching him struggle along through a snowstorm one afternoon, dressed in a black overcoat and black Tyrolean hat, bent more from some invisible weight than a failure of his frame. It struck me then that I had never seen him on his return journey. The trails through the woods went on for miles, and I was unaware of one that might bring him around to his house from the other end of the block.

I introduced him to Susan, my wife, and to my daughter Lyda. There, at the curb, he kissed both their hands, or tried to. When Lyda pulled her hand back at his approach, he laughed so, that I thought he would explode. Susan found him charming, but asked me later, “What the hell was he saying?”

The next day he brought a bouquet of violets for her; and for Lyda, because she had shown him her drawing pad, he left a drawing he had done, rolled up and tied with a green ribbon. After dinner, she opened it and smiled. “A monster,” she said. It was a beautifully rendered charcoal portrait of an otherwise normal middle-aged man, wearing an unnerving look of total blankness. The eyes were heavy lidded and so realistically glassy, the attitude of the body so slack, that the figure exuded a palpable sense of emptiness. At the bottom of the page in a fine calligraphic style were written the words
Malthusian's Zombie
.

“I told him I liked monsters,” said Lyda.

“Why is that a monster?” asked Susan, who I could tell was a little put off by the eerie nature of the drawing. “It looks more like a college professor on sabbatical.”

“He thinks nothing,” said Lyda, and with her pinky finger pointed to the zombie's head. She had me tack the drawing to the back of her door, so that it faced the wall unless she wanted to look at it. For the next few weeks, she drew zombies of her own. Some wore little hats, some bow ties, but all of them, no matter how huge and vacant the eyes, wore mischievous grins.

In early spring, Malthusian invited me to his house one evening to play a game of chess. The evening air was still quite cool, but the scent of the breeze carried the promise of things green. His house, which sat on the corner lot, was enormous, by far the largest in the neighborhood. The lot encompassed three acres of woods, which, at the very back, touched upon a lake that belonged to the adjacent town.

Malthusian was obviously not much for yard work or home repair—the very measure of a man in this part of the world. A tree had cracked and fallen during the winter and it still lay partially obstructing the driveway. The three-story structure and its four tall columns in front needed paint; certain porch planks had succumbed to dry rot and its many windows were streaked and smudged. The fact that he took no initiative to rectify these problems made him yet more likable to me.

He met me at the door and ushered me into his home. I had visions of the place being like a dim, candlelit museum of artifacts as odd as their owner, and had hoped to decipher Malthusian's true character from them as if they were clues in a mystery novel. There was nothing of the sort. The place was well lit and tastefully, though modestly, decorated.

“I hope you like merlot,” he said as he led me down an oak-paneled hallway toward the kitchen.

“Yes,” I said.

“It's good for the heart,” he said, and laughed.

The walls I passed were lined with photographs of Malthusian with different people. He moved quickly and I did not linger out of politeness, but I thought I saw one of him as a child, and more than one of him posing with various military personnel. If I wasn't mistaken, I could have sworn I had caught the face of an ex-president in one of the photos.

The kitchen was old linoleum in black-and-white checkerboard design, brightly lit by overhead fluorescent lights. Setting on a table in the center of the large expanse were a chessboard, a magnum of dark wine, two fine crystal goblets, and a thin silver box. He took a seat on one side of the table and extended his hand to indicate I was to sit across from him. He methodically poured wine for both of us, opened the box, retrieved a cigarette, lit it, puffed once, and then led with his knight.

“I'm not very good,” I said, as I countered with my opposite knight.

He waved his hand in the air, flicked ash onto the floor, and said, “Let's not let it ruin our game.”

We played in silence for some time and then I asked him something that had been on my mind since he had first disclosed his profession to me. “And what type of psychologist were you? Jungian? Freudian?”

“Neither,” he said. “Those are for children. I was a rat shocker. I made dogs drool.”

“Behaviorist?” I asked.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he said with a laugh.

“I teach the Puritans with the same method,” I said and this made him laugh louder. He loosened his ever-present string tie and cocked his glasses up before plunging through my pitiful pawn defense with his bishop.

“I couldn't help but notice those photos in the hall,” I said. “Were you in the army?”

“Please, no insults,” he said. “I worked for the U.S. government.”

“What branch?” I asked.

“One of the more shadowed entities,” he said. “It was necessary in order to bring my mother and father and sister to this country.”

“From where?” I asked.

“The old country.”

“Which one is that?”

“It no longer exists. You know, like in a fairy tale, it has disappeared through geopolitical enchantment.” With this he checked me by way of a pawn/castle combination.

“Your sister?” I asked.

“She was much like your girl, Lyda. Beautiful and brilliant and what an artist.”

As with the game, he took control of the conversation from here on out, directing me to divulge the history of my schooling, my marriage, the birth of our daughter, the nature of our household.

It was a gentle interrogation, the wine making me nostalgic. I told him everything and he seemed to take the greatest pleasure in it, nodding his head at my declaration of love for my wife, laughing at all of Lyda's antics I could remember, and I remembered all of them. Before I knew it, we had played three games, and I was as lit as a stick of kindling. He led me down the hallway to the front door.

As if from thin air, he produced a box of chocolates for my wife. “For the lady,” he said. Then he placed in my hand another larger box. Through bleary eyes, I looked down and saw the image of Rat Fink, the pot-bellied, deviant rodent who had been a drag-racing mascot in the late sixties.

“It's a model,” he told me. “Help the girl make it, she will enjoy this monster.”

I smiled in recognition of the figure I had not seen since my teens.

“Big Daddy Roth,” he said, and with this eased me out the door and gently closed it behind me.

Although I had as my mission to uncover the mystery of Malthusian, my visit had made him more of an enigma. I visited him twice more to play chess, and on each of these occasions, the scenario was much the same. The only incident that verged on revelation was when Lyda and I constructed the model and painted it. “Rat shocker,” I remembered him telling me. I had a momentary episode in which I envisioned myself salivating at the sound of a bell.

On the day that Lyda brought me spring's first crocus, a pale violet specimen with an orange mouth, Malthusian was taken away in an ambulance. I was very worried about him and enlisted Susan, since she was a nurse practitioner, to use her connections in the hospitals to find out where he was. She spent the better part of her Friday evening making calls but came up with nothing.

2

Days passed, and I began to think that Malthusian might have died. Then, a week to the day after the ambulance had come for him, I found a note in my mailbox. All it said was
Chess Tonight
.

I waited for the appointed hour, and after Susan had given me a list of things to ask about the old man's condition, and Lyda, a get-well drawing of a dancing zombie, I set out for the house on the corner.

He did not answer the door, so I opened it and called inside, “Hello?”

“Come,” he called from back in the kitchen.

I took the hallway and found him sitting at the chess table. The wine was there, and the cigarette case, but there was no board.

“What happened?” I said when I saw him.

Malthusian looked yet more wrinkled and stooped, sitting in his chair like a sack of old clothes. His white hair had thinned considerably and turned a pale shade of yellow. In his hands he clutched his cane, which I had never seen him use before while in his house, and that childish grin, between malevolence and innocence, had been replaced by the ill, forced smile of Rat Fink.

“No chess?” I asked, as a way of masking my concern.

“A game of a different order tonight,” he said, and sighed.

I was about to ask again what had happened, but he said, “Drink a glass of wine and then you will listen.”

We sat in silence as I poured and drank. I had never noticed before but the blindfold on the ivory woman's head did not completely cover her left eye. She half stared at me as I did what I was told. When the glass was empty and I had poured another, he looked up and said, “Now, you must listen carefully. I give you my confession and the last wish of a dying man.”

I wanted to object but he brought the cane to his lips in order to silence me.

“In 1969, September, I was attending a conference of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. A professor from Princeton, one Julian Jaynes, gave a lecture there. Have you heard of him?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Now you will,” he said. “The outrageous title of his address was ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.' Just the name of it led many to think it was pure snake oil. When Professor Jaynes began to explain his theory, the audience was sure of it. Individual consciousness as we know it today, he said, is a very recent development in the history of mankind. Before that, like schizophrenics, human beings listened to a voice that came from within their own heads and from this took their cues. These were post-ice-age hunter-gatherers for whom it was important to think with a single mind. They heard the voice of some venerable elder of their tribe who had since, perhaps, passed on. This was the much touted ‘voice of God.' Individual ego was virtually nonexistent.”

“You mean,” I said, “when the ancients refer to the word of the Lord, they were not speaking figuratively?”

“Yes, you follow,” he said and smiled, lifting the wineglass to his lips with a trembling hand. “I could tell you that this phenomenon had to do with the right hemispherical language center of the brain and a particular zone called Wernicke's area. When this area was stimulated in modern laboratory experiments, the subjects very often heard authoritarian voices that either admonished or commanded. But they were very distant voices. The reason, Jaynes believed, was that these auditory hallucinations were traveling from the right hemisphere to the left, not through the corpus callosum—the, shall we call it, bridge that joins the hemispheres—but rather through another passageway, the anterior commissure.”

“I'm hanging on by a thread, now,” I said.

Malthusian did not acknowledge my joke, but closed his eyes momentarily and pressed on as if it would all soon become clear.

“Whereas Jaynes gives many explanations for the growing faintness of the voice of God—genocide, natural upheavals, parental selection, environmental demands requiring the wonderful plasticity of the human brain to enact these changes—my fellow researchers and I believed that the muting of the voice was a result of the rapid shrinking of the anterior commissure to its present state of no more than one-eighth of an inch across. This, we believed, was the physiological change that fractured the group mind into individual consciousness. ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?' You see? There is much more, but that is the crux.”

“The survival of human beings depended upon this change?” I asked.

“The complexity of civilization required diversification.”

“Interesting,” was all I could manage.

“As I said,” Malthusian went on, “very few took Jaynes seriously, but I did. His ideas were revolutionary, but they were not unfounded.” Here, he took a cigarette from the silver case and lit it.

“Is that smart,” I asked, nodding at the cigarette, “considering your health?”

“I have been conditioned by Philip Morris,” he said with a smile.

“This theory is only the beginning, I can tell,” I said.

“Very good, professor,” he whispered. “As Farid Ud-Din Attar might have written: if this tale I am about to tell you were inscribed with needles upon the corner of the eye, it would still serve as a lesson to the circumspect.”

He lifted the bottle of wine and poured me another glass. “To begin with, if you tell anyone what I am about to tell you, you will be putting your family and yourself in great jeopardy. Understood?”

I thought momentarily of Malthusian's photos with all those military personnel and his telling me that he had been employed by one of the more shadowed entities of the government. A grim silence filled the room as those huge eyes of his focused on mine. I thought of leaving, but instead I slowly nodded.

“I was part of a secret government project called Dumbwaiter. The title might have been humorous if not for the heinous nature of the work we were doing. As psychologists, we were assigned the task of creating dedicated assassins, men devoid of personal volition, who would do anything—
anything
—that they were ordered to do. Mind control, it is sometimes called. The CIA had, for a short period, thought that the drug LSD might be useful in this pursuit, but instead of creating drones they spread cosmic consciousness. Once this failed, the behaviorists were called in.

“My lab was situated in a large, old Victorian house out in the woods. No one would have suspected that some bizarre Cold War experiment was taking place in its basement. I had two partners and, working off Jaynes's theory, through surgery and the implanting of pig arteries and chimpanzee neurons, we widened and filled the anterior commissure in a test subject's brain in order to increase the volume of the auditory hallucination. Through conditioning, my voice became the voice of God for our subject. I was always in his head. One verbal command from me and my order would remain with him, inside his mind, until the task was completed.”