The Man in the Tree (28 page)

Anderson paused to listen. Linck's group included one of the insurance
people, the publisher Orris Kilian and his wife, and a man whose name
he had forgotten -- one of the subcontractors, probably. The publisher's
wife was saying something about the mystery of folk tales. Linck answered,
"I think what you feel when you say a story like that is mysterious is
that there's another story behind it. For instance, 'Beauty and the
Beast.' That is mysterious, because it is covering up another story,
the Amor and Psyche myth, and that one is mysterious too, perhaps,
because it's covering up still another story that we don't know about."
"Who was the man who made that movie of 'Beauty and the Beast'?" the
publisher asked.
"Cocteau."
"Cocteau, right. Wasn't he a fag? Why do you suppose so many -- "
Anderson' moved on. He knew the question and the answer already. He
walked through the garden, past a man and a woman seriously engaged in
kissing; he let himself into the dark workshop, out again at the back,
and began to climb the hill. Behind him the house spilled its yellow
lights out over the garden and the lawn: it was like someone else's
house, in another country. The trees closed around him with their cool
breath. He climbed as far as the footbridge, crossed it, and sat down
on the far side, looking at the stars.
He remembered nights in the South Pacific when there had been, incredibly,
more stars than this. It was really better to be on the ocean, he and
Pongo the only sparks of human life in the great vacancy; then you saw
the world clearly and knew just how large it was. But even here, knowing
that St. Petersburg and the beaches were only ten miles away, it was good
to look up at the night sky and feel the great globe massively turning
under his body. The earth turned under the stars, and as it turned the
little sparks that were human souls dimmed and brightened, like candles
lighted and snuffed, endlessly, over and over, around the turning world.
If it was true, as the physicists seemed to be saying, that consciousness
did not merely observe reality but helped to create it, then perhaps
science was an impiety, and the original sin might have been, not eating
the fruit of the tree, but cutting it down -- forcing God to disclose
the structure of the rings which until then had not existed.
And if Western civilization were to be destroyed, if all that knowledge
were lost in the cataclysm that was surely coming, would the universe
then revert to a simpler model? The sky a crystal hemisphere over a flat
earth? Sometimes he felt he could almost believe it. What if it were
only human knowledge and belief that held the whole fabric together:
with that gone, would time unroll again to the beginning? Would God walk
again in the garden, in the cool of the evening?
It is a little after two o'clock. Pongo is in his living room, watched
by the marmoset as he turns the pages of a bikers' magazine. Here is
a photograph of a man with the usual beard and tattoos straddling a
Harley-Davidson; swastikas and silver dollars are sewn to his black
leather vest. Behind him stand two long-haired young women, bare to the
belly. All three are smiling. The two women have big fruity breasts,
pale and soft in the sunlight. The message seems to be that if you
are a real man, you will wear black leather and ride a big bike; then
the big-chested women will crowd around you and smile. Pongo's right
buttock is itching, but he is too lazy to scratch it. He thinks about an
afternoon at the Club de Pesce in Cartagena -- '73 was that, or '74? They
were sitting on the terrace in the shade of the flowering trees, looking
out across the bay at the rusty hulk of a Colombian naval cruiser. It
was hot even under the trees, but there was a little wind from the
water. The smiling indio waiter in his purple jacket had just served
them a pompano en papillote, brown and tender in the husk of charred
paper. He remembers the smell of the fish, and the water too bright
to look at. Now he sees the two women sitting down at the next table,
in the sun. Gene, with his back turned, does not see them. He tries to
capture that first moment, but it will not come clear -- just the two
women sitting down, and that one has glossy dark hair, the other a cap
of short champagne-colored curls. The sun is behind her, and he sees
that one breast is outlined clearly through her thin orange blouse;
it is almost a perfect half-sphere, like a little grapefruit, and the
nipple, thick and erect, is the size of a pencil eraser.
Irma, upstairs in the big house, is looking at one of the ads in "The
New Yorker." Two tanned young people stand under a tree. They are both
barefoot. The young man leans on a branch with his forearms crossed over
an open book; the flap of the book jacket has been folded in to keep his
place if he should decide to put the book down. There is a ring on the
third finger of his !eft hand. He looks patiently at the young woman,
who hangs onto the branch with one hand, while, with the other, she
brushes a hibiscus blossom against her chin. She does not look at him,
but at something off-camera, perhaps the sunset (this would account for
the pumpkin color of their skins); perhaps she is making up her mind
whether to give the young man any reason to put down his book. She is
a slightly disheveled blonde with a biteable lower lip. Her adolescent
breasts are concealed by two triangles of cloth, one blue, one violet:
She also wears a gauzy floral skirt in the same colors. Behind them
are two wicker chairs and a low wicker table on the brown-sugar sand;
on the table are two artfully decorated rum drinks, maybe rum Alexanders,
each with its straw; a pair of sunglasses; and another hibiscus blossom:
beyond all that lies the baby-blue sea.
Margaret is sitting on her bed with pillows behind her. She has just had a
shower, and feels cool and clean. She picks up a copy of "Cosmopolitan";
on the cover is a vapid teenager in a purple dress with the zipper
pulled down to reveal the inner slopes of two melony breasts. One has
been retouched to look much smaller than the other: why is that? She
opens the magazine toward the back and finds photos of women in purple
woolly wraps, a purple mohair sweater, a purple knitted tam. There is
a two-page cigarette ad showing the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. The
water is purple. The eye-shadow in the cosmetic ads is purple. She reads
a mail-order ad: "Yes, CONNECTING will show you how to find love
the
day you receive it
-- not after you've lost 20 pounds, not after you've
spent money on a new wardrobe, not after you've been rejected by fifty
other men, but
the day you receive it
! Just the way you are." Then a
diet article.
Linck is in the bathroom, a room he thoroughly approves of because it has
a tub long enough to stretch out in, a rubberized headrest, and a reading
light. He runs his bath, hot with a little admixture of cold, until it
is within a few inches of the drain; then he turns off the hot, turns
the cold water on full. Probably because of the frostbite he suffered as
a child, his toes are less tolerant of heat than the rest of his body,
and he has worked out this method of dividing his bathwater into zones.
When the tub is full he steps into it, carrying his bathtub book --
today it is "The Pound Era," by Hugh Kenner -- and lowers his buttocks
with care into the water. When he is seated in the tub with his legs
drawn up, he propels himself gently backward and lowers his body, with
grunts of pleasure, until it is submerged.
In the few moments after he sits in the tub and before he lies down,
he has noticed, as he always does in this house, that the light from
the wall behind him makes visible certain curious turbulent shadows in
the water. At first he supposed that oils from his skin, liberated by
the heat, were swirling out into the tub; but by holding his forearm a
few inches under the surface, he has been able to determine that the
shadows come from a level higher than his submerged body, and it is
now his opinion that these squirming ideograms are caused by the sudden
admixture of the hot and cold zones of the bathwater.
It is interesting how often the bathtub has figured in the history of
science, politics, and art: Archimedes, for instance, and the Shang
emperor about whom he has just been reading, who inscribed on his tub
the characters that Pound translated, "Make it new." Why on his tub? Was
it because the emperor, like Linck himself, this person, this physical
body who lies here now submerged and displacing water like Archimedes,
liked to philosophize in his tub?
Now the shapes at the bottom of the water have paled almost to
invisibility, but they are still there, no longer ideograms but slowly
elongating serpents. The Manichaeans believed that God was visible in
light, Satan in darkness. In the struggle between them, the elements had
been mingled; the whole world was a mixture of darkness and light, good
and evil. At certain moments Linck finds this a very plausible theory,
the more so because without this mingling there would be no contrast
and no borders; the perceptible universe could not exist.
On the bottom of the tub there is another shadow, a drifting chain of
three lozenges, each one surrounded by two bright arcs, mathematically
perfect, that intersect at the points of the lozenge. When he looks for
the source of this shadow, he finds that it is a floating hair. It is
curious, he thinks, that this marvelous and perfect appearance should
be generated by nothing more than a hair, probably a pubic hair.
Alone in his room in the secure yellow-white light, Gene Anderson takes
three coins from the cup on the desk. He throws them six times: they
yield the hexagram Tui, "The Joyous, Lake."
He finds it in the 'text. Tui is the hexagram of "the joyous" and of
success, which comes through gentleness. When men's hearts are won
by gentleness, says the oracle, they will accept hardships and even
death. This is the Judgment. The Image, the second trigram, tells him
that knowledge becomes a vitalizing force through stimulating conversation
with congenial friends.
There is a moving line, an old yin, in the third place. This tells him
that if a man is empty inside, idle pleasures will fill the void. The
next two lines are old yang. The first tells him that inner peace can
come only from the renunciation of base pleasures; the second, that danger
comes in the form of "disintegrating influences" even to the best of men.
As always, the I Ching's response is apposite, and as always, it
is ambiguous. He forms another question: "What is this danger?" and
casts the coins again. They yield the hexagram Pi, "Union." Again the
response is apposite: it says that for union to take place, there must
be a central figure for the others to rally around: but if that man has
no real calling, he will only bring about confusion.
Year by year the layers of coldness have folded around him, numbing
the pain to a distant pinprick. Sculpture, painting, that whole world,
is now like a nest of bright objects laid away in cabinets. People are
interesting, clever little mechanisms, with their bright eyes, their
flushes and smiles.
It is not that they are unintelligent. Taken one by one, they are as
smart as they need to be, but in their numbers they are a terrible
swarming mass, grinding everything to smaller and smaller bits.
For months he has been carrying in his mind the solution to humanity's
problem -- a way of saving the world. He knows it is possible, and he is
almost persuaded that he can do it himself. When he examines his motives,
he sees that for the most part they are selfish: the lust for glory;
the desire for great accomplishment, for a sense of superiority; the
urge to save his own life. On the other side, he is afraid of giving
up his peace and privacy, perhaps forever; he is afraid of failure;
he is afraid of revealing himself as a megalomaniac and narcissistic
fool. Which is worse, to save humanity for the wrong reasons -- or to
let it perish through cowardice?
Chapter Twenty-three
The cab driver let Cooley off in front of the railroad station in
Springfield. It was black dark, and cold. He went into the station
carrying the attaché case; it weighed only about five pounds, but it
felt like fifty. He sat with it between his knees until the train pulled
in. The conductor helped him up the steps. "There you go, Gramp."
There was a three-hour wait between trains in New York. On the Florida
train, the heat wasn't working in the dining car, and the food was
worse than he remembered, but his compartment was comfortable; an
"economy bedroom" was what they called it now. He slept fairly well,
and at eleven the next morning he was in Tampa. He got a cab and went
looking for a motel. The first one was not what he wanted: the lobby
was too small and too crowded. "That's a fleabag," he told the driver
when he came out. "Isn't there a decent motel in this town?"
The next one was just right; it had a big lobby with a lot of furniture
and planters, and there didn't seem to he many people around.
Cooley had lunch in the coffee shop and made a phone call from his room,
then went down to the desk to check out.
"You're not staying with us tonight, then?" the clerk said. He looked
disapproving.
"No, something's come up. A friend of mine's going to come for me in an
hour or so -- I'll just wait over there out of the way. How long's it
take to get to the airport from here?"
"About twenty minutes, sir."
The lobby was empty. At the far end there were two big wing chairs
facing each other. Cooley knelt on the floor, opened the attaché case
and lifted out the explosive device. He had to get his legs under the
chair, supporting the device on his knees, before he could attach it
the way Jacobs had shown him. When he finished, he was sweating and
dizzy. He closed the attaché case, which also contained his toothbrush
and a change of underwear, and sat down to wait.
They were finishing lunch when the phone rang; Irma leaned over to answer
it. "Anderson residence. . . . Who shall I say is calling?" After a
moment she punched the hold button and said, "His name is McIver, and
he says it's about your parents."