Wonderland (33 page)

Yes, even his spirit had become automated, mechanized. It worked perfectly for him. He had only to direct it and it responded. It grew wise.

He got special permission to work late and sometimes, in the nearly
deserted laboratory, he suddenly felt a sense of panic, as if a door might open at any moment and someone might walk in—a dream ballooning out of the empty corridor outside. If he could not control the panic with a cigarette or one of the little pills Anne-Marie had given him, he went outside, hurrying out into the street. His heart pumped, his eyes were wild. He walked around the block, around the large darkened buildings of the Medical Center, sensing himself absolutely alone, as if he had stepped out of the normal dimension of time and were already in his own future.
There
was sanctity, purity,
there
he could contemplate himself without panic. What was time? The element in which he lived, automatically. What was life? He knew that a living cell performs certain miraculous acts, that it contains a kind of electricity, and that a dead cell performs no acts, goes through no sequence of characteristic, identifying acts, and is nothing. The definition of life, then, was only one of behavior: the living cell behaved, the dead cell did nothing. The living cell was godly, the dead cell a zero. Between the two there was a universe of time.

This overwhelmed him. Fascinated him. He had no time to be fascinated because he had to work, yet his mind came back again and again to such facts.…
He had changed his name to Vogel in 1946. Jesse Vogel. The end of the war, the beginning of Jesse Vogel
. The facts he must be concerned with in his own private, interior life were simple and unmysterious and unfascinating: he would begin an internship in Chicago in July; he would marry Anne-Marie; he would establish a certain life, professional and private. Wasn’t this enough to pit against the universe?… Sometimes, on a night when his nerves were jumpy from too much coffee, too many half-hallucinations of opening doors, cells shaking themselves to life when they were dead, precise and dead, he went out to a drugstore and telephoned Anne-Marie. She woke, answered at once, before the telephone could ring a second time, because she lived with her mother and did not belong wholly to Jesse. He could see her only a few times a week because he was so busy. Always, telephoning her late at night, his heart tripped absurdly as he listened to the distant, fragile ring that seemed already transformed by Anne-Marie’s presence.

When she answered in her soft voice, “Jesse?” he closed his eyes in relief. She had answered his call. She was real.

“Hello,” he would say. “It’s just me. How are you? Did I wake you
up? Did you have a hard day?” This surprised him, the choppiness of his questions, the abruptness of his voice. He had forgotten that he was so young and demanding. If she was tired herself, Anne-Marie never said so; she insisted that she had not really been asleep but only lying in bed, thinking of him. And Jesse would ask her about her work that day, about the other nurses, about her mother, and he would tell her about his own work, going back over the events of his crowded day, the conversations he had had with other people, the state of his landlady’s domain—there were always minor domestic crises in the rooming house, with Jesse at the center, a kind of intermediary between the landlady and her other tenants. After a few minutes of this Jesse would begin to slow down, to relax. Anne-Marie would say sleepily, “I love you … you’re so serious … you work so hard.…” There was a kind of lightness about her that she seemed to insist upon in spite of her nursing schedule and her troubles with her mother. She was always offering herself to him lightly, childishly; even her problems were twisted about to seem trivial. She slighted herself: the complaints she offered to Jesse were not serious. A sense of gratitude for her, for her kindness, was focused for Jesse in the clumsy hearts carved on the inside of the telephone booth by high school girls—so many hearts, all of them touchingly distorted, dancing before his eyes—“When can I see you? When tomorrow?” Jesse would always ask urgently. And, waiting anxiously for her reply, he closed his eyes and saw Anne-Marie, this longhaired, healthy, pretty girl, freed of the very restraints of gravity itself, released in her perfect white nurse’s uniform from the old hospital in which she worked or from the aging house in which she lived, released to his arms.

Anne-Marie Vogel
.

She loved him and it caused him to think, on the darkest of his dark cloudy nights, that he was really a normal young man. Not isolated. Not fated to confusion, chaos. He stood six feet two inches tall, strong in the shoulders and self-consciously erect, his hair brushed back from his forehead, thick and slightly darkening now, no longer so blond; his gaze was clear and cautious, a level stare that scanned everything before him, out to the limits of the spatial horizon, before settling on what must be seen. There was a slowness about him, a ponderousness, that seemed to collide with a certain impatience in his speech, as if he were often prodding himself awake out of a confusion of memory, the
very brusqueness of his words meant to wake Jesse himself. Moods rose and fell in him, challenged him and were vanquished, moods of intense happiness—in his laboratory work and in his reading and in his love for Anne-Marie—and moods of sudden, almost abandoned depression, a gaiety of depressions, as if he knew everything was lost and could do nothing about it, nothing to save himself, why bother? Catching his own eye in a mirror he sometimes noticed a strange intense heat about his face, the very tone of his skin heated, pink-toned, very healthy on even his dreariest Ann Arbor days, as if the subdued and even shy manner that was his usual personality were underscored by this brazen, curious stare. He had avoided people for years now, perplexed by their response to him and not really wanting to do battle with it or comprehend it: it must have been that his face, in repose, had a skeptical or argumentative look, because he sensed a nervousness, a slight hostility in men his own age or older when they were in his company. “No, no, people like you, people are very fond of you,” Anne-Marie insisted. But he did not believe her. With her he felt confidence—even normality—he felt oddly protected. As long as he was with her he did not even need to believe her.

And yet, when he was away from her, he sometimes could not recall her face. He felt her essence, her presence, but only as an abstraction—she might have been any American beauty on a billboard, advertising a brand of cigarettes or a soft drink.

One quiet night in April, 1951, he left the pathology laboratory late, around eleven, and as he passed a group of men on the sidewalk he noticed that one of the men glanced toward him, then turned to look at him. He did not return the look. The young men were mostly students and he did not want to be invited out with them, he had no time or interest … no time for drinking, no interest in talking, arguing. He was a little dizzy from not having anything to eat since noon. But when he was out on his feet like this, outside in public, the dizziness usually abated. He was too proud to walk weakly.

Anne-Marie was working at the hospital and so he couldn’t see her; she would not go off duty until morning. So he walked quickly toward home, feeling the start of a familiar panic; he walked fast, as if he thought he might outwalk the panic, might get home before it struck. All day long he had been thinking about the utterly simple, grave pronouncements of the lecturer in neurochemistry, Dr. Cady:
The world is
our construction, peopled by us; it is a mystery. All we know of the world, even our most precise laboratory findings, rests on the perception of the senses, but this very knowledge cannot reveal the relations of the senses to the outside world
. Jesse had been struck by this; he had wanted to laugh in astonishment. He wanted to seek out Cady and argue with him. Cady was a short, slight, rather delicate man; Jesse would have to stoop a little to talk to him, he would have to speak gently to him. But he wanted, he wanted … he wanted to argue.… Isn’t the great lesson of science
control?
The lessons of homeostasis and cybernetics:
control?
What else mattered?

If he had control of himself, Jesse Vogel, then nothing else mattered in the universe.

He walked quickly—the panic was feeding energy into his legs. He could hear faint noises from the fraternity houses on the other side of the campus, up along Washtenaw, and he knew that what had seemed so deeply and ominously silent to him was not silence at all but was filled with the special small language of human beings. But he could not understand this language. Even Anne-Marie’s words, her love, her perfumy essence—he could not understand it. So he walked fast, heading home, hurrying home on a pleasant cloudy night in April. What would await him at the rooming house? It was a kind of home for him; yes, he was fond of it, dependent upon it—the other tenants laughed at him because he was so easily victimized by the landlady, who was without a husband, perhaps divorced? widowed? abandoned? and who got Jesse to leave his books and run errands for her, beat carpets in the back yard as they hung, enormously heavy, from a straining clothesline, or watch over her eight-year-old daughter, a sorrowful child with glasses. But he liked living there. It was filled with the noise of other students, with their yelping laughter and radios and heavy footsteps, with the landlady’s scolding of her daughter, but he liked it—it helped to dispel his own thoughts, his memories, the problems of his being.
Control
. That was all he wanted. The noises other people made helped to dispel Jesse’s private burdens a little. He did not want to complain, even to himself, and so he blocked off the channels that led back to certain thoughts, just as he had recklessly and desperately sold that car of his, at a great loss, just to be rid of it, rid of it permanently, years ago here in Ann Arbor.… But at times, when his panic threatened, he had the idea that his private memories fed somehow into a vast universal memory, a sorrow not his own that he had not
lived through and therefore could not erase, even by the most intense rituals of thought—this confused sorrow that populated the universe, that constructed the universe. It was not local. It was not even contained in the vast wastes of the war or in the jumble of history in this century. Time was mobbed with people. How could he establish himself, construct himself, in such a mob …? It was harmonious, unlocalized, spread out evenly everywhere. There was nothing human to it.

He wanted to argue with that professor. He wanted to insist that these things did not matter.… No, he wanted to embrace Anne-Marie violently, sweetly, he wanted to whisper these things to her, he wanted to frighten her with their terror and then calm her, soothe her, bring her back to the cheerful busyness of her usual life. But he knew that she would not understand. He had no right to force her to understand. If he loved her he would guard her from such thoughts; if he loved her he would not really bring her into himself, into his consciousness, but would allow her to remain herself.… He had learned from the few novels he had read in his lifetime that love demanded rescue. He must rescue his beloved from danger, even the danger of himself. The story demanded that a male rescue a female from danger and he would be punished if he failed.…

Glancing back over his shoulder, Jesse saw someone following him half a block away. This person—a man—looked familiar, but Jesse did not have time to see who it was before he turned back again uneasily. This street led past residence halls and was therefore noisy. Jesse glanced at the rows of lighted dormitory windows and felt a pang of jealousy for the simplicity of these undergraduates’ lives—when he had worked in dining halls he’d envied the boys’ sloppiness, their loud herding instincts. He felt an impulse to go into one of the halls, just to avoid the man behind him. It was probably a classmate of his, wanting help. Wanting to borrow notes. At least everyone knew enough not to ask to borrow money from him. He owed the university more money than ever, almost three thousand dollars.… Jesse turned up one of the walks and went into a residence hall, walking quickly, as if he lived here, and once inside he paused to wait a few minutes. It was crowded here. Jesse had always felt oddly benevolent toward the undergraduates at the university, though they had money and he was poor; he thought of them as children, they were so boisterous and sure of themselves. They lived in rooms jammed with junk, dirty clothes and towels
flung everywhere, sheets that went unchanged for weeks, they played poker and drank happily and stupidly; they were children and could be blamed for nothing. Those who did not live in the residence halls lived in palatial fraternity houses—enormous houses where music blared and curtains were blown outside windows. Jesse thought of these young people as jammed together warmly, perpetually. They came alive in crowds. Their faces brightened in herds. He envied them but felt, in a way, protective of them: when he was a doctor he would be serving them.

After a few minutes he took a side door out to the street again and hurried the few blocks to his rooming house. Now no one was following him.

He went up to his room on the third floor and saw that the door was ajar—he had evidently left it open in his hurry to leave that morning—and then, in the doorway, he was shocked to see that someone was in the room, sitting at his “desk,” the cluttered table he worked at. It was Dr. Monk, “Monk,” the man who assisted Dr. Cady in the neuro-chemistry course. Jesse realized now that Monk had been following him.

“Hello!” Monk said with a big smile.

He got to his feet and extended his hand. For a moment Jesse stood in the doorway, too stunned to react. Then, feebly, he shook hands with Monk. He could not help glancing around the room, as if checking it.

“I took the liberty of making myself at home. I didn’t think you’d mind. You don’t mind?” Monk said. He had caught Jesse’s instinctive checking of the room and this seemed to amuse him. “I swear I haven’t taken a thing! I haven’t been tempted even by that stale sweet roll on the radiator, I swear.… Are you comfortable here? You’re fairly isolated, at least, on the third floor.”