Xenograffiti (5 page)

There is no evidence in the Bible that states directly whether Jesus was ever married; the fact that others, including Simon Peter, are cited as having families would lead one to think, however, that such a fact would have been recorded if indeed he had a wife, and that such a person, given his character, would have played a major role in his ministry. In fact, celibacy is consistent with the person portrayed in the surviving gospels; here is a man devoted only to his mission in life, a mission that, in my estimation, precludes other preoccupations. I should mention here that I have no religious axe to grind, being an agnostic myself, as is Baigent; as a researcher, though, I must look at the New Testament in the same way I would examine any other historical document—and as a document, it stands up very well. The inconsistencies cited by Baigent are minor compared to the major consistencies between the four surviving accounts of Christ’s life. The apocrypha mentioned by Baigent do exist, but tend, on the whole, to be much less consistent, either with themselves or the gospels or other apocrypha; obviously, this is one reason they have not been accepted by Christians as true accounts. Church authorities could not have suppressed documents that had widespread popular appeal.

One must apply in both cases the old philosophical rule, Occam’s Razor, which holds that the simplest explanation for a particular problem is usually the best. The simplest explanation for the mysterious treasure of Rennes-le-Château is that Saunière found gold, jewels, or other precious artifacts in his church, which he then sold off at the highest price he could get; some of these artifacts may have had political or religious significance to his Church or to the Habsburgs, for whatever reason, and these he may have pawned directly to those most interested in them. The simplest explanation for the supposed later lineage of the Merovingians is that it did not exist, or at least cannot be demonstrated historically. The simplest explanation for Christ’s existence is given by himself, presumably in his own (remembered) words, in the gospels; one may believe them or not, as one chooses, but one cannot easily deny their power, consistency,
and
simplicity. As for the Priory of Sion, if it exists, one can say very little about it, since it has deliberately chosen to remain hidden from us; we have no verification that the documents mentioned by Baigent really do exist, or, if they exist, that they derive from the Priory, or, if they derive from the Priory, that they fully represent that organization’s beliefs, or, if they do represent the Priory’s credo, that they are in fact true. The Priory may well believe in the descent of the Merovingians from Christ, or in the descent of modern royal houses from the Merovingians; the fact that they claim these things as historical facts, and have produced written documents from their own files supporting their claims, does not make them so.

In the end, one must say that Baigent and his colleagues have piled too many inconsistencies and unsupported suppositions one upon another; it is one thing to examine the problem from many different angles, as the Fanthorpes have done; it is quite another to proceed from a conviction that the evidence must support one particular theory. Having reached such a conclusion, for whatever reasons, a person tends to orient the supporting documentation and its presentation in such a way as to best demonstrate the conclusion one wishes to reach. The entire business becomes a perpetual motion machine.

The Fanthorpes are much less pretentious in their examination of the mystery surrounding Rennes. They have attempted here to comb the evidence for every possible clue, to examine the man, his place of origin, and each facet of the puzzle in order, like detectives scanning the scene of the crime. They have allowed their imaginations to consider every angle, every theory, every fact that might apply. Some of their suppositions are outlandish, as they readily admit; some of their speculations are as wild as any science fiction story; some of their hypotheses will stand your hair on end. But they never pretend to
know
what the answer is absolutely, although they have their own ideas, and are not hesitant to present them. I do not agree with everything they say; I did find their six-year adventure as much fun as they clearly found it themselves. This love of a mystery, this enjoyment in pursuit of the unknown, shines through every page of their account. In the end, when they sum up what is known and what remains speculation, one is forced to agree with them; when they itemize the possible theories, one must applaud their thoroughness; when they finally present
their
answer, but decline to shove it down the reader’s throat, one must approve their evenhandedness.

Once upon a time, an impoverished parish priest in a little town of southeastern France stumbled upon a treasure, and suddenly found himself rich overnight. I wonder what he would think of all the commotion he has caused. I wonder if, somewhere in another space, time, or dimension, Bérenger Saunière is lying in his bed, laughing so hard that the tears are streaming down his cheeks. They do say in Rennes-le-Château that Saunière had a wicked sense of humor.

(6
February
1983)

I murdered my friend today. I didn’t have the courage to do it myself, so I paid someone else to handle the dirty work. I put him in the car, and took him to a place that smelled of death and fear and hurt. He submitted to all of this without balking, without any doubt whatever that I, his oldest and closest and only friend in this world, would save him from this awful place and from the terrible things that were destroying him inside. I did neither. I had him killed.

It began just over ten years ago, in March of 1973. I was a lonely bachelor living in a duplex on a hill overlooking San Bernardino, three years out of graduate school, working at my first professional position, and finishing my second book. My work was my life, and vice versa—I had few friends, little furniture, minimal social life. I was still enjoying the exhilaration of being away from home for the first time, but beginning to realize that there are more things in heaven and on earth than I had dreamed of.

Into this rather austere life came an interloper, a thin, somewhat dirty, adolescent bluetick hound that I had noticed wandering the neighborhood during the previous few months. He barked at me in my driveway one night; for no reason I’ve ever been able to fathom, I went into the house, poured some milk into a saucer, and set it in the open doorway. He accepted my offering, despite some initial shyness, and returned the following evening for more, barking at my front door. Soon he was spending the night. Nothing lascivious, of course—ours was purely a platonic relationship—but we did seem to fill a need in each other.

He was black on top, with white patches shadowed with auburn highlights; the end half of his long tail was pure white, and he carried it curled over his back like a personal banner. Young, strong, arrogant, intelligent, self-assured, but never mean, with a bad habit of chasing cars, motorcycles, postal jeeps, and jackrabbits (and the scars to prove it), he was a good companion, particularly on the long walks we took together in the evenings.

I named him Nebuchadnezzar, after the Babylonian king of the sixth century
b.c
., but never called him anything but Neb.

Then one day he disappeared for three days, and I discovered that Neb had had a previous master, a man who had bought the dog for his boy a year before, but had then set him loose when he and his wife had gone their separate ways. The son was visiting then, so Neb had been kept in his first master’s house. I managed to persuade them to let me take care of him permanently, with appropriate visiting rights.

In 1975 came a second crisis, when I met the woman who later agreed to share her life with me. Neb made his feelings on the subject perfectly clear the first time Mary stayed the night, when he crawled up on top of the bed between us. Thereafter, he tolerated her, since I did, but never failed to emphasize his own idea of the household pecking order, in which she fell somewhere between him and her own dogs (the hoi polloi of the canine world). I did notice, however, that he tolerated her much better on those occasions when she divvied out the food.

As the years passed, Neb gradually went blind from cataracts in both eyes at about the age of six or seven; by the time he lost his sight, he had memorized his way around the house and yard, and seemed to enjoy life as much as ever. Like many dogs who have scavenged on their own for a while, he would eat anything even vaguely edible, vegetable, fruit, or animal, in any quantity served, with great gusto and speed and much slurping and burping. No gourmet this. How ironic, then, that in the end he could eat nothing, that he would have starved himself to death if death hadn’t him visited him first, that his greatest pleasure in life was finally denied him.

Neb turned eleven in December, old for a middle-sized dog. He had grown somewhat cranky and solemn, as many beasts and pundits do in old age, but otherwise seemed in good health. His primary sport in his last years was “dog baiting,” barking at the dog in the yard behind us (who of course barked back); he also had two or three personal “things” that were his alone, including an old bone, and a rubber ball with a bell in its middle. This he would toss with a turn of his head, and then pounce on it as it rolled, chewing vigorously for five or ten minutes. In the evenings, he’d curl up in an old chair, or stretch out on the couch on his back, with his feet pointing out at several curious angles. He also barked loudly when anyone came to the door. By his own standards, he more than earned his keep.

In early January, he cut the pad of his paw, giving him a noticeable limp, and making difficult the act of bending over a dog dish. For the first time in his life, he began leaving various portions of his dinner uneaten. His foot healed, but his appetite didn’t, and so he made the trip to the dreaded veterinarian. The verdict came back the next day: advanced cirrhosis of the liver, a condition which also produces nausea and vomiting, among other symptoms. The injury to his paw had been merely coincidental. It was a death sentence, for, despite the inducement of special diets, meats, dairy products, and other tidbits that would previously have put him in dog heaven, Neb ate less and less, noticeably declining day by day, growing progressively thinner, until he finally resembled the homeless mutt I had first met almost ten years earlier. Nothing I tried worked: he was always a stubborn dog, with a mind of his own, and he had decided in his own mind that he would eat no more. In despair, I tried forcing food down his throat, with vitamin supplements; but he hated these violations of his body, and they weren’t enough, in any case, to halt his decline. Finally, all he could do was slurp a few teaspoons of milk from a saucer. We had at last come full circle.

And so, old dog, I killed you. I took you to that place you feared and hated so much, with the men in white and blue coats, and I left you there. They put some foreign substance in your veins, and finally stilled the beating of that loyal heart. Your body they threw into a freezer, later to be collected by the fertilizer man, and ground into plant food. And the sentence I must serve for this premeditated act of murder is the memory of all the good times we had together, and the certain knowledge that never again will we share an evening stroll, or the comforts of the couch, with your head lying gently on my knee, or the joys of a man with his dog.

THE NATURE OF REALITY IN DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S FANTASY
(1983)

with Mary A. Burgess

Daphne du Maurier is perhaps best known for her haunting tale of romantic suspense,
Rebecca
(1938), which has served as the classic prototype for that modern publishing phenomenon, the revival of the Gothic novel. That she is equally proficient in the field of fantasy is evident in such stories as “Don’t Look Now,” “The Blue Lenses,”
Rule Britannia
(1972), and particularly in her tragic tale of time travel,
The House on the Strand
(1969).

Richard Young has recently resigned his lucrative but boring position with a London publishing house, and is awaiting with no great pleasure the arrival of his American-born wife, Vita, and her two young sons. Vita, a strong-willed, unsympathetic woman, is determined that Richard will accept a “suitable” post with her brother in New York, thereby accomplishing his removal from England (which she dislikes intensely as being too parochial), and severing the ties which Richard has maintained with his childhood friend and mentor, the scientist Magnus Lane.

Magnus, in the meantime, offers the Youngs the use of his family estate in Cornwall (Kilmarth) for their summer holiday. In return, Richard will serve as a human “guinea pig” for a new drug developed by Lane. Richard agrees, and as the story opens, he is experiencing his first “trip,” which, to his astonishment, has transported him back six hundred years into the Cornwall of the fourteenth century. At first skeptical, Richard experiences a new feeling of awareness and freedom—colors seem brighter, senses sharper than before; and, almost in spite of himself, he is drawn deeper into the ancient landscape, which seems, ironically, more vital than the insipid vistas of the twentieth century.

Richard’s “guide” is the fourteenth century manorial steward, Roger Kylmarth; whenever he uses the drug, Richard gradually becomes conscious of Roger’s presence nearby and is compelled to follow him effortlessly across hill and dale in the course of his travels. The people of this early time live out their lives completely unaware of Richard’s presence. The uniqueness of his position as observer, and the fascination he develops for monitoring the lives of the people he observes, soon transform his interest into an addiction. Each session seems to last for several hours, after which the time traveler returns to his normal state. If, however, he attempts to touch one of the medieval persons, he is jolted back to reality with unpleasant nausea and vertigo. Chillingly, after several such “trips,” Richard finds it more and more difficult to distinguish between past and present, between the reality of his modern existence and the real (to him) world of his guide, Roger, who has in a sense become Richard’s alter-ego. Complicating the situation is the sudden arrival of Vita, who disrupts Richard’s privacy, thereby also interrupting his now obsessive experiments. Vita’s lack of sympathy with and disapproval of Richard’s altered and unexplained behavior and appearance further impair his sense of reality and lead predictably to his falling hopelessly (in every sense of the word) in love with Isolde Carminowe, whom Roger also loves from afar. As the tragic lives of Roger and Isolde unfold before his eyes, Richard is drawn inexorably into the vortex which seals his own fate.

Lane finally decides to take a “trip” with Richard, having proven with historical research that the persons mentioned by Richard really existed in the fourteenth century. Richard is elated; however, Magnus stumbles onto a railroad track and is killed by a passing car. With no mentor to guide him, Richard is devastated and grows increasingly disoriented, finally attempting to strangle his wife, whom he has mistakenly identified with the evil Joanna Champernoune from his other world. A local doctor befriends him and persuades him to leave England with Vita.

The couple reaches the airport, but Richard cleverly eludes Vita and misses the flight; driving back through the countryside without her, he feels freer than he ever has before. He takes the last dose of the drug (it had been hidden in Magnus’s walking-stick) and enters his old world to discover that Isolde has died, Cornwall is suffering from the Black Death, and Roger himself has contracted the disease. In a moving final speech, Roger asks forgiveness for his sins, although it remains uncertain whether he actually senses Richard’s presence at the end. Richard, a lapsed Catholic, gives extreme unction, feeling that this deed is the real reason for his involvement with the past, since it serves ultimately as a reaffirmation of his own faith. Richard returns to the present, where he confronts the doctor in Magnus’s basement laboratory. The story ends with the doctor’s unspoken but obvious conviction that Richard’s use of the untested drug will ultimately prove fatal. Richard’s enchantment, hubris, and eventual downfall are reminiscent of the hero’s fate in Richard Matheson’s
Bid Time Return
(1975), a comparable tale of love trapped in time, and in Jack Finney’s
Time and Again
(1970); there are also resonances of the work of Robert Nathan, particularly
Portrait of Jennie
(1940) and
So Love Returns
(1958).

This moving and skillful portrait of the destruction of a person through obsession also demonstrates simultaneously the difficulty of separating fact from fiction, and, more important, the
validity
of doing so. This is the crux of du Maurier’s message.
The House on the Strand
depicts a failed hero whose failing, in retrospect, is perhaps his greatest triumph. The author appears to be saying that the reality of Richard’s fantasy world is more rewarding to him than his mediocre and unfulfilled existence in the twentieth century. For some persons, perhaps, dreams are the only possible solace for the terminal disease of everyday living.