The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  On one reading, then, the novel’s real estate plot (to abuse the pun) seems to be supplanted by the formal experiment of the time-slips and their resonance for the rest of the book: the former is merely the vehicle for the latter, just as Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, a book similarly predicated on real estate and plotting, reveals itself ultimately to be a text about the possibility of a network of secret societies communicating by an alternative mail system. I have suggested as much to students, arguing (plausibly, to gauge by their responses) that none of them winds up reading the book for an answer to the question, Will Arnie succeed in staking his claim? And yet the real estate plot and the time-slips are more complexly interwoven, such that the latter do not supplant the former so much as infect it. Arnie does succeed in going back in time, but his time travel is Manfredized, so that even though the book begins to re-narrate its second chapter as Arnie starts his workday, the machinery starts to break down, and even Arnie’s copy of the New York Times begins to read, “gubble gubble” (254).

  More alarmingly, the novel then proceeds to replay the scene in which we first met the Bleekmen, back in chapter 2; Jack Bohlen stops his helicopter to offer water to some dying nomads (refusal to do so is a violation of U.N. law), whereas Arnie, traveling in his own helicopter, balks at doing so. In gratitude, the Bleekmen give Jack a charm, a “water witch”; they tell him, “It will bring you water, the source of life, any time you need” (31), and later, conversing with Arnie, Heliogabalus claims that “it may guarantee him safety” if anyone tries to harm Jack. Now, I believe it was Chekhov who once said that if you introduce a mysterious supernatural device into your text in chapter 2, it has to be used in chapter 16. In the time-travel replay of the water witch scene, Arnie tries to kill Jack, and is shot with a poisoned arrow by the Bleekmen. Can Arnie die in the past? Can he already have died? Is it like dying in a dream? And is this his dream, or Manfred’s? As Arnie ponders these questions, he stumbles onto the possibility that the time-slips in the novel began not when Manfred was introduced to the text, but when the Bleekmen brought out the water witch:

  How did that young Bleekman catch on so fast? They don’t ordinarily use their arrows on Earth people; it’s a capital crime. It means the end of them.

  Maybe, he thought, they were expecting me. They conspired to save Bohlen because he gave them food and water. Arnie thought, I bet they’re the ones who gave him the water witch. Of course. And when they gave it to him they knew. They knew about all this, even back then, at the very beginning. (264; emphasis in original)

  There is some serious verb-tense confusion going on here. How can it be that the Bleekmen conspired, in the past, to save Bohlen from Arnie’s murderous attack weeks later? Arnie’s hypothesis is that the Bleekmen, like Manfred, can come unstuck in time, and prophetically see in their first encounter with him the as-yet-unrealized time-travel version of the repetition of their encounter with him. What is the tense in which Arnie’s realization can be expressed? Now I know that in the past, the Bleekmen will have conspired to revisit the moment that was the present at the time I met them, and its repetition in the future, which is now the present from which I have traveled back to this moment in the past (as they knew I would do)?

  For the record, Arnie does eventually return to “real” time, whatever that might mean by now, where he is killed by a business rival (though he believes he is still in an altered time-travel state in which he cannot die). And Manfred escapes the fate of AM-WEB, living with the Bleekmen for the remainder of his days and returning in the novel’s enigmatic final scene at the end of this climactic day, now a very old man visiting from the future, to thank Jack for trying to help him long ago. “It wasn’t long ago,” Jack replies. “Have you forgotten? You came back to us; it was just today. This is your distant past, when you were a boy” (277). (Again, the verb tense is inscrutable: one wonders what “have you forgotten” can possibly mean here.) It is not entirely a happy ending; elderly Manfred is very much the tubes-and-wires, “pumps and hoses and dials” (276) cyborg he feared becoming. But he escaped AM-WEB, and that, it turns out, was the point; that, finally, is why he (and the Bleekmen?) fooled around with the temporal fabric of the novel.

  The mystical link between Manfred and the Bleekmen is a bit embarrassing, politically; Helio explains that he can communicate with the boy because “we are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land” (226), as if they are speaking by way of a special Subaltern Subchannel. Helio thereby becomes a version of what is known among film critics as the “magic Negro” who, according to Todd Boyd, is given “special powers and underlying mysticism.”10 But the Subaltern Subchannel, for all its orientalizing faults, helps to clarify the link between AM-WEB and Camp Ben-Gurion, which is never made explicit until Helio offers Arnie that extended exposition of Manfred’s deepest fears. Let us now return to Camp Ben-Gurion—or, more precisely, to Norbert Steiner’s visit to see his son, which almost immediately convinces him to kill himself. After shocking the Camp B-G staff by declaring that he believes the facility should be shut down, on the grounds that his son “will never be able to hold a job. . . . He’ll always be a burden on society, like he is now” (44), Norbert stops by the Red Fox restaurant and gets an earful of even more vicious eugenics discourse from the owner:

  “Why you looking so glum, Norb?”

  Steiner said, “They’re going to close down Camp B-G.”

  “Good,” the owner of the Red Fox said. “We don’t need those freaks here on Mars; it’s bad advertising.”

  “I agree,” Steiner said, “at least to a certain extent.”

  “It’s like those babies with seal flippers back in the ’60s, from them using that German drug. They should have destroyed all of them; there’s plenty of healthy normal children born, why spare those others? If you had a kid with extra arms or no arms, deformed in some way, you wouldn’t want it kept alive, would you?”

  “No,” Steiner said. He did not say that his wife’s brother back on Earth was a phocomelus; he had been born without arms and made use of superb artificial ones designed for him by a Canadian firm which specialized in such equipment. (49)

  The plot thickens, as if it weren’t already thick enough: writing in the wake of the controversy over Thalidomide (that German drug, first marketed in 1957 by Chemie Grünenthal), Dick suggests that the genocidal impulse toward people with disabilities will survive well into the future, even though Steiner’s brother-in-law appears to have himself some pretty fabulous prostheses (and no intellectual disabilities).

  Last but certainly not least, Arnie Kott himself has a child in Camp B-G, a child he fathered with Anne Esterhazy; damaged by exposure to gamma rays in utero, the child is three years old, “small and shriveled, with enormous eyes like a lemur’s . . . [and] peculiar webbed fingers” (40). Arnie’s attitude toward the child is predictable: close the camp and kill the kids.

  “I’ve been sorry ever since those Jews opened that camp.”

  Anne said, “Bless you, honest blunt Arnie Kott, mankind’s best friend.”

  “It tells the entire world we’ve got nuts here on Mars, that if you travel across space to get here you’re apt to damage your sexual organs and give birth to a monster that would make those German flipper-people look like your next-door neighbor.”

  “You and the gentleman who runs the Red Fox.”

  “I’m just being hard-headedly realistic. We’re in a struggle for our life; we’ve got to keep people emigrating here or we’re dead on the vine, Annie. You know that. If we didn’t have Camp B-G we could advertise that away from Earth’s H-bomb-testing, contaminated atmosphere there are no abnormal births. I hope to see that, but Camp B-G spoils it.”

  “Not Camp B-G. The births themselves.”

  “No one would be able to check up and show our abnormal births,” Arnie said, “without B-G.” (64–65)

  The realm of biopower, apparently, does not quite extend (yet) to Mars, where the sciences of population management are weaker than th
ey are on Earth and no one will know about disability if Camp B-G is shut down—and where Arnie is apparently unaware that back on Earth, some of those German flipper-people are your next-door neighbors, outfitted with superb artificial limbs. And as it happens, the U.N.’s thinking is not very far from Arnie’s; indeed, it is later in this very conversation with his ex-wife (though oddly, this part of the exchange is not narrated directly, but merely recalled by Arnie in the following chapter) that Arnie learns of the U.N.’s plan to develop land in the F.D.R. mountain range. He had already heard that someone was interested in the land; Anne happens to know of various rumors, one of which is that the U.N. “intended to build an enormous supranational park, a sort of Garden of Eden, to lure emigrants out of Earth” (94). The insinuation here, then, is that the building of AM-WEB (the Garden of Eden reimagined as an enormous supranational park on Mars?) and the closing of Camp Ben-Gurion are two facets of the same plan: lure emigrants from Earth, and suppress all official acknowledgment of the existence of people with disabilities on Mars. Manfred’s vision of his cyborg future is thus also a vision of imminent genocide.

  Martian Time-Slip represents one of Anglophone literature’s most fascinating attempts to textualize intellectual disability. By this I mean that the novel is not merely about disability; that much should be clear as plastic by now. If The Sound and the Fury is (among other things) a register of the fate of the “feebleminded” in the 1920s, Martian Time-Slip is (among other things) a response to the discourse of eliminationism, in which the United Nations turns out to be the exterminator-in-general and only the Israeli encampment on Mars has learned the lessons of recent history well enough to provide shelter and care for children like Manfred Steiner. But Martian Time-Slip is also very much more than that: it is a stunning example of how, in Quayson’s terms, the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability. Admittedly, for some readers, the radical experimentalism of Martian Time-Slip can be explained away by the very fact that it belongs to the genre of science fiction, where writers are permitted to concoct outlandish things like time travel and extraterrestrial civilizations, and where the dominant protocols of representation tend to defy the dominant protocols of representation in mainstream fiction on a page-by-page basis. But I think the objection only strengthens my point. This convoluted narrative experiment set on a ridiculously implausible Mars nevertheless provides a vehicle for a profound deliberation on time, space, mental illness, and intellectual disability. And as in The Sound and the Fury, it is critical that the disability chronotope is predicated on an unambiguously fictional disability—and yet poses the question, in the starkest of terms, of how to treat the most vulnerable humans among us.

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  And yet when it comes to vulnerability, humans are not the only creatures worth attending to. I remarked earlier that the disability chronotope can offer an outlet into realms of temporal experience that exceed human perception. In Martian Time-Slip, Manfred’s fictional disability opens onto time scales that (presumably) only the Bleekmen can comprehend; but critically, it also offers a link to the nonhuman. Our very first encounter with Manfred’s free indirect discourse arrives without warning after a brief break in the text, and without any warning that it is Manfred’s free indirect discourse, like so:

  High in the sky circled meat-eating birds. At the base of the windowed building lay their excrement. He picked up the wads until he held several. They twisted and turned like dough, and he knew there were living creatures within; he carried them carefully into the open corridor of the building. One wad opened, parted with a split in its woven, hairlike side; it became too large to hold, and he saw it now in the wall. A compartment where it lay on its side, the rent so wide that he perceived the creature within.

  Gubbish! A worm, coiled up, made of wet, bony-white pleats, the inside gubbish worm, from a person’s body. If only the high-flying birds could find it and eat it down, like that. He ran down the steps, which gave beneath his feet. Boards missing. He saw down through the sieve of wood to the soil beneath, the cavity, dark, cold, full of wood so rotten that it lay in damp powder, destroyed by gubbish-rot.

  Arms lifted up, tossed him to the circling birds; he floated up, falling at the same time. They ate his head off. And then he stood on a bridge over the sea. Sharks showed in the water, their sharp, cutting fins. He caught one on his line and it came sliding up from the water, mouth open, to swallow him. He stepped back, but the bridge caved in and sagged so that the water reached his middle.

  It rained gubbish, now; all was gubbish, wherever he looked. A group of those who didn’t like him appeared at the end of the bridge and held up a loop of shark teeth. He was emperor. They crowned him with the loop, and he tried to thank them. But they forced the loop down past his head to his neck, and they began to strangle him. They knotted the loop and the shark teeth cut his head off. Once more he sat in the dark, damp basement with the powdery rot around him, listening to the tidal water lap-lapping everywhere. A world where gubbish ruled, and he had no voice; the shark teeth had cut his voice out.

  I am Manfred, he said. (137–38)

  Again, this may not seem terribly out of line in a work of science fiction, where the parameters of mimesis are potentially infinite. You might even decide that this is little more than literary gubbish. But then compare it to this passage in a National Book Award-winning work of mainstream fiction, which appears without warning early in a narrative that, up to this point, has faithfully adhered to the dominant protocols of realistic representation:

  A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When grey pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it. (10)

  This is from Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker, and the passage might—one cannot say for certain—be focalized through a young man named Mark Schluter, who has sustained a devastating brain injury as the result of a mysterious accident in which his truck careened off an empty road at eighty miles per hour at 2:00 a.m. As Mark gradually regains consciousness, and as he slowly reacquires the ability to speak, we learn that he has suffered a rare neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. People with Capgras syndrome are unable to recognize their loved ones as their loved ones; they recognize the faces of their family members, but they do not recognize them as their family members. (In neurological terms, the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex have somehow become disconnected: the facial recognition systems of the brain are working, but have lost their connection to the emotional-processing centers that would make sense of those recognitions.) In their attempt to make sense of the fact that they recognize deeply familiar faces but have no emotional attachment to them, they come to believe that their family members have been replaced by doubles, androids, or impersonators. It is a devastating disorder, and some people with Capgras have snapped completely: as Powers writes, “a young Capgras sufferer from the British Midlands, to prove that his father was a robot, had cut the man open to expose the wires” (89–90).

  It sounds like material for Oliver Sacks, and, indeed, half of the novel is devoted to an Oliver Sacks–like character named Gerald Weber, to whom Mark Schluter’s sister, Karin, writes in despair. Weber’s growing self-doubt and eventual breakdown make up one strand of the plot; another involves water use, ecotourism, real estate development (this time on Earth), and the migration patterns of sandhill cranes, who stop every year in the Schluters’ hometown of Kearney, Nebraska. Most important for our purposes, the novel speculates repeatedly about the mental capacities of birds: “Birds will surprise you,” says Karin’s boyfriend, the conservationist Daniel Riegel. “Blue jays can lie. Ravens punish social cheaters. Crows fashion hooks out of straight wire and use them
to lift cups out of holes. Not even chimps can do that” (388). “What does it feel like, to be a bird?” the novel asks (424), renewing Thomas Nagel’s question about bats. Karin Schluter is led to an epiphany about her own species:

  The whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors. At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. (348)