“Dr. Thetford, goodnight.”
He hung up and stood for a long while with his forehead against the cool glass of the booth. At length, he shuddered, pulled himself together, went out and drove away in his little hatchback.
Seasoning
Don’t churn a bunch of seasonings and flavorings into your hamburgers. Just knead the meat well and form them on the cutting board. As they firm up you can get the knack of throwing them down flat with a gratifying slap. Make them just a little wider than your onion rolls. Now they won’t fall apart when you turn them under the broiler. The results are astonishing. But that’s not the best part.
I don’t belong here.
“Free will and predestination are the same thing,” said Alice. She was tall and had long brown hair and a high-domed forehead and blazing blue eyes, fire and ice. “By the time you leave here you’ll understand that.” She was a seminar leader. I never thought I’d go to one of those things but I did.
On each raw hamburger put four dots of Tabasco, a puddle of ketchup the size of a quarter, another one like it of steak sauce or barbecue sauce, and very lightly dust them with powdered garlic. Now stack them, one on top of the other, rotating each one enough to spread the seasonings. Take the top one and put it on the bottom. This will leave a mess on your cutting board. That’s okay. Turn the broiler on. And I still haven’t gotten to the best part.
Alice put us through a whole series of processes and exercises. I won’t describe them because you might want to go someday and a lot of them are effective only because you don’t know until later what they’re for. “I can’t give you insights,” Alice said, “You’ll have to do that by yourself.” But I will tell you about one of them. She gave us a set of cards with questions written on each, and one of mine said “Write what is true about yourself.” And I wrote: “I don’t belong here.”
Set out your hamburgers on a broiling grille—the kind with ridges. That’s important. Slice some onions (the red ones are best; the flat ones are mildest) and some tomatoes, very thin. A sharp serrated knife is best. Get two soup bowls exactly the same size and put the onions and tomatoes into one of them. Cover the surface with Worcestershire sauce and again with soy sauce. Slide the pan with the hamburgers under the broiler. The best part is coming up.
Four days after the seminar I went to see Alice. She did personal counseling as well as seminars, so I knew her address. I could’ve phoned first but I didn’t. I knocked and she called “Who is it?” And I said “Me—from the seminar.” She opened the door. She was wearing a blue robe with a red sash. She said, “Come in.” I looked at her for a long time—seconds, I suppose, but much longer I think that I’ve ever looked at anyone without saying anything. She looked into my eyes without blinking and without shifting her gaze. Finally I said, “I’d like to make love to you.” She said, “Now?”
Split your onion rolls. English muffins are all right, but too small. Onion rolls are best. Now is the time to slice your cheese. Your choice: I like extra sharp Cheddar. Now take the empty soup bowl and set it upside down, lip-to-lip, over the one with the tomatoes and onions in it, and turn them over. (Better do this over the sink.) Now all the soy and Worcestershire sauces which have drained through will drain right back again. Pull out the broiling pan and turn the hamburgers. You’re very near to learning the best part.
She pulled on the red sash and it fell away. She shrugged out of the robe and took my hand. She was very beautiful, lean and firm. She had a large warm waterbed. She was wonderful. Afterward I wanted to know if it was always that quick and easy with her, with, well, anybody, but I didn’t dare. She sat in the middle of the bed in a lotus position and smiled, and answered anyway. “You have something much more important than sex on your mind, but it was in the way. Now we can get to it. It’s what you wrote on that last card, isn’t it?”
If you have an oven over the broiler, put the onion rolls in for not more than two minutes. Take them out and spread each half with mayonnaise, very thin—so thin that people who don’t like mayonnaise won’t know it’s there. Now turn the broiler off, pull out the pan, lay on the cheese and slide the pan back in. The broiler will be quite hot enough to melt the cheese. Put a lettuce leaf on each half roll and then the onions and tomatoes. Peek into the broiler and if the cheese is melted, lift out the hamburgers with a spatula and assemble them onto the rolls. Aside from eating them, the best part is next.
“I wrote, ‘I don’t belong here,’ ” I said.
“I know,” she said. She really did; she remembered, and she sees scores of people, hundreds of cards. I said, “It … sort of went off like a flashbulb in the face.” She didn’t say anything, just watched me with that steady bright gaze. I said, “I didn’t mean I didn’t belong in the seminar, or in the city, I mean here, here in this world, in this life.” She was great at just waiting, just saying nothing. So I had to say more. “It hit me so hard that I knew it was true. Know that it is true. But …” She still waited; she wasn’t going to help, not at this point. “But if I don’t belong here, never have, never since I was born—where do I belong?”
Now comes the best part. After you’ve eaten, the broiling pan is still warm. Get a Pyrex dish—a large custard cup is just right—and a wire tea-strainer, and you pour off the fat that has sweated out of the hamburgers. You do the same thing when you broil anything except fish: pork, beef, lamb, venison—anything; also when you fry something in butter. That fat carries with it the flavor of all those meats and all those seasonings. Every once in awhile you warm the custard cup—the place on the top of the stove where the pilot light hides, if you have that kind of stove, is just right. All those different fats will blend, and down at the bottom (this is why you use glass), you’ll find a dark brown layer. This is water-based—all the fat has floated away from it. Put the cup in the fridge for an hour or so, and you have absolutely magic frying fat. Put a lot in a pan and when it melts, spoon it over eggs until they’re “blinded”—a thin film over the yolks while the whites are firm. As for the dark layer—pop the whole lump out of the cup and you can scrape that dark stuff off with a table knife and drop it into gravy, soup, or stew. That cup of fat is the best part.
Alice said, “Aside from that—what do you remember most about the seminar?”
I looked down at my hands, turned them over. They seemed very real. “The little man.” She waited. “The little man inside, that no matter how mad you get, how you scream or fight or—or—” I made a gesture at her, sitting in the middle of the bed “—or how high you fly with someone, that little man is back there watching you. I never met anyone yet who hasn’t had that feeling from time to time.”
Alice said, “And who is that little man?” I remembered. “You said that it wasn’t a little man at all. You said it was a—a thing—an entity. An intelligent entity … checking up on his script.”
“Your script,” she said.
“Okay, okay, my script.” I had to stop for a while then, to think back, replay. It was hard, but I felt very close to something.
The richest, tastiest chowder you ever flang a fang into, fast and easy: get a can of condensed New England chowder, and instead of milk, rinse out the can with two-thirds heavy cream or half-and-half, and one third sherry. Add a tin of smoked baby clams. Heat gently, and serve with a very light sprinkle of cayenne. Don’t expect anyone to eat a heavy entrée after this.
“You said to imagine a great big sphere, and inside is all of time and space. All of it. And outside are these intelligent entities, and all they are is curious; all they want to do is experience.”
“Go on,” Alice said. Her eyes are so bright.…
“One might say: ‘I want the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl in the fourteenth century who was burned at the stake.’ Or ‘I’d like the experience of being a four-month aborted fetus in 1994.’ And they just dive in and do it.” I looked at Alice. She was waiting for something. I thought about what I just said, and then I remembered: “They hav
e to create what happens. Write a script.” She still waited, so I said, “Not only the experience itself; the house, the city, the country, the whole world where it happens. All of it.”
“Which makes that entity responsible for all of it,” she reminded me.
“So that’s who the ‘little man watching’ really is—that, that thing—”
“Not a thing,” she said, interrupting for the very first time. “It’s you. You’re living a script that you wrote. Which is why free will and predestination are the same thing.”
It’s nice when food looks beautiful and it isn’t hard to do. Make nests of rice or mashed potatoes—some East Indian restaurants serve the rice out of ring molds, so you can put the curry in the center and the condiments all around the edges. When you mash potatoes, steal the packet of cheese sauce out of that cheap macaroni-and-cheese dinner and throw it in, with some butter and maybe a flat tablespoon of mayonnaise, not enough to identify. It comes out a beautiful pale orange. Make a nest and put in your stew or goulash or whatever, inside the nest. If you really want to make a guest gasp and drool, trim a piece of heavy cardboard exactly to the diameter of your dinner plates so that it makes a fence. Make a spaghetti sauce with clams instead of meat and a white clam sauce from an undiluted can of chowder with some minced clams added, plus their juice. Put linguine—that’s flat spaghetti—on one side of the fence and spinach noodles on the other side, and white sauce on the green pasta and red sauce on the white pasta and remove the fence.
“But why write such rotten scripts? If what you say is so, everybody’s where they want to be, even beggars with sores on their shins and starving children and guys being tortured in jails?” She nodded, watching me. I said, “I can’t accept that.”
She waited a bit and then almost smiled. “Unacceptable?” She asked softly.
And that rang a bell. “Unacceptable … ‘to accept the unacceptable.’ You said that, in the seminar. But I can’t remember why you said it.”
“Yes you can,” she said, and waited. I drew a total blank this time, and I guess she knew it, because she gave me a nudge: “You say you don’t belong here. Is ‘here’—unacceptable?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Then,” she asked, “why did you write this script?” “You mean—the me out there?” She nodded. I thought about that, and then mumbled, “I put it down to—curiosity? That’s all. I mean, throwing yourself into imperfect places, into pain and disappointment and well, the unacceptable—it just doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t?”
“It sure doesn’t … unless …” I felt my eyes get big. “Unless those, uh, entities want to do what you said—to learn to accept the unacceptable. Even if they have to create it. That doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t? Suppose they can’t go on unless they learn that.”
“Go on? Go on where?” She shrugs. “Everything living has to go on. Seed to shrub, shrub to tree, egg to bird.”
“You mean—evolve. They have to learn to accept the unacceptable in order to evolve into—whatever’s next for them.” Surprisingly, she laughed. She said, “You keep on saying ‘they.’ ”
Something in my stomach made me notice the clock on the headboard. “My God … have you eaten yet?”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“It isn’t all right. Hey, let me cook something.”
“I don’t know if there is anyth—”
I hopped off the waterbed, making waves. “I’ll find something. Where is the kitchen?” She pointed. Naked, I went into the kitchen.
She was right. A dozen eggs, some butter. Whole grain bread. In the freezer, broccoli, green beans—ah. Onion rings. I turned on the oven—all the way.
Alice came out to watch.
I set out four cups and a big bowl. On the third try I found the drawer with the eggbeater in it. I carefully separated the eggs, putting the whites in the bowl and one yolk each in the four cups. For this one you don’t want the yolks to break. I put a pinch of salt in the bowl. Alice leaned back against the refrigerator. “Why is ‘here’ unacceptable?” Lord, she’s beautiful.
I punched down the control on the electric toaster, and turn the knob over to ‘light.’ These things always work better if you cycle them once. I took up the eggbeater and began to crank like hell. When I began to feel it in my shoulder I stopped and asked her if she had any hot chocolate, cocoa. She waved a hand at a cabinet. I’d seen the bunch of dried jalapeno peppers by then, you see. I found two big mugs and used one of them to measure out two cupfuls of milk into a saucepan and put it on low. The chocolate was instant. Well, you use what you have. I dumped a packet into each mug. “Why is ‘here’ unacceptable?” She asked again.
I lifted the eggbeater to see if the beaten whites came to sharp points yet. They didn’t. She came close and touched my arm. You can build up static electricity with shoes on a dry carpet; can you do it barefoot on asphalt tile? She said, “You don’t answer. Is it because you don’t know, or because you do know?”
“Oh, I know. I just don’t have the words for it yet.” I started to crank and she went back to the refrigerator. I stopped to put the first two slices of bread in the toaster and turned down the heat under the milk. You don’t want to boil milk. I beat the egg whites some more until they peaked sharp and firm like stalagmites. I said, “There’s something so wrong about this whole world, about, well, life.… You really want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
The toaster popped. I took out the toast, barely golden, put in the rest of the bread, buttered the hot slices. “Where’d you get all this, about scripts and everything?”
“I read a book,” she said. “2150 A.D., by Alexander. I began to teach it. The more I taught it, the more I learned. That’s what teaching is all about.”
The rest of the toast popped up. Laying on butter, I said, “I saw a film. Underwater. Eight or nine crabs fighting over a dead fish. All kicking and clawing and biting each other, stealing and shoving … it’s all like that.”
“What’s all like that?”
I said impatiently, “Everything. Everything in the world. Life.” I found a cookie sheet and put out the four pieces of toast. I began spooning the stiff egg whites onto them. There was a lot of egg white; it mounded up high. With a spoon I made a crater in the middle of each one. I slit open the end of the box of frozen onion rings with my thumbnail and took out four of them, and placed one of them into each crater. “There’s something terribly wrong about that,” I said. “All the life there is feeds on the dead bodies of other life. I can’t believe any kind of life wants it that way; all life wants to do is to live.” I opened the oven and checked it: hot. I shut the door and took out one of the cups with the yolk in it, and carefully dropped the yolk into the center of the onion ring. “And you know what comes out of that?” I went on. “From the tiniest plankton right on up the food chain, it’s fighting and killing, to feed and stay alive to fight and kill some more.” I finished dropping in the yolks and put the cookie sheet into the oven. I spun around and looked her right in the eyes. “And that’s just plain wrong.”
She didn’t blink. But her lips twitched a little and she said softly, “Unacceptable?”
“You’re damn right, unacceptable!” I got to the milk about four seconds before bubbles started to lace the sides of the saucepan, and poured it into the mugs. I took down a dried jalapeno and cut it into two lengthwise and used the pieces, one in each hand, to stir the hot chocolate. “You know whose recipe this is, for the chocolate? Elizabeth the First, back in the 16th century … Unacceptable, yes. ‘Way out in the back country when I was a kid I saw them butcher a pig. They hung it up by the hind legs and cut its throat; it bled and screamed for twenty minutes. It’s easy to call that unacceptable; you can see it and hear it. Things are better now,” I said bitterly, “because it’s done where we don’t see or hear it anymore. One of those hunters who clubbed baby harp seals said something really important to a report
er; he said, ‘If these things looked like lobsters you guys wouldn’t be here.’ ”
“My goodness,” said Alice. I could tell she didn’t say that about pigs or lobsters; she said it about how excited I was. I peeked into the oven. Not yet. I went on: “And it isn’t only animal life. Who’s to say a carrot doesn’t scream in some different wavelength when it’s pulled up? Here’s a happy cow, murdering grass blades by the thousands, and shuffling its big hard feet through the bleeding bodies before they’re dead; talk about Auschwitz!” More quietly I said, “All life wants to do is live, but under it all is the pressure to do it by killing. Is it any wonder we’re at the very edge of blowing up the earth? On the surface we can cry a lot and chant ‘Give peace a chance,’ but deep down underneath is a joy in killing because there’s no other way to live here.” I turned off the oven. Alice took down two plates and put them on the work surface next to the stove. With a spatula I took the things out of the oven and dished them up.
“They’re called butterfly eggs,” I said. “I don’t know why.” Alice gasped. They were beautiful—quite large but light as cloud, with the little horns of the egg white not quite brown and shading through gold to snow. The yolks were still liquid, held in the seasoned circle of onion. She took the plates to the table in the nook at the end of the kitchen and I brought the mugs. We sat down and Alice tasted the cocoa. “Oh my goodness,” she said again, and it was as fine a compliment as I have ever heard. Then she set down the mug and began to laugh, chimes and cadenzas of rich wonderful laughter, until she ran out of breath, while I sat there dumbfounded. While she blotted her eyes with a paper napkin I said, a little stiffly, “What was that about?”
Case and the Dreamer Page 30
