Universe 14 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  For a year I persisted, walking the two miles from our apartment to the labs almost every night, entering between the two stone rhinos, the grates in the quad steaming in all seasons and the mist making coronas around the lamps. At last I had my second generation of Alytes and encouraged them to mate in water, contra naturam. I cleaned the fertilized eggs and kept them alive for two weeks. And then the approval for my project was withdrawn. My incubators were shut off. In disgust and despair I left for the Cape, alone, for a vacation, and took the chance job at Woods Hole thinking that I might still find a place for my work.

  I see what drove Kammerer to suicide. All work for a community is in three parts—constitution, execution, and interpretation. The constitution is communal: you necessarily draw on common knowledge. The execution, the creative act, is irredeemably isolated and solipsistic: the mind is alone with its labor and must take unique responsibility for everything it uses—communal, original, learned by design, or at hazard. The only possible redemption is in the interpretation: from that isolated solipsism the community must be able to draw meaning. Kammerer failed at the last step and so was left with a personal burden of impersonal knowledge unredeemed.

  An odd coincidence I discovered later was that Kammerer had shot himself on my birthday. Another was that the son of Kammerer’s harshest critic, Gregory Bateson, was at this time a regent of the University of California. Kammerer was a collector of coincidences, and I gather these here only for his sake—and for Murphy, who would doubtless find them meaningful.

  * * * *

  I wonder if forms have their own lives. I wonder if shapes in time repeat themselves, at periods, in variations, in retrograde, it is only by a long series of small accidents that we become what we are, and although we remain only what we are we can look back on branching points of possibility now canceled, an angel at each, that might have led to different selves. What is the number of accidents? What is the binding force? What is the shape of necessity? The notion that everything is possible is monstrous, so we restrict, by observing, then defining, then excluding what will not fit. The plenum is reduced to the principle of plenitude. But the excluded remain with us. Beyond all principles, we remain what we are.

  I owned a slight book on topology. It soothed me to consider ideal space. In topology there is no direction, and forms are mutable. A coffee cup is a torus, congruent to a doughnut or the human body. Yet laws govern. I took the terms as incantations—Mobius strip, Klein bottle, Cantor set—as pleasant as good dreams. My interest in topology was needless, but in the grace of the excluded even the needless may be needful. It pleased something in me that I should need the needless.

  Or perhaps it was a need related to my love of names. Like all biologists, I was a taxonomist at heart. I knew that things had names. They could float free of connotation and become pure poems. Or they could grant power. The true names of things were holy and fearsome. I even thought that a name could keep the thing it represented from existing, that imagination could prevent occurrence, that to envision something fully was to usurp it. At times I had purposely imagined the worst, to keep it at bay. But there is always something you fail to imagine. Every moment time branches. Each second murders possibilities. In a day, one’s most trivial decisions abort a million alternative selves. If we are the result of a sport of genes, how much more so of choice?

  To me, this was the true menagerie, the myriad decisive acts of will that make us what we are, most of them beyond analysis, impossible to tame by naming. Since I felt that creation was a plenum and untroubling, I suppose I should have felt the same about choice. But I thought my will imperfect and liable to error. Therefore I admired will-less Murphy. It was part of the quid pro quo of our friendship. Life is the exchange of energies.

  In all, I was as much a mother to him as I could be without making it obvious. And by degrees he opened up to me. Though a good student, he had never finished high school. He put himself through a trade school, doing smudged charcoal fashion drawings. He worked briefly in small ad agencies, always quitting. He seemed to fear the endorsements of the world. He had no social life, and filled his off-hours by reading von Daniken, Borges, Hegel, Rilke, Velikovsky, Nietzsche, Bergson, Vonnegut, Milton, Ouspensky, Frost, Heinlein, Koestler, a chaos of interests. He had no books on art, just as my own shelves had always been lightest in biology.

  Family trees, evolutionary charts, the maze of choice, a garden of forking paths, the drawings of Alexander’s horned sphere in my text—all had the same shape. I came to see Murphy’s life as congruent to my own.

  He began a painting, and to cadge a glimpse I teased him about not using always the same kinds of lines. He said solemnly —This is something else. I’ll show you when it’s done.

  He kept the canvas turned back when he wasn’t working on it. It left on the white wall varicolored lines where the wet top edge leaned.

  * * * *

  Now it is time to tell the real reason I came West.

  Topology, evolution, competition, cooperation, plenitude: these are stories we tell ourselves, as scientists, as politicians, as men, to hold back what we dare not embrace. But time and the time-bound mind are unforgiving; the excluded tend to surface.

  I came West on account of John Lang. He was a year ahead of me at school; we shared the same friends. He introduced me to the other great fiction of the nineteenth century, that of Karl Marx—the grand vision of cooperation as the furthering force of life.

  It was appealing. The metaphor of course did not hold in biology—Lysenko had been the great Soviet Lamarckian, working to vindicate the Marxist idea that life was not a free-market economy. But in time even the Soviets had bowed to their losing competition with Darwinism, and Lysenko was written out of history. I knew that. But as a binding fiction of life, it was appealing.

  Lang was no exemplar, however. When he graduated he went straight to work in his father’s chemical firm. We made him the butt of tolerant abuse—poor John, twenty-one and already bourgeois. He was making thirty thousand a year and drove to Cambridge often. We would joke with him and nurse him like a sick bird.

  I was living then with Joann Stephen, a slim dark beauty. For three years we were married in all eyes but the law’s. When I returned from Woods Hole she was living with Lang. He had finally quit his job. They took me out to dinner, and as my order arrived I fled, nauseated at the part I had to play, at my ineffectualness, my poverty, my pain and despair.

  What I resented most was that Lang was using her as the flag of his liberation. “Living in sin” was the way he liked to phrase it to everyone but me. And I resented that there was that in Joann to respond to his instrumentalism. And I wondered what story I had used to blind myself to the possibility of betrayal. For as Lang reminded me, almost sadly, betrayal is possible only within a framework of cooperation. So had I collaborated in my betrayal? Probably.

  I told no one when I went West, leaving Lang in my bedroom, with my books and plants, with the cat I had saved from a neighbor’s drowning. I left behind every totem of my three years of domestic life. I fled lamenting, How could he ever know her as I had?

  But if I cannot judge Murphy, how much less can I judge Lang? He had known what was needed for his life. He had acted. And I had not even known that I was in competition for her.

  I bought a radio. Late at night, when most stations were off the air, I listened to it. With my oil lamp set low I entered into dialogues with static. For variety I listened to talk shows. I seldom went to bed before three. It was here, after a month in Berkeley, during an unseasonable rain so light it seemed at times to ascend, that I was fully and finally acquainted with the depth of Murphy’s neurosis. I was reading a book on phylogeny by Gould, listening in the interstices to the murmur of rain and radio, which was holding an open telephone discussion of flying saucers, I think. I could ignore the sound of talk more easily than I could music, but an insistent inflection turned my attention to the radio’s tinny monologue.

  —This is
true, the voice said. —The Earth was fertilized from space. Aliens came and mixed proteins in the ancient sea, did this for amusement. The history of life on Earth is a catalog of permutations. All fabulous beasts were once real. We can’t have imagined them, our imaginations are poor, we can’t imagine a number greater than ten, nor the durations of our lives; our dreams are haunted only by what we’ve seen and done. The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of worlds. On their world, life is reasonable. But here they have made a genetic cesspool. It was a game to them. They are all perfect and identical. They do not die, age, or reproduce. What they have done here is a dirty joke, dirty because it is unnecessary. It is as dirty as speaking aloud, or writing, because a perfect thought needs no expression, and an imperfect thought produces only deformed progeny. We may clone, we may graft, we may splice genes, but we cannot approach the enormity of what they have done here. We mock ourselves by the very attempt. We are theirs. Perhaps they come back to observe us, perhaps not, that doesn’t matter. Perhaps they did it to mock their own perfection. Perhaps it gives them the filthy pleasure of the voyeur, of the boy fevered with the naked woman’s picture. The unspeakable difference. The eye and the act. It is a freak show, a menagerie of Babel, the combinations absurd, meaningless, incoherent. The eye. And the act.

  At the word Babel I looked out my one window. A light was on out there. My eyes rose to the cupola. I saw Murphy pacing back and forth before his window, holding a telephone.

  * * * *

  Peter Fraser, our landlord, late of Boalt Hall, conducted a purge of the house on September 23, my uncelebrated birthday. He demanded all back rents, or eviction by October 1. I drove with him to the Co-Op to post “for rent” notices. Kristin, the student of midwifery, was the only one greatly upset. I was with Murphy when she came up to ask if he was moving. She had to; she hadn’t the cash.

  I liked Kristin. She was as flighty as the rest of the household, but she was not truculent about it. She said she had been trying the past year to get her life in order. She needed two more months to finish her training, and if she had the expense of moving it would be back to typing at Cal and another year of trying to get free. Murphy listened to this, then took from his desk a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

  —Use this if you like, he said. —I don’t need it.

  After a speechless second she counted the money, wrote him a note, and promised to repay him by the new year. She did not thank him; her manner implied that thanks would debase his act.

  Rents paid, we three were invited by Peter to go hiking with him in the Sierra. I think he wanted to escape the repercussions of his decree, figuring it would take a day or two to sink in.

  Murphy and I agreed. We drove all night in the Karmann-Ghia. We had a ten-hour hike before us, and Peter crazily wanted to do it all in a day. We took Cayoga Road to 395 and drove south till dawn. Ten miles to our west and across the desert rose the sheer scarp of the eastern Sierra, sharp and clean. We turned up Pine Creek Road and parked near a tungsten mine at the trailhead. We unpacked the car, drank coffee, and ate rolls. The air was sweet. There was a van parked near us with a painting of the desert on its side.

  After we put on our packs, Peter handed Murphy and me each a car key.

  —Here. In case of emergencies any one of us can drive out for help. Go straight down 395 to Bishop. And for Christ’s sake, take a topo whenever you leave camp.

  We hiked in, up a steep road, past junipers, timber, and lodgepole pines. We passed a second mine, its tramway and steel shacks idle, eerie in the morning calm. The trail crossed a stream, then leveled. After a while the timber thinned. We climbed, panting, not talking. Scant lodgepoles stood atop their reflections in Pine Lake. We skirted the lake and crossed its inlet. Below falls we stopped for lunch. I took off my outer shirt. From here the trail climbed sharply in switchbacks. We labored to an untimbered ridge that divided two basins: to the north the Chalfant Lakes, to the south Granite Park strung with smaller, unnamed lakes. For a few hours we followed a stream that ducked under and over jumbled rocks. A set of switchbacks brought us to Italy Pass. We paused here for the view and to get our wind. It was midafternoon.

  The scale of the place was such that I did not know if it was beautiful or not—I was reminded of a line of Henry Miller: “No analysis can go on in this light; here the neurotic is either instantly cured, or goes mad”—you might as well call the moon beautiful. The warring forces which had jumbled this landscape were awesome, especially in this deep afternoon calm. From a human perspective it was like a desolated battlefield of giants—we were trespassing in their laps—and these images immediately canceled themselves before the reality, making all human perspective trivial.

  West of the pass there was still snow. I could not believe it was September. The last time I camped was two years before, when Joann and I spent a week in a cabin on the Appalachian Trail. It was April, too early for hikers. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, but that week the temperature stayed in the sixties. We went naked most of the time. It was there I got her pregnant.

  Near dusk we made camp by a rockbound lake in a glacial cirque. Peaks ringed us round. Despite our fatigue we were alert, and we stayed up talking, late enough to see Taurus’s V climb above the rough silhouette of mountains. The stars were brilliant. Each moment’s gaze seemed to bring out more. I named the Dippers and Cassiopeia’s W, but it took Murphy to identify the dimmer constellations. I remember laughing at Camelopardelus, the giraffe. I felt free and vigorous. Peter rolled a joint, and he and I smoked and talked while Murphy looked for meteors.

  There was a resemblance between Peter and John Lang, and Peter too was a Marxist. Far from cooperation, this seemed to mean that he never made a profit on rent or dope deals. In America selling at cost plus right attitude is the nearest approach to communism. He repined over the evictions. He had been more than fair. But they had acted in bad faith, and it was no favor to anyone to support the irresponsible. How the responsible differed from those who paid their bills I did not hear him say. He sketched the consequences of his Marxist heresy in a capitalist, normative society. His parents gave him grief for dropping out. His job prospects were nil. He suffered angst. Only in the mountains did he feel free.

  Doubtless I am being unjust to Peter. The point is that I liked unreflective Murphy better. Despite all Peter and I shared in training and rejection, I felt little sympathy. Still, I gave him in turn some of my background, my own heresies and failures, insofar as they reflected his. I was smoking his dope. We all felt fine.

  After a while Peter stood. —Time to make some humus . . . anyone else? Why, I wondered, are Marxists such scoutmasters?

  When he had gone, Murphy spoke to me. —I used to think that I was not human. I thought I was from a star somewhere. They had left me here to grow up as human, and when I had observed enough, they would take me back. I used this, this fantasy as a rationale for interest. I liked to study, and this gave me a reason.

  —Which star? I asked.

  —Omega Orionis, he said with no hesitation. —They live in an artificial world orbiting the star. It’s a winter star. Where I lived I could see it only sometimes, it’s dim. I knew they had left me, and would come back.

  —How long did this . . . fantasy last? I asked carefully.

  —Oh, a few years. I never told anyone. After a while I just stopped thinking about it.

  —When I was a kid, I thought I was some kind of genetic sport, you know, a mutant. We all need some story to separate us from our parents.

  —I was afraid. I studied Earth things, you see, and I began to believe in them. So I was afraid they would see this, and not come back for me. I was supposed to be just an observer. Not a participant. So I left off studying for a while.

  —Murphy. My friend. What the hell is your first name?

  —Hugh.

  —Irish?

  —My mother denies it. She says it’s Scottish. She wears orange on St. Patrick’s Day.

&
nbsp; I laughed. —And what’s your father?

  —Dead. Of drink.

  —Oh.

  —I ... I waited a long time for it. He raped my older sister. He was ... it was his name too.

  —Is that why you don’t use it?

  —Oh, no. It’s, well, I sign myself, my drawings, just “Murphy.” It’s kind of a personal secret. You know, the way some people won’t tell their middle names, as if names gave power? It’s silly.

  —No. If you know someone’s name, in a way you’re responsible for them.

  —And you, you know the names of so many things, don’t you . . .

  —Not their true names. You know more of that, I think.