Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  II

  I sat by the Terrace swimming pool, reading about magic. A salesman from an educational publishing company sat in the chair next to mine. I’d met him earlier when he’d caught me staring into his car, a late-model Pontiac with a back seat full of globes, spheres of reinforced cardboard, blue, green, and brown, spilled into a tangle of equatorial seat belts. The sight was marvelous, and not a little unexpected, and I lingered, staring, until the salesman came out of his room and asked me what the hell I was doing. The globes had overwhelmed me, I said, and then showed him my room key to prove I wasn’t a thief. This made him feel guilty. Minor judgmental errors tend to unhinge men who’ve been drinking alone in motel rooms since two in the afternoon. He opened the trunk of his car and insisted on giving me an outdated model he’d collected from a Berkeley retailer. “Keep it, keep it,” he said. “I already credited the guy’s account. Company can’t use it.” He tapped the globe with a finger. “Africa’s all screwed up. They keep changing the names over there.”

  I put the globe on my dresser and as a fair-trade gesture gave the man—Ted—a warm beer from my stash on the windowsill, which was a mistake. When I went to sit by the pool Ted joined me, bringing along an ice bucket, two sani-sealed glasses, and a half-bottle of Old Stasis bourbon. He wanted to get a little snookered and then go looking for “nookie,” but I was after the magic and couldn’t explain. So we sat together and listened to the ice melt. It melted slowly, with no audible variation. Finally Ted got to his feet and pulled up his trousers, which seemed to contain thousands of pennies, and said, “Well, I better turn in. Got to be in Palo Alto early tomorrow.” We shook hands and he made me write my name and address on the back of his business card so he could send me an atlas, gratis, when he got home to Citrus Heights, some horrible planned community near Sacramento. The atlas has yet to arrive.

  III

  In 1460 a Macedonian monk brought Cosimo de’ Medici a manuscript reputed to be an incomplete copy of the secret, magical Corpus Hermeticum, a book supposedly written by Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, who was known to the Florentines by his Greek name, Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes was held in high regard for his powers and valued, as were many things during the Renaissance, for his antiquity. He predated Plato, for whom Cosimo had forsaken Aristotle, and hence was considered prima materia, closer to the flame. Cosimo was old and sick and wanted to read the Corpus, even in fragmentary form, before he died, so he repaired to his villa above Florence and summoned court scholar Marsilio Ficino.

  “I arrived here at Careggi yesterday,” he wrote Ficino in his letter of instruction, “not in order to till my fields, but to cultivate my soul.”

  Ficino came at once. He was a short serious melancholy man who’d established his reputation as a translator early in life, while still at school. Cosimo had made him a ward of the Medici so he could translate, for Cosimo’s delectation, Plato’s work from Greek into Latin without being subjected to the usual distractions of penurious scholars. For Ficino the arrangement was a windfall. Since his youth he’d been devoted to Plato and to the notion that love in its idealized Platonic form was the universe’s glue, its sustaining principle; Cosimo’s patronage gave him the freedom to try to reconcile such doctrines with those of the Church. Religion and philosophy were both spiritual pursuits, he believed, and it was his desire to fuse his own mystical Platonism with the conceptual core of Christianity. To this end he labored on in a villa near Cosimo’s, under the blank marble stare of a bust of Plato that Cosimo had given him. Once a year, on Plato’s birthday, Ficino held a banquet for leading statesmen, artists, writers, and students, the nucleus of his informal “Academy.” Arriving guests, tired from the long journey on horseback, up from the city into hills leavened with vines and olive trees, were instructed to take note of the motto Ficino had inscribed (perhaps as a caution against the weight of his own humors) on a wall of the villa: FREE TROUBLES, BE HAPPY IN THE PRESENT.

  At Cosimo’s request, Ficino set aside his other work and took up the fragments of the Corpus. He recognized the importance of the find; only Zoroaster came before Hermes in the genealogy of wisdom. By 1463 Ficino had finished a translation, Greek to Latin. This he presented to Cosimo, who was almost on his deathbed. The Corpus was something of a disappointment, though, at least in its philosophical sections, which only echoed the longings and aspirations of Humanism. In one characteristic passage, Pimander, an aspect of the Divine Mind, floats down to earth to give dozing Hermes advice on conducting his life. Man’s doubleness complicates existence, Pimander says; your flesh is mortal, but you are immortal by connection to essential man. Unlike other creatures, man can grow and change and perhaps become one with the Divine Mind. “You are light and life, like God the Father of whom Man was born. If therefore you know yourself as made of light and life … you will return to life.” This was familiar stuff, but the magical elements in the Corpus excited Ficino and his friends and helped to liberate the figure of the magus from the granite and doxology of the medieval church.

  Before the advent of Christianity, and through the period of its inception and diaspora, magicians had flourished in and around Florence. They were consulted not only for potions and abracadabras, but for the medicinal herbs, roots, and barks that formed the substance of the early pharmacy. But priests were afraid of them and believed that they practiced a form of black magic designed to topple the Church, so a campaign against them was mounted and they were forced underground. The Corpus helped to redefine magic and broaden the scope of its praxis. There were really two categories of magic, black and white, malevolent and benevolent, and Hermes advocated the use of a variety of the latter, called sympathetic.

  According to the scholar Francis Yates, this magic worked by simpatia, sympathy, by “knowing the mutual reports running through all nature, the secret charms by which one thing can be drawn to another.” It explored affinities and relationships and tried to attract celestial energy, spiritus, and then deploy it in the service of benign goals. Pico pushed this distinction even further. He described sympathetic magic as “the utter perfection of natural philosophy,” hardly magical at all, and certainly separate from that other magic “which depends entirely on the work and authority of demons, a thing to be abhorred, so help me the God of truth, and a monstrous thing.” Even the word magus had been misconstrued, Pico wrote. In fact it derived from Persian and “expresses the same idea as ‘interpreter’ and ‘worshipper of the divine’ with us.” Pico’s naive reformulation, sure to appeal to academics, did much to enhance magic’s reputation, and soon magical texts of all sorts, translations as well as newly written materials, were in great demand. Ficino contributed a volume called On Capturing the Life of the Stars. It was an eclectic compendium, somewhat like an herbal, full of imaginative prescriptions for healing body and soul.

  An Arabian manual, Picatrix, had influenced Ficino’s work and portions of it were quoted in the book I was reading. There was a long description of a city Hermes/Thoth had built in Egypt and controlled by manipulating images.

  On the eastern gate he placed the form of an Eagle; on the western gate, the form of a Bull; on the southern gate the form of a Lion, and on the northern gate the form of a Dog. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the City except by their permission. There he planted trees in the midst of which was a great tree which bore the fruit of all generation. On the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower thirty cubits high on the top of which he ordered to be placed a light-house the colour of which changed every day until the seventh day after which it returned to the first colour, and so the City was illuminated with these colours. Near the City there was an abundance of waters in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference of the City he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by virtue of it the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm. The name of the City was Adocentyn.

  The descrip
tion had a fairy-tale piquancy, and that night I dreamed of Adocentyn. It was still with me in the morning when I went to the track.

  IV

  The race was for two-year-olds, a five-furlong sprint, and I looked over the stock in the paddock before making my wager. The horses had run only once or twice before, or not at all, and they were still green and had the alert playful look of the ranch about them. They weren’t aware of resistances, opposition, the gradual wearing down of tissue and desire, and some of them had a bafflement in their eyes when they surveyed the grandstand and the unfamiliar faces reading their limbs. I liked to bet two-year-olds because they were so young and guileless. Older horses, the Form’s “hard-hitting veterans,” were often deceptive before a race, drag-assing around, shuffling, their backs swayed and noses dappling the dust, and more than once I’d lost money when just such an animal rose into himself a hundred yards from the gate, suddenly pumped up on thoroughbred afflatus, and led the field from wire to wire.

  Two horses in the present field attracted me, Pass Completion, the favorite, and an outsider, Flight Message. Both looked honest, and I was standing in front of a toteboard, trying to decide between them, when an old man came up and asked if he could look at my Form. He was very polite, with clean pink cheeks, and he smelled of cologne and a dash of clubhouse whiskey and wore gold-rimmed specs and a traditional senior citizen’s shirt, white nylon and short-sleeved, with a strapped T-shirt beneath it.

  “Haven’t read one of these for years,” he mumbled, running the spine of his comb under lines of type. “Say, this horse has been working well. Raindrop Kid. Raindrop Kid. What’re the odds?” he asked, squinting.

  “Eighteen to one.”

  “Eighteen to one? Eighteen to one?” His eyes were gleaming now and a bit of froth appeared on his lips. “That’s an overlay if ever I saw one,” he said before vanishing into the six-dollar-combination line.

  Around me people were suddenly moving, prodded into action by the five-minute-warning buzzer, and I was arrested by the swarming colors and shapes, nests of teased hair, lime-green trousers, dark skin. I wondered if the old man knew what he was talking about or if he was just another trailer-park baron on holiday. It occurred to me that he might be a manifestation, some emissary from the outposts of my consciousness. I looked around. He wasn’t there. Time was passing, so I stepped into the flow to play Pass Completion, but when I reached for my money, I pulled out something along with it, a small antique medal my brother had given me years ago. I’d used it as a key chain until the hook at the top had broken, and now I carried it for sentimental reasons. It pictured a knickered boy in a golf cap rolling up his sleeves and preparing to flick a marble at other marbles arranged in a cruciform at the center of a circle. Above the boy’s head were the words, “United States Marble Shooting Championship Tournament.” His feet rested on laurel leaves. There was no illustration on the other side, only text: “Malden Championship Awarded to Emil Lawrence by The Boston Traveler,” it read. Nowhere did it mention Adocentyn, but I still bet Raindrop Kid to win.

  Sometimes a race unfolds exactly as you’ve envisioned it, with the horses cleaving to a pattern in your brain, and this seemed to be happening now. Raindrop Kid broke slowly, as I thought he would, and was seventh at the three-sixteenths pole, but I expected him to begin moving soon and he did, on the outside. By the stretch he was in striking distance. His legs were fully extended and he moved along in an effortless coltish glide. He trailed My Golly, whom I hadn’t even considered, and as he drew up to challenge I waited for the next phase of the pattern to develop, horses hooked and matching stride for stride, and then the final phase, the Kid’s slick expenditure of energy he’d held in reserve, his head thrown forward just far enough to nip My Golly at the wire. But it was My Golly who began to accelerate, drawing away, and I watched him pass the finish line and felt the pattern dissolve, soup draining into my shoes.

  Then the “Inquiry” sign appeared on the toteboard. The stewards were going to review a videotape of the race because my jockey, Rogelio Gomez, had lodged a complaint against Enrique Muñoz on My Golly, claiming Muñoz had bumped him in the stretch. The sign had a strange effect on me. It was one turn-around too many and I felt unpleasantly suspended. I turned away and looked up and saw a sparrow trying to pin a moth against the windbreak of the grandstand. The ongoing business of biology made me aware of the sound of my heart and the blood circulating through my body. I took a deep breath, but the air was warm and settled miasmatically in my lungs. Somebody had spilled popcorn down the steps in front of me, and for a while I counted kernels. The waiting was bad, as it always is, and I tried thinking about other things. The man next to me had a digital watch strapped to his wrist and I wondered how such instruments would affect our sense of time, extracting numbers from some bottomless well instead of graphing them, as clock hands did, across a recognizable globe. Computers with their miniaturized functions had a tendency to destroy space by making it seem equivalent to time, of the same invisible substance, when in fact the opposite was true: space was real, was grass, trees, rivers, and earth, real as horses are and so of greater validity than human constructs like time.

  A sudden explosion of bulbs, brilliant flashes on the toteboard, interrupted my cogitation, and then John Gibson, the track announcer, announced in that grand theatrical manner he had, full of hesitations, that after examining the videotape … the stewards … had decided … to disqualify My Golly and award the race to Raindrop Kid. The Kid paid thirty-eight dollars and twenty cents for every two dollars wagered to win, and when I collected my money I could feel the heat in my hands, all through me, and I knew how hot I was going to get.

  V

  John Gibson’s booth, which looks like a fishing shack on the fringe of some desperate hyacinth-choked lake, is on the roof of the grandstand, and to get to it I had to ascend a secret staircase behind a bar in the special groups’ dining room. It was a windy day and I could feel the grandstand trembling under my feet. The tenuousness of the structure was apparent. It seemed almost to list from left to right in concord with the gusting winds. I could see across the Bay to San Francisco, where a fire was burning on the Embarcadero. Dark gray smoke funneled into the sky and from where I stood, miles away, it looked beautiful, robbed of its tragic elements. Chaos, too, was a shifting notion, a matter of perspective, and I thought Gibson’s job must be a difficult one because nine times a day he had to lend a sense of order and purpose to animals spilling out of the gate. This was Gibson’s first season at Golden Gate, his first ever calling thoroughbreds—he’d had some experience with trotters and pacers at Hollywood Park, but that was a simpler business—and he was having a little trouble adjusting. Every announcer puts the wrong horse in front sometimes, but Gibson made the mistake frequently and had on occasion named the wrong horse at the wire. His style was imitative of Harry Henson’s, the dean of Hollypark, and his tongue didn’t easily embrace the foreign syllables fate tossed his way. Certain horses might never have their names pronounced right, not by Gibson, but then again he was young, only twenty-seven, and had plenty of time to improve.

  Inside, the booth was crammed with chairs, shelves, electronic equipment that an engineer named Charlie used to tape and later feed delayed race calls to KCBS in San Francisco, soda cans, beer cans, plates scarred with dried gravy, cake and pie plates tumbling crumbs—Gibson was a big man, pushing three hundred pounds—books and magazines, Gibson himself, and the track electrician, Ernie, a shifty-eyed man who was busy repairing a battery-powered horse-racing game. Ernie flipped a switch, testing, and the little horses, pushed forward by vibrations, began jiggling along their slots toward a finish line about ten inches away.

  “Red horse is still too fast,” Ernie said.

  “We’re gonna have to heavy-weight that sucker,” said Gibson. He took a thin strand of wire and wrapped it around the base of the horse. “That ought to slow ’im down.”

  Gibson liked games and used them to fill up the dead time
between races. He had something called Space Shuttle, which involved maneuvering a steel ball with two steel rods toward a hole at the end of a wooden board, but his favorite was darts. His dart board was nailed to the far wall, above Charlie’s equipment, and because Gibson was fairly inept it was dangerous for Charlie to let his attention lag. when Gibson was throwing, darts bounced all over the shack, skewering Forms and forearms alike. He lost two quick games to Ernie, who seemed to be toying with him, and then took me to an elevated platform at the front of the booth. This was where he worked. He sat on a stool with a microphone around his neck and used high-powered binoculars to scan the track. The view was exceptional, with nothing but glass between him and the strip.

  Gibson’s calling problems were due mostly to inexperience. His flaws seemed exaggerated, though, because he’d been hired to replace a local favorite, Tod Creed, who had resigned in a dispute with management. Creed, Berkeley-born, talented, with the high-strung temperament of a diva, was legendary for his fits, fights, and outbursts. Often he got away with them because he was so good at what he did. Over the years he’d been offered jobs at several major-league tracks but had chosen to stay close to home and his aging mother and boyhood pals. When he walked into Spenger’s, he was greeted with enthusiasm. Waiters slapped him on the back and bartenders filled his wineglass without being asked and said, winking, “On the house, Toddy, it’s on the house.”