The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  Commander Werdlum was a heavy-set man with steady blue eyes and white eyebrows. He smiled. “They damned well may shoot!” he said. “But, unfortunately; Dr.

  Gaunt, I’ve got orders. Exact orders. This is the way I’ve been told to do it—this is the way I’m doing it. After all, they’ve had hundreds of conferences, everywhere, and not yielded—”

  Gaunt looked down the line of rigid men facing the plant. “If they should fire—”

  “Orders.” The commander repeated calmly.

  “I’d be willing to take full responsibility—”

  For perhaps thirty seconds the officer considered, gazing at the building and then at the long line of young, pale faces. “No,” he said mildly. “Sorry. But, thanks.” He examined his wrist watch. “You better get back with the mayor and the rest—”

  Gaunt went.

  The fifteen minutes crawled to an end.

  Then it seemed that all the windows in the great plant burst outward at once and from every window came the muzzle of a rifle, from every barrel, fire. Gaunt dropped down among the rocks. The air was stung by bullets at a hundred points; steel ricocheted from the pavement, from stones, from the bones of men.

  The drawn-up column screamed and roared. Part of it fell to the ground, streaming blood. Gaunt saw a clarinet shot from a bandsman’s hands. He saw the tuba player spit blood upon his golden instrument and look worriedly at the stain and fall with the horn on the hard road. He saw men not immediately hit take cover behind oleanders and other shrubs and he ducked low as machine guns in the plant began to probe the flowers, cutting down branches, so that soon the parkway was cleared of its pretty verdure.

  He didn’t see more because the man beside him, whose unshaven face he recalled, whose name he did not know, tried to stand in order to observe better and was hit in the shoulder and fell back into the warm, dirty water of the Bay. Crouching, Gaunt waded after him.

  From the Base, beyond the plant, came booming sounds; other explosions, mushy but heavy, could be heard as gas shells burst inside the building. The men there were screaming too. Gaunt knew they would not be able to hold their position for long. Not with the plant a haze of gas.

  That was the strategy, then: expose a column, play the songs, make an offer and a threat and then—if the volley came—gas them out with the new weapon.

  Gaunt made a pad of his handkerchiefs and tied it in place with a necktie and settled the wounded official on a little patch of sand below the line of fire. The other men looked frightened and sick and one of them began to cry. There was clanking on the causeway, now—armor moving. Light tanks, Gaunt imagined, and when they began to shoot Gaunt knew they were picking off strikers who came choking from the untenable building.

  The next day the Miami papers had the statistics. So many members of the Coast Guard killed and wounded; so many of the National Guard. Commander Werdlum dead, his body, on the center westbound lane, shot to bits by vengeful strikers. One hundred and three of these dead, two hundred and six injured, a hundred and fifteen unharmed and jailed.

  The national story was in the same scale. A White House spokesman said that

  “civil war had been prevented.”

  Editorials attacking the useless exposure of troops to assassination were written . .

  . and filed away unprinted when a directive about such comment was received by every paper.

  But the General Strike had ended. Trains ran. Phones rang. Food moved. Planes flew. Factories churned. Men shut their mouths and looked at the ground, worked, ate, and accepted the new orders.

  Most men.

  A few here, a handful there, a total of many, moved outside the law where marauders had camps in swamps or held remote villages in high mountains.

  Gaunt had driven home shakily at noon on the day the strike had been broken.

  He felt that he had done what he could.

  He felt that he had done nothing.

  That was all he could do: nothing. Talk to a commander who was killed minutes later. Tie up a wounded city commissioner. Help lift him into an ambulance. And go.

  Work after that on his next report.

  Work, in a slow period of time, when his feet seemed dead and horror pursuing.

  But he was not surprised at what had happened or at what was happening. A free people had thrown aside the meaning of liberty, traded it for goods and rising production, bull markets and a chimera that went by the name of security, for another legend called secrecy, for weapons when the thing they had needed was a thing they might have called character—if they’d had enough character left to name itself.

  Now, when iron discipline came down, they tentatively accepted it, having no longer a discipline of themselves. They accepted it, or if not, their rebellion lacked the noble quality of American tradition. It was not an attempt to regain liberty but merely the embrace of crime. They did not even see there was a choice left of self-government and private determination; they saw only the alternatives of mass submission or of outlawry.

  And most had for so long romanticized thugs that many of these believed the banded criminals were the last representatives of “pioneer” spirit.

  Music on the radio grew louder and more martial.

  Television shows enjoyed a governmental relaxation and became obscenity feasts.

  Bread from Washington; circuses.

  Uniforms multiplied. Men by the tens of thousands were sent to places not called concentration camps.

  But the government was referred to as the “regime” openly now; and all good citizens wore red, white and blue badges that said simply “100%” and suppozedly stood for total support of the regime. Support meant subservience.

  Gaunt wore one.

  So did Jim Elliot.

  Not to wear one was to be struck without warning by a hostile fist, or arrested, or even clubbed to death by the rifle butt of a man who was not called a Storm Trooper.

  Europe, long used to tyranny, was amazed.

  But Europe, trying its opposite, was shaking off “regimes” and “orders.”

  Spring came at last.

  From his study windows the miserable philosopher could see a dilapidated neighborhood. Borers, bred in the hurricane-felled timber, were pitting his pines, streaking their boles with the red sawdust of chewed bark, turning their needles brown, killing all of them. A vine grew out of the broken roof of the Wests’ bungalow—grew, branched and blossomed claret. Occasional cars and trucks banged on roads that had not been repaired for a long while. But the birds still mated. He watched enviously one day while a cardinal, like a red ball falling from a Christmas tree to a green rug, landed on what was left of his lawn, bounced a foot or two and danced in front of a pink-billed female. Springtime.

  Whenever he peered in the mirror in Paula’s and his bathroom he could see winter coming to him: the whitening of his thinned hair, the deep creases in his cheeks, the leathern look and the yellowness of eyeball that came from age, improper nutrition, anxiety and fear. He had cramps in his belly, often, now, unexplained diarrheas, rheumatism of his sinews. Sometimes he thought of the drugs in the locked suitcase he’d bought long ago and always, when he did so, he told himself, “Not yet.” The need would be greater in a time foreseen but merely slow in coming.

  It was in April, on a bland evening, that Jim Elliot came by and invited Gaunt to see what he had been building during the winter. Jim’s coal-black hair was white-shot nowadays. His hands always shook. But his voice was unchanged.

  Gaunt went over, glad that his friend’s taciturnity had at last ended and supposing Jim had remodeled his house to while away the days, or perhaps fortified it.

  They went through the kitchen and down the hall. The door to the high-ceilinged living room was shut. A dim light revealed on the hall Boor a heap of shavings, sawdust and scraps of bright-colored paper. Gaunt was puzzled. He was more puzzled when his friend fumbled for a key: the door was locked.

  “Glad the power’s on,” Jim said. “With candles a
nd kerosene lamps, the effect isn’t so good. And, besides, there’s a fire hazard—”

  Gaunt nodded as if he understood.

  Jim unlocked the door. Darkness lay ahead; he reached around the wall and began to snap electric switches.

  What Gaunt saw was breath-taking.

  Jim Elliot had changed his big living room into a fantastic place. It was no longer oblong, but star shaped. The sides of the star curved up and in, so that the ribs supporting the sides met, like groins, at the center, fifteen feet overhead. The floor was gilded. Each

  “point” of the star-shaped chamber had been laboriously constructed of wood, plywood and paper. Each was brilliantly painted. And the rising walls were cellular, with colored tissue paper glued on the backs of the “cells.” Lights came from behind or outside the

  “star’: itself, so when Jim turned the switches the enormous contraption was like the midst of a rainbow.

  Jim stepped forward and beckoned Gaunt to follow.

  It was like being inside a gigantic paper Christmas bell of the kind that opens from a folded half-bell into a compartmented tissue-paper whole. Like such a bell, but a star, and hollow within.

  Jim walked to the middle. A single chair had been placed there.

  “Try it,” Jim said.

  Gaunt very nearly smiled. But untold work had gone into the structure; it was spectacular, it was pathetic, and it would not do even to show a smile.

  “Of course,” Jim murmured as his guest seated himself, “I’d like to have been able to project the thing down too. This is just half—an upper half. If I could have got mirrors, I’d have covered the floor to reflect the top half, which would have given the effect.

  Gaunt found that the chair was on casters; he could swivel himself around to face any part of the “star.” He turned slowly in a circle. The geometrical shapes of the compartments in the walls gave the place depth and dimensionality; the translucent, colored backing of each of the hundreds of recesses—with light flooding from behind in every hue and shade on still other yellow, scarlet, green, purple and blue segments—

  increased his vivid, yet baffling sense of space built upon space, dimension added to dimension. The eye could fix on no one point, detect no dominant hue; it discerned myriad patterns, yet the beholder remained aware of the spatial star that contained him.

  The external illumination, furthermore, lent a simultaneous impression of a containing and outgoing radiance beyond the walls so that dimensions beyond the familiar three were more than suggested. They seemed here to exist.

  The desire to smile, which he had first felt, and the sense close to pity, which had quickly followed, changed as he revolved the chair. The “room” was affective. Glowing compartments in its vaulted, five-pointed “corners,” childish at first glance, primitive, superstitious seeming, soon conveyed an elusive sense of identification, of half-recognized meaning, and of awe.

  The philosopher had thought of the new room, immediately, as a three-dimensional “mandala.” He was familiar not only with the mandala concept but with his friend’s researches into the concept. But it would be difficult even here, he realized, to explain to anybody what that was; and he wondered idly if there was even one more person in the state of Florida who, seeing this place, would comprehend it.

  “I’ve brought children in here—Gordon and others,” Jim said.

  “They love it.”

  “A handsome toy?”

  “I don’t believe so. What you professors call culture—what Freudians call superego, rubs out of existence so many inklings and intuitions and—maybe—memories that few adults can even remember what went on in their daydreams when they were children. The sense of knowing that children have is destroyed. Even the desire to know.

  How many adults are left even with that? One in a thousand?”

  Gaunt shrugged. It might be true.

  There might be, implicit, inherent in the center of the imperfectly known phenomenon of personality, a diagram of the basic scheme of things. That pattern might give rise to images of a geometrical sort, pure abstractions of line and color, or balanced designs composed of pictures. The truly introspective person, under certain circumstances, might see such pictograms or dream them. They could be hexagons, or pentagons like this new room, or circles or squares and composed of human figures, flowers, trees, landscapes, mere lines, colors, anything. To them the old Sanskrit word

  “mandala” might apply.

  From such a mandala, buried behind man’s consciousness, perhaps summing up his unconscious-conscious mind, or his instincts, all men might have received their impulse toward pattern, order, balance, harmony, organization. A mandala might be the core of it.

  Might, Gaunt thought. Looking at Jim’s “room” he gave the thought more attention than he had ever before accorded it. What was the line of reasoning on the mandala? The argument for it?

  That every human tribe, however barbaric, had endeavored, automatically, to sum up its notions of the nature of man and cosmos in some geometrical pattern. Thus, even the simplest mandala was a form of shorthand for a “religious statement.” The swastika—

  one such—was not Nazi invented. In fact, the Nazis had got it backwards, making what dead millions of savages would have anxiously called a bad-luck sign. To the savages, a proper swastika would have represented man, man-and-woman, the sun, and therefore, God. They had used it as that symbol for thousands of years. In Christianity, the Sign had become a cross; rather, all the crosses, but always with parallel meaning.

  The mandala, the sense of centered design, the illustrated need for harmony and balance, appeared in every Oriental art form. You could see it in old Persian rugs. On Chinese pottery. The Goths had elaborated it in stained glass as rose windows. Their cruciform cathedrals were mandalas. Form of the flower, the snowflake, idealized, it was used to represent the center of Nature, for the Sun and its, rays, for God, for the concentrated, attentive soul, reflecting these. It was a symbol whereby a man, one who could not read, might still have a literate communication with the Perfect, the Integrated, and the Infinite.

  It was also, Gaunt thought, the basic design of nature known to modern man: the crystal whereof all things are constructed. And it was more: the sun and its planets, the turning nebulae, and the electrons spinning through their orbits about the atom’s nucleus.

  All such “mandalas” described, in periods fantastically long, unbelievably brief, centered patterns both gigantic and minute.

  In some almost but not quite comprehensible fashion, Nature seemed to manufacture her every composition from the single thesis of a center surrounded by balancing parts, in circles, in squares, in cubes and spheres, in polygons and polyhedrons.

  Long-dead authors of the Vedas, who had discussed the phenomenon at length, and certain of the most modern nuclear physicists, had both suggested that, in the Beginning, there was but one entity in cosmos, one super-crystal, which had exploded into the universes.

  Could this “source” design therefore be repeated in all its parts, in atoms, in molecules in the crystals of matter in spheres and solar systems, galaxies and island universes? And could the recollection of the original state sometimes become conscious when (as in man) enough crystals had been brought together to make awareness possible?

  Was the pattern nature’s own final definition of itself? Was it a set of directions, everywhere intrinsic, for the eventual restoration of the original, sublime substance-a feat to be achieved by a universe grown altogether conscious at some remote period in time?

  Or was it the vision from which visions came, the ultimate revelation of God, the instinct’s own instinct of itself, the key to the way of individual being (as all old religions had assumed), and the key, also, to the purpose of evolving life?

  And artist, on one hand, and a mathematician, on the other (Gaunt thought), would dismiss such tenuous speculation as a waste of time. The artist would say that harmony in pattern is a “natural” or “obvious” fact; the mat
hematician, that the structure of things demanded equation, and so there was no mystery about it: two does not equal three. Only a very analytical person, dissatisfied with all existing descriptions of nature and man’s relation to it, only such a one searching amongst unconventional relationship for fresh clues (amongst old, abandoned theories or amidst new hypotheses seen in a different light) would undertake to think long and soberly about pattern itself and what its significance might be. And a rarer person still would be needed for the deliberate construction, in light and color, of a pure pattern in which to meditate—a three-dimensional mandala—an old thing, yet very new.

  “It’s beautiful,” Gaunt said at last.

  Jim sighed, as if he had been holding his breath all the while his friend sat and stared. “Yes. I like to be here. I play music to myself. All kinds. It seems to fit all kinds.”

  He had a look of meekness in his eyes and of determination around his mouth. “You see what it is?”

  “Yeah. A mandala.”

  “A chapel. An abstract chapel. I have thought a great deal about how a good purpose, conducted without much consciousness, generally turns into its opposite; and a great many wiser men have appreciated the same thing. It occurred to me, for instance, that during the past few centuries, when we wanted to worship, we’ve always gone into some gloomy, tomblike building—a church—and knelt and chanted in the murk like beetles grubbing underground. When we wanted to think, we built cells as bare and colorless as possible, with as little light, and put on sackcloth, and fasted: we became monks. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It is to prevent distraction.”

  Jim shook his head. “No! It’s because we’ve got everything wrong! We identify serious thought with death—worship with death—ourselves with death. God is death to us all-and has been for ages. Nobody lives this life—really; everybody is interested in an afterlife—so this one we know is ipso facto a kind of death. If we were really alive, the way, we were meant to be, we would not make so much of death, in the way we do. We think, for instance, that the cosmos is mostly cold, dark space. Actually, it’s mostly light—and most of the objects in it are burning suns. Only the planets and gassy clouds have shadows, and not all the clouds; some glow. The suns are shadowless. When we cannot see our one sun, we call it the dark of night, even though we’re looking at thousands of suns!”