The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  I didn’t try to squeeze up front to where Ted, Doris and Arlene were sitting, or even let them know I was there. Instead, I found myself a shadow in the far rear corner of the room, stepped into it, and proceeded to lurk.

  Harvey lit a cigarette, waved it around like a censer; I imagined the congregation eagerly sucking up the carcinogenic incense. “Well now,” Harvey said, “we all know what this meeting is about.” Silence filled the room like a physical presence; so far the Great Trek to San Francisco had been a word-game, but now it was whooshing like a runaway freight-train toward reality and you could taste the second thoughts. I had to play it right, had to ride the wave of doubt and catch it just at the moment it poised to crest...

  “We’re going to vote on moving to San Francisco in a few minutes,” Harvey said. “But first I’d like you to understand the mechanics of such a move, if we make it. I’d fly out to the Coast immediately to look for a house for the Foundation. I’d hope that at least a dozen of you would be able to go out no more than two or three weeks later as a kind of advance guard to help me set things up, find apartments and jobs, so that when the bulk of you arrive more or less at your leisure, you’ll have jobs and apartments and a functioning Foundation ready for you.”

  The whole room seemed to take a deep breath. Harvey had moved them a long way towards acceptance: talking like a vote was a foregone conclusion, a mere formality (which, not knowing what I was going to spring, he must’ve been sure it was) and telling them they’d just have to get there and their womb would be waiting for them. I took The Path to Consciousness out of its garbage bag—I had missed the crest of the wave; I needed some kind of opening fast.

  “Come on, come on,” Ted shouted up front. “Let’s vote already!” General silence. Shit, I had to find some way of sneaking the book in before they voted! And I couldn’t just start yelling—they’d shout me down. I had to sneak up on their head, real cool-like. Had to have an opening...

  “Take it easy, Ted,” Harvey said. “Before we vote, I think we should see if anyone has anything further to say...”

  The hole opened up in the line, courtesy of Harvey himself, but I didn’t bull my way through, I played it real cool, raised my hand, waiting for Harvey himself to call on me.

  “Yes Tom?” Harvey said with a barely-concealed smile. I could read what he was thinking: he knew that the suckers expected a pie in the face from me, he knew that I had been converted, he knew that I would now be a pussycat, and he knew that this sudden reversal would be the capper he needed.

  So I played his game, smiled innocently, led him up the primrose path.

  “You all know what I’ve been saying about Harvey and the Foundation and moving to San Francisco,” I said in a humble, contrite voice. “Well, since the last meeting, I’ve had a few revelations...”

  I paused and let the moment hang as everyone craned their necks around to rubberneck at the new, humble, converted Tom Hollander. Harvey was smiling at me—he thought he knew what was coming and why. Arlene’s eyes lit up—she probably was sure I had decided to go to San Francisco for her sake. Ted looked smugly paternal. No one else seemed to know what was coming off. I had to do this just right or I wouldn’t get to do it at all...

  “Yeah,” I finally said, “since last meeting, my girl told me it was San Francisco or splitsville, my friend Ted tried to talk some sense into me, I’ve had a terrible acid bummer and a very interesting private session with Harvey...”

  I paused again and made a kind of bookcover out of the brown paper bag, hid the gray binder of Harvey’s book behind it. Harvey was flashing the biggest public smile I had ever seen on him; a lot of the Foundation-freaks like Linda and Ida were nodding, smug and tight-lipped, sure that the chief heathen was about to announce his conversion. So far, so good—I had to con them along long enough to be allowed to read from the book; I couldn’t let Harvey realize what was coming till it was too late.

  “And something else,” I said. “I just happened to come across a groovy book which seems to have some relevant things to say to us, as we’re about to vote to undertake a kind of great adventure... I guess when an idea’s time has come, it crops up in all kinds of places at once. So for the benefit of any doubters that may still be left, I’d like to read a few passages from this book...”

  A mutter went through the room. I had delivered the whole thing deadpan, but I suppose the idea of listening to me read from some book seemed awfully weird to most of them. What the fuck is the lunatic doing now? seemed to be the general expression. But Harvey nodded clerically, still smiling, sure in the knowledge that whatever I thought I was doing now, I was on his side.

  Still keeping the book hidden behind the paper bag, I opened it to the first passage I had marked and began to read: “...Down through the ages, mystics who have achieved a greater degree of consciousness than their fellows... have been feared and reviled and persecuted, or worse, ignored...”

  Linda and Rich and the rest of the shitheads seemed about to yawn. But old Harv really reacted—his jaw started to flap open; then he caught himself. But he knew! I had to con him along. I gave him a near-subliminal wink and quickly said: “Yeah, I read that, and suddenly I saw myself right in there with the fearers and the doubters. I started to really think...”

  Harvey’s face relaxed into a nervous smile. Nervous because where the hell did I get his book; smile because he was sure The Path to Consciousness was pure unadulterated self-evident Truth, and besides I had been converted even before I had read it. That was Harvey’s blind spot and it was a mile wide: he couldn’t see that The Path to Consciousness was a piece of gibbering insanity; to him it was Cosmic Truth.

  “The guy that wrote this book really understands where consciousness is at,” I said. “Dig... Consciousness is the ego looking at itself and proclaiming “I am therefore I am”...Consciousness is the interface between the mind and time...”

  Ah, I was getting weird looks now. Half the freaks seemed to be thinking “That sounds just like Harvey.” The other half seemed to think it sounded like meaningless bullshit. Interesting philosophical questions: which faction was stupider? Harvey, though, seemed really relaxed now; after all, I was reading from a Great Book, making him look good from either end.

  “You dig?” I said. “Great minds move in the same paths, right? Guy that wrote this book says so himself: ‘... I am not placing myself above the great minds of mystical thought, but I am walking in their footsteps, along the path of Gautama the Buddha, of Jesus, of the founders of Yoga, of the Zen masters...”

  I paused, let the inevitable snickers move like a hopping mouse through the room. Harvey’s smile became an empty, hollow thing as his worshippers unwittingly tittered at Holy Writ. And who knows, maybe hearing the words read back to him aloud was enough to let even him sense their madness.

  As the groans reached their maximum, I said: “What’s the joke?” in a very uptight voice, telling Harvey that I was on his side. Yeah! That was the way to do it! Get them to laugh at me and get madder and madder and act like a prick who believed in the book so they’d see what a prick you had to be to believe in it, and then...

  “Hey, come on,” I said, “this guy is laying down some heavy truth. He’s got a right to talk like that!” Harvey nodded slightly, sucked on his cigarette. Linda Kahn shook her head. Arlene looked at me as if she were sure I was stoned. “Dig what he says about consciousness:... our ego fears its own annihilation... Our egos are the enemy for they fight against the inevitable and deny us peace. Therefore, we must reach out for a new level of consciousness which will bring us peace... We must learn to embrace death.’”

  “Oh crap!” Linda Kahn shouted. “How much more of this garbage do we have to listen to?”

  “Sick, sick, sick!” Bill Nelson chanted.

  “Ah, he’s stoned again!” Rich Rossi yelled.

  Now there was real fear in Harvey’s eyes. Fear and confusion—they were putting down his book! He took off his glasses, rose to the edge of hi
s chair, seemed about to try and cut me off somehow—so I leapt to his defense.

  “Shut up, you jerks!” I yelled. “This guy really knows what he’s talking about! Dig: ‘Total Consciousness is the annihilation of the self. Total Consciousness is the psychic equivalent of death...’”

  Dead silence. They had heard the magic words. Every head turned to stare at Harvey. Harvey held his glasses limply in one hand, toyed with his cigarette with the other as if it was his prick. His face was a pasty blank mask; only I knew what worms were writhing behind it. What could he say? What could he do? But he still didn’t realize that nothing would gross them out more than more crap from his book. It was time to hit them with the kitchen sink.

  “Dig this!” I shouted. “‘The Foundation for Total Consciousness is a social and psychological mechanism for the annihilation of the ego... initiates into the Foundation suppose... that its goal is a healthy mind integrated into its environment. Actually, the goal is quite opposite: the total destruction of what psychotherapists consider the psyche. Neurotics come to the Foundation seeking hope, but it is hope which must be destroyed—”

  “Where did you get that book?” Harvey was on his feet screaming. I was blowing the con! He must’ve finally realized that The Path to Consciousness sounded like a snakepit of insanity. “Where did you get that book?” People were jumping to their feet, looking back and forth between me and Harvey, whose face was turning beet-red, whose eyes were flaming, like spastics at a tennis match. “Where did you get that book?”

  I raised my voice till my throat burned, screamed at them, above Harvey, above the murmurs and the shouts and the sounds of a mob lumbering to its feet: “Listen, you stupid bastards! Listen to this! ‘... once all hope has been destroyed by the Foundation, something beyond hope is possible: faith... Once faith is total... selfmotivation... is abolished... the Foundation becomes... a single organism in which the constituents are mindless cells... the egos of the members die... my ego exists as the “brain” of the gestalt organism—’”

  “STOP! STOP! STOP! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!” Harvey was howling, waving his arms, his eyes rolling wildly. Everyone in the room seemed to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, baying like a pack of dogs.

  “Dig it, suckers!” I shouted. “Dig this: ‘... the time will come when individual consciousness no longer exists, when every human mind will be concentrated in one great Super-Consciousness Commune, when death will be defeated, when the Consciousness-Commune will contain all of us, will contain every iota of consciousness on Earth, will be like a God....”

  I threw aside the paper bag and waved the gray binder over my head. “Dig it! Dig it!” I screamed. “There’s your fucking Foundation in the man’s own words! The Path to Consciousness by Harvey Brustein!”

  Harvey’s knees went out from under him; he collapsed back into his chair like a deflated balloon. His glasses lay at the foot of the folding chair, his eyes were vacant and glazed. One great sob wracked his body. People were rushing up to him, pushing each other out of the way, knee-and-elbowing, milling around like panicked cattle.

  “Dig it, you idiots!” I howled into the whirlwind. “Harvey sent this piece of puke into the literary agency where I work. He swallowed the agency’s con just like you swallowed his. Dig it, he’s crazy, he wants to rule the world, he wants to be God, he wants to gobble you up! Want to hear more? ‘It is given to few men to comprehend the nature of the universe, fewer still to transcend the limits of their own ego and live the ultimate truth. Therefore, it is the obligation of all of us who have achieved Total Consciousness to...’”

  Suddenly, I realized that I had been speaking into silence. No one was even looking at me; they were all crowding around the dais where Harvey sat on his chair in a limp stupor. As I became aware that I was being ignored, I stopped reading and a strange hush seemed to sop up every sound in the room.

  Ted was the first to step up onto the dais. Everyone else in the room was silent as he bent over Harvey and said quietly: “Did you write that book, Harvey?”

  Harvey seemed to drift slowly back from the black pit inside; as he looked up at Ted, life started to come back into his eyes.

  “Yes,” Harvey said.

  “Are you okay now?” Ted asked, with almost a lover’s tenderness.

  Harvey retrieved his glasses, put them on, sat up straighter in his chair. “Yes, I’m all right,” he said. Tone was coming back into his voice but there was still a certain dull flatness to it. He fished his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, stuck one in his mouth, lit it, exhaled smoke.

  “I... I’m sorry I flew off the handle like that,” Harvey said. Slowly, his voice was reassuming its former cool power. He was projecting his voice out to all of them as he said: “I guess that proves I’m human too.” He even managed a ghost of a laugh. “I sent my book to a literary agency knowing I was no writer, and knowing the whole thing would have to be rewritten and thinking it would be treated confidentially. I guess I have some ego left after all, because I did feel awfully foolish having my rough draft read back to me...”

  Doris stepped up onto the dais beside Ted, looked me square in the eye across the sea of people and said very loudly: “Tom Hollander, that was a thoroughly rotten thing to do.”

  A semi-audible sound came off the crowd around the dais, like a thunderstorm gathering, like a crowd contemplating becoming a mob. Hackles went up on my neck. I smelled waves of ugliness coming off their bodies aimed at me. The imbeciles!

  “Doris! For Chrissakes, weren’t you listening!”

  “We were listening,” Ted said coldly. His blue eyes were hard and shiny—perhaps too hard and too shiny like a brittle pane of glass over unfaceable fear.

  “Well goddammit, what’s the matter with you people!” I shouted. “Harvey’s crazy! He’s stark raving nuts inside! A mongoloid idiot can see that!” I waved the book over my head like the proverbial bloody shirt. “This thing is a classic example of a crank book! Harvey’s a crank!”

  Suddenly I noticed that Rich Rossi had been pushing his way through the mob towards me, his face red, his hands balled into fists. “Why don’t you shut your fucking—”

  “Stop!” Harvey shouted. “No violence, Rich.” Rich obeyed his master’s voice. Way we both were feeling, Harvey had probably saved someone’s life.

  “Look, look!” Ted shouted for attention. “Tom has read us a lot of stuff from Harvey’s book. Some of it sounded pretty good and some of it sounded pretty bad. So what does all that prove...?”

  Harvey got to his feet. “It proves something pretty important,” he said. He smiled wanly. “First of all, I’m afraid it proves I’m not much of a writer. But that should remind all of you that I’m only human; when I set out to express myself in a book, I can fail. No doubt when I express myself at these meetings or even in therapy sessions, I fail to an extent too. Total Consciousness is beyond verbal formulas. And I too have faults, perhaps I haven’t achieved complete Total Consciousness yet myself. But Harvey Brustein is not what counts—”

  Hog-grunts and whines of denial. Old Humble Harv! He had managed to turn humility into the highest form of arrogance—Old Humble Harv, simple human prophet of the Total Truth.

  “No!” Harvey said. “I’m not what’s important—the Foundation is what counts. And the Foundation is all of us, not just me. We’re all imperfect, but the Foundation is our means for striving for the perfection of Total Consciousness. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what I was trying to say in my book. We must all merge our neurotic selves into the total community of the Foundation. As individuals, we can never be Totally Conscious—and that includes me, I need the Foundation as much as any of you. I’ve always insisted that I wasn’t a therapist and you weren’t my patients. We’re all equal members of the Foundation. We must put ourselves behind us. I’m an individual; don’t expect me to be perfect, you’re sure to be disappointed. But through the Foundation, we can all taste perfecti
on. The deaths of our egos is not an end but a beginning—the beginning of a community consciousness greater and purer than our own!”

  “We came here to vote on going to San Francisco,” Ted said. He turned his hot blue eyes on the crowd, challenged them with his size and his stance and his blind commitment. “I say let’s do what we came here to do! I say let’s vote now!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Vote!”

  “Come on, vote!”

  Harvey held up his hand for silence: it descended like a curtain. “All right,” he said. “And before we vote, I want to thank you, all of you...”

  As he said it, he stared across the room, and our eyes met. The thing in his eyes was neither hate nor triumph. It was as if Harvey was acknowledging a level of reality that only the two of us shared. On that level, he was my devil and I his. He had won and I had lost. But because we had fought on a plane above the reality of those we had fought over, there was a strange communion between us. We hated each other, each knew the other was mad, but in a strange curious way Harvey and I seemed to share the feeling that we were the only two real people in the room. The others were already shadows who had sold pieces of their souls. And how could the Smoker of Souls feel equality with his Dope?

  “All in favor of moving the Foundation to San Francisco...?”

  A forest of hands.

  “Against?”

  Only a pitiful few.

  And Arlene’s was not among them.

  The stairwell was warm and empty; down at the bottom was a door that led out into the cold. I stood alone on the landing at the top of the stairs. Behind me was light and warmth and the sounds of excited planning. I felt empty and drained and defeated. And alone.

  I took one step down the stairs—

  “Tom!”

  I stopped, turned, saw Arlene framed in the doorway. I went back to her.

  “You’ve changed your mind?”