The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  I (removing my hand from his thigh and folding it with my other hand): “Where will we go?”

  He: “Dunno. I’ll know. ‘Night, Lil.”

  Landing outside Paris at Le Bourget: clear early morning, virginal summer having begun after the six or eight weeks of miserableness that always follow the two-week April Island in Paris. Taxi from Le Bourget on surface roads (no freeway yet) to the Hôtel des Invalides, then left on St. Germain to Place de l'Odéon. Female cabbie, hard but quite nice; Dio impressed her and me with his precise rapid-fire French. (To me he commented, “Five times in Paris in 1944 and 1945, and four times since, with or without Esther; this is like coming home.”) Middle-aged clerk, heavy-mustached, in tiny Odéon lobby; sleepy but polite, throating French with pursed lips, interspersing it with purse-lipped English; carried the two light bags himself up the short stair-flight to the self-serve elevator, shoved in the bags, handed Dio the key to Numero 21, stepped back, was saying “À votre service, m’sieu’-’dame” as Dio pushed the button and closed him out. The second-floor room (not counting the rez-de-chaussée as a floor) was typical Odéon, conservatively clean provincial French with a plain double bed and ordinary furniture; by leaning out the window and looking left, one could see in gray dawn the Senate building behind the Luxembourg Palace. I said, “I like it, and I’m time-confused and pooped”; and we undressed like a veteran married couple. This aspect of our brand-new relationship privately interested me; its comfortableness (despite Dio’s dynamism) was unlike any man-association I’d ever known.

  In bed, we lay on our backs staring at the undistinguished ceiling. Dio murmured, “Tu n’as que vingt-huit ans, ma’m’selle —ton plaisir?” Lazily I responded, “You have thirty-nine, and you won’t hurt my weary ego if you want to sleep now— or not, but I’d be lethargic.” Turning to me with a sleepy smile, he patted my cheek: ‘Tu es gentille, chérie. Et j’espère bien pour ce soir.” I patted his cheek, sleepily smiling: “ ’Night in the morning, kid.”

  We slept, but not dreamlessly. And we were vitally together in the mutual dream, but my sense was that his dreaming was primary...,

  The first part of our dream was a swift and almost purely cognitive review of Dio’s career-past since 1942: one of those oddball dreams in which there is no feeling and very little imagery and yet a sense of images. Dio the red-hot psychopath flaming brilliantly and murderously in 1944 European combat, battlefield-promoted up to major. Then Major Diodoro Horse in 1945, ludicrously reassigned to command a station complement in a backwater French town many miles from any combat, gnawing his frustrated soul at the breech-end of a broom. Consequently Dio, to relieve his suicidal boredom, getting himself involved with the local Communist underground in a brilliantly maniacal attempt to take it over and turn it to the service of his own long-range plan for personal conquest of the world. Dio caught red-handed, court-martialed—and, utilizing his own legal talents (he’d been a lawyer) and schizoid logic, completely stalemating the trial judge advocate with a defense plea that he had embarked on this role solely for the patriotic purpose of exposing the Communist underground. Dio therefore found guilty only on a charge of conduct unbecoming an officer, and discharged “for the convenience of the service” but not dishonorably, and retaining his rank of major. Dio afterward privately contacted by a military intelligence officer who expressed the admiration of Army Intelligence for Dio’s undercover and courtroom adroitness and, working subsequently and confidentially with the New York Commissioner of Police, got Dio placed as a detective-lieutenant on the New York Police Force, provided that Dio would be available on call to the intelligence services. Dio going through a profound and agonizing self-reappraisal and reorientation which was more effective than what any psychiatrist I know could have done for him. Dio then honestly, ambitiously, aggressively nerve-driving himself sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety hours a week in police work that frequently made headlines, rocketing himself upward to inspector’s rank in a cool half-dozen years, and bewhiles taking leave for Army Intelligence and then for the CIA in this or that sort of cloak-and-dagger assignment in several parts of Europe but frequently with a French involvement. . . .

  That was the swift dream-review. Most of it Dio had never told me about, I would simply have to check it—but that was a later awake-reflection: just now I was still in the dream, which had flowed me or us into a swift meaningful nearly unintelligible reprise at an almost purely connative level. Dio’s emotionality, experienced pure: vibrant, anxiety-ridden, driving, murderous-raging, yawing with cosmic frustration, rapiering into a crack in the blockage wall, irradiated with glory-ambition, cynical, wicked-grinning, involved with Esther in lustful-domineering-contemptuous self-gratification— then involved with a Frenchwoman in desire and frustration and unexpected victory and keening passion and high triumph capped by bitter tragedy. . . . And the long grind of lacerating self-reappraisal, and the mothering fidelity of Esther, and the marriage with Esther, and the self-surrender to Army Intelligence and Esther and the New York Police Force and the CIA, and the realignment of his Promethean fire on civic dedication in his new career sustained by the home-warmth of Esther

  and then the rope-running of Esther

  and then

  abruptly the dream opening out into the full imagery of us lying together here on a bed in the Odéon .. . But neither of us awoke, this actuality was part of the dream, and here we lay and bare we lay

  and without transition were rocketing

  across France alone together in a train compartment, with the window-flashing scenery growing rugged and ragged as we approached the Alps, with altitude-cold progressively permeating our compartment

  We disembarked in Switzerland at Alpine Pic Dentelé; and now the dreaming was three-dimensionally multisensorily realistic and sequential minute-by-minute. We stood forlorn in the tiny old depot at Pic Dentelé, listening to the departing train as it mourned our destination. Pic Dentelé was snow-wintry, in a small flat valley with snowpeaks jagging all around us. In 1952, the moon-mountains were thought to be toothed like that, although snowless.

  I clutched his hand, delightedly gazing around and upward. He clutched mine, warily sniffing around and upward. . . .

  A big black voluptuous airport-type limousine pulled up in front of us with snow creaking under the tires. The uniformed bareheaded driver shot out, ran around in front, and saluted Dio: “M’sieu’ le directeur Horse?” This driver was a redheaded Kali. Dio, sheathing teeth, nodded. The driver seized our bags and led us to the limousine and opened a door and shoved in bags and us before we had time to protest; then instantaneously reclaiming his own seat behind the wheel, he called back, “Your reservations are ready at the hotel, m’sieu’-’dame.” And the limousine top dissolved, exposing us to the radiantly bestarred sky of lofty winter night.

  Alone in this vast limousine, we crunched off in brittle snow between close-together-packed chalet-buildings, mainly conscious of snow-creak and frost-nose-nip and hard black stars pecked sky and congealing breath-steam, until on a broad street we approached and passed through a high city-arch gate and stopped before a classic Swiss hotel. The Kali-driver swished around to get our bags and lead us in. All alone, we descended from the topless tonneau and snowtreaded into a cavernously fireplaced and massively beam-raftered lobby which could easily have housed a hundred weary skiers but just now was empty except for the desk clerk, who was a flame-topped Kali. Our bags stood in front of the desk; the driver was gone.

  Dio gave his name. They had a two-person reservation for him (now why? he hadn’t made one). He and I were turned over to a bellman who was a flame-topped Kali. The bellman took us up a short flight of stairs and on the landing (right-angled left turn and more stairs) pointed above and said approximately, “Votre chambre, c’est Numéro 7 en haut. Pour uriner, toute la distance a droit ou a gauche, n’importe rien; pour l’autre, au fond, naturellement; même pour tous deux.” He vanished, leaving the bags there: no chance to tip, no desire to tip.

&n
bsp; I murmured, “I’m about ready to traverse toute la distance à droit ou à gauche—”

  By the inward bite in bis belly, Dio knew that he was on the track of something big. Seizing our bags, he clumped upward to Numéro 7 with me wife-obediently following. In the room (which was nice enough, with twin beds and a washstand), he dumped the bags on one of the beds and closed the door and dropped into the only chair, glowering straight ahead.

  I sat on''the edge of the unbagged bed, studying him.

  He kept glowering at something on the far wall. I turned and looked: it was some kind of place-photo, and under it was some kind of script. I swung back to him; alert, gripping the bed edge with both hands and leaning forward, I suggested, “Ready to talk about what it is?”

  He began beating on the chair arm. “No,” he said.

  “I’ll unpack,” I told him, rising and beginning it...

  He barked, “Not”

  I dropped the bag lid, sighed, grinned, resat, and waited.

  “We don’t stay here,” he told me bitterly. “I’m being had. There’s a message here—I’m getting a goddamned sense of a fox-and-hounds game. Did you notice all those redheaded Kali-guys?”

  “How could I help—”

  “There’s a message there on the wall—and he left it there for us! Go read it!”

  Up close without transition, I considered the photo and the legend beneath. The photo showed a cave-mouth, and unquestionably it was the same cave-mouth which had gaped at Dio as his Fishermen’s Cove illusion had ended. The verses beneath said: “Quand tu penses a la sagesse de l’homme moderne, souvenez-vous de l’homme de Mont Veillac.”

  I muttered aloud a halting translation: “When you are thinking about the wisdom of modern man, remember the man of Mont Veillac—”

  As though my words had opened Pandora’s box, out of the cave-mouth flowed hundreds of diversified sail-craft, champagne-bubbling our space...,

  We awakened on that, in the Paris Odéon; and each of us was impelled to sit up in bed and punch up his pillow and lean back against it staring straight ahead. All of the dream was hard before both of us: Dio’s cognitive past, Dio’s emotional past, the train trip, Pic Dentelé, the cave....

  My watch said 1:09; window-light said early afternoon. I took his hand; he gripped mine. I said, “Pic Dentelé?” He nodded. I said, “Why there? I never heard of it.” He shook his head slowly. All right: note-comparing was not for now, it was presumably for later. I left him with it and went to the bathroom down a short corridor. Here in the Odéon in Paris (the dream was hard on me, I had to keep reminding myself that we weren’t in Pic Dentelé), quite naturally at this hour I caught the bathroom unoccupied—there were only five rooms on thus floor. Returning, I got dressed while he made the same visit; then he dressed in silence, and we went out on the street and walked three blocks and found a little restaurant for lunch on the Boulevard St. Germain.

  With coffee gone and refilled, and ham and eggs partially stowed away, Dio told a tattered egg; “You and I dreamed the same dream again, right?”

  “I think so.”

  "Then you know all about my pertinent past And Esther.” “I know some. The dream didn’t tell me all.”

  “Of course. Why Esther never got bitter, I’D never know.” “Some women don’t—depending on the man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It isn’t bad. Go on.”

  “Lilith, you and I seem to be having conscious experiences of an amazing sort. Tell me what consciousness is—and don’t give me some damn verbal runaround like ‘Consciousness is attention.’ ”

  I laughed my delight “But it is!"

  “Now why isn’t that just a nonexplanatory synonym?” “For this reason, Dio.” I was grinning, but I laid it out “I’ll give you that we can’t say what consciousness is— but we can say how it works. See, your mind is able to pay attention to only a small number of things at the same time, right? But your brain knows a lot and absorbs a lot that you aren’t noticing at any given moment right?” He was nodding at each “right.” “But any time you want to or have to or are led to do so, you can divert your attention from something you were noticing, in order to dredge up and study something that was stored there beneath your notice —right?”

  “Computer retrieval?”

  “Right—except that every computer including a brain is mind-directed. Now. To say that at a given moment you are conscious of X, just means that at the moment you are noticing X, you are paying attention to it.”

  “Provisionally okay. Now—as Lo the Poor Indian once inquired about electricity, after they’d told him all about how it worked—what is consciousness, Dr. Vogel?”

  I looked at him solemnly: my own ignorance after years of specialized study and practice never ceased to challenge and appall me. “Dio, I do think I’ve given you just about the best short sweeping summary that scientific psychology can responsibly offer. But now, if you want to move out several energy-orbits into the metaphysics of experience—”

  He shook his head hard, waving his hand up and down palm-toward-me in the cease-fire signal. “I want it, but not at this minute. Stay scientific. Here’s my hot question: Why can’t I pay attention to something that I probably know but can’t think of? That’s a thorn-bush in any investigation, and right now on the Esther/Kali trail it is driving me absolutely batty!”

  I was on an elbow with chin palmed, my right hand fork-toying with a ham-remnant, looking at him; he was gazing earnestly back. “Dio, if you were psychoneurotic, which you aren’t now although I suspect you were once, you would have inward fears which would keep your computer from being able to retrieve a lot of stuff—exactly the kind of stuff which would help you cure yourself if your neurosis would only let you at it. Well: even if you aren’t psychoneurotic, some things that your brain has stored are elusive; you just can’t bring them into clear notice. And that’s all there is, in my opinion, to Freud’s famous unconscious: it is the whole body of brain-knowings and attitudes that the mind either hasn't gotten at or can’t get at. I like the word subconscious better, myself: that which is below the level of conscious attention at some given moment; all of it is potentially available, but some of it may be tough to dig.”

  He assimilated that. I let him.

  He, slowly: “Is any psychoneurosis ever completely cured?” With him I should be honest “Maybe not really. It just comes under better control.”

  “When you shared my dream this morning—your sharing included the first part about my past?”

  I nodded.

  “What was the diagnosis?”

  “Off the cuff, aggressive-type paranoid-schizoid.”

  “I was a legitimate bastard. That means a legitimate child who is a self-made bastard. And I’m not even sure about the legitimacy.”

  “Good boy.”

  “I—think maybe remnants of that old neurosis are keeping what I want to find suppressed. How would I melt through that block?”

  “Old remedy. Figure out what you feel most guilty about, then face the facts of that guilt, including everything—your real guilt, your phony breast-beating guilt-overlay, and all your stupid inadvertencies. Then—verbalize it, to somebody you trust.”

  His gaze was shrivelingly direct: “Didn’t I do all that—in my dream this morning?”

  I brooded over him, really loving him. “Your self-serving wildness during your last months in the army. Your callous using of Esther. Your partially self-serving career-drive with the police and the CIA. Your consequent neglect of Esther—”

  He leaned toward me, pleading, “Lilith, God damn it, she didn't want to absorb me, she only wanted to share my life! And I denied her that—”

  I, coldly direct: “You tell me why you denied her that.”

  He, looking down, fists clenched: “Because I was afraid to love her, I was afraid of getting sucked into her.”

  “And now?”

  Hard: “She’s gone, and God bless you, Lil, I’ve shot my anx
iety into you; I hope it doesn’t trouble you. And I know now that Esther wasn’t about to suck me into herself. And that is not a phony guilt-overlay, it is guilt!”

  I, lightly: “Because you have rethought and confessed, absolvo te, psychiatrically speaking. And now there shouldn’t remain any neurotic barrier to your brain-dredging.”

  Following an afternoon of Left-Bank cruising, an exquisite dinner at the Restaurant Méditerrané, on Place de l'Odéon just across the street from our hotel. The Méditerrané had caught my fancy as we had walked past it; Dio had wanted to blow me to Maxim’s, but I had counter-appealed to the equal rights concept: “Look, chum, you’ve chosen all the places and paid all the bills—this one is on me, and I pick the place—and I do the actual paying and tipping, none of this bull about slipping you the lettuce under the table—” He’d shrugged and hadn’t fought it; and after my first gratification at this mark of his fellow-to-fellow respect, I’d passed to forebodings about whether he might begin expecting me to do this all the time—until it penetrated my stupidity that he had merely been too preoccupied to pay much attention. I reminded him while we were at the hotel cleaning up for dinner; his eyebrows hit the ceiling, but he grinned and acquiesced, and I had a pleased feeling that he was pleased.

  It was at the Méditerrané that he butterfly-pinned some of the pertinent elusiveness in his subconscious. His announcement of it was casual, except that his teeth were exposed while a forkful of pike quenelles Lyonnaises midair-hovered. He said, “It is like this, Lil. You and I have got to go, not to Pic Dentelé—we’ve already been there—but instead, to Mont Veillac."