The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  It caught me with a mouthful of fish; and I stayed ladylike until I got most of it down, whereafter I queried around the rest of it, “Where in hell is that!"

  He laid down his fork, sheathed his teeth, and reached for the wine bottle in the nearby icebucket stand; the alacritous wine-waiter, who had been halfway across the room, easily beat Dio’s hand to the bottle, filled both our glasses, bobbed, grinned, and vanished. Dio remarked, “You’re supposed to tip them separately.” Preoccupied, I muttered, “The hell with that, I’ll leave one healthy tip, they can split it their own way. . . . Mont Veillac: that would be the cave in your Pic Dentelé dream?”

  “In two dreams,” he reminded me. “Remember the legend under the photo? ‘When you are thinking about the wisdom of modern man, remember the man of Mont Veillac.’ That man was Cro-Magnon man, vintage twenty to fifty thousand years ago; and in caverns in Spain like Altamira and in France like Lascaux and Mont Veillac—and maybe too in Switzerland, possibly even near Pic Dentelé—they did frescoes with skill and sophistication rivaling the Italian Renaissance—”

  Maybe I was staring: he cut himself off with a grin and apologized for lecturing. I said intently, “Keep going in detail, it’s fascinating me. And eat your fish, it’s costing me.” He nodded, took up his fork, and began to stuff in while he was putting out, talking intelligibly around his food because of his army training____

  He reminded me that his dream this morning had linked in a single continuity a review of his pertinent past, with special reference to Esther, whom he was seeking. Then the Pic Dentelé portion of the dream had taken us into mountain country, mountains on a grander scale than those around Mont Veillac but not dissimilar in winter. Three successive men who received us at Pic Dentelé had been Kali-guys. (Personally jolting consideration!) The third Kali had told us that our room was “en hauf’ (rather than “au dessous”), in retrospect associatively suggesting the Mont Veillac highlands. In the room, his attention had first of all and last of all been drawn to the photo of Mont Veillac— “And as a small thing,” he added, “the third Kali had told us to go either left or right, ‘n’importe rim,’ to urinate—i.e., if you’ll forgive me, go anywhere we like for pissing-types of business, but for serious business, ‘au fond,’ into the depths—the cavern, Lilith.”

  Under my ant-prodding, he gave milk like an aphid. His dream-impression that Kali or somebody was playing him for a pawn-hound in a fox-and-hounds game. The identification between Kali and what he now recognized as the Mont Veillac cave in the Fishermen’s Cove illusion, and Kali and Mont Veillac at Pic Dentelé. Then he sketched multiplied allusiveness in the historical perspective of the Cro-Magnon art in the Mont Veillac cave, hinted at by the dream-injunction to guard any gloating over modem achievements in the deep light of the prehistoric achievement at Mont Veillac. This animal art was not merely head and shoulders above anything before or since until the Italian Renaissance, it was up in a higher plane of mind: Minoan fresco-art had touched it, with more elaboration and less feeling, but neither Egyptian nor Greek nor Roman two-dimensional art had touched it. Mont Veillac, like Altamira and Lascaux, represented an authentic artistic naissance, relative to which what happened in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been merely a renaissance....

  “I am tentatively proposing,” he said low, “that this Kali, or Halloran, or whoever, is leading me—us—through Mont Veillac as an allusive jumping-off place to—maybe some kind of a new human renaissance in this world that needs it so hideously.”

  I queried, “The bizarre fleet of sailing-ships emitted by the cave-mouth in both illusions?”

  His hands were flat on the white tablecloth; he was gazing at his messy platter with all the pike gone. “Maybe so. But I have to confess that my own silly subconscious may have put that aspect into both dreams. Many years ago, I had a vision about an independent nation of sailing ships which would sail up the world’s rivers and unify Earth. But that went away with my reformation. . . . Hey, remember? Kali was pleading for me to unify him—”

  His voice trailed off. The food-waiter had been waiting, and now respectfully he inquired of Dio about dessert, while nearby the wine-waiter eagerly awaited a new wine-order. I gave both orders, while Dio inattentively mused; they bowed uncertainly to me and then to Dio and went away to meet our wishes. These wishes were met in approximately two minutes, and my estimate of the tip went up to 20 or 25 percent depending on the check. (Francs we’d picked up at Le Bourget.) Meanwhile I was watching Dio.

  He said presently: “Kali stole Esther with an Indian rope-trick which is magic. Presumably it was Kali who hit us with the auto-body levitation and the erotic Esther changing ridiculously to a box of pot: magic. The entire Fishermen’s Cove illusion was whole-cloth magic; the emergence of fantastic sail-ships from the cave-mouth in both dreams was magic. Well: and the original purpose of the cave drawings at Mont Veillac was—magic, having either or both of two purposes: to assure hunting-prosperity, and to remind both men and animals of the brotherhood between Man and animals. Lilith, magic has been the quality of the entire fox-and-hounds trail; and my training simply does not prepare me to deal with magic that isn’t mere trickery.”

  Warmly I commented, “But your seif-training has prepared you to talk about the meanings of Mont Veillac man, and to suggest a dual magical meaning for their animal frescoes—”

  His face came slowly up from the monumental sugar-cream peach Melba, which he was ignoring along with a sparkling glass of Piper-Hiedseck douce. “Lilith—what is magic—I mean, not modern illusion-craft, but the the real magic that primitive and ancient peoples were continually trying to use?”

  I bent to the problem, not however ignoring the palatal goodies. “You don’t want categories, like imitative and—”

  “I know the categories. What is it?”

  “Well, they didn’t have science, and I think magic was their primitive approach to—”

  “Could it have been more than that?”

  Slowly I shook my head, not in negation. “There is so much in human experience that science can’t handle. Religion: we can study the mental states, but the reality of their reference eludes us. Or the opposed powers of light and darkness that have meant so much throughout history and prehistory, which meant so much even to a dynamic twentieth-century psychologist like Carl Jung. Or Jung’s collective unconscious. Or, for that matter, the universality of symbols in dreaming. Or the mechanics of ESP—” I cut it off, smiling: “Eat and drink your goodies. When do we leave for Mont Veillac?”

  He stared, nodded, scooped desert, savored it, slugged champagne, repressed a burp, and blurted, “Remember this afternoon when we spent a couple of hours browsing bookstands along the Seine?”

  “Separately from you, I had a ball—”

  “Separately from you, I found a two-year-old timetable for trains out of the Gare de Lyons.”

  Sharp again! “Okay: the train for Mont Veillac?”

  “At seven A.M. daily a train departs for Bordeaux. Next day, we pick up a train out of Bordeaux to Sore and points southeast The seventh stop is at Mont Veillac. Just incidentally, in our Pic Dentelé dream our room was Numéro 7.” Weakened, I gulped champagne, and it rallied me—and rallied also the wine-waiter, who came to refill. I hurled my little dart: “Right after you checked that timetable, that must have been when you excused yourself and went into a bistro to make a couple of phone calls.”

  “One was to the Gare de Lyons; we entrain tomorrow morning at seven, I have reservations to Bordeaux, and from there we take our chances. The other was to the Vicomte de Mont Veillac; I should have added that I also found a beat-up old pamphlet about Cro-Magnon caves which mentioned Mont Veillac and identified the vicomte as proprietor —” And he told me about that conversation.

  Re-weakened, all I could do was finish my refilled champagne; he managed his and one more glass. Then he looked a question at me; and I signaled for the check, which was in front of Dio in forty-seven seconds, an
d Dio passed it to me, and I was just able to bring off a rapid calculation and leave a tip of high generosity.

  When we departed the Méditerrané, with the wine-waiter eagerly in attendance, I explained to the wine-waiter that I had left at the table a gratuity for both waiters to divide between them. The crestfallen expression on the wine-waiter’s face would come back through years to haunt me.

  During the short walk back to the Odéon—just across the street, really—I pondered all this with more swiftness than I usually manage; but my mind kept focusing on one unanswered question—why was the locale of the dream at a place in the Swiss Alps called Pic Dentelé? I am perfectly aware that in a significant dream, the totality of the dream with respect to the significant essence is as the environment to the pertinent happening, as soda to whiskey, as bread mold to penicillin: in other words, the psychic significance is bedded in a context of random dream-work contributed from many irrelevant associative sources. The trick is to separate out what is significant, and this means elimination of what is mere dream-work. Yet Dio seemed to have wrung all the juice out of the orange with only a suppositious reference to this Pic Dentelé context which made no dear sense for his interpretation; and I resolved to question him about it in our room....

  My resolve died a quick death in the Odéon lobby, where I waited, attention drifting, while at the desk Dio settled the bill and requested a 5:00 a.m. call. (Here, they called you with door-rapping.) Half a dozen scenic photographs hung in this lobby. One near the desk was a photo, shot downward from an overhanging mountain, of a Swiss village in winter. It was labeled “Pic Dentelé.”

  Oh, well: one travels with a detective-inspector, one should expect a photographic mind.

  11.

  Entrained for Mont Veillac, Dio: “Want to tell me more about Burk Halloran?” Clearly he was the detective-inspector looking for Kali-related evidence, but so sympathetically was the question put that I surrendered instantly. What the hell, hadn’t he confessed to me?

  I told it to my lap, sitting across from Dio, considerably expanding what I had let out at Fishermen’s Cove. “He came to our rest home as a mixed psychotic, but my God, he was so graceful-brilliant and apparently so objective about his own impulses and so-called delusions that none of us on the staff could figure out for a month whether he was nuts or faking. Look, he heard leprechauns, he had to obey them, they lured him into climbing flagpoles! Well: I was his psychologist, and I was young but a virgin saving myself for my unknown husband; I was liberal, but I endorsed the old double standard—which means, if you’ve forgotten, that a man’s nature is to philander while a woman’s nature is to be one-man-true, and both sexes should honor their natures—”

  Passionately now, gazing at Dio: “Dammit, he got mel Let me tell you in a simplified way how he got me. He seemed to be an American-Irish rogue, he had every nurse in the rest home lathering for him, but somehow he never seemed to score; and meanwhile he and I became marvelous friends, he somehow understood me entirely, I almost understood him, and I mean understanding in all the personality-ways, motives and philosophies and beauty-appreciation and laughter and all the rest of it. He savored the ultra-antiquity of my name Lilith; he enjoyed comparing me with Ishtar the homed-and-bearded star-moon goddess of fertility-and-mind....

  “Well: one evening I was in his room as psychologist-friend with patient-friend, and what the hell, we got necking, by then I was almost sure he was faking the psychosis and I wasn’t going to let him score anyway; but then all of a sudden, blast him, he froze away from me. And afterward, analyzing it, I realized on certain negative memory-evidence that he must be impotent—and a whole lot of neurotic inter-weavings came clear in the structure of their web, one being that his phallic impotency was not merely a symptom any longer but had turned around on itself and him to become a keystone cause. So I—”

  Pausing, I reddened. Dio dryly finished for me: “—hardened and softened the keystone.”

  My chin hit my chest, I could feel my hot flush cooling paling. I told my together-clenched hands: “He was perceptive like that. So next day I departed the rest home for collitch without seeing him again, and I spent many weeks alternately asking myself had I done him good or harm and if good would he try to follow me or not and was I pregnant and did it matter. If you followed those four thoughts, the answers turned out to be, respectively: good, no, no, yes. As to the last, about pregnancy, since he didn't chase me, I am —not like the wartime French girls I heard about who begged their American paramours, ‘Donnez-moi un GI souvenir.’ I want no souvenirs, friend: Halloran or nothing. And since it has so far been definitely nothing, I’ve decided that I like the free life of the intellect with a rare selective topple-over—” Swift remorse: “No, Dio, it is not like that! When rarely I bed with a guy, he is a friend and I want to know him that way among the other ways, and I’ve loved all the ways I’ve known you—”

  Both his hands came out to grasp both of mine, and he told me, “This has been very good for me. All my hope for the future is that Esther and I will see you often.”

  I leaned toward him, uncertain: “Will you tell her?”

  “Would I put her at a disadvantage by introducing you when I hadn’t told her?”

  The way he had put it was almost Jewish. Clasping his hands, I gazed at him a long instant; then releasing his hands, I leaned back in my seat and sort of collapsed, eyes closed, smiling. “You are good in all the ways that there are.”

  “Exclude marriage,” came his gloomy reply. After a moment, he added, “Besides, you haven’t really answered the thrust of my question.”

  Abruptly wide-eyed: “I—haven’t?”

  His little grin was very slightly dirty. “The thrust was— more substance about Halloran himself, apart from Lilith Vogel.”

  “And I—” But my protest aborted into laughter, and he joined in, and as we came out of it I managed a giggling apology for my own arrant egotism, and then we got sober and I studied his question hard.

  I saw what he really wanted, and I told him so and tried to lay it in front of him clearly. Burk Halloran had really been two people all scrambled into a one that dwelt uneasily with itself but with an external appearance of total ease. The externality, and much of the genuine internalness, had been eager, buoyant, self-confident, highly gregarious, energetically zestful, sexually hearty and compelling but with sympathy and concern and grace. The other side, what Jung would call the chthonic dark as opposed to the shining side, was metaphysical to the point of being able to develop competent cosmic theory, introspective to the point where it sometimes seemed as though he could watch his own thoughts and feelings developing, analytical of others to the degree that as a pro he would have burned up psychology and psychiatry, and so detached from the world that he liked the sylvan rest home far better than outside and practically made a career of it during the month I’d known him. The psychotic outcome of the uneasy mix had been beautiful to watch and to talk with and play with and to know on the surface—and underneath, impotent limbo. If this paragraph has been hard to read, my extrusion of it for Dio’s attentive comprehension was excruciatingly difficult to bring off; and I ended breathing rather hard, physically fatigued.

  There was quiet for a while. He opened a brown bag that we’d brought and offered me (gratefully accepted) wine and a bit of cheese. After munching and sipping, I was thoroughly ready to go on—and that in itself interested me: seemingly I had gone quite a healthy way in my objectification of Burk.

  Dio’s hands were between his knees, his fingers were restlessly interlacing, he was watching them as he observed with care: “I too was an uneasy mix, a wild nutty mix, although different from your Halloran analysis. I got myself largely straightened out, I think. When that happened was about nineteen forty-eight. When did Halloran get straightened out?”

  I was alert. “1948—basically, anyhow. Probably he is still having to work on himself—”

  He looked up, his hands now still. “So am I. Can you tell
me what he straightened out as?”

  Frowning, I tried to remember exactly what I’d learned. “This is competent hearsay. He embraced the bright extroverted energetic side of his personality, tempering the extravagance with certain useful infusions from his dark side while turning away from certain other dark aspects. I suppose you know that you must never totally reject your dark side, it is where you get your depth; well, he knew that.” “Which dark things did he reject? Which did he turn away from?”

  “I—understand that he kept his tendency to philosophize but turned away from compulsively intricate systems; kept his tendency to analyze himself and others for purposes of growing and understanding, but turned away from morbid self-scrutiny and from morbid in-scrutiny of others; kept his liking for special worlds, but required that they always be dynamically related to the whole world; got Ins free-floating anxiety tamed by learning to laugh at it in the perspective of cosmic time—”

  “That’s a pretty large observation for your institutional psychiatrist-colleague after dismissing a patient and without ever seeing him again.”

  My little smile wasn’t happy. ‘To tell the truth, I’m drawing on more than his report. I’ve had a spy on him. He seems to be holding it nicely.”

  Almost angrily, Dio clutched the neck of the wine bottle and grated, “Now you tell me!”

  Understanding, contrite, I leaned forward to lay a hand on his arm. ‘There was no point in my telling you, friend, because I don’t know enough to help us find him. I don’t know where he is now or for several months back—”

  Dio shook off my hand, swigged wine, replaced cork and hand-heeled it home, brown-bagged the bottle. “Okay, forget that, I was unfair, it’s just that I am a bird dog—”

  I nodded slowly. “And you think maybe he stole your girl."

  He stared out the window: the scenery was becoming as rugged as during our dream-approach to the Alps. “Let me tell you about my own inward split and my nineteen forty-eight reformation. My bright side was—zest for life, eager but not compelling sexuality although I did all right in that quarter, and—forgive me—a luminously photographic and almost infallibly logical mind. And I guess another trait counts as bright side: determination to move upward and onward no matter what, along with a lot of dreamings about what would be upward and onward. Now, dark side: hideous and continually present anxiety, bitter inferiority feelings about my Pueblo Indian social status and my runty ugliness, and a hell-hot feeling inside all the time that I would let myself be damned by God or the gods before I would surrender to all that or do anything except use it as fuel for my drive. Well: the dynamism of that mix was crushed in nineteen forty-five by its own extravagance; you got a whiff of that when you shared my dream at the Odéon. And between nineteen forty-eight and now—I think —I have kept all the bright and flatly rejected all the dark, except that a certain amount of the old anxiety and inferiority has kept seeping up to keep Sammy running. If your Halloran’s self-adjustment was as beautifully balanced as you say, then he did a hell of a lot better than I have done; but at least, I think I’m a constructive citizen now and won’t ever be anything else, and I like it this way.”