by John Crowley
Some of his actors confused his instruction with what they knew of method acting—finding the character they are playing within themselves and their experience, bringing up emotions as in a therapeutic session which they could then attach to the imaginary people they instantiated. No, that’s not it, he told them. All this is happening to someone else, the person you are being; it’s all on the outside, it only seems to be on the inside. A couple of them quit in disgust; authenticity was their touchstone, this all seemed hypocrisy or artificiality. But not his Duchess. He told her that the Duchess knows, of course she knows, she’s doomed; but she’s going to fight right to the end with every trick and every power she has. You have to be both, he told her: both doomed and fighting. And sexy. Sex is power, sex is proof of love, sex is everything. Her damn brother is in love with her. In a motel room on Alvarado he drew still more out of her, and she gripped his shoulders fiercely in the dark.
And later that night sat alone in a bright bar, filled with a subtle and pervasive nausea, the Sartrean kind he did not need to read about again in Sartre: a profound embarrassment at the fact of existence.
La Brea Medical Transcription Service • 1419 La Brea Avenue • Los Angeles CA 90019
For: Dr. Carla Young PhD
10/06/92
Subject: John C.
Third Session
CY Notes. This is the most thoroughgoing delusion I have ever encountered, and it is maintained with a calm and certainty that is remarkable. An icy calm I would say except that he does not seem frozen in the way that a paranoid schizophrenic can seem. He can recount the contents of long novels he wrote (and was writing) in his “other existence” as a novelist. Asked if he could write out one of those novels now—his answer was Why would he? A check of the arpanet shows that no such titles as he puts forward are in existence. It’s clear that he has invented the other life because of unhappiness in this one: desire for marriage and children, for real love which he can’t feel in the disconnected, perhaps alienated, LA life he has led. It’s a mental illness that he can’t acknowledge: that he has invented the other life as a repository for his unacknowledged and inadmissible disease. I wonder if I can help him at all. I wonder if he’ll be back.
Transcription begins at 06:09:00
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CY: . . . Now it’s turned on. I’m always forgetting to push the button. We were saying—well, I was—that it must have taken you some courage to make this leap from one life to another. With the knowledge that as many limiting and disappointing things would be likely to happen, despite all this careful planning you say you did. Life itself. Can’t be controlled, can it?
JC: Well—Doctor—I think that you are like everyone in this respect: you’re sure that anyone given the chance to remake his or her life is going to make just as much of a mess of it the second time. Isn’t that what all the stories tell, the stories about second chances, about getting a do-over? Isn’t that the moral?
CY: It was, in that TV show you wrote.
JC: You think, don’t you, that it would have to turn out that way, the way it does in all the stories about such possibilities. That it would turn to the bad, in retribution for doing the forbidden, taking the fruit. That it will lead to a worse life than before, at least no better.
CY: Since I don’t believe it’s possible in fact, I’ll have to remain silent on the question. You alone know how it differs, what the changes amount to.
JC: I’d have liked it to change more than it did. The private history too—the history of private life, you might say—that too I’d like to have been more different. I’d like to have been taken by surprise more often. But that great sweep of change that occurred in my twenties and thirties—both times—well, having experienced it once, I could marvel at its coming to be, and at the same time be irritated at how little it knew itself—if self-knowledge can be ascribed to history, as Hegel almost says it can be. I didn’t know whether to be bored or elated half the time.
CY: And the other half?
JC: I exploited what I knew. I was on the curl of the wave. I knew what to say before others could get their heads around it, as the phrase then was. The films I wrote, the television series, were breakthroughs, or seemed to everyone else to be breakthroughs. I’d gone to school with the people who would become the most important and potent in the field I wanted to work in, and I knew I would when I applied to go there. And I knew what they couldn’t know: what would become of them, which of them would fail or die, which would survive and grow. My faith in them—which of course wasn’t faith but knowledge—earned me their loyalty too, and I’ve profited from it. I attracted women. Many women. It was like knowing every bet you placed would win, a little or a lot, no matter which horse you played.
CY: Horse? You seem to be saying that remaking your sexual experiences was the real reason for your restarting your life from adolescence, to avoid commitments and enjoy a sort of movable harem. Can that really be so? Wouldn’t your disposition and the limits of your, what’ll we say, your charms, come along with you into the new life? I’m sorry to find this just a little amusing. It just seems a bit adolescent.
JC: Yes, I counted on it, the many women. I looked forward to it. It never got old, but somehow the life I lived turned out . . . more chaste than I would have thought.
CY: You’ve been celibate?
JC: I said chaste, not celibate. I’ve never understood why. Something about the physicality of sex, of nakedness, of heat, so intense, made me more aware that it was in a sense manufactured. It was abashing. I’ll tell you how I thought of it. It was like being in an exquisite museum, all alone and free among priceless works of art. You wouldn’t steal them, would you? You could, but you can’t have them really, even if you did steal them; they’d never be yours, and possession isn’t the point anyway. So you admire, and maybe touch, and are gratified just to be there, with all of it around you.
CY: You’ve never married. Did you never want a family? Children?
JC: I’ve been married. Had children. Two daughters. Just not in this time-stream.
CY: And what was that like, when you think about it now? Did it seem a burden?
JC: Oh, sometimes it was. Mostly it was a delight and a wonder.
CY: Strange how easy to was for you to abandon them.
JC: See, but I didn’t. I . . . sort of took a vacation. A years-long vacation. They’re still there, where and when I left them. In two days I might be with them again. Might well.
CY: Ah yes. I’ve been thinking about this crux you believe you face, and I have a question.
JC: Yes?
CY: You said that the film you were writing couldn’t have an ending, that the choice of either ending for the character would be a disappointment. But what prevents your character from simply doing it all again, starting again from the same place or from a different place? If he believes he can. Wouldn’t that be a Third Thing, in effect?
JC: Well, yes, I suppose it would be.
CY: Have you thought that it would be possible for you?
JC: I couldn’t do it. I can’t.
CY: Because you feel you’d find yourself disappointed again, disappointed in the world?
JC: No. I haven’t been disappointed. I can’t do it again for the same reason that I could do it in the first place. You can’t see it, Dr. Young, but you and I are of the same kind, and so are all the other persons that have appeared in my world and that appear to you in yours. Any one of you might be granted the power I was granted. To be granted it you just need to know you have it. And at that point the world grows transparent, and you can walk through it, and do as you like. But only once. This one time. After this time, it closes up. Those are the conditions.
CY: And who set these conditions? God?
JC: The God of this world, maybe.
CY: I can only think that it was you yo
urself.
JC: You think I’ve constructed this whole, this dilemma, this ontological problem . . . You think I’m anosognosic, that I can’t see I’m delusional.
CY: I’m far from making such a diagnosis.
JC: But do you think, Doctor, that I . . . that someone with this condition, this sickness that he can’t know he has, might perceive or . . . well, account for the way he is, by supposing that he is, for example, a fiction? A character in a story, whose fate is being written rather than just appearing to him day by day out of the chances of the universe. That his life now is a kind of second draft. Wouldn’t that make a kind of sense? That that’s the reason why he—
CY: Yes. Of course. There are examples of such negation.
JC: Is it what you want me to see, something like that? What I should confess to, if ever I can see that it’s so?
CY: I want nothing from you, John. Honestly. You came to me for help. I think you’re in need of help, and I believe help is available. Whatever you now believe you are, whatever you think you can choose tomorrow, whatever you think you have chosen, I hope and expect to see you back here next week at your usual time.
JC: God willing, Doctor. God willing.
Transcript ends at 49:43:13
From the beginning, from the time of his re-arriving in the world, John C. watched with anxiety, knowing how the things arriving endlessly from up ahead in the time-stream could turn out on arrival, knowing also that they could turn out better, or not so good, or far worse than they ever had in the world he had left. He was sure of what he had told Dr. Young, because he’d seen it: in the short space of thirty or forty years the general pressure of forward-moving time in all its infinite parts could not be deflected in huge ways, though in small ways it could. But what would count as huge? What as small?
He was in his third year at USC when the bombs almost did fall, but—once again—didn’t. Toe to toe with the Russkies. He knew they wouldn’t—almost knew. Would it be more or less likely in this here-and-now, that it hadn’t happened in the there-and-then he had come from? That was incalculable; it was as though the worst lay hidden and unchanged within the world even as, day by day, it didn’t come about. John C. had known immediately that what had not happened in Dallas would alter what did happen thereafter, but not how.
He dropped out of grad school, he began making a living in films and television, did some acting, courted women, and watched the world dream its unending dream of possibilities, the descendants of other dreams. The escape from fate that in this reality kept the President from the telescopic sight of a Mannlicher-Carcano, though he hadn’t in the reality John C. came from (a story John C. had decided not to tell to Carla Young). John C. once tried to write that story, to write it just as it had not happened, until he found himself one late night before his little green Hermes typewriter in such a bath of cold sweat his fingers kept slipping from the keys, seeing inwardly napalm and Hueys, in a hellish film that would never be made.
Yes, that great whore History changed her mind, and the course of events in Southeast Asia was deflected. In November Kennedy experienced a crisis because of his Addison’s disease—the thing that would kill him at 60—and lay for days in a coma. He awoke a different man. When American commitments in South Vietnam were withdrawn after the Catholic Diem family was murdered, Kennedy was able to let go of the domino theory. The South Vietnamese army unraveled, a new plebiscite was enforced by the United Nations. About the year 1972 John C. sat on the terrace of a grand old colonial Saigon hotel reading his Paris Herald Tribune, drinking an iced artichoke tea and watching the people, small beautifully formed men and women, the most graceful he’d encountered in a year’s travel in these parts. A Viet Minh veteran sat impassive at the next table, smoking a cigarette Russian-style; he nodded, and John C. nodded in return, maybe a little more deeply, acknowledging the winning side.
The Trib he returned to reading on that day, like the news he watched and read back in the USA, had articles about people and events that were shadow-play versions of the ones he’d known in these years as he lived through them before. About the Hidden: growing numbers of American young people living in remote places in America, tribes of the golden west, placid, inventive, self-righteous or anarchic, almost illiterate. John C. imagined joining one of the beautiful and secret ones (there were fragmenting and slovenly ones too) and living out of time, beyond the reach of a strangeness and difference that sometimes made him dizzy. They were still there now, still a force; larger than ever, quietist, immune to history for now. But he never went beyond the imagining.
He stayed in LA, and did things that assumed the world would go on about as it had or better, and did other things that assumed it would be engulfed soon in mad destruction. He thought of buying gold to hoard with the money he made from his story sales and screenplay options, and people he’d gone to school with and were already much richer than he was urged him to do it, but in the end the absurdity prevented him; instead he bought shares in young companies that he could expect would do as well as they had done, or were doing, in the world he had exited from, and so they did. It was enough. He acquired a lovely British-green Jaguar and had it restored; once the restoration was done it would last for decades, a century. As he had his old Studebaker, he had it equipped with seat belts. He’d met Ernie Kovacs; he remembered James Dean. He got himself a house in Topanga up above the killing smog, not fancy but comfortable: good feng-shui, those few who knew the concept then told him. He was immune to nostalgia—it seemed to him inevitable that he would be—and yet the Canyon and its denizens, the scent of eucalyptus, the rock musicians and the folk musicians, the filmmakers with their Nagras and Eclairs, the photographers following them with their Leicas and Hasselblads, all filled him as though with memories, memories of a place he had never been but had known he wanted to be. He had a big stone-lined pool on the edge of the cliff at the edge of his place, from where bathers could look out over the lower reaches of the canyon and glimpse the Pacific. An old stone farmhouse or shelter with a roof of still-odorous cedar, dating from the previous century: the photographers liked to pose people there. Canyon people liked the pool and the place, and John C. liked having them there; they understood there was something isolated or evanescent about him, that he never smoked dope or took drugs, but with the women and certain young boys who were drawn to him he was quite open: a spectrum shift that was profoundly attractive to certain wilder natures or hearts more aflame than his was. Often enough he slept alone.
And the world just rolled forward, or gave the illusion of doing so, no longer able to be guessed at; he gave up guessing, practiced Zen in the morning, he himself a koan that could be pondered but not solved. Things exist, his wrinkled little guru said, but they aren’t real. This baffled some friends who came to sit with him, made them laugh or fall silent. But John C. knew it was simply so: he lived in a world falsified by the continued existence of another in his own unreal heart and mind.
At about the time his life here outstripped his power to control it—when the world as he had made it for himself seemed to be wholly subsumed in the world that everybody all together made, and would have made even if he had never been part of it—he realized that he would still have to go through all the events from the first life that would not or could not be changed. His father’s death, at a relatively young age, burst aneurysm in the hospital to which in that time he’d gone for a CAT scan and where in this time, soon, he would go again, and the same thing would happen, for there was nothing John C. could do about it and nothing in this life would be likely to deflect it; he would have to wait for his mother’s call, the same call he had got in this year in a different place. And there would be all the other griefs, his sisters’, the nation’s, to pass through: a few of them avoided by luck or a clinamen accounted for by nothing, but that were mostly just the ones he knew were to come because they had come and he had experienced them once already. He began to feel mo
nstrously old.
And now it’s the day before his birthday, seven o’clock in the evening, a sweet LA winter day. Five hours till midnight. What should he do, this night that is different from all other nights? Should he be Socrates, gather around him the wise and the young who love him (there are a few) to pass the last hours? Drive the Jag out to the desert, sit alone and watch dawn and judgment come? He can’t know if the whole of his birthday is allowed to him to make his decision, or if it has to be made on the stroke of midnight or be moot. He decides that he will spend the hours exactly as he would if he didn’t have destiny’s coin to flip. He’ll go to a party.
When was it that he began to find himself, even in the midst of the memorable and lovely things he earned in the second life, missing the small things of the first life? It didn’t surprise him really, anyone with a shred of consciousness would have known at the start that such would be possible; it wasn’t as if he escaped from a life in hell or prison or from poverty or hideous abuse, no, it was a good life, and the remembered moments are mostly sweet. He can even feel shame that he abandoned wife and children, friends and associates, career and home—but of course he has abandoned nothing, it all remains there for him to rejoin it if he chooses to. Whereupon the other life, this life he now inhabited, will—if he understands the rules—simply and entirely vanish away, never actually having existed.
If it were possible that he could be returned to the other, the first, life and once returned have no memory at all of this life; that if he did choose that life, which just because it was the original had ontological status different from the made life, then might he somehow contrive to be reconstituted in it at some commonplace moment, a moment that had arrived just at the point of his vanishment, or rather of his duplication or his revision, whatever the word might be; a moment anyway in which real life would tomorrow commence or recommence for him seamlessly, he himself oblivious that decades of otherness elsewhere had ever passed?
