"Three circles from its substance now appeared,
Of three colors, and each an equal whole."
That was Dante's vision of God as the Trinity. Most people when they try to read the Commedia get bogged down in Inferno and suppose his vision to be that of a chamber of horrors: people head up in shit; people head down in shit; and a lake of ice (suggesting Arabic influences; that is the Muslim hell), but this is only the beginning of the journey; it is how it starts. I read the Commedia through to the end that night and then shot up the street for Dr. Davidson's office, and was never the same again. I never changed back into what I had previously been. So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own. The pain and the crying and the sweating and stinking and cheap Jim Beam Bourbon was my Inferno and it wasn't imaginary; what I read bore the label "Paradiso" and Paradiso it was. This is the triumph of Dante's vision: that all the realms are real, none less than the others, none more than the others. And they blend into each other, by means of what Bill would call "gradual increments," which is indeed the proper term. There is a harmony in this because, like automobiles of today in contrast to autos of the Thirties, no sharp break exists.
God save me from another night like that. But goddamn it, had I not lived out that night, drinking and crying and reading and hurting, I would never have been born, truly born. That was the time of my birth into the real world; and the real world, for me, is a mixture of pain and beauty, and this is the correct view of it because these are the components that make up reality. And I had them all there that night, including a packet of pain-pills to carry home with me from the dentist's, after my ordeal had ended. I arrived home, took a pill, drank some coffee, and went to bed.
And yet—I feel that this was what Tim had not done; he had either not integrated the book and the pain, or, if he had, he had got it wrong. He had the tune but not the words. More correctly, he had the words but those words pertained not to world but to other words, which is termed by philosophy books and articles on logic "a vicious regress." It is sometimes said in such books and articles that "again a regress threatens," which means that the thinker has entered a loop and is in great danger. Usually he does not know it. A critical commentator with a mind that is keen and an eye that is keen comes along and points this out. Or doesn't. For Tim Archer I could not serve as that critical commentator. Who could? Dingaling Bill had taken a good shot at it and had been sent back to his East Bay apartment to think better of it.
"Jeff has the answers to my questions," Tim said. Yes, I should have said, but Jeff does not exist. And very likely the questions themselves are irreal as well.
That left only Tim. And he was busily preparing his book dealing with Jeff's return from the next world, the book that Tim knew would finish off his career in the Episcopal Church—and, moreover, deal him out of the game of influencing public opinion. That is a high price to pay; that is a very vicious regress. And indeed it threatened. It was, in fact, at hand; the time for the trip to Santa Barbara to visit Dr. Rachel Garret, the medium, had come.
***
Santa Barbara, California, strikes me as one of the most touchingly beautiful places in the country. Although technically (which is to say, geographically) it is a portion of Southern California, spiritually it is not; either that or else we in the north supremely misunderstand the Southland. A few years ago, antiwar students from the University of California at Santa Barbara burned down the Bank of America, to everyone's secret delight; the town, then, is not cut off from time and world, not isolated, although its lovely gardens suggest a tame persuasion rather than a violent one.
The three of us flew from the San Francisco International Airport to the small airport at Santa Barbara; we had to go by two-motor prop plane, that airport being too short of runway length to accommodate jets. Law requires that the city's adobe character, which is to say, Spanish Colonial-style, be preserved. As a cab took us to the house where we would stay, I noted the overwhelmingly Spanish design of everything, including arcade-type shopping centers; to myself I said, This is a place where I reasonably might live. If I ever depart the Bay Area.
Tim's friends, with whom we stayed, made no impression on me: they consisted of retractile, genteel, well-to-do people who stayed out of our way. They had servants. Kirsten and Tim slept in one bedroom; I had another, a rather small one, obviously made use of only when the other rooms had filled up.
The next morning, Tim and Kirsten and I set forth by cab to visit Dr. Rachel Garret, who would—no doubt—put us in touch with the dead, the next world, heal the sick, turn water into wine, and perform whatever other marvels were necessary. Both Tim and Kirsten seemed excited; I felt nothing in particular, perhaps only a dim consciousness of what we planned, what lay ahead; not even curiosity: only what a starfish living at the bottom of a tidal pond might feel.
We found Dr. Garret to be a rather lively small elderly Irish lady wearing a red sweater over her blouse—even though the weather was warm—and low-heeled shoes, and the sort of utility skirt suggesting that she performed all her own chores.
"And who are you, again?" she said, cupping her ear. She could not even figure out who stood before her on her porch: Not an encouraging beginning, I said to myself.
Presently, the four of us sat in a darkened living room, drinking tea and hearing from Dr. Garret a narration, delivered with enthusiasm, of the heroism of the IRA to which—she told us proudly—she contributed all the money she took in via her'séances. However, she informed us, "séance" was the wrong word; it suggests the occult. What Dr. Garret did belonged within the realm of the perfectly natural; one could rightly call it a science. I saw in a corner of the living room among the other archaic furniture a Magnavox radio-phonograph of the Forties, a large one, the kind with two identical twelve-inch speakers. On each side of the Magnavox, stacks of 78 records—albums of Bing Crosby and Nat Cole and all the other trash of that period could be discerned. I wondered if Dr. Garret still listened to them. I wondered if, in her supernatural fashion, she had learned about long-playing records and the artists of today. Probably not.
To me Dr. Garret said, "And you're their daughter?"
"No," I said.
"My daughter-in-law," Tim said.
"You have an Indian guide," Dr. Garret said to me brightly.
"Really," I murmured.
"He's standing just behind you, to your left. He has very long hair. And behind you on your right side stands your great-grandfather on your father's side. They are always with you."
"I had a feeling that was the case," I said.
Kirsten gave me one of her mixed looks; I said no more. I settled back against the couch with all its pillows, noted a fern growing in a huge clay pot near the doors leading to the garden ... I noted assorted uninstructive pictures on the walls, including several famous loser pictures of the Twenties.
"Is it about the son?" Dr. Garret said.
"Yes," Tim said.
I felt as if I had found my way into Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Medium, which Menotti describes in his album-liner notes for Columbia Records as set in "Mme. Flora's weird and shabby Parlor." That is the trouble with education, I realized; you have been everywhere before, seen everything, vicariously; it has all already happened to you. We are Mr. and Mrs. Gobineau visiting Mme. Flora, a fraud and lunatic. Mr. and Mrs. Gobineau have been coming to Mme. Flora's séances—or, rather, scientific sessions—every week for nearly two years, as I recall. What a drag. Worst of all, the money Tim will be paying her goes to kill British soldiers; this is a fund-raiser for terrorists. Great.
"What is your son's name?" Dr. Garret asked. She sat in an ancient wicker chair, leaning back, her hands clasped together, her eyes slowly shutting. She had begun to breathe through her mouth, as the very ill do; her skin resembled that of a chicken, with bits of hair here and there, little tufts like minor scarcely watered
plants. The whole room and everything in it now possessed a vegetable quality, totally lacking in vitality. I felt myself drained and being drained, my own energy taken away. Perhaps the light—or lack of light—gave me this impression. I did not find it pleasant.
"Jeff," Tim said. He sat alert, his eyes fixed on Dr. Garret. Kirsten had gotten a cigarette from her purse but did not light it; she merely held it; she also scrutinized Dr. Garret, with evident expectations.
"Jeff has passed across to the distant shore," Dr. Garret said.
As the newspapers reported, I said to myself.
I had expected a lengthy preamble from Dr. Garret, to set up the scene. I was wrong. She launched into it at once.
"Jeff wants you to know that—" Dr. Garret paused as if listening. "You should feel no guilt. Jeff has been trying to reach you for some time. He wanted to tell you that he forgives you. He has tried one means after another to attract your attention. He has stuck pins into your fingers; he has broken things; he has left notes to you—" Dr. Garret opened her eyes wide. "Jeff is highly agitated. He—" She broke off. "He took his own life."
You are batting a thousand, I thought acridly.
"Yes, he did," Kirsten said, as if Dr. Garret's statement was a revelation or else confirmed in a startling way something up to now only suspected.
"And violently," Dr. Garret said. "I get the impression that he used a gun."
"That's correct," Tim said.
"Jeff wants you to know that he is no longer in pain," Dr. Garret said. "He was in a great deal of pain when he took his own life. He didn't want you to know. He suffered from great doubts about the worth of living."
"What does he say to me?" I said.
Dr. Garret opened her eyes long enough to fathom who had spoken.
"He was my husband," I said.
"Jeff says that he loves you and prays for you," Dr. Garret said. "He wants you to be happy."
That and fifty cents, I thought, will get you a cup of coffee.
"There is more," Dr. Garret declared. "A great deal more. It's all coming in a rush. Oh my. Jeff, what is it you're trying to tell us?" She listened silently for a time, her face showing agitation. "The man at the restaurant was a Soviet what?" Again she opened her eyes wide. "My goodness. A Soviet police agent."
Jesus, I thought.
"But there's nothing to worry about," Dr. Garret said, then, showing relief; she leaned back. "God will see that he is punished."
I glanced questioningly at Kirsten, trying to catch her eye; I wanted to know what—if anything—she had said to Dr. Garret; Kirsten, however, sat staring fixedly at the old lady, apparently dumbfounded. So it would seem I had my answer.
"Jeff says," Dr. Garret said, "that it is a matter of utmost joy to him that—that Kirsten and his father have each other. This is a great comfort to him. He wants you to know that. Who is 'Kirsten'?"
"I am," Kirsten said.
"He says," the old lady continued, "that he loves you."
Kirsten said nothing. But she listened with more intensity than I had ever seen her display before.
"He felt it was wrong," Dr. Garret said. "He says he's sorry ... but he couldn't help it. He feels guilty about it and he would like your forgiveness."
"He has it," Tim said.
"Jeff says that he can't forgive himself," Dr. Garret said. "He also felt anger toward Kirsten for coming between him and his father. It made him feel cut off from his father. I get the impression that his father and Kirsten went on a long trip, a trip to England, and left him behind. He felt very badly about that." Again the old lady paused. "Angel is not to smoke any more drugs," Dr. Garret said, then. "She smokes too much ... what is it, Jeff? I can't pick this up clearly. 'Too many numbers.' I don't know what that means."
I laughed. In spite of myself.
"Does that make any sense to you?" Dr. Garret said to me.
"In a way," I said, paying out as little line to her as possible.
"Jeff says he's glad about your job at the record store," Dr. Garret said. "But—" She laughed. "You're not being paid enough. He liked it better when you worked at the—shop kind of shop. A bottle shop?"
"Law office and candle shop," I said.
"Strange," Dr. Garret said, puzzled. "'Law office and candle shop.'"
"It was in Berkeley," I said.
Dr. Garret said, "Jeff has something very important to say to Kirsten and his father." Her voice, now, had become faint, almost reduced to a rasping whisper. As if coming from a vast distance away. Traveling over invisible wires strung between stars. "Jeff has some dreadful news he wants to convey to the two of you. This is why he has been trying so badly to get through to you. This is why the pins and the burning and the breaking and the disordering and the smearing. He has a reason, a dreadful reason."
Silence, then.
Leaning toward Tim, I said, "This is a judgment call, but I want to leave."
"No," Tim said. He shook his head. His face showed unhappiness.
10
WHAT A PECULIAR mixture of nonsense and the uncanny, I thought as we waited for elderly Dr. Rachel Garret to go on. Mention of Fred Hill, the KGB agent ... mention of Jeff disapproving of my turning on. Scraps derived obviously from newspapers: how Jeff had died and his probable motivations. Lumpen psychoanalysis and scandal-sheet garbage, and yet, stuck in here and there, a fragment like a tiny shard that could not be explained.
Beyond doubt Dr. Garret had easy access to most of the knowledge she had divulged, but there remained a creepy residuum: defined as, "That which remains after certain deductions are made," so this is the right term, and I have had a long time, many years, to mull over it. I have mulled and I can explain no part of it. How could Dr. Garret know about the Bad Luck Restaurant? And even if she knew that Kirsten and Tim had met originally at that place, how could she have known about Fred Hill or what we supposed was the case with Fred Hill?
It had been the joke passed endlessly between Jeff and me, that the owner of the Bad Luck Restaurant in Berkeley had been a KGB agent, but this fact wasn't printed anywhere; no one had ever written it down, except perhaps in the computers of the FBI and of course at KGB GHQ in Moscow, and it was only speculation anyhow. The issue of my turning on could be a shrewd guess, since I lived and worked in Berkeley, and, as everyone in the world knows, all the people in Berkeley do dope regularly—in fact, do it to excess. A medium is traditionally one who relies on a potpourri of hunches, common knowledge, clues unknowingly delivered by the audience itself, delivered unintentionally and then handed back ... and, of course, the standard bullshit, such as "Jeff loves you" and "Jeff isn't in any more pain" and "Jeff felt a lot of doubt," generalizations available to anyone at any time, given the known facts.
Yet an eerie sensation held me, even though I knew that this old Irish lady who gave money—or said she gave money—to the Irish Republican Army was a fraud, that we three collectively were being fleeced out of our money, fleeced, too, in the sense that our credulity was being pandered to and manipulated—by someone in the business of doing this: a professional. The primary medium—it sounded like the medical term for cancer: "the primary cancer"—Dr. Mason had undoubtedly passed on everything he had learned and knew; this is how mediums work it, and we all know this.
The time to have left was before the revelation came, and now it was going to come, dumped on us by an unscrupulous old lady with dollar signs in her eyes and a clever ability to fathom the weak links in human psyches. But we didn't leave, and so it followed as the night the day that we got to hear from Dr. Garret what had so agitated Jeff, causing him to come back to Tim and Kirsten as the occult "phenomena" that they logged each day for Tim's forthcoming book.
It seemed to me as if Rachel Garret had become very old as she sat in her wicker chair, and I thought about the ancient sibyl—I could not remember which sibyl it had been, the one at Delphi or at Cumae—who had asked for immortality but had neglected to stipulate that she remain young; whereupon she lived forever but
got so old that eventually her friends hung her up on the wall in a bag. Rachel Garret resembled that tattered wisp of skin and fragile bones, whispering out of the bag nailed to the wall; what wall in what city of the Empire I do not know—perhaps the sibyl is still there; perhaps this being who faced us as Rachel Garret was, in fact, that same sibyl; in any case, I did not want to hear what she had to say: I wanted to leave.
"Sit down," Kirsten said.
I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.
Rachel Garret whispered, "Kirsten." But now she pronounced it correctly: Shishen, which I did not do, nor had Jeff, nor did Tim. But that was how she pronounced it herself, and gave up on getting anyone else to, at least in the States.
At this, Kirsten gave a muffled gasp.
The old lady in the wicker chair said:
"'Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. lam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia régna; iam nova—'"
"My God," Tim said. "It's the Fourth Eclogue. Of Virgil."
"That's enough," Kirsten said faintly.
I thought: The old lady is reading my mind. She knows I thought about the sibyl.
Speaking to me, Rachel Garret said:
"'Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla.'"
Yes, she is reading my mind, I realized. She even knows that I know it; as I think she reads my thoughts back to me.
"Mors Kirsten nunc carpit," Rachel Garret whispered. "Hodie. Calamitas ... timeo ..." She drew herself up in her wicker chair.
"What did she say?" Kirsten said to Tim.