The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

  "Young lady," Barefoot said.

  With a start, I realized he was speaking to me.

  "Yes," I said, rousing myself.

  "What's your name?" Barefoot asked.

  "Angel Archer," I said.

  "Why are you here?"

  "To get away," I said.

  "From what?"

  "Everything," I said.

  "Why?"

  "It hurts," I said.

  "John Lennon, you mean?"

  "Yes," I said. "And more. Other things."

  "I was noticing you," Barefoot said, "because you were asleep. You may not have realized it. Did you realize it?"

  "I realized it," I said.

  "Is that how you want me to perceive you? As asleep?"

  "Let me alone," I said.

  "Let you sleep, then."

  "Yes," I said.

  "'The sound of one hand clapping,'" Barefoot quoted.

  I said nothing.

  "Do you want me to hit you? Cuff you? To wake you up?"

  "I don't care," I said. "It doesn't matter to me."

  "What would it take to awaken you?" Barefoot said.

  I did not answer.

  "My job is to wake people."

  "You are another fisherman."

  "Yes; I fish for fish. Not for souls. I do not know of 'soul'; I only know of fish. A fisherman fishes for fish; if he thinks he fishes for anything else, he is a fool; he deludes himself and those he fishes for."

  "Fish for me, then," I said.

  "What do you want?"

  "Not ever to wake up."

  "Then come up here," Barefoot said. "Come up and stand beside me. I will teach you how to sleep. It is as hard to sleep as it is to wake up. You sleep poorly, without skill. I can teach you that as easily as I can teach you to wake up. Whatever you want you can have. Are you sure you know what you want? Maybe you secretly want to wake up. You may be wrong about yourself. Come on up here." He reached out his hand.

  "Don't touch me," I said as I walked toward him. "I don't want to be touched."

  "So you know that."

  "I am sure of that," I said.

  "Maybe what is wrong with you is that no one has ever touched you," Barefoot said.

  "You tell me," I said. "I have nothing to say. Whatever I had to say—"

  "You have never said anything," Barefoot said. "You have been silent all your life. Only your mouth has talked."

  "If you say so."

  "Tell me your name again."

  "Angel Archer."

  "Do you have a secret name? That no one knows?"

  "I have no secret name," I said. And then I said, "I am traitor."

  "Who did you betray?"

  "Friends," I said.

  "Well, Traitor," Barefoot said, "talk to me about your bringing your friends to ruin. How did you do it?"

  "With words," I said. "Like now."

  "You are good with words."

  "Very good," I said. "I am a sickness, a word-sickness. I was taught it by professionals."

  "I have no words," Barefoot said.

  "Okay," I said. "Then I will listen."

  "Now you begin to know."

  I nodded.

  "Do you have any pets at home?" Barefoot said. "Any dogs or cats? An animal?"

  "Two cats," I said.

  "Do you groom them and feed them and care for them? Are you responsible for them? Do you take them to the vet when they're ill?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Who does all that for you?"

  "For me?" I said. "No one."

  "Can you do it for yourself?"

  "Yes, I can," I said.

  "Then, Angel Archer, you are alive."

  "Not intentionally," I said.

  "But you are. You don't think so but you are. Under the words, the disease of words, you are alive. I am trying to tell you this without using words but it is impossible. All we have is words. Sit down again and listen. Everything 1 say from now on, today, is directed at you; I am speaking to you but not with words. Does that make any sense to you?"

  "No," I said.

  "Then just sit down," Barefoot said.

  I reseated myself.

  "Angel Archer," Barefoot said, "You are wrong about yourself. You are not sick; you are starved. What is killing you is hunger. Words have nothing to do with it. You have been starved all your life. Spiritual things will not help. You don't need them. There are too many spiritual things in the world, far too many. You are a fool, Angel Archer, but not a good kind of fool."

  I said nothing.

  "You need real meat," Barefoot said, "and real drink, not spiritual meat and drink. I offer you real food, for your body, so it will grow. You are a starving person who has come here to be fed, but without knowing it. You have no idea why you came here today. It is my job to tell you. When people come here to listen to me speak, I offer them a sandwich. The foolish ones listen to my words; the wise ones eat the sandwich. This is not an absurdity that I tell you; it is the truth. This is something none of you has imagined, but I give you real food and that food is a sandwich; the words, the talking, is only wind—is nothing. I charge you one hundred dollars but you learn something priceless. When your dog or cat is hungry, do you talk to him? No; you give him food, I give you food, but you do not know it. You have everything backward because the university has taught you that; it has taught you wrong. It has lied to you. And now you tell yourselves lies; you have learned how to do it and you do it very well. Take the sandwich and eat; forget about the words. The only purpose in the words was to lure you here."

  Strange, I thought. He means it. Some of my unhappiness began, then, to ebb away. I felt a peacefulness come over me, a loss of suffering.

  Someone from behind me leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder. "Hi, Angel."

  I turned around to see who it was. A pudgy-faced youth, blond-haired, smiling at me, his eyes guileless. Bill Lundborg, wearing a turtleneck sweater and gray slacks and, I saw to my surprise, Hush Puppies.

  "Remember me?" he said softly. "I'm sorry I didn't answer any of your letters. I've been wondering how you've been doing."

  "Fine," I said. "Just fine."

  "I guess we better be quiet." He leaned back and folded his arms, intent on what Edgar Barefoot was saying.

  At the end of his lecture, Barefoot walked over to me; I still sat, unmoving. Bending, Barefoot said, "Are you related to Bishop Archer?"

  "Yes," I said. "I was his daughter-in-law."

  "We knew each other," Barefoot said. "Tim and I. For years. It was such a shock, his death. We used to discuss theology."

  Coming up beside us, Bill Lundborg stood listening, saying nothing; he still smiled the same old smile I remembered,

  "And then John Lennon's death today," Barefoot said. "I hope I didn't embarrass you, bringing you up front like that. But I could see something was wrong. You look better now."

  I said, "I feel better."

  "Do you want a sandwich?" Barefoot indicated the people gathered around the table at the rear of the room.

  "No," I said.

  Barefoot said, "Then you weren't listening. To what I told you. I wasn't joking. Angel, you can't live on words; words do not feed. Jesus said, 'Man does not live by bread alone'; I say, 'Man does not live by words at all.' Have a sandwich."

  "Have something to eat, Angel," Bill Lundborg said.

  "I don't feel like eating," I said. "I'm sorry." I thought, I'd rather be left alone.

  Bending down, Bill said, "You look so thin."

  "My work," I said remotely.

  "Angel," Edgar Barefoot said, "this is Bill Lundborg."

  "We know each other," Bill said. "We're old friends."

  "Then you know," Barefoot said to me, "that Bill is a bodhisattva."

  "I didn't know that," I said.

  Barefoot said, "Do you know what a bodhisattva is, Angel?"

  "It has something to do with the Buddha," I said.

  "The bodhisattva is one who has turned
down his chance to attain Nirvana in order to turn back to help others," Barefoot said. "For the bodhisattva compassion is as important a goal as wisdom. That is the essential realization of the bodhisattva."

  "That's fine," I said.

  "I get a lot out of what Edgar teaches," Bill said to me. "Come on." He took me by the hand. "I'm going to see that you eat something."

  "Do you consider yourself a bodhisattva?" I said to him.

  "No," Bill said.

  "Sometimes the bodhisattva does not know," Barefoot said. "It is possible to be enlightened without knowing it. Also, it is possible to think you are enlightened and yet not be. The Buddha is called 'the Awakened One,' because 'awakened' means the same as 'enlightened.' We all sleep but do not know it. We live in a dream; we walk and move and have our lives in a dream; most of all we speak in a dream; our speech is the speech of dreamers, and unreal."

  Like now, I thought. What I'm hearing.

  Bill disappeared; I looked around for him.

  "He's getting you something to eat," Barefoot said.

  "This is all very strange," I said. "This whole day has been unreal. It is like a dream; you're right. They're playing all the old Beatles songs on every station."

  "Let me tell you something that happened to me once," Barefoot said; he seated himself in the chair beside me, bent over, his hands clasped together. "I was very young, still in school. I attended classes at Stanford, but I did not graduate. I took a lot of philosophy classes."

  "So did I," I said.

  "One day I left my apartment to mail a letter. I had been working on a paper—not a paper to turn in but a paper of my own: profound philosophical ideas, ideas very important to me. There was one particular problem I couldn't figure out; it had to do with Kant and his ontological categories by which the human mind structures experience—"

  "Time, space and causation," I said. "I know. I studied that."

  "What I realized as I walked along," Barefoot said, "was that, in a very real sense, I myself create the world that I experience; I both make that world and perceive it. As I walked, the correct formulation of this came to me, suddenly, out of the blue. One minute I didn't have it; the next minute I did. It was a solution I'd been striving for over a period of years ... I had read Hume, and then I had found the response to Hume's criticism of causation in Kant's writing—now, suddenly, I had a response, and a correctly worked-out response to Kant. I started hurrying."

  Bill Lundborg reappeared; he held a sandwich and a cup of fruit punch of some sort; these he held out to me. I accepted them reflexively.

  Continuing, Barefoot said, "I hurried back up the street toward my apartment as fast as I could go. I had to get the satori down on paper before I forgot it. What I had acquired, there on that walk, out of my apartment where I had no access to pen and paper, was a comprehension of a world conceptually arranged, a world not arranged in time and space and by causation, but a world as idea conceived in a great mind, the way our own minds store memories. I had caught a glimpse of world not as my own arrangement—by time, space and causation—but as it is in itself arranged; Kant's 'thing-in-itself.'"

  "Which can't be known, Kant said," I said.

  "Which normally can't be known," Barefoot said. "But I had somehow perceived it, like a great, reticulated, arborizing structure of interrelationships, everything organized according to meaning, with all new events entering as accretions; I had never before grasped the absolute nature of reality this way." He paused a moment.

  "You got home and wrote it down," I said.

  "No," Barefoot said. "I never wrote it down. As I hurried along, I saw two tiny children, one of them holding a baby-bottle. They were running back and forth across a street. A lot of cars came along very fast. I watched for a moment and then I went over to them. I saw no adult. I asked them to take me to their mother. They didn't speak English; it was a Spanish neighborhood, very poor ... I didn't have any money in those days. I found their mother. She said, 'I don't speak English' and closed the door in my face. She was smiling. I remember that. Smiling at me beatifically. She thought I was a salesman. I wanted to tell her that her children would very soon be killed and she shut the door in my face, smiling angelically at me."

  "So what did you do?" Bill said.

  Barefoot said, "I sat down on the curb and watched the two children. For the rest of the afternoon. Until their father came home. He spoke a little English. I was able to get him to understand. He thanked me."

  "You did the right thing," I said.

  "So I never got my model of the universe down on paper," Barefoot said. "I just have a dim memory of it. Something like that fades. It was a once-in-a-lifetime satori. Moksa, it is called in India; a sudden flash of absolute comprehension, out of nowhere. What James Joyce means by 'epiphanies,' arising from the trivial or without cause at all, simply happening. Total insight into world." He was silent, then.

  I said, "What I hear you saying is that the life of a Mexican child is—"

  "Which way would you have taken?" Barefoot said to me. "Would you have gone home and written down your philosophical idea, your moksa? Or would you have stayed with the children?"

  "I would have called the police," I said.

  "To have done that," Barefoot said, "would have required you to go to a phone. To do that you would have had to leave the children."

  "It's a nice story," I said. "But I knew someone else who told nice stories. He's dead."

  "Maybe," Barefoot said, "he found what he went to Israel to find. Found it before he died."

  "I very much doubt that," I said.

  "I doubt it, too," Barefoot said. "On the other hand, maybe he found something better. Something he should have been looking for but wasn't. What I am trying to tell you is that all of us are unknowing bodhisattvas, unwilling, even; unintentional. It is something forced on us by chance circumstance. All I wanted to do that day was rush home and get my great insight down on paper before I forgot it. It really was a great insight; I have no doubt of that. I did not want to be a bodhisattva. I did not ask to be. I did not expect to be. In those days, I hadn't even heard the term. Anyone would have done what I did."

  "Not anyone," I said. "Most people would have, I guess."

  "What would you have done?" Barefoot said. "Given that choice."

  I said, "I guess I would have done what you did and hoped I'd remember the insight."

  "But I did not remember it," he said. "And that is the point."

  Bill said to me, then, "Can I hitch a ride with you back to the East Bay? My car got towed off. It threw a rod and I—"

  "Sure," I said; I stood up, stiffly; my bones ached. "Mr. Barefoot, I've listened to you on KPFA many times. At first, I thought you were stuffy but now I'm not so sure."

  "Before you go," Barefoot said, "I want you to tell me how you betrayed your friends."

  "She didn't," Bill said. "It's all in her mind."

  Barefoot leaned toward me; he put his arm around me and drew me back to my chair, reseating me.

  "Well," I said, "I let them die. Especially Tim."

  "Tim could not have avoided death," Barefoot said. "He went to Israel in order to die. That's what he wanted. Death was what he was looking for. That's why I say, Maybe he found what he was looking for or even something better."

  Shocked, I said, "Tim wasn't looking for death. Tim put up the bravest fight against fate I ever saw anybody put up."

  "Death and fate are not the same," Barefoot said. "He died to avoid fate, because the fate he saw coming for him was worse than dying there on the Dead Sea Desert. That's why he sought it and that's what he found; but I think he found something better." To Bill he said, "What do you think, Bill?"

  "I'd rather not say," Bill said.

  "But you know," Barefoot said to him.

  "What was the fate you're talking about?" I asked Barefoot.

  Barefoot said, "The same as yours. The fate that has overtaken you. And that you're aware of."

  "What is
that?" I said.

  "Lost in meaningless words," Barefoot said. "A merchant of words. With no contact to life. Tim had advanced far into that. I read Here, Tyrant Death several times. It said nothing, nothing at all. Just words. Flatus vocis, an empty noise."

  After a moment I said, "You're right. I read it, too." How true it was, how terribly, sadly true.

  "And Tim realized it," Barefoot said. "He told me. He came to me a few months before his trip to Israel and told me. He wanted me to teach him about the Sufis. He wanted to exchange meaning—all the meaning he'd piled up in his lifetime—for something else. For beauty. He told me about an album of records that you sold him that he never got a chance to play. Beethoven's Fidelio. He was always too busy."

  "Then you knew who I was already," I said. "Before I told you."

  "That's why I asked you to come up front with me," Barefoot said. "I recognized you. Tim had shown me a picture of you and Jeff. At first, I wasn't sure. You're a lot thinner now."

  "Well, I have a demanding job," I said.

  Together, Bill Lundborg and I drove back across the Richardson Bridge to the East Bay. We listened to the radio, to the endless procession of Beatles songs.

  "I knew you were trying to find me," Bill said, "but my life wasn't going too well. I've finally been diagnosed as what they call 'hebephrenic.'"

  To change the subject I said, "I hope the music isn't depressing you; I can turn it off."

  "I like the Beatles," Bill said.

  "Are you aware of John Lennon's death?"

  "Sure," Bill said. "Everybody is. So you manage the Musik Shop now."

  "Yes, indeed," I said. "I have five clerks working under me and unlimited buying power. I've got an offer from Capitol Records to go down to the L.A. area, to Burbank, I guess, and go to work for them. I've reached the top in terms of the retail record business; managing a store is as far as you can go. Except for owning the store. And I don't have the money."

  "Do you know what 'hebephrenic' means?"

  "Yes," I said. I thought, I even know the origin of the word. "Hebe was the Greek goddess of youth," I said.

  "I never grew up," Bill said. "Hebephrenia is characterized by silliness."

  "Guess so," I said.

  "When you're hebephrenic," Bill said, "things strike you as funny. Kirsten's death struck me as funny."