The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

  Then you are indeed hebephrenic, I said to myself as I drove. Because there was nothing funny about it. I said, "What about Tim's death?"

  "Well, parts of it were funny. That little boxy car, that Datsun. And those two bottles of Coke. Tim probably had shoes on like I have on now." He lifted his foot to show me his Hush Puppies.

  "At least," I said.

  "But by and large," Bill said, "it was not funny. What Tim was looking for wasn't funny. Barefoot is wrong about what Tim was looking for; he wasn't looking for death."

  "Not consciously," I said, "but maybe unconsciously he was."

  "That's nonsense," Bill said. "All that about unconscious motivation. You can posit anything by reasoning that way. You can attribute any motivation you want, since there's no way it can be tested. Tim was looking for that mushroom. He sure picked a funny place to look for a mushroom: a desert. Mushrooms grow where it's moist and cool and shaded."

  "In caves," I said. "There are caves there."

  "Yes, well," Bill said, "it wasn't actually a mushroom anyhow. That, too, is a supposition. A gratuitous assumption. Tim stole that idea from a scholar named John Allegro. Tim's problem was that he didn't really think for himself; he picked up other people's ideas and believed they had come out of his own mind, whereas, in fact, he stole them."

  "But the ideas had value," I said, "and Tim synthesized them. Tim brought various ideas together."

  "But not very good ones."

  Glancing at Bill, I said, "Who are you to judge?"

  "I know you loved him," Bill said. "You don't have to defend him all the time. I'm not attacking him."

  "It sure sounds like it."

  "I loved him, too. A lot of people loved Bishop Archer. He was a great man, the greatest we'll ever know. But he was a foolish man and you know that."

  I said nothing; I drove and I half-listened to the radio. They were now playing "Yesterday."

  "Edgar was right about you, however," Bill said. "You should have dropped out of the university and not finished. You learned too much."

  With bitterness I said, "'Learned too much.' Christ. The vox populi. Distrust of education. I get sick and tired of hearing that shit; I am glad of what I know."

  "It's wrecked you," Bill said.

  "You can just go take a flying fling," I said.

  Bill said calmly, "You are very bitter and very unhappy. You are a good person who loved Kirsten and Tim and Jeff and you haven't gotten over what happened to them. And your education has not helped you cope with this."

  "There is no coping with this!" I said, with fury. "They all were good people and they are all dead!"

  "'Your fathers ate manna in the desert and they are all dead.'"

  "What's that?"

  "Jesus says that. I think it's said during Mass. I attended Mass a few times with Kirsten, at Grace Cathedral. One time, when Tim was passing the chalice around—Kirsten was kneeling at the rail—he secretly slipped a ring around her finger. No one saw but she told me. It was a symbolic wedding ring. Tim had on all his robes, then."

  "Tell me about it," I said, bitterly.

  "I am telling you about it. Did you know—"

  "I knew about the ring," I said. "She told me. She showed it to me."

  "They considered themselves spiritually married. Before and in the eyes of God. Although not according to civil law. 'Your fathers ate manna in the desert and they are all dead.' That refers to the Old Testament. Jesus brings—"

  "Oh, my good God," I said, "I thought I'd heard the last of all this stuff. I don't want ever to hear any more. It didn't do any good then and it won't ever do any good. Barefoot talks about useless words—those are useless words. Why would Barefoot call you a bodhisattva? What is all this compassion and wisdom you have? You attained Nirvana and came back to help others, is that it?"

  "I could have attained Nirvana," Bill said. "But I turned it down. To return."

  "Forgive me," I said, with weariness. "I don't understand what you're talking about. Okay?"

  Bill said, "I came back to this world. From the next world. Out of compassion. That is what I learned out there in the desert, the Dead Sea Desert." His voice was calm; his face showed a deep calm. "That is what I found."

  I stared at him.

  "I am Tim Archer," Bill said. "I have come back from the other side. To those I love." He smiled a vast and secret smile.

  15

  AFTER A MOMENT of silence, I said, "Did you tell Edgar Barefoot?"

  "Yes," Bill said.

  "Who else?"

  "Almost no one else."

  I said, "When did this happen?" And then I said, "You fucking lunatic. It will never end; it goes on and it goes on. One by one, they go mad and die. All I want to do is run my record store and turn on and get laid now and then and read a few books. I never asked for this." My car's tires squealed as I swerved to pass a slow-moving vehicle. We had almost reached the Richmond end of the Richardson Bridge.

  "Angel," Bill said. He put his hand on my shoulder, tenderly.

  "Get your goddamn hand off of me," I said.

  He withdrew his hand. "I have come back," he said.

  "You have gone crazy again and belong back in the hospital, you hebephrenic nut. Can't you see what this is doing to me, to have to listen to more of this? You know what I thought about you? I thought: There, in a certain real sense, is the only sane one among us; he is labeled as a nut but he is sane. We are labeled as sane and we are nuts. And now you. You are the last one I would have expected this from, but I guess—" I broke off. "Shit," I said. "It's out of control, this madness process. I always said to myself: Bill Lundborg is in touch with the real; he thinks about cars. You could have explained to Tim why one does not drive out on the Dead Sea Desert in a Datsun with two bottles of Coke and a gas station map. And now you are as crazy as they were. More crazy." Reaching, I turned up the radio; the sound of the Beatles filled the car—Bill at once shut the radio off, entirely off.

  "Please slow down," Bill said.

  "Please," I said, "when we get to the toll gate, get out of the car and hitch a ride with somebody else. And you can tell Edgar Barefoot to go stick his—"

  "Don't blame him," Bill said sharply. "I only told him; he didn't tell me. Slow down!" He reached for the ignition key.

  "Okay," I said, putting my foot on the brake.

  "You will roll this sardine can," Bill said, "and kill us both. And you don't even have your seat belt fastened."

  "On this day of all days," I said. "The day they murder John Lennon. I have to hear this right now."

  "I did not find the anokhi mushroom," Bill said.

  I said nothing; I simply drove. As best I could.

  "I fell," Bill said. "From a cliff."

  "Yes," I said. "I read that, too, in the Chronicle. Did it hurt?"

  "By that time, I had become unconscious from the sunlight and the heat."

  "Well," I said, "apparently you are just not a very bright person, to go out there like that." And then, suddenly, I felt compassion; I felt shame, overwhelming shame at what I was doing to him. "Bill," I said, "forgive me."

  "Sure," he said, simply.

  I thought through my words and then I said, "When did—what am I supposed to call you? Bill or Tim? Are you both, now?"

  "I'm both. One personality has been formed out of the two. Either name will do. Probably you should call me Bill so that people won't know."

  "Why don't you want them to know? I would think something as important and unique as this, as momentous as this, should be known."

  Bill said, "They'll put me back in the hospital."

  "Then," I said, "I will call you Bill."

  "About a month after his death, Tim came back to me. I didn't understand what was happening; I couldn't figure it out. Lights and colors and then an alien presence in my mind. Another personality much smarter than me, thinking all sorts of things I never thought. And he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew, and all about theology. He thought about you
very clearly. He had wanted to take you with him to Israel."

  At that, I glanced sharply at him and felt chilled.

  "That night at the Chinese restaurant," Bill said, "he tried to talk you into it. But you said you had your life all planned out. You couldn't leave Berkeley."

  Taking my foot from the gas pedal, I allowed the car to slow down; it moved more and more slowly until it came to a stop.

  "It's illegal to stop on the bridge," Bill said. "Unless you're having motor trouble or run out of gas, something of that sort. Keep on driving."

  Tim told him, I said to myself. Reflexively, I down-shifted, into low; I started the car up again.

  "Tim had a crush on you," Bill said.

  "So?" I said.

  "That was one reason he wanted to take you to Israel with him."

  I said, "You speak of Tim in the third person. So, in point of fact, you do not identify yourself with Tim or as Tim; you are Bill Lundborg talking about Tim."

  "I am Bill Lundborg," he agreed. "But also I am Tim Archer."

  "Tim wouldn't tell me that," I said, "about being sexually interested in me."

  "I know," Bill said, "but I am telling you."

  "What did we have for dinner that night at the Chinese restaurant?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Where was the restaurant?"

  "In Berkeley."

  "Where in Berkeley?"

  "I don't remember."

  I said, "Tell me what hysteron proteron means."

  "How would I know that? That's Latin. Tim knows Latin; I don't."

  "It's Greek."

  "I don't know any Greek. I pick up Tim's thoughts and now and then he's thinking in Greek but I don't know what the Greek means."

  "What if I believe you?" I said. "What then?"

  "Then," Bill said, "you are happy because your old friend is not dead."

  "And that's the point of this."

  He nodded. "Yes."

  "It would seem to me," I said carefully, "there would be a larger point involved. This would be a miracle of staggering importance, to the entire world. It is something that scientists should investigate. It proves there is eternal life, that a next world does exist—everything that Tim and Kirsten believed is, in fact, true. Here, Tyrant Death is true. Don't you agree?"

  "Yes. I suppose so. That's what Tim is thinking; he thinks that a lot. He wants me to write a book, but I can't write a book; I don't have any writing talent."

  "You can act as Tim's secretary. The way your mother did. Tim can dictate and you can write it all down."

  "He rattles on and on a mile a minute. I've tried to write it down but—his thinking is fucked. If you'll pardon the expression. It's all disorganized; it goes everywhere and nowhere. And I don't know half the words. In fact, a lot of it isn't words at all, just impressions."

  "Can you hear him now?"

  "No. Not right now. It's usually when I'm alone and no one else is talking. Then I can sort of tune in on it."

  "'Hysteron proteron,'" I murmured. "When the thing to be demonstrated is included in the premise. So it's all in vain, the reasoning. Bill," I said, "I've got to hand it to you; you have me tied up in a knot, you really have. Does Tim remember backing over the gas pump? Never mind; fuck the gas pump."

  Bill said. "It's a presence of mind. See, Tim was in that area—the word 'presence' reminded me; he uses that word a lot. The Presence, as he calls it, was there in the desert."

  "The Parousia," I said.

  "Right." Bill emphatically nodded.

  "That would be anokhi," I said.

  "Would it? What he was looking for?"

  "Apparently he found it," I said. "What did Barefoot say to all this?"

  "That's when he told me—when he realized—I was a bodhisattva. I came back. Tim came back, I mean, out of compassion for others. For those he loves. Such as you."

  "What is Barefoot going to do with this news?"

  "Nothing."

  "'Nothing,'" I echoed, nodding.

  "There's no way I can prove it," Bill said. "To skeptical minds. Edgar pointed that out."

  "Why can't you prove it? It should be easy to prove it. You have access to everything Tim knew; like you said—all the theology, details of his personal life. Facts. It should be the most simple matter on Earth to prove."

  "Can I prove it to you?" Bill said. "I can't even prove it to you. It's like belief in God; you can know God, know he exists; you can experience him, and yet you can never prove to anyone else that you've experienced him."

  "Do you believe in God now?" I said.

  "Sure." He nodded.

  "I guess you believe in a lot of things now," I said.

  "Because of Tim in me, I know a lot of things; it isn't just belief. It's like—" He gestured earnestly. "Having swallowed a computer or the whole Britannica, a whole library. The facts, the ideas, come and go and just whizz around in my head; they go too fast—that's the problem. I don't understand them; I can't remember them; I can't write them down or explain them to other people. It's like having KPFA turned on inside your head twenty-four hours a day, without cease. In many respects, it's an affliction. But it's interesting."

  Have fun with your thoughts, I said to myself. That is what Harry Stack Sullivan said schizophrenics do: they have endless fun with their thoughts, and forget the world.

  There is not much you can say when someone unveils an account such as Bill Lundborg's—assuming that anyone ever unveiled such a narration before. It did, of course, resemble what Tim and Kirsten had revealed to me (that is the wrong word) when they returned from England, after Jeff's death. But that had been minor compared with this. This, I thought, consists of the ultimate escalation, the monument itself. The other narration was only the marker pointing to the monument.

  Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances. It is not solitary. Madness does not remain content; it fans out across the landscape, or seascape, whichever.

  Yes, I thought; it is like we are under water: not in a dream—as Barefoot says—but in a tank, and being observed, for our bizarre behavior and our more bizarre beliefs. I am a metaphor junkie; Bill Lundborg is a madness junkie, unable to get enough of it: he possesses a boundless appetite for it and will obtain it by whatever means possible. Just when it seemed, too, as if madness had passed out of the world. First John Lennon's death and now this; and, for me, on the same day.

  I could not say, and yet he is so plausible. Because Bill was not plausible; it is not a plausible matter. Probably, even Edgar Barefoot recognized that—well, however a Sufi phrases such moksa to himself, that someone is sick and needs help, but is touchingly appealing, is guileless and not going to do any harm. This madness arose from pain, from the loss of a mother and what almost certainly amounted to a father in the true sense of the word. I felt it; I feel it; I always will feel it, as long as I live. But Bill's solution could not be mine.

  Any more than mine—managing the record store—could be his. We each must find our own solution, and, in particular, we each must solve the sort of problem that death creates—creates for others; but not death only: madness also, madness leading to final death as its end-state, its logical goal.

  When my original anger at Bill Lundborg's psychosis had subsided—it did subside—I began to view it as funny. The utility of Bill Lundborg, not just for himself but, as I viewed it, to all of us, consisted in his grounding in the concrete. This, precisely, he had lost. His showing up at Edgar Barefoot's seminar disclosed the change in Bill; the kid I had known, formerly known, would never have set foot in such surroundings. Bill had gone the way of the rest of us, not the way of all flesh but the way of our intellects: into nonsense and the foolish, there to languish without a trace of anything redemptive.

  Except, of course, Bill could now emotionally deal with the assortment of deaths that had plagued us. Was my solution any better? I worked; I read; I listened to music—I bought music in the form of records; I lived a professional life and
yearned to move into the A & R Division of Capitol Records down in Southern California. There my future lay, there were the tangible things that records had become for me, not something to enjoy but something to first buy and then sell.

  That the bishop had returned from the next world and now inhabited Bill Lundborg's mind or brain—that couldn't be, for obvious reasons. One knows this instinctively; one does not debate this; one perceives this as absolute fact: it cannot happen. I could quiz Bill forever, trying to establish the presence in him of facts known only to me and to Tim, but this would lead nowhere. Like the dinner Tim and I had eaten at the Chinese restaurant on University Avenue in Berkeley, all data became suspect because there are multiple ways that data can arise within the human mind, ways more readily acceptable and explained than to assume that one man died in Israel and his psyche floated halfway across the world until it discriminated Bill Lundborg from all the other people in the United States and then dove into that person, into that waiting brain, and took up residence there, to sputter with ideas, thoughts and memories, half-baked notions; in other words, the bishop as we had known him, the bishop himself, like a sort of plasma. This does not lie within the domain of the real. It lies elsewhere; it is the invention of derangement, of a young man who grieved over the suicide of his mother and the sudden death of a father-figure, grieved and tried to understand, and one day into Bill's mind came—not Bishop Timothy Archer—but the concept of Timothy Archer, the notion that Timothy Archer was there, in him, spiritually, a ghost. There is a difference between the notion of something and that something itself.

  Still, upon the lessening of my original anger, I felt sympathy toward Bill because I understood why he had gone this route; he had not willed it out of perversity: it did not consist of, so to speak, optional madness but, rather, madness compelled on him, thrust onto him forcibly, whether he liked it or not. It had simply happened.

  Bill Lundborg, the first of us to be crazy, had become now the last of us to be crazy; the only genuine issue could best be phrased this way: could anything be done about it? Which raises a deeper question: should anything be done about it?