"Jesus Christ," Jeff said bitterly.
I went back to reading Howard the Duck. It was the episode where space people turn Howard the Duck into Richard Nixon. Reciprocally, Richard Nixon grows feathers while addressing the nation on network TV. Likewise the top brass at the Pentagon.
"And they're going to be gone how long?" Jeff said.
"Until Tim figures out the meaning of the Zadokite Documents and how they pertain to Christianity."
"Shit," Jeff said.
"What's 'Q'?" I said.
"'Q,'" Jeff echoed.
"Tim said that preliminary reports, based on fragmentary translations of some documents—"
"'Q' is the hypothetical source for the Synoptics." His voice was brutal and rough.
"What are the Synoptics?"
"The first three Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke. They supposedly come from one source, probably Aramaic. Nobody's ever been able to prove it."
"Well," I said, "Tim told me on the phone the other night while you were in class that the translators in London think that the Zadokite Documents contain—not just Q—but the material Q is based on. They're not sure. Tim sounded more excited than I ever heard him sound before."
"But the Zadokite Documents date from two hundred years before Christ."
"That's probably why he was so excited."
Jeff said, "I want to go along."
"You can't," I said.
"Why not?" Raising his voice, he said, "Why don't I get to go if she gets to go? I'm his son!"
"He's straining the Bishop's Discretionary Fund as it is. They're going to be staying several months; it's going to cost a whole lot."
Jeff walked out of the living room. I continued reading. After a time, I realized I was hearing a strange sound; I lowered my copy of Howard the Duck and listened.
In the kitchen, in the darkness, by himself, my husband was crying.
One of the strangest and most perplexing accounts I ever read concerning my husband's suicide was that he, Jeff Archer, Bishop Timothy Archer's son, killed himself because he was afraid he was a homosexual. Some book written a number of years after his death—after all three of them had died—mangled the facts so thoroughly that, when you had finished reading it (I don't even remember the title or who wrote it) you knew less about Jeff and Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg than before you started. It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.
Jeff held two mutually exclusive views toward his father's mistress. On the one hand she sexually stimulated him, so he felt strongly but wickedly attracted to her. On the other hand he loathed her and hated her and resented her for—he supposed—replacing him in terms of Tim's interest and affections.
But it did not end even there ... although I didn't discern the rest until years had passed. Beyond and above being jealous of Kirsten, he was jealous of—well, Jeff had it all screwed up; I can't really untangle it. One has to bear in mind the special problems in being the son of a man whose picture has appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek and who gets interviewed by David Frost, shows up on the Johnny Carson program, gets political cartoons in major newspapers devoted to him—what in Christ's name do you do, as the son?
For one week Jeff joined them in England, and regarding that week I know little; Jeff came back mute and withdrawn, and that was when he headed for the hotel room in which he shot himself in the face one late night. I am not going to go into my feelings about that as a way of killing yourself. It did bring the bishop back from London within a matter of hours, which, in a certain sense, the suicide was all about.
In a very real sense, it also had to do with Q, or rather the source of Q, now referred to in the newspaper articles as U.Q., which is Ur-Quelle in German: Original Source. Behind Q lay the Ur-Quelle, and this is what led Timothy Archer to London and several months in a hotel with his mistress, ostensibly his business agent and general secretary.
No one had ever expected the documents behind Q to reappear in the world; no one had known that U.Q. existed. Since I am not a Christian—and never will be, after the deaths of the people I loved—I am not now and was not then particularly interested, but I suppose it is theologically important, especially so inasmuch as the date assigned to U.Q. is two hundred years before the time of Jesus.
5
WHAT I REMEMBER most, in the first newspaper articles to come out, the first intimation we had, anybody beyond the translators had, that this was an even more important find than the Qumran scrolls, was (the articles said) a particular Hebrew noun. They spell it two different ways; sometimes it showed up as anokhi and sometimes anochi.
The word shows up in Exodus, chapter twenty, verse two. This is a terribly moving and important section of the Torah, for here God Himself speaks, and he says:
"I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."
The first Hebrew word is anokhi or anochi and it means "I"—as in "I am the Lord thy God." Jeff showed me what the official Jewish commentary is on this part of the Torah:
"The God adored by Judaism is not an impersonal Force, an It, whether spoken of as 'Nature' or 'World-Reason.' The God of Israel is the Source not only of power and life, but of consciousness, personality, moral purpose and ethical action."
Even for me, a non-Christian—or I should say a non-Jew, I guess—this shakes me; I am touched and changed; I am not the same. What is expressed here, Jeff explained to me, is, in this single word, one letter of the English alphabet, the unique self-consciousness of God:
"As man towers above all the other creatures by his will and self-conscious action, so God 'rules over all as the one completely self-conscious Mind and Will. In both the visible and the invisible realms, He manifests Himself as the absolutely free personality, moral and spiritual, who allots to everything its existence, form and purpose.'"
That was written by Samuel M.Cohon, quoting Kaufmann Kohler. Another Jewish writer, Hermann Cohen, wrote:
"God answered him thus: 'I am that which I am. So shalt thou say to the children of Israel: "I am" has sent me to you.' There is probably no greater miracle in the history of the spirit than that revealed in this verse. For here, a primeval language which is as yet without any philosophy, emerges and haltingly pronounces the most profound word of all philosophy. The name of God is 'I am that which I am.' This signifies that God is Being, that God is the I, which denotes the Existing One."
And this is what turned up at the wadi in Israel, dating from 200 B.C.E., the wadi not far from Qumran; this word lay at the heart of the Zadokite Documents, and every Hebrew scholar knows this word, and every Christian and Jew should know it, but there at that wadi the word anokhi was used in a different way, a way no living person had ever seen it employed before. And so Tim and Kirsten stayed in London twice as long as they had intended to stay, because the very core of something had been located, the core in fact, of the Decalogue, as if the Lord had left tracings in his own autograph, which is to say, his own hand.
While these discoveries took place—in the translating stage—Jeff wandered around the U.C. Berkeley campus learning about the Thirty Years War and Wallenstein, who had cut himself off progressively from reality during the worst war, perhaps, of all wars, except for the total wars of this century; I am not going to say that I have ascertained which particular drive killed my husband, which thrust from the mix got to him, but one did or they all did in chorus—he is dead and I wasn't even there at the time, nor did I expect it. My expectation came initially when I learned that Kirsten and Tim had gotten involved in an invisible affair. I said what I had to say then; I took my best shot—I visited the bishop at Grace Cathedral and found myself outargued with little effort
on his part: little effort and professional skill. It was an easy verbal victory for Tim Archer. So much for that.
If you intend to kill yourself you don't require a reason, in the usual sense of the term; just as, to the contrary, when you intend to stay alive, no verbal, articulated, formal reason is necessary, one you can seize on if the issue comes up. Jeff had been left out. I could see that his interest in the Thirty Years War really had. to do with Kirsten; his mind, or some portion of it, had noted her Scandinavian origin, and another part of his mind had perceived and recorded the fact that the Swedish army was the victor and heroic power of that war; his emotional pursuits and his intellectual pursuits wove together, which was, for a time, to his advantage, and then when Kirsten flew to England he found himself wrecked by his own cleverness. Now he had to confront the fact that he didn't really give a good goddamn about Tilly and Wallenstein and the Holy Roman Empire; he was in love with a woman his mother's age who was sleeping with his father—and doing that eight thousand miles away, and above and beyond everything else the two of them, to his exclusion, participated in one of the most exhilarating archeological theology discoveries in history, on a day-to-day basis as the translations became available, as the documents got patched and pasted together and the words emerged, one by one, and again and again the Hebrew word anokhi manifested itself, in unusual contexts, baffling contexts: new contexts. The documents spoke as if anokhi were present at the wadi. It or he was referred to as here, not there, now, not then. Anokhi was not something the Zadokites thought about or knew about; it was something they possessed.
It is very hard to read your library books and listen to a Donovan record, no matter how good, when a discovery of that magnitude is going on in another part of the world, and if your father and his mistress, both of whom you love and at the same time furiously hate, are involved in that unfolding discovery—what drove me frantic was Jeff playing and replaying Paul McCartney's first solo album; he liked "Teddy Boy" in particular. When he left me to go live alone in the hotel room—the room where he shot himself—he took the album with him, although he had, it turned out, nothing to play it on. He wrote me a number of times, telling me that he was still active in antiwar happenings. Probably he was. I think, though, by and large he just sat alone in the hotel room trying to figure out how he felt about his father and, even more important, how he felt about Kirsten. So that would be 1971, since the McCartney album came out in 1970. But see, that left me alone, too, in our house. I got the house; Jeff died. I told you not to live alone but I am speaking, really, to myself. You can do any goddamn thing you want but I am never going to live alone again. I'll take in street people before I let that happen to me, that isolation.
Just don't play any Beatles albums around me. That's the main thing I ask. I can take Joplin, because I still think it's funny that Tim thought Joplin was alive and black instead of dead and white, but I do not want to hear the Beatles because they are linked to too much pain in me, inside me, in my life, in what happened.
I am not quite rational myself when it comes down to it, to, specifically, my husband's suicide. I hear in my mind a mélange of John and Paul and George—with Ringo thumping away in the rear somewhere—with fragments of tunes and their words, critical terms pertaining to souls suffering a great deal, although not in a way I can pin down except, of course, for my husband's death and then Kirsten's death, and finally, Tim Archer's death—but I suppose that is enough. Now, with John Lennon shot, everyone is pierced as I have been, so I can fucking well stop feeling sorry for myself and join the rest of the world, no better off than they are, no worse off either.
Often, when I look back to Jeff's suicide, I discover that I rearrange dates and events in sequences more syntonic to my mind; that is, I edit. I condense, cut bits out, do a fast number myself so that—for example—I no longer recall viewing Jeff's body and identifying it. I have managed to forget the name of the hotel where he stayed. I don't know how long he stayed there. As near as I can make out, he didn't hang around the house very long after Tim and Kirsten flew to London; one early letter came from them, typed: signed by both of them but almost certainly written by Kirsten. Possibly Tim dictated it. The first hint of the magnitude of the find showed up in that letter. I didn't recognize what the news implied but Jeff did. So, perhaps, he left right after that.
What surprised me the most was to grasp, all at once, that Jeff had wanted to go into the priesthood, but what point was there, in view of his father's role? But this left a vacuum. Jeff did not want to do anything else either. He could not become a priest; he did not care about any other profession. So he remained what we in Berkeley called a "professional student"; he never stopped going to Cal. Maybe he left and came back. Our marriage hadn't been working for some time; I have blank spots back to 1968, perhaps a full year missing in all. Jeff had emotional problems that I later repressed any knowledge of. We both repressed it. There is always free psychotherapy in the Bay Area and we took advantage of it.
I don't think Jeff could be called—could have been called—mentally ill; he simply wasn't terribly happy. Sometimes it is not a drive to die but a failure of a subtle kind, a failing of the sense of joy. He fell out of life by degrees. When he came across someone he genuinely wanted she became his father's mistress, whereupon they both flew to England, leaving him to study a war he didn't care about, leaving him stranded back where he had started from. He started out not caring; he wound up not caring. One of the doctors did say he believed that Jeff started taking LSD during that period after he left me and before he shot himself. That is only a theory. However, unlike the homosexual theory, it may have been true.
Thousands of young people kill themselves in America each year, but it remains the custom, by and large, to list their deaths as accidental. This is to spare the family the shame attached to suicide. There is, indeed, something shameful about a young man or woman, maybe an adolescent, wanting to die and achieving that goal, dead before in a certain sense they ever lived, ever were born. Wives get beaten by their husbands; cops kill blacks and Latinos; old people rummage in garbage cans or eat dog food—shame rules, calling the shots. Suicide is only one shameful event out of a plethora. There are black teenagers who will never get a job as long as they live, not because they are lazy but because there are no jobs—because, too, these ghetto kids possess no skills they can sell. Children run away, find the strip in New York or Hollywood; they become prostitutes and wind up with their bodies hacked apart. If the impulse to slay the Spartan runners reporting the battle results, the outcome at Thermopylae, rises in you, by all means slay them. I am those runners and I report what you do not want, most likely, to hear. Personally, I report only three deaths, but three more than were necessary. This is the day John Lennon died; you wish to slay those who report that, too? As Sri Krishna says when he assumes his true form, his universal form, that of time:
"All these hosts must die; strike, stay
your hand—no matter.
Seem to slay. By me these men are slain already."
It is an awful sight. Arjuna has seen what he cannot believe exists.
"Licking with your burning tongues,
Devouring all the worlds,
You probe the heights of heaven
With intolerable beams, O Vishnu."
What Arjuna sees was once his friend and charioteer. A man like himself. That was only an aspect, a kindly disguise. Sri Krishna wished to spare him, to hide the truth. Arjuna asked to see Sri Krishna's true form and he got to see it. He will not now be as he was. The spectacle has changed him, changed him forever. This is the true forbidden fruit, this kind of knowledge. Sri Krishna waited a long time before he showed Arjuna his actual shape. He wanted to spare him. The true shape, that of the universal destroyer, emerged at last.
I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowin
g, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk.
When Kirsten and the bishop had returned to the Bay Area—not permanently but, rather, to deal with Jeff's death and the problems raised by it—I could upon seeing them again notice a change in both of them. Kirsten looked worn and wretched, and this did not seem to me to emanate from the shock of Jeff's death alone. Obviously she was in ill health in purely physical terms. On the other hand, Bishop Archer seemed even more animated than when I had last seen him. He took complete charge of the situation regarding Jeff; he selected the burial spot, the kind of gravestone; he delivered the eulogy and all other rites, wearing full robes, and he paid for everything. The inscription on the gravestone came as a result of his inspiration. He chose a phrase which I found quite acceptable; it is the motto or basic statement of the school of Heraclitus: NO SINGLE THING ABIDES; BUT ALL THINGS FLOW. I had been taught in philosophy class that Heraclitus himself invented that, but Tim explained that this summation came after Heraclitus, by those of his school who followed him. They believed that only flux, which is to say change, is real. They may have been right.
The three of us joined together after the graveside service; we returned to the Tenderloin apartment and tried to make ourselves comfortable. It took a while for any of us to say anything.
Tim talked about Satan, for some reason. Tim had a new theory about Satan's rise and fall that he apparently wanted to try out on us, since we—Kirsten and I—were the closest people at hand. I presumed at the time that Tim intended to include his theory in the book he had begun working on.
"I see the legend of Satan in a new way. Satan desired to know God as fully as possible. The fullest knowledge would come if he became God, was himself God. He strove for this and achieved it, knowing that the punishment would be permanent exile from God. But he did it anyhow, because the memory of knowing God, really knowing him as no one else ever had or would, justified to him his eternal punishment. Now, who would you say truly loved God out of everyone who ever existed? Satan willingly accepted eternal punishment and exile just to know God—by becoming God—for an instant. Further, it occurs to me, Satan truly knew God, but perhaps God did not know or understand Satan; had He understood him, He would not have punished him. That is why it is said that Satan rebelled—which means Satan was outside of God's control, outside God's domain, as if in another universe. But Satan did I think welcome his punishment, for it was his proof to himself that he knew and loved God. Otherwise he might have done what he did for the reward ... had there been a reward. 'Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven' is an issue, here, but not the true one: which is the ultimate goal and search to know and be: fully and really to know God, in comparison to which all else is really very little."