Ferguson thanked him and promised to return the book as soon as possible, but Ron waved him off and said, Keep it. I have two other copies, so this one belongs to you now.
Ferguson opened the book, flipped through it for a couple of moments, and then fell upon this sentence on page 96: “The world is teeming: anything can happen.”
It was Friday, October 15, 1965, and Ferguson had been a student at Princeton for one month, one of the most trying and exhausting months he could remember, but he was pulling out of it now, he felt, something was starting to shift in him again, and spending those hours with Noah and Ron and the others had helped push him away from the things that were weak and angry and arrested in him, and now he had the book, a hardcover copy of John Cage’s Silence, and when the little party broke up and everyone left, he told Noah that he was feeling tired and wanted to head back to his grandfather’s place uptown, which wasn’t in fact true, since he wasn’t the least bit tired and merely wanted to be alone.
Twice before, a book had turned him inside out and altered who he was, had blasted apart his assumptions about the world and thrust him onto a new ground where everything in the world suddenly looked different—and would remain different for the rest of time, for as long as he himself went on living in time and occupied space in the world. Dostoyevsky’s book was about the passions and contradictions of the human soul, Thoreau’s book was a manual on how to live, and now Ferguson had discovered a book that Ron had correctly called a book about how to think, and as he sat in his grandfather’s apartment reading “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance,” “Lecture on Nothing,” “Lecture on Something,” “45′ for a Speaker,” and “Indeterminancy,” he felt as if a fierce, purifying wind were blowing through his brain and cleaning out the junk that had accumulated there, that he was in the presence of a man who was unafraid to ask first questions, to start all over from the beginning and walk down a path no one had ever traveled before him, and when Ferguson finally put down the book at three-thirty in the morning, he felt so stirred up and ignited by what he had read that he knew sleep was out of the question, that he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes for the rest of the night.
The world is teeming: anything can happen.
He had made plans to get together with Noah at noon tomorrow and march down Fifth Avenue in what would be their first anti-war demonstration, New York’s first large-scale protest against the buildup of American troops in Vietnam, an event that was sure to attract tens of thousands of people if not one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand, and nothing was going to stop Ferguson from taking part in it, not even if he was dead on his feet and had to shuffle down Fifth Avenue like a drunken somnambulist, but noon was many hours away, and for the first time since he had first set foot in Brown Hall last month, he was ready to start writing again, and nothing was going to stop him from doing that either.
Mulligan’s first twelve voyages had taken him to countries that lived in a state of permanent war, countries of intense religious severity that punished their citizens for thinking impure thoughts, countries whose cultures were dedicated to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, countries whose people thought about little else but food, countries run by women in which the men served as low-paid lackeys, countries devoted to the making of art and music, countries governed by racist, Nazi-like laws and other countries in which the people could not distinguish between different colors of skin, countries in which merchants and businessmen cheated the public as a matter of civic duty, countries organized around perpetual sports competitions, countries besieged by earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and continual bad weather, tropical countries in which the people wore no clothes, frigid countries in which the people were obsessed with fur, primitive countries and technologically advanced countries, countries that seemed to belong to the past and others that seemed to belong to the present or the distant future. Ferguson had made a rough map of the twenty-four journeys before starting the project, but he had found that the best way to enter a new chapter was by writing blindly, to put down whatever seemed to be bubbling in his head as he barreled along from sentence to sentence, and then, when the wild first draft was finished, he would go back and slowly begin to tame it, usually going through five or six more drafts before it reached its proper and definitive shape, the mysterious combination of lightness and heaviness he was searching for, the seriocomic tone that was necessary to pull off such outlandish narratives, the plausible implausibility of what he called nonsense in motion. He looked upon his little book as an experiment, an exercise that would allow him to flex some new writerly muscles, and when he had finished writing the last chapter, he was planning to burn the manuscript or, if not burn it, bury the book in a place where no one would ever find it.
That night in his grandfather’s spare bedroom, which had once been the room his mother had shared with her sister Mildred, charged with the sense of freedom Cage’s book had given him, hell-bent and exultant, reveling in the thought that his month-long silence had come to an end, he wrote the first and second drafts of what was undoubtedly his most crackpot effort so far.
THE DROONS
The Droons are happiest when complaining about the condition of their land. The mountain dwellers envy the people who live in the valleys, and the people in the valleys long to migrate to the mountains. The farmers are dissatisfied with the yield of their crops, the fishermen grumble about their daily catch, and yet no fisherman or farmer has ever stepped forward to accept responsibility for his failure. They prefer to blame the land and the sea rather than admit that they are less than good farmers and fishermen, that the old knowledge has gradually been lost and they are no more skilled at what they do than untrained beginners.
For the first time in my travels, I have come across what I would call a lazy people.
The women have lost hope in the future and are no longer interested in bearing children. The wealthiest ones spend their days stretched out naked on smooth slabs of rock, drowsing in the warmth of the sun. The men, who seem to prefer roaming among jagged outcrops and areas of extreme declivity, resent the indifference of their women toward them, but they do little about it and have no clear plan about how to change the situation. Every now and then, they will mount a feeble assault and throw stones at the recumbent women, but the stones usually fall short of their target.
For some time now, each newborn child has been drowned at birth.
On my arrival at the palace, I was greeted by the Princess of Bones and her retinue. She led me away from the latest skirmish into her garden, where she served me a bowl of apples and discussed the passions of her people. What new defiance were they preparing against the custodians of virtue? she asked. Although she spoke of grave matters, the princess did not seem perplexed or unduly alarmed. She laughed often, as though at some private joke, and went on fanning herself throughout our conversation with the bamboo fan that had been given to her as a girl, she said, by the ambassador of China. In the morning, she gave me provisions for my journey.
There are many villages, all of them ringing the tower in a series of eight concentric circles. From the shore, icebergs are always in sight.
The tower is said to be the oldest structure on the island, built in a time before memory. It is no longer inhabited, but legend tells that it was once a site of worship and that the oracles emitted there by the soothsayer Botana governed the Droons in their golden age.
I mounted my horse and decided to head for the hinterlands of the interior. After three days and three nights, I arrived at the village of Flom, where, I had been told, a new cult has infected the imaginations of the people and is threatening to destroy them. According to my source (a scribe at the palace), the contagion of self-loathing that is spreading among the citizens of Flom has reached such proportions that they have turned against their own bodies and seek to diminish them or disfigure them or render them useless in what the scribe called an orgy of dismemberment.
Orgy is not the word for it. Orgy suggests
transport and ecstatic pleasure, but there is no pleasure among the people of Flom. They go about their business with the intense calm of religious zealots.
Once a day, a ceremony known as the Endurance is performed in the central square of the village. The participants wrap themselves tightly in gauze from head to toe, leaving only a small hole for the nostrils to prevent suffocation, and then four servants of those mummy-like figures are ordered to pull on the limbs of their master or mistress, to pull as energetically as possible for as long as possible. The test is to withstand the torture. In the event that a limb should be ripped off in the process, a great roar of exaltation rises up from the crowd. The Endurance has now been transformed into what is known as the Transcending. The severed limbs are preserved in a glass case in the Town Hall and worshipped as sacred objects. Amputees are accorded the privileges of royalty.
The new laws passed by the municipal government all reflect the principles of the Transcending. Services to the community are rewarded with painless amputations, whereas convicted criminals are forced to submit to a lengthy operation, during which additional body parts are sewn onto their flesh. For a first offense, it is usual to attach a hand to the area around the stomach. For repeated offenders, however, more humiliating punishments are prepared. I once saw a man with the head of a young girl attached to his back. Another had baby’s feet sprouting from his palms. There are even some who seem to be carrying around another entire body.
In their daily comings and goings, the people of Flom try to dispel the fears one might associate with their precarious existence. They are not inclined to forgetfulness—their anguish persists even when no sign of it is visible to the naked eye. They have therefore chosen to confront it and in that way overcome the obstacles that have prevented them from knowing themselves. They make no excuses for having transformed their solipsism into a fetish.
It is not merely their bodies that they wish to overcome but their feeling of separateness from one another. One man put it to me this way: “We can’t seem to find a common ground. Each one of us carries around his own world, which seldom overlaps with anyone else’s world. By reducing the size of our bodies, we hope to diminish the spaces that lie between us. Remarkably enough, it is a proven fact that amputees are more inclined to participate in the lives of others than most four-limbed Flomians. Some have even been able to marry. Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.”
Including the time he spent pacing around the room between paragraphs, along with the minutes lost in making a cup of instant coffee and retrieving a fresh pack of Camels from his overnight bag, it took Ferguson a little under two hours to compose that preliminary draft. When he had finished writing it, he put down his pencil and carefully read over what he had done, sat back in the chair, paused for a while to smoke and scratch and think, and then picked up his pencil and started writing the chapter again. Six versions and nine days later, only four sentences from the original draft remained.
* * *
ON THE WEDNESDAY before Thanksgiving, Ferguson went home for the first time in more than two months, traveling with Jim to the house on Woodhall Crescent as Amy made a similar journey from Boston, and there they were again, all five of them together for the long weekend, but beyond sitting down for the annual turkeyfest on Thursday afternoon, Ferguson spent little time at the house. Dan and his mother were so deeply married now, they were beginning to look like each other, he thought, but Amy had descended on them in a foul and contentious mood, and when Ferguson tried to buck up her spirits at the holiday dinner by reeling off a dozen of the newest tennis matches he had concocted with Howard (Arthur Dove versus Walter Pidgeon, John Locke versus Francis Scott Key, Charles Lamb versus Georges Poulet, Robert Byrd versus John Cage), all the others laughed, including Jim, who had already heard most of them twice, but Amy let out a prolonged groan and then tore into him for wasting his time on what she called trivial, asinine, college-boy humor. Didn’t he know that America was fighting an illegal and immoral war? Didn’t he know that black people were being gunned down and killed all across the country? And what gave him the right, Mr. Pampered Princeton Know-It-All, to ignore those injustices and fritter away his education by indulging in dumb dormitory pranks?
Ferguson gathered that Amy’s romance with Freedom Summer hero Michael Morris was not going well or perhaps not going at all, but he held back from asking her about her love life and simply said: Yes, Amy, I agree with you. The world is a cesspool of shit and pain and horror, but if you’re telling me you want to start a country where it’s against the law to laugh, then I think I’d rather live somewhere else.
You’re not listening to me, Amy said. Of course we need to laugh. If we didn’t laugh, we’d probably all be dead within a year. It’s just that your tennis matches aren’t funny—and they don’t make me laugh.
Dan told his daughter to calm down and take it easy. Jim told his sister to take an anti-grumpus pill, which he quickly amended to an anti-pill pill, and Ferguson’s mother asked Amy if there was something on her mind, a question Amy answered by looking down at her napkin and chewing on her lower lip, and from that point on until the end of the meal Ferguson said almost nothing to anyone. After the pumpkin pie, they all went into the kitchen to wash dishes and scrub pots and pans together, and then Dan and Jim went into the living room to watch the news and the results of the Thanksgiving football games on TV while Amy and Ferguson’s mother sat down at the kitchen table to have what Ferguson presumed would develop into a serious heart-to-heart talk about the thing that happened to be on Amy’s mind (no doubt Michael Morris). It was a little past six o’clock. Ferguson went upstairs to use the telephone in the master bedroom, the only phone in the house that would give him the privacy to talk without being overheard. Evie had told him last weekend that she would be having Thanksgiving dinner with the Kaplans, the couple who lived next door to her and were her best friends in the neighborhood, but on the off chance that the party had broken up early, he called her house first. No answer. That would mean having to call the Kaplans, which in turn would oblige him to have a long talk with the Kaplan family member who happened to pick up the phone, either George or Nancy or one of their two college-age kids, Bob or Ellen, all of whom were Ferguson’s friends, all of whom he normally would have been glad to talk to, but on that particular night he wanted to talk only to Evie.
Some of his best memories of growing up were connected to the Kaplans’ house, which he had visited many times during his years in high school, the Friday and Saturday night gatherings in that two-story, sagging wooden structure crammed with thousands of overspill books from George’s secondhand bookstore, often with Dana, often also with Mike Loeb and Amy, and on most of those evenings a small crowd of twelve or sixteen would be there, an unusual mix of adults and teenagers together, an even more unusual mix of white and black teenagers together, but that part of East Orange was more or less half white and half black by then, and because the Kaplans and Evie Monroe were ban-the-bomb-pro-integration leftists with no money and no intention of running away, and also because everyone who showed up there was nimble enough to joke about George’s name and call him the Man Who Didn’t Exist (a reference to the false name given to Cary Grant in North by Northwest—GEORGE KAPLAN), Ferguson sometimes thought of that house as the last outpost of sanity anywhere in America.
Bob was the one who picked up, which was a good thing for Ferguson, since Bob was the least talkative of the Kaplans and tended to have four things on his mind at once, so after a short conversation about the pluses and minuses of college and the goddamn fucking mess in Vietnam (Bob’s words), the phone was passed to Evie.
What’s up, Archie? she asked.
Nothing. I just want to see you.
Dessert begins in about ten minutes. Why not hop in your car and come over?
Just you. Alone.
Anything wr
ong?
Not really. A sudden need for air. Amy’s in one of her grand snits, the guys are talking football, and I’m hankering to see you.
That’s nice, hankering.
I don’t think I’ve ever used that word before, not once in my whole life.
Nancy has a headache, and George seems to be coming down with the flu, so I doubt this thing will go on much longer. I should be home in about an hour.
You don’t mind?
No, of course not. I’d love to see you.
Good. I’ll be at your place in an hour.
It was no secret that they were fond of each other, that the eighteen-year-old Ferguson and the thirty-one-year-old Evie Monroe had long since moved beyond the teacher-student formalities of the classroom. They were friends now, good friends, possibly the best of friends, but along with their friendship there had been a growing physical attraction on both sides, which had remained a secret to everyone, even to themselves at first, the unbidden lustful thoughts that neither one of them was prepared to act on out of fear or inhibition, but then came the disinhibiting effect of one too many scotches on a Thursday night in mid-August, and from one moment to the next the tamped-down flames of their mutual attraction combusted into a savage necking binge on the sofa in the downstairs parlor, the love play that was interrupted in mid-squeeze by the ringing doorbell, a notable event not only because of its ferocity but because it had taken place during the time of Ed, albeit toward the end of the time of Ed, and now that Ed was gone and Dana Rosenbloom was gone and Celia Federman was no more than a figment on the far horizon and neither Ferguson nor Evie had touched anyone for longer than he or she cared to remember, it seemed almost inevitable that they should want to touch each other again on that chilly Thanksgiving night. No alcohol was necessary this time. Ferguson’s unexpected use of the word hankering had thrust them back into a memory of that Thursday evening in August when the thing they had started had not been finished, and so it was that when Ferguson arrived at Evie’s half of the two-family house on Warrington Place, they went upstairs to the bedroom, gradually removed their clothes, and made a long, happy night of finishing off what they had started at last.