The Santaroga Barrier

  Something white was thrown over the figure he was dragging, engulfed the flames. Hands eased him aside. Dasein realized he was out of the garage, that Piaget was using his white smock to smother the fire on Harry.

  Someone appeared to be doing something similar to both Dasein’s arms and the front of his jacket, using a coat and a car robe. The coat and robe were pulled away. Dasein stared down at his own arms—black and red flesh, blisters forming. The sleeves of his shirt and jacket ended at the elbows in jagged edgings of char.

  The pain began—a throbbing agony along the backs of both arms and hands. Through a world hazed by the pain, Dasein saw a station-wagon screech to a rocking stop beside him, saw men carry the smock-shrouded figure of Harry into the back of the wagon. More hands eased Dasein into the seat beside the driver.

  There were voices: “Easy there.” “Get ’em to the clinic, Ed, and don’t loiter.” “Give us a hand here.” “Here! Over here!”

  There was a sound of sirens, the pounding throb of heavy truck engines.

  Dasein heard Piaget’s voice from the rear of the station-wagon: “Okay, Ed. Let’s get going.”

  The wagon slipped into motion, dipped onto the street, turned, gathered speed. Dasein looked at the driver, recognized one of the station attendants, turned to peer into the back.

  Piaget crouched there working over the injured youth.

  “How bad is he?” Dasein asked.

  “He was wearing long johns,” Piaget said. “They helped. He seems to’ve protected his face by burying it in his cap, but his back is bad. So’re his legs and arms and his hands.”

  Dasein stared at the injured youth.

  “Will he …”

  “I think we got to him in time,” Piaget said. “I gave him a shot to put him out.” He looked at Dasein’s arms. “Do you want a needle?”

  Dasein shook his head from side to side. “No.”

  What made me rush in there to save him? Dasein asked himself. It had been an instinctive reaction. Saving Harry had precipitated him into a semihelpless situation, needing medical attention himself, caught in a car with two Santarogans. Dasein probed at his embryo Jaspers awareness, the sixth sense which had warned him of danger. He found nothing. The threat appeared to have been withdrawn. Is that why I acted to save Harry? Dasein wondered. Did I hope to propitiate Santaroga by saving one of their own even while they were trying to kill me?

  “Another accident,” Piaget said, and his voice carried a questioning tone of self-doubt.

  Dasein met the doctor’s probing gaze, nodded.

  The station-wagon turned onto a tree-lined street, and Dasein recognized the broad, brown-shingled front of Piaget’s house. They drove past it and onto a graveled driveway that curved around to the rear through a tall board fence and under a portico jutting from a two-storey brick building.

  In spite of his pain, Dasein realized this building lay concealed from the street by the fence and a border planting of evergreens, that it must be part of the complex which included Piaget’s house. It all seemed hazily significant.

  White-coated attendants rushed a gurney out of the building, eased the burned youth from the rear of the station wagon. Piaget opened Dasein’s door, said: “Can you get out under your own power, Gilbert?”

  “I … think so.”

  Dasein held his arms out in front of him, slid from the car. The pain and the motion required all his attention. There was a beginning ache along his forehead now and down the right side of his face. The brick building, a pair of swinging glass doors, hands gently guiding him—all seemed rather distant and receding.

  I’m blacking out, he thought. He felt it might be extremely dangerous to sink into unconsciousness. With a start, he realized he had been eased into a wheelchair, that it was speeding down a green-walled hallway. The surge of awareness sent his senses crashing into the pain. He felt himself recoiling toward the blessed relief of unconsciousness. It was an almost physical thing, as though his body was bouncing between limiting walls—unconsciousness or pain.

  Bright lights!

  The light was all around him. He heard scissors snipping, looked down to see hands working the scissors. They were cutting the sleeves of his jacket and shirt, lifting the fabric away from seared flesh.

  That’s my flesh, Dasein thought. He tore his gaze away from it.

  Dasein felt something cool at his left shoulder, a pricking sensation, a pulling. A hand holding a hypodermic moved across his plane of vision. The important thing to Dasein in this moment was that his vision was limited to a plane. There was light, a foggy glittering out of which hands moved and faces appeared. He felt himself being undressed. Something cool, soothing, sliding was being applied to his hands and arms, to his face.

  They’ve given me a shot to put me out, he thought. He tried to think about danger then, about being totally helpless here. Consciousness refused to respond. He couldn’t push his awareness through the glittering fog.

  There were voices. He concentrated on the voices. Someone said: “For the love of heaven! He was carrying a gun.” Another voice: “Put that down!”

  For some reason, this amused Dasein, but his body refused to laugh.

  He thought then of his camper as he’d last seen it—a ball of orange flame. All his records had been in there, Dasein realized. Every bit of evidence he’d accumulated about Santaroga had gone up in that fire. Evidence? he thought. Notes … speculations … It was all still in his mind, subject to recall.

  But memory is lost at death! he thought.

  Fear galvanized a miniscule core of selfdom in him. He tried to shout. No sound came. He tried to move. Muscles refused to obey.

  When the darkness came, it was like a hand that reached up and seized him.

  11

  Dasein awoke remembering a dream—a conversation with faceless gods.

  “Dunghills rise and castles fall.” In the dream, something with an echo-box voice had said that. “Dunghills rise and castles fall.”

  Dasein felt it important to remember all the dream. Yes. “I’m the man who woke up.” That was what he’d tried to tell the faceless gods. “I’m the man who woke up.”

  The dream was a flowing pattern in his memory, a process that couldn’t be separated from himself. It was full of pure deeds and anguish. There was a chronic frustration in it. He had tried to do something that was inherently impossible. What had he tried to do? It eluded him.

  Dasein remembered the hand of darkness that had preceded the dream. He caught his breath and his eyes popped open. Daylight. He was in a bed in a green-walled room. Out a window at his left he could see a twisted red branch of madrone, oily green leaves, blue sky. He felt his body then: bandages and pain along his arms, bandages across his forehead and his right cheek. His throat felt dry and there was a sourness on his tongue.

  Still, the dream clung to him. It was a disembodied thing. Disembodied. Death! That was a clue. He knew it. Dasein recalled Piaget speaking of “a common instinctive experience.” What did instinct have to do with the dream? Instinct. Instinct. What was instinct? An innate pattern impressed on the nervous system. Death. Instinct.

  “Look inward, look inward, oh Man, on thyself,” the faceless gods of the dream had said. He recalled that now, and felt like sneering.

  It was the old know-thyself syndrome, the psychologist’s disease. Inward, ever inward. The death instinct was in there with all the other instincts. Know thyself? Dasein sensed then he couldn’t know himself without dying. Death was the background against which life could know itself.

  A throat was cleared to Dasein’s right.

  He tensed, turned his head to look toward the sound.

  Winston Burdeaux sat in a chair beside the door. The brown eyes staring out of Burdeaux’s moorish face held a quizzical expression.

  Why Burdeaux? Dasein wondered.

  “I’m happy to see you’re awake, sir,” Burdeaux said.

  There was a soothing sense of companionship in the man’s r
umbling voice. Was that why Burdeaux had been brought in? Dasein wondered. Had Burdeaux been picked to soothe and lull the victim?

  But I’m still alive, Dasein thought.

  If they’d wanted to harm him, what better opportunity had presented itself? He’d been helpless, unconscious …

  “What time is it?” Dasein asked. The movement of speaking hurt his burned cheek.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock of a beautiful morning,” Burdeaux said. He smiled, a flash of white teeth in the dark features. “Is there anything you wish?”

  At the question, Daselin’s stomach knotted in a pang of hunger. He hesitated on the point of asking for breakfast. What might be in any food served here? he asked himself.

  Hunger is more than an empty stomach, Dasein thought. I can go without a meal.

  “What I wish,” Dasein said, “is to know why you’re here.”

  “The doctor thought I might be the safest one,” Burdeaux said. “I, myself, was an outsider once. I can recall how it was.”

  “They tried to kill you, too?”

  “Sir!”

  “Well … did you have accidents?” Dasein asked.

  “I do not share the doctor’s opinion about … accidents,” Burdeaux said. “Once … I thought—But I can see now how wrong I was. The people of this valley wish to harm no man.”

  “Yet, you’re here because the doctor decided you’d be the safest,” Dasein said. “And you haven’t answered my question: Did you have accidents?”

  “You must understand,” Burdeaux said, “that when you don’t know the ways of the valley, you can get into … situations which …”

  “So you did have accidents. Is that why you asked for secret packages from Louisiana?”

  “Secret packages?”

  “Why else did you have them sent to Porterville?”

  “Oh, you know about that.” Burdeaux shook his head, chuckled. “Haven’t you ever hungered for the foods of your childhood? I didn’t think my new friends would understand.”

  “Is that what it was?” Dasein asked. “Or did you wake up one morning shaking with fear at what the Jaspers in the local food was doing to you?”

  Burdeaux scowled, then: “Sir, when I first came here, I was an ignorant nigger. Now, I’m an educated Negro … and a Santarogan. I no longer have the delusions which I …”

  “So you did try to fight it!”

  “Yes … I fought it. But I soon learned how foolish that was.”

  “A delusion.”

  “Indeed; a delusion.”

  To remove a man’s delusions, Dasein thought, is to create a vacuum. What rushes into that vacuum?

  “Let us say,” Burdeaux said, “that I shared your delusions once.”

  “It’s normal to share the delusions of one’s society,” Dasein murmured, half to himself. “It’s abnormal to develop private delusions.”

  “Well put,” Burdeaux said.

  Again, he wondered: What rushed into the vacuum? What delusions do Santarogans share?

  For one thing, he knew they couldn’t see the unconscious violence which created accidents for outsiders. Most of them couldn’t see this, he corrected himself. There was a possibility Piaget was beginning to understand. After all, he’d put Burdeaux in here. And Jenny—“Stay away from me! I love you!”

  Dasein began to see Santarogans in a new light. There was something decorously Roman about them … and Spartan. They were turned in upon themselves, unfriendly, insular, proud, cut off from exchange of ideas that might … He hesitated on this thought, wondering about the TV room at the Inn.

  “The room you tried to hide from me,” Dasein said. “At the Inn—the room with the television receivers …”

  “We didn’t really want to hide that from you,” Burdeaux said. “In a way, we hide it from ourselves … and from chance outsiders. There’s something very alluring about the sickness that’s poured over TV. That’s why we rotate the watchers. But we cannot ignore it. TV is the key to the outside and it’s gods.” “It’s gods?” Dasein suddenly remembered his dream.

  “They have very practical gods outside,” Burdeaux said.

  “What’s a practical god?” Dasein asked.

  “A practical god? That’a a god who agrees with his worshipers. This is a way to keep from being conquered, you see.”

  Dasein turned away from Burdeaux to stare up at the green ceiling. Conquer the gods? Was that the dream’s chronic frustration?

  “I don’t understand,” he murmured.

  “You still carry some of the outside’s delusions,” Burdeaux said. “Outside, they don’t really try to understand the universe. Oh, they say they do, but that’s not really what they’re up to. You can tell by what they do. They’re trying to conquer the universe. Gods are part of the universe … even man-made gods.”

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Dasein said. “To keep from being conquered, a practical god agrees with his attackers. Is that it?”

  “You’re just as perceptive as Jenny said you’d be,” Burdeaux said.

  “So outsiders attack their gods,” Dasein said.

  “Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it,” Burdeaux said. “You try to change a god? What’s that except accusing the god of not agreeing with you?”

  “And you get all this from the TV?”

  “All this from …” Burdeaux broke into a chuckle. “Oh, no, Doctor Gil … You don’t mind if I call you Doctor Gil?”

  Dasein turned to stare at the questioning look on Burdeaux’s face. Doctor Gil. To object would be to appear the stiffnecked fool. But Dasein felt that agreement would be a step backward, the loss of an important battle. He could see no way to object, though.

  “Whatever you wish,” Dasein said. “Just explain this about the TV.”

  “That’s … our window on the outside,” Burdeaux said. “That whole world of the permanent expediency out there, that whole world is TV. And we watch it through …”

  “Permanent expediency?” Dasein tried to raise himself on his elbows, but the effect set his burned arms to throbbing. He sank back, kept his gaze on Burdeaux.

  “Why, of course, sir. The outside works on the temporary expedient, Doctor Gil. You must know that. And the temporary always turns into the permanent, somehow. The temporary tax, the necessary little war, the temporary brutality that will cease as soon as certain conditions end … the government agency created for the permanent interim …”

  “So you watch the news broadcasts and get all this from …”

  “More than the news, Doctor Gil. All of it, and our watchers write condensed reports that … You see, it’s all TV out there—life, everything. Outsiders are spectators. They expect everything to happen to them and they don’t want to do more than turn a switch. They want to sit back and let life happen to them. They watch the late-late show and turn off their TVs. Then they go to bed to sleep—which is a form of turning themselves off just like the TV. The trouble is, their late-late show is often later than they think. There’s a desperation in not being able to recognize this, Doctor Gil. Desperation leads to violence. There comes a morning for almost every one of those poor people outside when they realize that life hasn’t happened to them no matter how much TV they’ve watched. Life hasn’t happened because they didn’t take part in it. They’ve never been onstage, never had anything real. It was all illusion … delusion.”

  Dasein absorbed the intensity of the words, their meaning and what lay under them. There was a terrifying sense of truth in Burdeaux’s words.

  “So they get turned off,” Dasein murmured.

  “It’s all TV,” Burdeaux said.

  Dasein turned his head, looked out the window.

  “You really ought to eat something, Doctor Gil,” Burdeaux said.

  “No.”

  “Doctor Gil, you’re a wise man in some things, but in others …”

  “Don’t call me wise,” Dasein said. “Call me experienced.”

&nb
sp; “The food here is the very best,” Burdeaux said. “I’ll get it and serve you myself. You don’t have to fear a …”

  “I’ve been burned enough times,” Dasein said.

  “Fire won’t crack a full pot, Doctor Gil.”

  “Win, I admire you and trust you. You saved my life. I don’t think you were supposed to, but you did. That’s why Doctor Piaget sent you in here. But an accident could happen—even with you.”

  “You hurt me to say that, Doctor Gil. I’m not the kind feeds you with the corn and chokes you with the cob.”

  Dasein sighed. He’d offended Burdeaux, but the alternative … It occurred to Dasein abruptly that he was sitting on a special kind of bomb. Santaroga had abated its attack on him, probably in part because of his present helplessness. But the community was capable of returning to the manufacture of accidents if and when he should ever want something not permitted here.

  At the moment, Dasein wanted nothing more than to be far away from here. He wanted this desperately despite the certain knowledge this desire must be on the proscribed list.

  The door beside Burdeaux opened. A nurse backed into the room pulling a cart. She turned. Jenny!

  Dasein ignored his burns, lifted himself on his elbows.

  Jenny stared at him with an oddly pained expression. Her full lips were thrust out almost in a pout. The long black hair had been tied back in a neat bun. She wore a white uniform, white stockings, white shoes—no cap.

  Dasein swallowed.

  “Miss Jenny,” Burdeaux said. “What do you have on that cart?”

  She spoke without taking her gaze from Dasein. “Some food for this madman. I prepared it myself.”

  “I’ve been trying to get him to eat,” Burdeaux said, “but he says no.”

  “Would you leave us for a while, Win?” she asked. “I want …”

  “The doctor said I wasn’t to let …”

  “Win, please?” She turned toward him, pleading.