Nor did he believe, as had Kurt Vonnegut, the late-twentieth-century avatar of Mark Twain, that we were governed entirely by the chemical makeup of our bodies. God wasn't the Great Garage Mechanic in the Sky or the Divine Pill Pusher. If there was a God. Frigate didn't know what God was and often doubted that He existed.
God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.
Still, we were born with different genetic combinations, and these did determine to some extent our intellect, aptitudes, leanings, reactions, in short, our characters. Character determines destiny, according to the old Greek, Heraclitus. But a person could change his/her character. Somewhere in there was a force, an entity, that said, "I won't do it!" Or – "Nobody's going to stop me from doing it!" Or – "I've been a coward but this time I'm a raging lion!"
Sometimes you needed an outside stimulus or stimulator, as had the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. But the Wizard only gave them what they had had all the time. The brains of mixed sawdust, bran, pins and needles, the silk sawdust-stuffed heart, and the liquid from the square green bottle marked Courage were only anti-placebos.
By thought you could change your emotional attitudes. Frigate believed that, though his practice had never matched his theory. He'd been reared in a Christian Scientist family. But when he was about eleven his parents had sent him to a Presbyterian church, since they were having a fit of religious apathy then. His mother cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the babies Sunday mornings while his father read The Chicago Tribune. Like it or not, he went off to Sunday school and then the sermon. So, he had gotten two contrary religious educations.
One believed in free will, in evil and matter as illusion, in Spirit as the only reality.
The other believed in predestination. God picked out a few here and there for salvation and let the others go to hell. No rhyme or reason to this. You couldn't do a thing to change that. Once the divine choice had been made, it was done. You could live purely, agonizedly praying and hoping all your life. But when the end of life on Earth came, you went to your appointed place. The sheep, those whom God for some unexplainable reason had marked with His grace, went up to sit on His right side. The goats, rejected for the same mysterious reasons, slid down the prearranged chute into the fire, sinner and saint alike.
When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.
It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn't stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he'd liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he'd have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiority for doing so.
His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher's large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.
The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He'd be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.
Twice, his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had .denied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.
Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking-off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbecile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he'd just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.
Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.
Peter hadn't lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn't know, since Onan hadn't masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique: pulling out in time.
Some of his junior high school acquaintances – the "racy" ones – bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.
Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street
, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman's legs disappear. It wasn't until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn't say a thing about it to Bob until after they'd gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.
Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He'd been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The "proper" reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.
Chapter 47
* * *
That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they'd been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn't have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn't be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.
Which was a curious attitude. If you didn't believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?
As if that wasn't bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn't recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they'd moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the
doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They'd been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.
Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have happened if they'd been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn't look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.
He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.
A thirty-eight year old man shouldn't be doing stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.
Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob's parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he'd never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conversion had taken place when he was eighteen.
Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.
Much to Peter's astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.
That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood's parlance, he had "backslid," "fallen from grace."
Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the passionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.
Allwood continued to argue with him, to "wrestle with his soul." Peter remained adamant.
Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut would be dust and less than dust.
What did it all mean? Without immortality, it meant nothing.
There were people who said that life was the excuse for life, its only reason.
These were fools, self-deluded. No matter how intelligent they might be in other matters, they were fools – in this. Self-blinkered, emotional idiots.
On the other hand, why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches. Even the best were. He knew no saints, though he admitted that there might have been and might be some. It seemed to him that only saints would be worthy of immortality. Even so, he doubted the claims of some of those who had been awarded halos.
Take Saint Augustine, for instance. "Asshole" was the only word that fitted him. A monster of ego and selfishness.
St. Francis was about as saintly as a person could be. But he was undoubtedly psychotic. Kissing a leper's sores to demonstrate humility, indeed!
Still, as Peter's wife had pointed out, no one was perfect.
Then there was Jesus, though there was no proof that he was a saint. In fact, it was evident from the New Testament that he had restricted salvation to the Jews. But they had rejected him. And so, St. Paul, finding that the Jews were not about to give up the religion for which they had fought so hard and suffered so much, had turned to the Gentiles. He made certain compromises, and Christianity, better named Paulism, was launched. But St. Paul was a sexual pervert, since total sexual abstinence was a perversion.
That made Jesus a pervert, too.
However, some people just did not have much sex drive. Perhaps Jesus and Paul had been such. Or they had sublimated their drive in something more important, their desire to have people see the Truth.
Buddha was perhaps a saint. Heir to a throne, to riches and power, married to a lovely princess who had borne him children, he had given all these up. The miseries and wretchedness of the poor, the stark unavoidability of death, had sent him wandering through India, seeking the Truth. And so he had founded Buddhism, eventually rejected by the very people, the Hindus, whom he had tried to help. His disciples had taken it elsewhere, however, and there it had thrived. Just as St. Paul had taken the teachings of Jesus from his native land and planted its seeds among foreigners.
The religions of Jesus, Paul, and Buddha had started to degenerate before their founders were cold in their graves. Just as St. Francis' order had begun corrupting before its founder's body was rotten.
Chapter 48
* * *
On an afternoon while the Razzle Dazzle was sailing along, a good breeze behind its sails, Frigate told Nur el-Musafir these thoughts. They were sitting against the bulkhead of the forecastle, smoking cigars and looking idly at the people on the bank. The Frisco Kid was at the wheel, and the others were talking or playing chess.
"The trouble with you, Pete – one of the troubles – is you worry too much about other people's behavior. And you have too high ideals for them, ideals which you yourself don't try to live up to."
"I know I can't live up to them, so I make no pretense," Frigate said.
"But it bothers me that others claim to have these ideals and to be living up to them. If I point out that they aren't, they get angry."
The little Moor chuckled. "Naturally. Your criticism threatens their self-image. If that were to be destroyed, they, too, would be destroyed. At least, they think so."
"I know that," Frigate said. "That's why I quit doing that long ago. I learned on Earth to keep quiet about such matters. Besides, people got very angry and some even threatened violence. I can't stand anger or violence."
"Yet you are a very angry person. And I think your abhorrence of violence stems from fear of being violent yourself. You were – are – afraid that you'd hurt someone else. Which is why you suppressed that violence in yourself.
"But as a writer, you could express it. It would be done impersonally, as it were. You wouldn't be doing it in a face-to-face situation."
"I know all that."
"Then why haven't you done something about it?"
"I have. I tried various therapies, disciplines, and religions. Psychoanalysis, dianetics, scientology, Zen, transcendental meditation, Nichirenism, group therapy, Christian Science, and fundamental Christianity. And I was strongly tempted to become a Roman Catholic.''
"I never heard of most of those, of course," Nur said. "Nor do I need to know what they were. The fault lies in yourself, regardless of the validity of these. By your own admission, you never stuck to any of them long. You didn't give them a chance."
"That," Frigate said, "was because, once in them, I could see their flaws. And I had a chance to study the people practicing them. Most of these religions and disciplines were having some beneficial effect on their practitioners. But hot nearly what was claimed for them. And the practitioners were fooling themselves about much of the benefits claimed."
"Besides,
you didn't have the stick-to-itiveness needed," Nur said. "I think that comes from fear of being changed. You desire change, yet dread it. And the fear wins out."
"I know that, too," Frigate said.
"Yet you have done nothing to overcome that fear."
"Not nothing. A little."
"But not enough."
"Yes. However, as I got older, I did make some progress. And here I have made even more."
"But not nearly enough?"
"No."
"What good is self-knowledge if the will to act on it is lacking?"
"Not much," Frigate said.
"Then you must find a way to make your will to act overcome your will not to act."
Nur paused, smiling, his little black eyes bright.
"Of course, you will tell me you know all that. Next, you will ask me if I can show you the way. And I will reply that you must first be willing to let me show you the way. You are not as yet ready, though you think you are. And you may never be, which is a pity. You have potentiality."
"Everybody has potentiality."
Nur looked up at Frigate. "In a sense, yes. In another sense, no.''
"Mind explaining that?"
Nur rubbed his huge nose with a small, thin hand and then pitched his cigar across over the deck and over the railing. He picked up his bamboo flute and looked at it but laid it down.
"When the time comes, if it ever does."
He looked sideways at Frigate.
"You feel rejected? Yes. I know that you react too strongly to rejection. Which is one reason that you have always tried to avoid situations in which you might be rejected. Though why you should then have become a fiction writer is a mystery to me. Or is it? You did persist in your intended profession despite initial rejections. Though, according to your own story, you often let long periods of time elapse before you tried again. But you persisted.