“What is all this ancient Greek stuff,” Dr. Schwartz said. “Did you see some movie on this subject? Or read an historical novel?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m telling you what really happened to me.”
A bell sounded, and a green light on the wall came on.
Dr. Schwartz closed his clipboard. He said, “I have appointments. I’d like to talk to you later. That all right with you? I may have some clues on your condition.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere soon.”
“Later,” Schwartz said, and left.
I hardly ever tell people how it is with me. They usually assume I’m crazy and lock me away.
Of course, I am only one man, and not a well-schooled man. I can’t prove any of this. I cannot give you a surveyor’s view of Babylon or Rome or Ur of the Chaldees. Particularities seem always to be exceptional. I have never seen, knowingly, an average temple, tavern, or citizen.
Another thing that bothers me is, why am I so often in famous places? Why am I in Rome rather than Pisa, London instead of Birmingham, New York instead of White Plains? In the timeñtrack of the Earth there are infinitely more obscure and unknown places than famous ones. What brings me to the ones well-known in history? Am I somehow selecting them myself? Or is there some other principle at work? I can speculate on this, but I can never know.
I asked Dr. Schwartz about that when he returned.
“I can’t answer that directly,” Dr. Schwartz said. “The formula is a little involved. But I can tell you something about the condition from which you suffer. Spatio-temporal dislocation, known today as Jenkins-Steiner syndrome, is not unknown in this day and age, especially since the publication of Jenkins’ and Steiner’s authoritative work on the subject. But it is still rare, and is frequently mistaken for other ailments of a psychological nature. The documentation is extensive and persuasive. Historical instances of sufferers from Jenkins-Steiner include Victor Hauser, and the man who walked around the horses. “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” would be a good early example if they had not been proven to be purely legendary, and thus not to be included in our list of historical instances. The so-called Man from Mars, who walked the streets of Moscow early in the 20th century and was written up in newspapers at the time, and even photographed, was once believed a hoax, has but been since shown to be a literal and well-documented case of a man or, rather, creature suffering from an alien form of Jenkins-Steiner, called Jenkins-Steiner Alien Strain A. I could go on and on, but perhaps you would like to consult our source itself.”
“I would,” I said. “But first can you tell me if there is any cure for Jenkins-Steiner? Because I must tell you, fascinating as my condition may seem to you, I am heartily sick of it. I’m tired of journeying up and down the ages, never staying in one place for long, sometimes for no longer than a day, never having any friends, no wife, no family, no work, no income, not even any hobbies or interests, for my condition prevents me all that.”
“You really want to get rid of your Jenkins-Steiner?”
“With all my heart!”
“Interesting. There are others who would do anything to get it. Time-travel is one of the oldest and most precious dreams of the human race. But if you really want to get rid of it—
“I do!”
“Then let me tell you, your case is not without hope. Amazing strides have been made recently in humano-temporal engineering. Although we can hold out no definitive promise, I can tell you that—”
Whatever Schwartz was going to say was suddenly cut short when the door to the room was violently flung open. Two husky men in white pants, with short-sleeved white shirts, came through, followed by a nurse, also in white.
“There he is!” the nurse said.
The husky attendants advanced, and I cowered back. They seized—not me, but Schwartz, who collapsed in their arms like a rag doll.
“Mr. Lepsky!” the nurse said to him in a scolding voice. “You promised you wouldn’t act out again. But you stole Dr. Schwartz’s coat and pad, and here you are, impersonating a doctor.”
“Impersonating?” the false Schwartz cried. “You think this is an impersonation? Wail until I tell the authorities how you are treating me. Where I come from, I am a licensed physician. Nurse, this man is a sufferer from Jenkins-Steiner, and I demand—”
“Take him to Observation B,” the nurse said, and they dragged Schwartz or whatever his name was out.
“Nurse,” I said, “I need to speak further with that man! I have reason to believe he has information that could be vital to me.”
“The only vital thing Lepsky has is a gift of gab,” the nurse said. “You may see him again on the open floor, during recreation hour, if he behaves.”
I looked forward to the meeting. But of course, before it could take place, I was somewhere else.
THE DREAM OF MISUNDERSTANDING
I wrote this to say something about the membrane, as I call it, that separates humans from one another, and makes misunderstanding inevitable. In this story I solve the problem, and show myself and, I hope, others, that solving this problem does not necessarily solve the problem.
Brenton’s the name. I am a fairly well-known psychologist, well off, and with a respectable list of publications. Maybe you’ve read my popular book, The Dream of Misunderstanding. It has helped a lot of people. I know a lot about misunderstanding. Despite this, I have a lot of trouble helping myself.
As a matter of fact, my wife and I are separated. I live in my office on the East Side of New York; Myra is in our family apartment on the West Side.
My own books, excellent though they are generally accounted to be, have failed to get my wife to understand me. I have been brooding a lot over that lately. Maybe that accounts for my dream.
In my dream, I was standing in a bluish room with no furniture. In front of me was a man larger than life-size. He had a noble beard, and seemed very worthy of respect.
“Well,” he said, “so you finally made it all the way to me.”
“Who are you?” I said.
“I am Ahriman, subdiety in charge of Earthly solutions.”
“What solution are you talking about?”
“A solution to the membrane problem.”
“And what is that?”
“The membrane is what separates one thing from another on your Earth. It is invisible to human eyes, but it is there all the same. It is the equivalent of a thick, semi-transparent substance that coats the world and separates one person’s understanding from another’s.”
“This membrane,” I said. “I believe it is unknown to science?”
“That is true.”
“What is the effect of this membrane?” I asked.
“It interferes with human relations. It is the barrier, invisible but palpable, that prevents anyone from really understanding anyone else.”
“That’s a big problem,” I said. “I’ve often thought about this, using different metaphors.”
“We are aware that you have worked all your professional life on the problem of human misunderstanding.”
“Without much success.”
“I wouldn’t say that. We are aware of your publications on the subject of the impossibility of one person really understanding another. Your books do a good job of describing life as it is lived behind the membrane.”
“I have proven that understanding is a difficult thing. But to prove a negative is negligible.”
“Not at all. Your attempts constitute a notable achievement.”
“My attempts at clarification have only succeeded in muddying up my own situation.”
“With the ability imparted by this parchment, you can clear up misunderstandings, which are all that separate one person from another.”
He handed me a parchment. On it was written, “Charles Brenton is now granted the ability to pass through the membranes that separate mind from mind.”
I couldn’t read the signature, but
it was bold and black and somehow looked holy.
I took the parchment in my hand. A feeling of competence and rightness came over me.
The parchment shrunk and flew from my hand into my head. It was glorious to feel it there. My image of my own rightness increased.
The subgod said, “Are you sure you know what to do with it?”
“I know,” I said.
“Anything you want to run over with me?”
“No, I’ve got it. Many thanks, and I’ll get to work immediately.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”
I saw in a flash what needed to be done. God knows I had written about it often enough. The world was filled with misunderstandings. Ignorant and misinformed armies clashed by night, innocent women and children were killed, dictators and terrorists reigned.
There was work to be done with all of that and much more. On an international level.
And there were many problems in America, too. There were some things I badly needed to tell our President, and have him understand them. I saw them all. The parchment in my head gave me the ability to do that.
There was work to be done, and no time to lose.
But first, I thought I’d begin with a situation nearer to home.
Light as air, I flew out of my apartment window and across town. I crossed Central Park, and admired the lights along the roadways. Across Central Park West, then I turned uptown for a few blocks, and then west again. I saw Myra’s apartment building ahead. It used to be mine, too.
I entered through a long-remembered window. Like a breath of wind I moved through the rooms. I found my wife asleep in her bed. Alone in her room. I paused a moment to admire her beauty. Then, pursuant to the instructions of the subdiety as I understood them, I entered her mind.
The membrane at the threshold held me back for a moment. Without Ahriman’s parchment, I couldn’t have done it. As it was, I feared the parchment might not work. But I found myself passing through it slowly, turning myself into something infinitesimal, ions, electrons—except for psychology I have no scientific training. Anyhow, I passed through the membrane.
Once on the other side, I reconstituted myself.
I was in a corridor that curved far away into the distance. It was lined with filing cabinets, which held the banks of dicta Myra lived by. These were the commands that she gave herself, the judgments she made, and most of them followed the commands set down from childhood. There were many she had not altered since that time.
Her mind to me was a long labyrinthine path that wound slowly into the interior of her soul.
I had gotten through the membrane. I was in another person’s mind! I was in my wife’s mind.
I passed the secret place where she kept her ideas about herself. I was tempted to look at them and do a little rearranging. But a tact I hadn’t thought myself capable of kept me from it. I continued down the corridor.
Soon I came to where her memories of me were stored. These I scanned with some care.
I felt horror at the interlocking logic of those thoughts, those impressions. I knew she had once loved me, once thought highly of me. How could it have changed into this? How could she have thought I thought that? I would never have accused my worst enemy of the thoughts and emotions she assigned to me. “Cold” and “prissy” was the least of it.
Very gently I began readjusting her attitudes toward me.
“Basic liking” needed some tweaking to bring it up to a proper level. “Appreciation of his looks” needed a little more adjustment. “Approval of deeds as understood from motives” required a lot of attention. “Perception of gallantry” also took some work.
There were other things to adjust. I reversed a number of her perceptions so that she would wake up realizing they were misperceptions. I wanted her to think, “Oh, I don’t know how I could have gotten him so wrong . . .”
Frankly, I wasn’t too sure I had indeed meant what I wanted her to believe I’d meant, but if I was going to err, it would be in my own favor.
I saw her turn in her sleep, smile, reach toward me. For a moment I thought there was hope. But then a spasm shook her body. She rolled away, and still asleep, her face twisted in disgust. She shuddered.
“Get out of me!” she cried, still asleep.
Obviously, my actions had stirred up a rebellion in her. In the unconscious, I suppose. I watched her reject the alien thoughts. My thoughts, my adjustments!
She couldn’t bear to see me through my eyes, from my point of view.
I realized that even if I had created a truer version of myself, it wasn’t her truth, wasn’t true for her, and maybe had never been true, maybe never could be true. This despite my good intentions.
The repair work I had done in her mind began to shake and quiver. Each place I had touched turned a dark and unpleasant color. In that darkness I saw the rejection of my own valuations, my own desired self-images that I had tried to impose on her. She threw them off as alien matter. Shamefaced, my self-conceptions had crept back inside of me.
In the midst of this, I had another vision. A vision within a vision, as it were. I caught a glimpse of that universal mind, owned by no one and everyone, to which few are given access. I saw all our differences reconciled. But this too faded away. Apparently this ultimate reconciliation with the person I loved was not allowed by the ground rules of existence.
Shortly after that, I was expelled from her mind.
Her interior filing cabinets were shaking and quaking. The corridor itself writhed. The interior of her mind suddenly seemed to knot, then explode outward with an irresistible force. I was thrown from her mind against the membrane. I passed through as before, and came out the other side intact.
Someone was standing there, waiting for me. It was the Ahriman, the subgod who had given me the parchment. Now he plucked it out of my head.
Ahriman said, “Apparently you didn’t understand the gift. It’s not to be used for yourself. You give it to someone else. The gift to give is to be able to understand, not to be understood.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t ask. You said you knew what to do.”
“Why did you give it to me in the first place, among all the people you could have given it to? You must have known from the start that I was damaged.”
“We can only give the parchment to the damaged ones,” he said. “Unfortunately, being damaged, they don’t use it correctly.”
So that was the end of it. When I woke up in my bedroom, I could find no sign of the parchment, and luckily I had the sense to tell no one about it, until now, in the form of a fictitious story.
I have never again heard from Ahriman.
If I had it to do over, I think I’d start changing the minds of dictators. Adjusting their political and social attitudes seems an easier task than trying to solve those of the secrets of a human heart.
THE TALES OF ZANTHIAS
I knew I had to get down to the train station and meet the new people. They would probably arrive today, frightened, unsure of themselves, clumsy, some of them apathetic, others manic, apt to do themselves and others an injury. It’s my job to calm them down, tell them what they need to know, welcome them to the village. Help them to find their own scenes.
But as strong as that inclination was in me, first I had to make a thorough search for my wife, Rosamund. When I woke up this morning, she was not in the bed with me. She was not in the house. I didn’t know where she was.
I decided to seek out Tom the Cobbler, who always seemed up on the latest gossip. He wasn’t at his cobbler’s shop, so I looked for him at the livery stables, where I knew he frequently went to look for a horse, though what he needed one for I don’t know. He wasn’t at the stables, so I went to Ma Barker’s Saloon & Luncheonette at the end of town, and sure enough, Tom was there, sitting in a booth in the back with three of his cronies.
They all greeted me pleasantly enough—“Ah, Zanthias, how good to see you today—” Greeting
s to which I nodded, since they needed no more acknowledgement than that. One of them was a zombie, and he quickly finished his beer and left almost at once. He must have known that it is improper for zombies to be in the village, though I have made no direct law against it. The other two men soon said they had errands to attend to, made their excuses and left.
“Tom,” I said, once the others were gone, “Have you seen Rosamund this morning?”
He gave a guilty start. “No, Zanthias, I have not seen her for the last several days. Is she missing?”
“I believe she is,” I said. “I need to find her as soon as possible. She is not well, you know.”
“Really? I am sorry to hear that. A minor indisposition?”
Tom was making too much conversation now, and he knew, or should have known, that I am not one for idle chatter. If Tom did not know, or was unwilling to say, there was no sense wasting time asking anyone else. I would have to search in the places where she might be.
“Don’t forget,” Tom said, “the new people are supposed to arrive today.”
“I remembered. But thank you.”
The new people! Isn’t that just the way life always goes in a village like ours? You drift along, nothing much happens, you do what you have to do . . . and suddenly your wife is missing and you have to get down to the train station to meet the new people. Your boring life has fallen apart and suddenly become unbearably crowded.
But that’s how life goes in this village of ours. That it is a place of punishment seems to have been understood by everyone from the start. But wasn’t that self-judgment on the villages’ part? What terrible deeds had these villagers to atone for? Even I, Zanthias, the brightest among them, and, in a way, the most twisted, was a good person most of the time. The village can be called a place of punishment only in regard to self-viewed values, which take as punishment any state that is not actively pleasurable. What right-thinking person would use that as his or her standard for excellence? Of myself, at least I can say, I was not guilty of the sin of passivity.
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