Artificial Light

by James Greer

  At the time I thought the difference was in my imagining. Certainly on the surface nothing seemed different, in fact the relative scarcity of our Albion nights only served to highlight and set them apart from the normal run of bar-going and after-hours party-making, and in so doing make them special. We learned in those days, I think, to appreciate what we’d formerly taken for granted at Albion, but as with most appreciated things, our learning came too late. A thing is gone; you miss the thing; but what you miss about the thing is precisely what cannot ever be recaptured, which is why you miss it. So it’s not fair to say, as some did, that Albion was never again as good as in its vogue. Some nights it was better. But even on those better nights the original spirit was missing; a simulacrum decanted from desperation and longing took the place of that original spirit, and if you drank enough, and tried, you could convince yourself that nothing had changed.

  Nothing had changed: instead, we had changed. Amanda Early confided to me late one night that she was pregnant, though she would not say who the father was. Unplanned pregnancy is a fairly common event in Dayton. It’s responsible for most of the weddings and subsequent divorces in our circle of friends. But Amanda assured me that she had no intention of marrying the father, that the conception was a more or less one-time thing (as most things in Dayton are more or less onetime things, meaning infrequent rather than unique), and that she was sure that the unnamed father, who by the way she had not bothered to notify yet, would be relieved that Amanda did not plan to make demands, financial or emotional, on him, in the event she decided to keep the baby.

  She wanted advice on what to do, she said, though as with most people who ask my advice, she wanted mostly to explain her reasons for making whatever choice she would, in the end, make. And, I suppose, she wanted my assurance or approval that her choice was the right one. A person likes to have such assurances or grants of approval in times of great stress or when hard decisions must be made, even if from someone he or she doesn’t know well, or respect, or understand. I’m happy to provide this service, although I can’t imagine asking anyone’s advice about anything important to me. But my lack of imagination is not anyone else’s problem, and so, as I say, I’ll issue advice like the Roman emperor who used to fling pots of white-hot coins to the rabble from the roof, in other words for fun. And because I love everyone.

  With Amanda I was hard-pressed. I don’t know what I think about abortion. I haven’t formulated a position. Most people in our circle are fairly pragmatic on the issue: against, until it happens to them. I have been lucky, or prudent, or possibly just pathetic, but I’ve never missed a period. My punctuation’s punctual, I used to joke, back when we told jokes, and understood them. I’ve never known the panic of delay, or had to undergo the private humiliation of the home pregnancy test. I did once take a pregnancy test, as a gag, late one night at Albion in the bathroom with Joe Smallman. We each took one. I had as much chance of being pregnant as he did, so I thought—if the process that led to the two of us peeing on plastic sticks in a mold-encrusted john can be dignified with that word—that his false negative (because Joe was neither pregnant nor unpregnant, he was, as all men are, the opposite of pregnant—barren, uncreative, infertile, destructive) would be the funny complement to what I fervently hoped would be my false positive. My hope was of course unfulfilled.

  The value of life seems to me a constant: unquestionably sacred, for reasons that escape me. In other words, irrationally sacred, but sacred nonetheless, whether invested in a splitting ovum, or branching tree, or weed, stone, seed, foal, gull, wisp of wave, field of sun-blanched wheat, green-eyed lady frowning, brown cloud, dream or sneeze or bleating heart. But we don’t always honor what’s sacred, we often kill what’s sacred, we sometimes murder what’s sacred, in the name of a principle or higher law or out of carelessness, ignorance, or brutal glee. Or as a favor. When I say we, I mean me.

  So the value of life is a constant, but our treatment of that constant, especially our perspective as regards its purpose, shifts uneasily under our stomping feet. At least from where I sit. My instinct to regard its sanctity as absolute clashes with my recognition of the relative value of absolutes in practical terms. That’s to say, as life applies to life. What my mother would call the Divine Principle governs a realm removed from here by our inability, or unwillingness, to see. I don’t know whether it’s inability or unwillingness, but I do know that no one living can see what many intelligent people have told us, speaking from seeming authority, is plainly there but not-there. That’s the Religious Nut. The core of the God-apple.

  When my mother died, I did not feel immediately sad. I did not feel sad for some time. Her funeral was sparsely attended, mostly by people from church who I recognized but did not know well, if at all. A few of my friends came, too. I’d invited them less to blunt the pain of my mother’s death than to blunt the pain of dealing with her relatives and friends trying to console me. I did not need consoling—actually, the opposite. The man who read from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures at the funeral, whose name I remember but would prefer not to commit to paper, had been my Sunday School teacher for three years when I was on the verge of adolescence, which as we all know can be a difficult time for a fatherless child. There’s a thrill to be had at that age from profaning the sacred, as there’s a thrill to be had at any age from discounting the things of real value to oneself. My Sunday School teacher was telling us, the four or five in his class—none of whom I can now name, none of whom may remember what I’m recounting here, but that doesn’t mean, does it? that what I’m recounting didn’t happen—the story of Mary Baker Eddy’s sunburst revelation, her Saul/Paul moment, when she first entered the region of thought that became Christian Science. She was laid up in bed after an ice-skating accident, I think my Sunday School teacher said, an apparently very serious accident that even threatened her life, maybe (the details are frangible—not the details themselves but my remembering), when she had a sudden inspiration, the sky opening like a heavy blue door (with a golden knob, I’m tempted to add) to admit the presence of Love. I suggested to my Sunday School teacher, at this point in his story, actually I rudely interrupted, as he told my mother later, and pretended to wonder aloud if maybe the crack on the ice hadn’t scrambled Mrs. Eddy’s brains, and if the resultant religion we were forced, week after week, to learn and revere, wasn’t erected on an edifice of insanity. Of course I didn’t say edifice of insanity at the time, I was only twelve years old, not nearly smart enough to see how insanity might be the soundest basis for a religion.

  The other kids giggled. My Sunday School teacher looked at me with an expression of great sadness. This exact same expression of great sadness he wore as he read passages from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures intended to mark the passing of my mother and to comfort those left behind. This expression of great sadness, along with my Sunday School teacher’s balding head, bulbous nose, and high, reedy voice intoning with unbearable solemnity words upon words from these important books, moved me to a fit of uncontrollable nervous laughter that proved infectious with my friends and drew angry looks from the audience that only spurred my laughing.

  I didn’t mean anything by my laughing. I didn’t mean any disrespect, as I hope my mom realized, looking down as we like to think the dead look down on the living, watching me sweat in my dark green dress as I struggled to contain the laughter that flowered evilly in my throat with every sentence my Sunday School teacher read. I had worn the dark green dress because it was the closest thing I could find to black. Now I have a lot of black in my wardrobe. Black and other morbid colors clot my closet like a stack of photograph negatives, torn or curled at the edges and smelling of chemicals. Last year my Sunday School teacher was diagnosed with a rare brain disease that’s not fatal, but reduces the victim to a near-vegetable state in a short period of time. I heard about his condition but I did not go visit him. I was afraid I might laugh.

  Afte
r the funeral, my mother’s second cousin, who I’d met maybe once before and have never spoken to again, organized a reception for the mourners, where a number of people informed me that my mom had passed on to a higher plane of existence, like waking from an extended dream, which is how Christian Science treats the idea of death in very general terms. I did not argue, then, as I would not choose to argue, now, with their consolations. I have no genius to disputes in religion and I have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage. That these difficulties might prevent us from expressing in true words the desert in our heart we understand, and forgive. But we cannot, whatever the cause, watch without judgment the cold trajectory of lies issuing like arrows from our mouth, to pierce the fragile envelope of our only relations’ empty heads. No weapon scores more deeply than untruth.

  I accepted their acceptance, as graciously as my throbbing temples would allow, with silent nods and a half-smile of beatific ambiguity, permanently since that day etched on my face in any awkward situation. I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish on the ruin of its principles. By end he means end and not a kind of change, is quite clear: as the work of creation was above nature, so its anniversary, annihilation; without which the world has not its end, but its mutation. Much more pessimistic than me. I conclude, therefore, and say, there is no happiness under the sun. All is vanity and vexation of the spirit (the preacher, again—these gloomy men always turn to him, misunderstanding the hope he taught). Whatsoever else the world terms happiness is to me a story out of Pliny, an apparition or neat delusion, wherein there is no more of happiness than the name.

  We have thus by reverse-engineering the image of Christian Science, which would agree with Sir Tom in respect to apparitions and neat delusions, though he was a much better writer than Mrs. Eddy, sorry to say. My mom would tell me that she spent a great deal of time trying to separate the evil from the person, because the person was a perfect child of God, just like she was. Only it was a struggle sometimes to see that perfection through the corrupt eyes of mortal sense. For my own part I’m not always sure it’s worth the effort.

  The things I have had to do in order to preserve what used to be called my sanity these past few days I would not do again, nor do I choose to relate. In the same room with me, though at the far end and thankfully not yet begun to decompose (the reason I have not tried to figure out how to turn on the heat, or light a fire), lies Kurt’s corpse. Blood everywhere. Bits of brain stuck to the wall, his face unrecognizable in an instant and now pale purple from either the cold or the rigors of death or both. Is it grotesque for me to say that the color is lovely?

  I don’t look over there much. The sight reminds me of the last few minutes of his life, which were the last few minutes of mine, too, in a sense. I have spent too much time in the company of dying souls. In one sense I know that’s ridiculous, because either souls don’t die, you tell me, or every soul dies, you add. But until you, and you, have faced one of these poor human beings in the brutal bloom of his misery, you will never know what you would have done in my place. I suspect you would have quailed. I suspect this because I quailed. I suspect you would have broken down in tears and pleaded to be relieved of so awesome a responsibility. That is what I did. And I suspect you would, in the end, have pulled the trigger, because that’s what I did.

  I’m afraid of falling asleep because either his avenging ghost will gut me or the cops will come, or someone at least, the meter reader or the plumber on some longdelayed appointment, and I will be caught. I will be caught and arrested because there was no note. I have in my defense only Kurt’s word, and his words are no longer available. Now you tell me: If you were sitting in that jury, dear peer, would you believe a scrawny young woman with matted hair that one of the most famous, rich, successful human beings on the planet had begged you to put a bullet in his brain? Because even though he wanted to commit suicide, even though every atom in his body cried out to the setting sun in mine, who among you, ladies and gentlemen of Humbert’s jury, would believe that a person as fortunate as Kurt, who had attained the summit of celebrity mountain, a place I’m told every normal boy or girl aspires to climb, would volunteer to end his Perfect Life, and further would recruit someone like me, to whom no rumor of fame (forgive the very small Latin pun) had ever attached itself, even in the confines of my provincial prison, to implement his end?

  Don’t kid yourselves. You’d do what I would do: You’d say guilty, you’d judge before you’d even settled into the juror’s box, before you heard the prosecutor’s opening statement, before the weakness of my own defense was laid bare in the first few moments of the trial. Reason: I am guilty. I murdered Kurt. Whether by his request or by my own free will, or both, I did the thing that I am accused of doing. It’s not guns that kill people. It’s me.

  On the last night we were all together at Albion, which turned out to be the last night, forever, or else the beginning of one very long night, Amanda confided in me that she had asked the still-anonymous father for money for an abortion. But now, she said, she’d decided to take the money instead and buy a plane ticket to England and visit the sacred stones and plinths and mounds and so on, and then maybe disappear into the forest and give birth to a woodland creature and eat off the land and dwell among the trees forever. I didn’t tell her what I thought—which was that I wasn’t sure much of England was any longer forested—because the first words to Wordsworth’s Prelude went through my head at that moment and I agreed, absolutely, with Amanda’s plan. I told her she was doing the right thing, and that I would never tell anyone, because she wanted to keep her trip a secret not just from the father, but from everyone else. She told me because she knew I would keep her secret.

  I told Amanda, too, what I think to be true: Whatever her choice, ending anything is difficult, and sometimes necessary. All endings are a bore.

  Notebook Fourteen

  7.

  • My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright. My name is Orville Wright.

  • No matter how many times I write my name, I am still Orville Wright. I am still the man who invented the airplane: That is who I am, that is how I will be remembered, some forty-five years after the fact, some thousand years after the event. I understand that my complaint is small, and that I should be thankful for having contributed to such an evidently important piece of human progress, but good Christ, how I have been bored these many long years since! When your life’s work has been achieved at age twenty-seven, even if you don’t know that, even if you remain blissfully ignorant of the fulfillment of your purpose on earth for decades hence (because you have an almost limitless capacity for illusion), nothing that you can imagine will fill the hours and days. The hours and days will pass; but they will pass as husks, empty, formless, and you will remember nothing of their passing except their passing. No hedge against the numb parade avails itself, except the sick refuge of pipe and leaf. The pipe! And visions therewith produced—enjoyed—which are not visions Heaven-sent, or maybe are, but cannot salve the open wound of time. Had K. remained, had K. not broken her vow, the more pronounced for never having been uttered, I might have lived usefully. Or had I forgiven—had I been granted the capacity to forgive, as the bishop would insist, when we were boys, that we forgive each other some small slight—but this! Her leaving was no mere childhood prank. It’s an awful thing to leave a man alone, and one by one I have been left alone, by (over time) everyone I have ever loved, which number is not great. My sister bore the best part of my love, the majority; bore it far away, though not so far that I couldn’t have visited if I’d wanted. I didn’t want. Oh, there is no word for what I sought—want, need, require: These are pale emblems of the fierce palliative I should have applied, if possible, to the profoun
d thirst in my deepest recess (I dare not call it soul).

  • And so the pipe my last best friend, whose chief merit lies in its capacious appetite for time. In the reveries provoked by its use, I surrender myself to a current of air that is not air, yet behaves the way I understand air to behave. But is rather a current of time, and by entering at the proper angle of incidence (the key, as I have outlined in countless interviews and speeches and articles, to proper adjustment of an airplane’s wings so to achieve optimum loft), I can travel anywhere, by which I mean any when. I can return to the days of my youth, to the excitement and anticipation with which I greeted every day, the sense of satisfied exhaustion with which my cheek greeted the pillow at night.

  • Often I wake the next morning and read what I have scribbled in my journal the previous night without understanding a single word. I am no writer. I have never claimed to be; though long ago Will and I did publish a newspaper for which I wrote a fair amount of copy. I can spell, I do know that. I understand the principles of grammar well enough to ignore them when I want; but I can’t make a hell of a lot of sense, without a great deal of effort. No man should expend such effort on something as worthless as the written word, doubly worthless when the subject is himself, when the subject has no object.

  • The fact remains, staring like an insolent child at my long gray pipe-smoking face, that I have out-lived my purpose. Out-lived for many empty years my only purpose on earth; no tinkering or puttering or what-have-you in my laboratory or at Albion can obscure the pointlessness of any such experiments, or better, distractions. That I have managed to fill my days, with or without the aid of opium (with): entirely secondary to the point of living. I can be, I am sometimes, I have often in the past been, content. You will note that Jefferson did not write “pursuit of contentment” and that true happiness belongs to those who serve, without cease, not just mankind but the Creator. That I once helped, that I joined in the devising of a good machine toward whose uses I continue to keep a hopeful outlook, provides solace and a warm pit of pride in the hollow of my heart, but that same pride, that same warm pitfall, will take me to Hell if I do not let go before death plucks me from my habits and my habitat. Named Albion, for reasons I do not choose to share. I would prefer not to!