It is interesting to be the Lubavitcher, although somewhat puzzling. One of the elements of which I was not aware was that in addition to the grander passions, the greater personages, I would also find myself enacting a number of smaller roles, the interstices of the religious life, as it were, and exactly as it was pointed out to me there is a great deal of rigor. Emotion does not seem to be part of this rabbi’s persona; the question of Talmudic interpretation seems to be quite far from the thrashings of Calvary. Still, the indoctrinative techniques have done their job; I am able to make my way through these roles even as the others, on the basis of encoded knowledge; and although the superficialities I babble seem meaningless to me, they seem to please those who surround. I adjust my cuffs with a feeling of grandeur; Bruck Linn may not be all of the glistening spaces of Rome but it is a not inconsiderable part of the history, and within it I seem to wield a great deal of power. “Rabbi,” an advisor says opening the door, “I am temerarious to interrupt your musings, but we have reached a crisis and your intervention is requested at this time.”
“What crisis?” I say. “You know I must be allowed to meditate.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, we respect your meditations. It is wrong to impose. I should not,” and some edge of agony within his voice, some bleating aspect of his face touches me even as he is about to withdraw. I come from behind the desk saying, “What then, what?” and he says, “Rabbi, it was wrong to bother you, we should protect, we will respect,” and now I am really concerned, from large hat to pointed shoe he is trembling and I push past him into the dense and smoky air of the vestibule where congregants, advisors, women and children are gathered. As they see me their faces one by one register intent and then they are pleading, their voices inchoate but massed. Save us, Rabbi, they are saying, save us, and I do not know what is going on here, an awkward position for a Talmudic judge to occupy but I simply do not know; I push my way through the clinging throng pushing them aside, Oh my God, Rabbi, they are saying, oh my God, and I go through the outer doors, look down the street and see the massed armaments, see the troops eight abreast moving in great columns toward the building, behind them the great engines of destruction, and in the sky, noise, the holocaust, Rabbi, someone says, the holocaust has come, they will kill us, and I feel disbelief. How can this be happening. There was no purge in Bruck Linn to the best of my recollection; there have never been any great purges on this part of the continent. Nevertheless here they are and behind me I can hear the children screaming. It is all that I can do to spread my arms and, toward them, toward the massed congregants and advisors behind, cry, “Stay calm, this is not happening; it is an aspect of the imagination, some misdirection of the machinery.” Surely it must be that, some flaws in the fabric of my perceptions being fed through the machines and creating history out of context, and yet the thunder and smell of the armies is great in the air and I realize that they are heading directly toward this place, that they have from the beginning, and that there is nothing I can do to stop them.
“Be calm, be calm,” I cry, “you are imagining this, indeed you are all imagining,” but the words do not help, and as I look at the people, as they look at me, as the sounds of Holocaust overwhelm, I seem to fall through the situation leaving them to a worse fate or perhaps it is a better, but it is only I who have exited, leaving the rest, these fragments of my imagination, to shore themselves against their ruins, and not a moment too soon, too soon.
* * * *
Otherwise, life such as it is proceeds as always. I spend a portion of the time on the hypnotics and in the machinery, but there are commitments otherwise to eat, to sleep, to participate in the minimal but always bizarre social activities of the complex; even, on occasion to copulate, which I accomplish in methodical fashion. The construction, I have been reminded, is only a portion of my life; responsibilities do not cease on its account. I maintain my cubicle, convey the usual depositions from level to level, busy myself in the perpetuation of microcosm. Only at odd times do I find myself thinking of the nature of the hypnotic experiences I have had, and then I try to push these recollections away. They are extremely painful and this subtext, as it were, is difficult to integrate into the outer span of my life. In due course I am assured that the fusion will be made, but in the meantime there is no way to hasten it. “You have changed, Harold,” Edna says to me. Edna is my current companion. She is not named Edna, nor I Harold, but these are the names that they have assigned for our contemporary interaction, and Harold is as good as any; it is a name by which I would as soon be known. Harold in Galilee. And I have spoken his name and it is Harold. She leans toward me confidentially. “You are not the same person that you were.”
“That is a common illusion provided by the treatments,” I say. “I am exactly the same person. Nothing is any different than it was.”
“Yes it is,” she murmurs. “You may not realize how withdrawn and distracted you have become.” She is a rather pretty woman and there are times, during our more or less mechanical transactions, when I have felt real surges of feeling for her, but they have only been incidental to the main purpose. In truth I can have no feeling for anyone but myself; I was told this a long time ago. She puts a hand on me intensely. “What are they doing to you?”
“Nothing,” I say quite truthfully. “They are merely providing a means. Everything that is done I am doing myself; this is the principle of the treatment.”
“You are deluded,” she says and loops an arm around me, drags me into stinging but pleasurable embrace. Forehead to forehead we lay nestled amidst the bedclothes; I feel the tentative touch of her fingers. “Now,” she says, moving her hand against me. “Do it now.”
I push against her embrace. “No. It is impossible.”
“Why?”
“During the treatments?”
“Nonsense,” she says, “you are avoiding me. You are avoiding yourself. The treatments are anaesthetic, don’t you see that” They are forcing you to avoid the terms of your life and you cannot do that.” Her grasp is more insistent, at the beginning of pain. “Come on,” she says. Insistent woman. Against myself, I feel a slow gathering.
“No,” I mutter against her cheekbone, “it is impossible. I will not do it now.”
“Fool.”
“The chemicals. I am awash in chemicals; I remain in a sustaining dose all the time. I would upset all of the delicate balances.”
“You understand nothing,” she says, but in an inversion of mood turns from me anyway, scurrying to a far point. “Have it as you will. Do you want me to leave?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not. You are so accommodating. Do you want me to entertain you then?”
“Whatever you will.”
“You have changed utterly. You are not the same. These treatments have rendered you cataleptic. I had hopes for you, Harold, I want you to know that. I thought that there were elements of genuine perception, real thought. How was I to know that all of the time you merely wanted to escape into your fantasies?”
“What did you want me to do?” I say casually. “Overthrow the mentors?”
She shrugs. “Why not?” she says. “It would be something to keep us occupied.”
“I’d rather overthrow myself.”
“You know, Harold,” she says and there is a clear, steady light of implication in her eye, “it is not impossible for me to like you; we could really come to understand one another, work together to deal with this crazy situation, but there is this one overwhelming problem, and do you know what that is?”
“Yes I do,” I say wearily because this has happened before. “I surely do.”
“Don’t deprive me of the satisfaction,” she says. “Harold, you are a fool.”
“Well,” I say shrugging, “in these perilous and difficult times, this madly technocratic age of 2219, when we have so become merely the machinery of our institutions, where any search for individuality must be accomplished by moving within rather than wi
thout, taking all of this into consideration and what with one thing being like every other thing in this increasingly homogenous world, tell me, aren’t we all?”
“Not like you,” she says. “Harold, even in these perilous and difficult times, not like you at all.”
* * * *
On the great and empty desert he takes himself to see the form of Satan, manifest in the guise of an itinerant, wandering amidst the sands. Moving with an odd, off-center gait, rolling on limping leg, Satan seems eager for the encounter, and he is ready for it too, ready at last to wrestle the old, damned angel and be done with it, but Satan is taking his time the cunning of the creature and seems even reluctant to make the encounter. Perhaps he is merely being taunted. Once again he thinks of the odd discrepancy of persona; he is unable in this particular role to work within the first person but is instead a detached observer seeing all of it at a near and yet far remove, imprisoned within the perception, yet not able to effect it. An interesting phenomenon, perhaps he has some fear that to become the persona would be blasphemous. He must discuss this with the technicians sometime. Then again, maybe not. Maybe he will not discuss it with the technicians; it is none of their damned business, any of it, and besides, he has all that he can do to concentrate upon Satan, who in garb of bright hues and dull now comes upon him. “Are you prepared?” Satan says to him. “Are you prepared for the undertaking?”
He looks down at his sandals embedded in the dense and settled sands. “I am ready for the encounter,” He says.
“Do you know the consequences?” Satan says. He has a curiously ingratiating voice, a warm and personal manner, an offhand ease which immediately grants a feeling of confidence, but then again this was to be expected. What belies the manner, however, is the face, the riven and broken features, the darting aspect of the eyes, the small crevices in which torment and desert sweat seem to lurk and which compel attention beyond the body which has been broken by the perpetration of many seeming injustices. Satan extends his arm. “Very well, then,” Satan says, “let us wrestle.”
“Non-disputandum,” he says. “I understood that first we were to talk and only after that to struggle.”
“Latin is no protection here,” Satan says firmly. “All tongues pay homage to me.”
“Mais non,” he says in his abominable French, “voulez-vous je me porte bien.”
“Nor does humor exist in these dark spaces,” Satan says. “From walking up and down upon the earth and to and fro I have learned the emptiness of present laughter. Come,” he says, leaning forward, his arm extended, “let us wrestle now.”
He reaches for that gnarled limb, then brings his hands back. The sun is pitiless overhead but like a painting; he does not feel the heat. His only physical sensation is of the dry and terrible odor seeping from his antagonist. “No,” he says. “Mais non, mon frere. Not until we have had the opportunity to speak.”
“There is nothing to speak about. There are no sophistries in this emptiness, merely contention.”
Do not argue with Satan. He had been warned of this, had known it as his journey toward the darkness had begun, that there was no way in which the ancient and terrible enemy could be engaged with dialectic and yet, non disputandum, he has faded again. Not to do it. Not to try argument; it is time to wrestle and it might as well be done. He seizes the wrist and slowly he and the devil lock.
Coming to grips with that old antagonist it is to the man as if he has found not an enemy but only some long-removed aspect of himself, as if indeed, just as in sex or dreams, he is in the act of completing himself with this engagement. The stolidity of the form, the interlocking of limbs, gives him not a sense of horror, as he might have imagined, but rather comfort. It must have been this way. Their hands fit smoothly together. “Do you see?” Satan says winking and coming to close quarters. “You know that it must always have been meant this way. Touch me, my friend, touch me and find grace,” and slowly, evenly, Satan begins to drag him forward.
He understands, he understands what is happening to him: Satan in another of his guises would seduce him with warmth when it is really a mask for evil. He should be fighting against the ancient and terrible enemy with renewed zeal for recognizing this, but it is hard, it is hard to do so when Satan is looking at him with such compassion, when the mesh of their bodies is so perfect. Never has he felt anyone has understood him this well; his secret and most terrible agonies seem to flutter, one by one, birdlike, across the features of the antagonist, and he could if he would sob out all of his agonies knowing that Satan could understand. Who ever would as well? It must have been the same for him. I do not believe, he wants to cry to the devil; I believe none of it; I am taken by strange, shrieking visions and messages in the night; I feel that I must take upon the host of Heaven, and yet these dreams which leave me empty and sick are, I know, madness. I hear the voice of God speaking unto me saying I am the Father, I am the incompleteness which you will fill and know that this must be madness, and yet I cannot deny that voice, can deny no aspect of it, which is what set me here upon the desert, but I am filled with fear, filled with loathing and trembling “ he wants to cry all of this out to Satan, but he will not, he will not, and slowly he finds himself being drawn to the ground.
“Comfort,” Satan says in the most confiding and compassionate of whispers, covering him now with his gnarled body so that the sun itself is obscured, all landscape dwindled to the small perception of shifting colors, “comfort: I understand, I am your dearest and closest friend. Who can ever understand you as I? Who would possibly know your anguish? Easy, be easeful,” Satan says, and he begins to feel the pressure come across his chest. “So easy,” Satan murmurs, “it will be so easy, for only I understand; we can dwell together,” and breath begins to desert him. The devil is draining his respiration.
Understanding that, he understands much else: the nature of the engagement, the quality of deception, exactly what has been done to him. Just as Satan was the most beautiful and best loved of all the angels, so in turn he would be Satan’s bride in the act of death. It is the kiss that will convey the darkness, and seeing this, he has a flickering moment of transcendence: he thinks he knows now how he might be able to deal with this. Knowing the devil’s meaning will enable him to contest, and yet it would be so easy, “inevitable” is the word necessary to yield to his antagonist and let it be done, let the old, cold, bold intruder have his will, thy will be done, and Satan’s too, and the yielding is so close to him now he can feel himself leaning against the network of his being, the empty space where desire might have rested, in the interstices the lunge toward annihilation ””mais non,” he says, “mais non, je renounce, I will not do it!” and forces himself against the figure, understanding finally the nature of this contest, what it must accomplish, in what mood it must be done and wearily, wearily, carrying all of consequence upon him he begins the first and final of all his contests with the devil.
* * * *
It is a madly technocratic age, a madly technocratic age, and yet it is not cruel; the devices of our existence, we have been assured, exist only in order to perpetrate our being. Take away the technology and the planet would kill us; take away the institutions and the technology would collapse. There is no way in which we can continue to be supported without the technology and the institutions, and furthermore they are essentially benign. They are essentially benign. This is not rationalization or an attempt to conceal from myself and others the dreadful aspects of our mortality, the engines of our condition grinding us slowly away … no, this is a fixed and rational judgment which comes from a true assessment of this life.
It is true that a hundred years ago, in the decades of the great slaughters and even beyond, the institutions were characterized by vengeance, pusillanimity, murder and fear, but no more. In 2160 the oligarchy was finally toppled, the reordering began, and by 2189, the very year in which I was born, the slaughter was already glimpsed within a historical context. I was nurtured by a reasonable state
in a reasonable fashion; if I needed love, I found it; sustenance was there in more forms than the purely physical. I grew within the bounds of the state; indeed, I matured to a full and reasonable compassion. Aware of the limits which were imposed, I did not resent them nor find them stifling.
There was space; there has been space for a long time now. Standing on the high parapet of the dormer, looking out on Intervalley Six and the web of connecting arteries beneath the veil of dust, I can see the small lights of the many friendly cities nodding and winking in the darkness, the penetrating cast of light creating small spokes of fire moving upward in the night. Toward the west the great thrust of South Harvest rears its bulk and spires, lending geometry to a landscape which would otherwise be endless, and I find reassurance in that presence just as I find reassurance in the act of being on the parapet itself. There was a time, and it was not so terribly long ago, that they would not have allowed residents to stand out on the parapet alone; the threat of suicide was constant, but in the last years the statistics have become increasingly favorable, and it is now within the means of all of us if only we will to come out in the night for some air.
Edna is beside me. For once we are not talking; our relationship has become almost endlessly convoluted now, filled with despair, rationalization and dialogue, but in simple awe of the vision she too has stopped talking and it is comfortable, almost companionable standing with her thus, our hands touching lightly, smelling the strange little breezes of our technology. A long time ago people went out in pairs to places like this and had a kind of emotional connection by the solitude and the vision, but now emotions are resolved for more sensible arenas such as the hypnotics. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to stand with her thus. It would almost be possible for me at this moment to conceive some genuine attachment to her, except that I know better; it is not the union but its absence which tantalizes me at this moment, the knowledge that there is no connection which will ever mean as much to us as this landscape. The sensation is unbearably poignant although it does not match in poignance other moments I have had under the hypnotics. At length she turns toward me, her touch more tentative in the uneven light and says, “It hurts me too. It hurts all of us.”
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 30