“Is it significant?”
She folds his hands together and gives them a motherly pat. “What it means is—no change. You were born to be a certain kind of person, and you're going to die a certain kind of person. Sorry, man.” She is standing in the doorway again before he can decide what to say to her. “Thanks for the bus money, though. I hope your next life is a little more spiritually dynamic.”
And with that, she is gone. He listens for the sound of her footsteps as she walks away, but there is only the crisp, irregular rustling of her skirt and then, from out of nowhere, the clatter of the custodian's cart.
Absurdly, Jacob finds that he is flustered. He can feel his palms gathering sweat. Everything the woman has told him about himself is true, he realizes. Every last detail. But then wouldn't most people describe themselves as affectionate and intelligent? And who doesn't experience periods of sorrow in love? It occurs to him that he ought to have asked her a test question, one with an answer he could either verify or falsify. Something about Audrey and the baby, maybe, or something about his dissertation. He rushes down the hall to see if he can catch her, but the elevator has already descended into the floor. He goes to the window that gazes down on the parking lot. The streetlights pick out a single abandoned car with an hourglass-shaped patch of rust on the hood.
He will continue to look for the woman over the next few weeks, searching for her face in the campus's flowing river of students, but he will never see her again.
Audrey is waiting for him at the kitchen counter when he gets home, using the ball of her index finger to cull the toast crumbs out of a tub of butter. There is a certain look she wears when she is too brittle or hopeless or beaten down by the demands of the world to sustain her disappointment in him any longer, a kind of bruised slackness concentrated mostly around her eyes and lips. He never knows whether it is his job at such times to put his hand on her arm and console her or to disappoint her so radically that the old passion takes spark in her again.
“Where have you been? I've been waiting for you,” she says.
“I'm sorry. I thought you were on at the clinic tonight.”
“I was. They sent me home early.”
He has to be careful here and he knows it, so he flattens his voice, stripping it of even the slightest trace of emotion. “Is there something wrong with the baby?”
She shakes her head, concentrating on the butter again, and for a moment he is almost able to believe that he has gotten away with it. She says, “I had a touch of vertigo, that's all. But after the spotting last week, Dr. Phillips told me I should take the rest of the night off just to be on the safe side.” Then she gives him a little poison dart of a smile. “Not the answer you were hoping for, is it, Jacob?”
“Now that's not true. You know it isn't. I want only the best for you.”
She sniffs dismissively. “You know, maybe you really mean that. But listen to the way you say it. ‘I want only the best for you.’ For you, second person singular. Never us, first person plural.”
He can tell that he is making a false step before the words have even left his mouth, but still he asks her, “ ‘Us’ meaning you and me, or ‘us’ meaning you and the baby?”
He is not trying to lay the ground for a debate, only raising a question, but for the past five months, ever since Audrey felt the first intimations of the baby growing inside her, slowly spinning around on itself like a dandelion seed, it seems as though the two of them have been doomed to misunderstand each other. Her face tightens with indignation. She says, “Us meaning this family—all three of us.” She wipes her finger clean on a paper towel and replaces the cap on the tub of butter, then thinks better of it, pries the cap back off, and flings it at him. It bounces ineffectually off his chest.
“Whatever you're waiting to figure out, you need to go ahead and figure it out, Jacob. Put the butter away for me,” she says. And she storms off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Jacob has never wanted to raise a child. He has always thought of parenthood as something like those sand mandalas that Buddhist monks create grain by grain over a period of months, then sweep away in a matter of seconds—the sort of noble yet exhausting activity that, no matter how beautiful or enriching it might be, he can only imagine himself observing from a distance. Audrey used to tell him that she felt exactly the same way. It was one of the things that had bound them together through seven years and four apartments and all the changes life had brought them. But when she found out she was pregnant, a transformation took place inside her, as profound in its way as the transformation that turned all the accomplishments of Thomas Aquinas's life to straw in his eyes. She realized that she wanted to keep the baby and start a family. The fact that Jacob did not share this wish was at first a mystery to her, and later an annoyance, and finally, he had come to see, a humiliation, as though he were gazing through an open door at her deepest instincts, her most intimate desires, and refusing to step inside.
Which in a way, he supposed, he was.
It has become clear to both of them that if he does not experience a change of heart soon, they are going to split cleanly apart down the center, falling away from each other like the two halves of a plastic Easter egg.
He takes a bottle of water into the living room and sits down on the couch. Because of the hot spells Audrey has been having, she has left the apartment's windows cracked open an inch or two, and a small, soft wind flows through the air. He finds himself thinking of the mystery of Aquinas again—how the story of his final days was both like and unlike a fairy tale, since in the traditional fairy tale straw was transformed into gold, whereas in the case of Aquinas gold was transformed into straw.
He listens to Audrey washing her face on the other side of the bedroom door.
He does not know what he is going to do.
The light from the kitchen has turned the clock on the mantel into an expressionless white disk. Jacob glances at his wristwatch to check the time. But something is wrong. For some while now, he has been aware of a strange feeling of floatiness in his hand, the slight tingle of cool air on his skin, but not until this moment has he really given the sensations his proper attention.
He looks in his lap, on the carpet, and in the crevice behind the couch cushions. He gets up to check the inside of his satchel and the pockets of his coat. He even goes outside with a flashlight to search the sidewalk and the grass along the curb. It is no good, though. He must have lost his watch somewhere.
On the morning of January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche was walking through the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin when he experienced an insight that would cripple him for the rest of his days. It was a bright, brisk morning. The sun was spreading a glossy light over the pavements of black granite. Nietzsche must have been reasoning out some minor difficulty in his philosophy—the antagonism between the evolution of man and the persistence of the moral imagination, perhaps, or the problem of memory in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence. He was often incapacitated by headaches and nausea in those days, symptoms of his midstage syphilis, yet his boldest ideas always occurred to him while he was walking. He struggled against his illness for the sake of his work.
He was stepping into the lane when he saw a coachman thrashing his horse. The driver whipped the animal three, six, seven times. The horse locked its withers and lowered its head. It was the sort of sight one could witness on the streets of Turin every day, but something had been waiting for Nietzsche at the highest corner of his thinking, some desperate revelation, and at that moment, like a jumper perched on the edge of a building, it tilted forward and tumbled into space.
Nietzsche staggered into the square and flung his arms around the neck of the horse. He buried his head in the dark hair of its mane, and he wept. All around him people stood and stared.
“Someone should help that man,” he heard one of them say.
When at last he lifted his face, the dust on his eyeglasses shone like a cluster of stars.
&nb
sp; That night he wrote a few last letters, signing himself “Dionysus,” “Nietzsche Caesar,” and “The Crucified.” After which, like Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, too, fell silent. He spent the final years of his life as a mental paralytic, barely aware of himself or his surroundings. He never explained—and Jacob imagines he was incapable of explaining—what it was that he understood that morning in the piazza.
It is late April now, six weeks since the gypsy stepped into Jacob's office and saw the contours of his life marked out on his hands, six weeks since Audrey told him he needed to figure out whatever it was he was waiting to figure out. The elms and the poplars have finished leafing out, and the students of Bertram College spend hours every day loafing around in the courtyard, tossing footballs and Frisbees to one another and spreading out in the sun and the clover. Jacob can see them from the window of his office. He has given himself until the end of the semester to come to a decision about Audrey and the baby. He loves Audrey, or at least he loves the Audrey he can still see glimpses of occasionally, the Audrey who has not yet lost the last of her faith in him. He cannot imagine the shape his life would take without her. But—and this is the problem—he cannot imagine the shape his life would take with a baby, either. Again and again he has tried to envision himself as a father, tending his child through thousands of late-night sicknesses and crying jags, but the picture will never come clear.
Maybe what he is really suffering from is a failure of the imagination. It certainly seems that way. But there is something inside him that resists thinking about it, and he is no closer to making up his mind now than he was before. He finds it easier just to prepare his lectures, grade his students' essays, and attempt to sort through the never-ending puzzle of his dissertation, which he has been putting together word by torturous word, a page or so every week, for almost two years now. He often feels as though he is making no real progress at all. It is not that he is unwilling to engage with the work or unable to tease out the implications of his ideas. It has simply become obvious to him that he is writing around the edges of his subject rather than directly into the center of it. He has all the right ingredients for a thesis—an interesting premise, a set of unusual propositions, an important question in need of an answer. And yet, somehow, no actual thesis.
Here is where he stands: the two figures at the center of his project, Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche, were polar opposites in their roles as icons and thinkers, one the father of Christian philosophy and the other the father of anti-Christian philosophy. Yet both of them underwent mysterious, deeply interior ordeals of thought that fundamentally reshaped their visions of the world. They were the two most articulate minds of their day, capable of expressing even the finest and most elusive distinctions, yet after they had their revelations—Aquinas in the darkness of the friary and Nietzsche in the cold morning light of the piazza—they ceased writing altogether.
The question Jacob has is why? What did they realize at the final stage of their lives? What was it that came apart or locked together inside them? And, more important, were the revelations they experienced one and the same? No matter how much consideration he gives the questions, he cannot seem to come to an answer.
The problem is never far from the center of his mind. He thinks about it while he is exercising and shopping for groceries, while he is walking across campus and preparing his notes for class. Sometimes, in the middle of a lecture, he will pause for a moment, pursuing the bright flash of an idea, but as soon as he goes to his desk to jot it down, he will find that it has been extinguished. Countless times he has fallen asleep thinking of Aquinas and Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Aquinas. He has even dreamed about them—dreamed that Aquinas was looking out over the Bay of Naples, watching the birds dive like white scythes into the ocean; dreamed that Nietzsche was dangling a pocket watch from his fingers and feeling its weight shift as it swayed back and forth; dreamed that Nietzsche was dining with Lou Salomé when he looked across the restaurant and saw Aquinas sitting alone beneath a yellow lamp, and he tore at his hair and held up his copy of Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles, and he dropped it in despair, saying, “He knows me, Audrey. He contains me.” Jacob finds himself thinking about the men as if they are two old friends of his from whom he has been waiting to receive a letter: Dear Jacob, I must offer my apologies for not writing sooner. I have been changed by the events of the last few weeks. Here is what happened . . . Sometimes, when he and Audrey are alone in the house together, he will listen to her filing her nails with an emery board or watch her passing through the kitchen in her quilted blue robe, and though he is watching and listening to her, and it would seem that she should fill his senses, he will be unable to separate her from the great rolling mill wheel of his speculations. Aquinas and Nietzsche and Audrey. Nietzsche and Audrey and Aquinas. She no longer asks him what he is thinking about. She no longer wants to know.
One day, shortly after his morning office hours have ended, he goes to the cafeteria for a sandwich and some coffee and overhears a couple of his students talking about one of his classes. “I mean, you would think that a course like Introduction to Ethics would at least teach you something about the difference between right and wrong, wouldn't you? Isn't that like the whole point? But I don't understand anything more about the difference between right and wrong than I did back in January.”
“The professors always cover their tails pretty well on that one. It's the standard first-day-of-class lecture: Philosophy Is About Asking Questions, Not Getting Answers.”
“Yeah, but.” It is a finished statement: Yeah, but. “Here's what I think: I think we should treat philosophers the same way we treat job applicants. Have them put down their name, their employment history, and their answer to every important philosophical dilemma of the last two thousand years. You can't get away with that kind of wishy-washy, the-questions-are-what-really-matters crap if you want somebody to hire you for their marketing team.”
Jacob puts his hand to his mouth to cover his grin. The boy who is speaking is one of his least motivated students, someone who spends most of the class hour taking his baseball cap off, limbering up the brim, and replacing it on his head. Nevertheless, there is a part of him that can't help but agree with the kid.
Later that day, after he has finished teaching his Wednesday afternoon aesthetics seminar, he heads over to the humanities office to check his mailbox. He finds a note from the department chair:
J.—
Please stop by when you have a moment.
—H.
The fluorescent lamp at the end of the hall has burned out, which makes all of the offices there look deserted, as if that one small wing of the building has been abandoned for demolition. Jacob can see a thin rectangle of white light filtering out from around the edges of one of the doors, though, and he walks down the hall and gives a few raps on the scuffed blond wood beneath the nameplate: HART MOSER, PHILOSOPHY CHAIR.
He waits for an answer.
“Come on in.”
Jacob opens the door. Hart Moser is sitting behind an electric typewriter, his hands poised over the keyboard, a blank sheet of paper curled around the roller. Friedrich Nietzsche owned a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a typewriter whose circular arrangement of keys prevented him from seeing his words as they struck the page. He was, like Jacob and Thomas Aquinas, left-handed.
“You wanted to see me?” Jacob asks.
“I did.” Hart switches his typewriter off, and the humming noise of its machinery slowly dwindles away. He turns and sifts through the stack of material on his desk. “Ah, here it is,” he says. He peers over his glasses at a sheet of paper, silently reading a few lines. “Yes, this is it,” and he holds the paper out to Jacob. “Here you go, tell me what you think.”
Jacob takes it from him. It contains a description of a summer course for upper-level undergraduates contrasting the religious philosophy of the medieval Scholastics with that of the existentialists—the kind of class he has been requesting from the department fo
r years. “Are you asking me if I want to teach this?”
“Are you interested?”
“Definitely.”
Hart takes a pencil from behind his ear. “I thought you would be. The class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from three to five. It's a ten-weeker, beginning June the second. Should I put you down?”
“Yes, yes, absolutely.”
“Good.” He scrawls Jacob's name on a piece of correspondence paper, punctuating it with an emphatic period. “All right then. I'll have Theresa give this to Academic Affairs first thing in the morning. So how is your dissertation coming along, may I ask?”
Jacob can tell by the tightening in his cheeks that something is happening to his face. It must be something amusing, because Hart chuckles and says, “That bad, huh?”
“No, no, it's not so bad really. I just feel a bit overwhelmed by it all. For the amount of time I spend thinking about the damn thing, I should have a magnum opus by now.”
Hart says, “It's like that for everybody. Do you want to hear how long it took me to finish my dissertation after my committee gave me the go-ahead? Eight years. You know that old chestnut about what ABD stands for, don't you? ‘All But Dead.’ ” He punches the joke with a vaudevillian cock of his eyebrows. Then he swivels back around to his typewriter. “Well, listen, Jacob, I have to get some work done before I head home to the wife and kids. Oh, and by the way—your pen is busted.”
The View From the Seventh Layer Page 5