Dewey seemed to understand Jack’s purpose with the coat and hunkered down without resistance, his muzzle resting on the snow, then lifted up a few inches, and then resting on the snow again. He shivered, then was still, then shivered again. Jack was plenty warm, however. He’d suffered anguish and even a bit of fear to get to this spot, but at least he wasn’t cold after all that effort. Remaining still for him would have the opposite effect as for Dewey. Dewey was being warmed from lying there, but Jack was cooling after his exertion, so that the longer he lay like that, the more he risked hypothermia himself. But for the moment, he took in his surroundings, even as he lay there on his side with Dewey pulled up close to him. The pasture sloped gently down from the house, but at this spot up the slope from the snow drift, they were already at an elevation a little above the roof of the house. Ahead of him, the slope continued to the hilltop horizon against the weirdly blue sky perhaps thirty yards upslope from him. If he were to ascend to that point, he could turn right and follow the ridgetop down until it eventually melded into the lower pasture, a half-mile along, or he could turn left and hike a bit uphill, then very slightly down but still along the ridgetop to where the ridge blended into the mountain to the east of the farm.
Jack had been looking at that ridgetop since he’d begun living with Peter and Robin, from the house or the drive or the greenhouse—opposite the garden spot and the upper pasture. Its peak was just opposite the house. It had held for Jack an air of mystery. He’d spent many an afternoon, especially on Sundays, just walking through the woods, but he’d always wandered north from the house, or up the mountain, or northwest from the upper pasture to the lower, and the bend of trees around it toward the north, sometimes coming back on the long dirt road that served the house.
Why he ended up tackling the ridgeline on this day of all days was a mystery beyond reckoning. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and the travail was incremental. That is, though each step was more difficult than the last, up to this point the step-by-step differential was not enough to warrant turning from the goal. Why move forward when he might have turned back? Why persist toward a goal that was voluntary in the first place? What telos inheres in the stuff of life’s journey to impel us forward? Why continue to breathe?
Dewey had had enough of the confining lay-down. Perhaps after all he’d only cooperated in this moment with Jack because he thought it was for Jack’s benefit, but in any event, it was time to move on. Jack was glad to be on his feet again anyway, and no longer having to fight to move forward, other than to step especially carefully, and solidly, to continue making uphill progress. As he rose, Jack paused from time to time to take in the bowl of their settlement, which nestled against the mountain yet steadily fell away from him as he gained altitude. He zoomed out in his perspective of the place that had come to represent home to him, more thoroughly imprinted as such following the season of his consciousness fading, slipping away in the absence of shared awareness of the world with others—the lebenswelt of mankind pulled from him entirely so that he withered as a result, right up until the moment he stared into wide almond eyes that had instantly restored him to humanity.
At the ridgeline, Jack purposely stopped to look backward, long and longingly, before turning to learn what would appear beyond the ridge. Now far below him, the house and the garden and the barn and the greenhouse and the upper pasture giving way to the lower pasture ever widening into the bright plain beyond presented themselves in a flawless tableau that Jack willed himself to store for later recall, making a photograph in his mind of just this arrangement, at just this point of remove, in just this light. The cloud cover had receded further during the time of Jack’s adventure in the snow drift, and now the light was no longer merely dimmed entire, but rather there was a bright cast of indirect rather than direct sunlight that played against the darker muddle of flat light and shadow, bathing the whole settlement in a melancholy sentimentality. It did not merely evoke emotion, but seemed to be conscious emotion itself, calling to Jack on a level deeper than speech, deeper than vision, and deeper than Jack’s soul alone. Jack was in the presence of God.
Jack turned. Now with his back to his new life and his face to the south, he was at last able to look beyond and past the ridgetop that had bounded his existence in this place. Before him was the land that lay beyond, heretofore a mystery. Gauzy cloud partially curtained the sun, so that this entire vista of the White Mountains was also bathed in that melancholy light, except that here the light was a few degrees brighter in that unique indirect sunlight. The scene was arrestingly beautiful. He was looking south toward the lands of the San Carlos Indian Reservation, and west toward the Fort Apache Reservation, stretching before him in vales and meadow and peaks. Not an undulating, rounded series of hills like the Appalachians of Jack’s early experiences, but the sharp foothills of Mount Baldy and lands to the south and west of it. As with the farm behind him, Jack stored this scene in his mind, even while wondering if he could ever do it justice in his re-imagining. The scene before him was wilder than that behind, more austerely beautiful, and more lonely—and yet it beckoned to him more. The deep conifer covering of the rocky places was bleached by distance, the thin golden light giving way to a vastness and a vast consciousness not of man. It induced awe. Jack felt unsteady, and he took to his knees.
Chapter 19
As they had expected, this was a lasting snow. As the week wore on, the snow was less like powder and drifted less, but it didn’t crust over at night, nor even diminish significantly in depth. They spent long days in what they called “school.” On these days, Robin fell into a pattern of working in one-hour increments—one each for math, science, and reading—then an early lunch, then the same pattern again, and an early dinner, and then the same pattern again. This was a pretty demanding pace for purely academic work, and Jack commended Robin on it.
Peter was likewise engaged, but with somewhat less enthusiasm. Jack could see that he was impatient to visit Millie again, the more so because the weather rendered such a visit unfeasible. He kicked against the goads. Still, the days were, for the most part, well-spent. When they weren’t studying technical subjects, they relaxed a little, taking the humanities part of their self-imposed curriculum a little less seriously. It involved little more than being sure there was time for recreational reading, and that it was edifying and educational. There were long conversations in which Jack’s take on history and philosophy were central.
In that environment, it seemed natural that the lead in the conversation would sometimes shift to Peter, who did not elicit an exchange on theology per se, but understood the Bible well enough to be able to contrast his grasp of theology with the development of philosophy that Jack presented. And the history of the Bible itself became an object of study, even though Jack at first questioned its relevance. Why study history that was ancient and possibly mythological anyway?
But on that argument, Jack realized, the history of the whole world up to the great die-off might be deemed irrelevant, too, and yet that was surely not the case. Their interaction with the canyon people and the independent neighbors all around, and even with the zombies, was directly informed by the history of individuals’ lives, which included the shared consciousness of everyone alive to the present day. And that understanding was in turn informed primarily by the shared consciousness of those alive yesterday, and the day before, and so on, going back the beginning—the first day on which an individual in his subjective aloneness beheld another. About whom he would say “another like me.”
Jack considered this. If he came to think of himself as he was perceived by another, as with Robin on that other snowy day, and if Robin at the same time thought of herself as Jack perceived her, then there would result a common awareness, each not only conscious of the other, but conscious of the other’s self- and other-awareness. It would shift and evolve and reformulate over time, as would their experiences, shared and unshared. There would be a shared consciousness, in a sense,
the content of which was independent of each of them. In all of their thoughts, even private thoughts, they would necessarily perceive themselves and be conscious of themselves not just as sole creatures, but as individuals in relation to the sum of all others.
At the same time, though, Robin did not share that mutual self- and other-awareness only with Jack, but also with Peter. So the shared consciousness already reached further than Jack’s and Robin’s mutual awareness. Even the zombies’ consciousness played a part—not every member of the shared human consciousness would contribute equally to it. Robin was not much influenced by the zombies’ sense of themselves or by what they thought directly, but she was certainly affected by the fact of their existence, and her own compassion in response to them. Her perception of herself as part of a society necessarily included them because they were human, too. And so also, once she had become aware of them, the faux Apache and the fake Diné.
So there was this shared consciousness, but it presumably did not exist independently in the ether somewhere, but rather in each participating mind. And if this were so, then the experiences of every living being must be relevant to one’s own self-perception, too. That would mean that the more one understood about others, the richer would be his participation in this shared consciousness. This would have to be true not just as to those who exist today, but for those who came before, whose own shared consciousness did not merely influence, but actually defined, the shared consciousness of those alive now. In fact, perhaps understanding those alive at the beginning was more relevant than understanding those who existed more recently. Those in their millions, now expired, who yet lived on in a sense, because someone—even if just a handful of people—survived.
There was more, even, than this, Jack mused. That consciousness, though shared, was not shared equally. It was not the same in each person’s mind. Robin’s eyes had burned into Jack’s mind, and instantly Jack had a consciousness of self that was different than before. And yet more different when Jack came to know of Peter. The two of them continued to loom large in Jack’s still rapidly-changing consciousness, as Jack became aware of the zombies, and then of the independent Apache, and then of the Diné. But still Robin figured more prominently in Jack’s connection to a society around him than did, for example, Alma Lee. Alma became one more person among others, in Jack’s world, instead of just one person. But then the relationship with Robin was different than for every other person in the world. He thought of her as a daughter. He had a desire to protect, even as he admired her and found her enigmatic ways intriguing. They lived together, with Peter, and were friends.
And Millie? Jack had only met Millie the one time, around Rupert’s dining room table. She was now one small point of perception of Jack, in Jack’s mind, and thereby contributed to defining for Jack his self-awareness. Jack thought of himself in relation to everyone around him, of whom he was aware, at least, and she was a part of that. But what about Peter? How was Peter’s self-awareness affected by her? Peter was clearly enamored of Millie. His impatience to see her despite the snow was telling. Could it be that their mutual enamorada would enhance the sense each had of consciousness of the whole human race? Perhaps this is why when a person is in love, he is also in love with the whole world. Perhaps giddy infatuation with another rests on this expanded view of oneself as part of mankind. Peter would have in his mind a vision of himself acting on the stage in Millie’s mind. This vision would be a distortion, though, like seeing it through Jack’s binoculars instead of the naked eye. For that reason, it would fade—infatuation always does. But while it lasts, it is informative about who we are as a people, not just who we are as one of a couple. Perhaps it’s true that erotic love follows love for the whole world, rather than the other way around.
He thought about fame as another instance informing us of our consciousness, and whence it derives. The desire for fame is in one sense a desire to loom large in the imagining of others, just like infatuation is such a desire for just one other. A person who achieves fame achieves a vision of himself as he thinks he is perceived in many minds, and then he carries that vision around as his self-perception thereafter. We hunger for fame, if we do, for the same reason we develop infatuation, if we do. For that matter, we hunger for strong and enduring family and friend relationships for similar reason—the search for ourselves is undertaken in the perceptions we believe others have of us.
Now what would Peter say? Jack wondered. Or Robin? Jack felt they would say something’s still missing if they don’t hear a reference to God in it somewhere. So is the shared consciousness that we each subscribe in part to—is it also shared with God? Or only so for some of us? Or all of us whether we will it or no?
“Jack?” A hand waved in front of him, fingers blurred in the sideways movement. “What’s so fascinating about the snow?”
“I was off on a reverie, my dear. The snow is not fascinating—it’s just there. How’s it coming?”
“I checked my work,” Robin said, “and I think I have this section okay. I’m ready for calculus now.”
“Oh my goodness. I think you want calculus just because Peter hasn’t had it yet. Do you even know what it is?”
“That’s what I want to learn,” she said with mock exasperation.
“Listen to this,” Jack said, fumbling for a book that he’d laid aside a few minutes before. “Where did I put it? Here. Listen:”
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others’ eyes: nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed
Salutes each other with each other’s form;
For speculation turns not to itself,
Till it hath travell’d and is mirror’d there
Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all.
“What do you think?”
“I would have to read it through myself and think about it. It’s about mankind’s awareness, right? A person’s consciousness? Isn’t that what you’re always talking about?”
“I don’t know about ‘always.’ It’s Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida. Where’s Peter? He’s the Shakespeare expert.”
“He went to the barn to check on the horses. I think he wants to go see you-know-who, so he’s walking around in the snow to see how bad it is.”
“Why don’t we see about getting you some more advanced practical medicine books? Nurse practitioner materials, things like that? We can catch up later with the deeper background stuff. It would take years to do things the old way, and we may have need for your doctoring before then.”
“Where would we get those books?”
“We can make a trip to wherever there’s a medical school or nursing school. When the weather’s better. But let’s not slack off on the other schoolwork before then.”
They were due for restocking their stores of books. Peter was antsy to see Millie. Robin, and to a lesser degree Peter, had been quite studious all week. “Why don’t we get out?” Jack queried Robin.
They heard Peter on the back stoop, stomping the snow off his boots, and then the kitchen door opened and Peter stepped in, still stomping.
“Where would we go?” Robin asked. “And how?” she added.
“Go where?” Peter called from the kitchen.
“Whoa, the boredom level is higher than I thought,” Jack said. “I was just making a suggestion.”
“Let’s ride into Alpine,” Peter said. “Maybe detour over to the Willises.”
“Can the horses handle this?” Jack asked. “I know the car won’t.”
“I think they’ll be fine,” Peter said.
Robin jumped up to get ready. With some alacrity, Jack thought.
A half hour later, they were on the road. They took it slow. The road was a dirt road with some gravel, but these kinds of roads require frequent maintenance. The county had done it, previously. Scr
aping the road with heavy machinery had not made it to Jack’s or Peter’s to-do list, and very likely never would. Even in perfect weather, they noted that the ruts had gotten wider and the drains to the ditches on either side more pronounced over time. The snow disguised all this. Now they walked the horses down the middle of the road to avoid mishaps. The depth of the snow turned out to be no trouble for the horses at all.
After the initial storm, the weather had cleared, mostly, for about a day, and then it had clouded up again. The trio had waited expectantly for another winter pounding, but it never came. Instead, it remained cloudy for a few more days, until this day, when Peter, Robin, and Jack escaped on horseback. Just as they entered the road from the turnout to the house and mounted, the sun came out. It was tentative, though, casting shards of golden light through the trunks and limbs of rust-brown ponderosa mixed with gray, lichen-covered scrub pine. But the sunlight nonetheless breathed visual life into the gray-upon-gray-upon-gray landscape. It was like the eye of God had opened upon them.
It was quiet on the road, but for the swishing through snow and the horses’ satisfied breathing. Off to their left, through the trees, they could see where the lower pasture opened until it terminated at an angle into the wooded creek line, and there was further pasturage below that. The thin golden light settled on all that scene. Jack wanted to convey to his fellow travelers his fleeting sense of déjà vu carried forward from his ridgetop experience a few days before, but he found that he spoke the wrong language. He could not pronounce the words that would convey the experience, and anyway he knew that they experienced it with him anew now. The golden light contrasted with blue shadow, the enormity of creation spread before them, the cold air and the healthy warmth from activity, the quiet resulting from sound-absorbing snow contrasted with the muffled snow-swish and the healthy huffing of the animals, and most of all the almost tangible bond of friendship among the three of them. For once, Jack remained silent, knowing the mutual awareness was sufficient.
Another Like Me Page 19