by Daniel Quinn
One would think, of course, that there must be some better system, but if thousands of centuries of cultural experimentation haven’t turned it up, what does “better” mean? Evolution is a process that sorts for what works, and “better” is discarded as easily as “worse”—if it doesn’t work.
What works, evidently, is cultural diversity. This should not come as a surprise. If culture is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then we should expect to see diversity favored over uniformity. A thousand designs—one for every locale and situation—always works better than one design for all locales and situations. Birds are more likely to survive in ten thousand nest patterns than in one. Mammals are more likely to survive in ten thousand social patterns than in one. And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we’re in the process of proving right now. We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way. There would be no problem if only one person in ten thousand lived the way we live. The problem appears only as we approach the point where only one person in ten thousand is permitted to live any other way than the way we live. In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable.
So: Tribal warfare—casual, intermittent, small-scale, and frequent—worked well for tribal peoples, because it safeguarded cultural diversity. It was not sweet or beautiful or angelic, but it did work … for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even millions of years.
Into the rubble
Sitting in Little Bohemia getting sloshed, I didn’t work all this out as easily or as tidily as I’ve presented it here—and I certainly don’t suggest that this represents a definitive last word on the subject. By taking off the obscuring lenses of the Great Forgetting, I was able to make out a dim path where before there seemed to be only an impenetrable thicket; I haven’t explored the path to its full extent by any means. This, I think, is what B does. B opens a path for exploration.
Albrecht was forced to agree. He wasn’t thrilled, clearly, but he had to admit that my insight into the problem had the stamp of B on it.
When it was all over, I was pleased and surprised. How had I failed to realize that I needed to be tested? How had I dared to think I could assume the mantle of B without first proving I could wear it?
I was pleased and surprised—and very, very drunk. I’d accepted Albrecht’s challenge around nine o’clock, and it was now almost two. The crowd in the Little Bohemia had thinned out and, oddly, had clustered round my table to witness Albrecht’s examination of me. I couldn’t tell whether they comprehended what I was saying, but they listened in a lively, smiling way, applauding well-made points, exchanging appraisals of my success, and generally cheering me on. By now, most of the candles had been extinguished, and it was exceedingly dark.
Someone asked, “What is that thing?”
Quite unconsciously, I’d brought out the fossil ammonite to busy my fingers with as I made my presentation to Albrecht. It now lay in a pool of light beside the candle on my table.
“This is another test that was given to me, one I haven’t managed to pass as yet. It’s the fossil remains of a creature that may have lived as much as four hundred million years ago. I’ve been assured that the past, the present, and the future are written in it. Think of it as a track in the dust. A track in the dust shows not only where the creature has been but where it is and will be.”
“Are you supposed to tell its future?” someone asked from the shadows.
“I’m not sure. Charles Atterley gave it to me but was killed before he had a chance to explain why. Shirin wanted me to smash it to pieces.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember, to tell the truth.” Memory wasn’t the only thing that was beginning to slip away from me at that point.
“There’s a message from B inside of it,” someone suggested. “Like a Chinese fortune cookie. That’s why you have to smash it.”
“There’s no way to get a message inside,” I explained stupidly. “It’s solid rock.”
“B could get a message inside.”
Several unseen listeners expressed confident agreement with this opinion.
Before I quite realized what was going on, a fossil-smashing party had been organized. I was uprooted from my table and hustled outdoors to stumble along in the center of a small drunken mob. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where we were going or why we were going anywhere at all. Others were leading, in search of some place or resource completely unimaginable by me.
As suddenly as we began, we stopped and were promptly squashed and trampled by those who continued to blunder forward, slapstick style. Someone ahead of me turned around, handed me a brick, and said, “Here!”
“Bring him over here!” someone else called out. A path opened up in front of me and I was led forward to a brick stack as wide and high as a pool table.
“Go ahead!” someone called out. “Let’s see what’s inside!”
“There’s nothing inside!” I protested.
“Here, give it to me!” another said. “I’ll do it!”
I clutched the fossil to my chest, and someone shoved me from behind. “Go on,” he said, in a voice no longer quite friendly.
With the brick pile at my back, I turned to face them. “I’m not going to destroy this fossil,” I said.
They received this news as if it were a thunderclap. After a moment someone at the back said in a puzzled tone, “I thought Shirin told him to smash it …?”
An imposingly tall man at the front said, “Are you a coward?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then why are you dithering? The fossil has no intrinsic value.”
A woman at the back called out, “He’s not a coward in general, Giinter. He’s just scared of this particular message.”
Two in the crowd spoke at once. One said, “What is the message?” The other said, “What’s he scared of?”
The tall man called Giinter stepped forward and spoke to me almost confidentially. “It’s not a thing you can just refuse to do, Jared. Charles gave you the fossil for a reason, and Shirin said you’d have to smash it to find out what the reason was—so you have to smash it. Otherwise this period of your life will remain incomplete and inconclusive.”
I knew he was right, and one way or another I knew I was not going to leave that place with the fossil intact, so with no more dithering I set it on top of the bricks and smashed it. While I stood there befuddled, Giinter stepped forward, plucked a scrap of white paper from the rubble, and instantly balled it up in his fist.
“Give me that!” I cried.
“There’s no way to get a message inside,” he told me gravely, already walking away. “It’s solid rock.”
The others laughed, and someone said, “Don’t pay any attention to him—he’s just teasing. It’s a trick, a sleight of hand. He’s always pulling coins out of people’s ears.”
On hearing these words, Giinter tossed the ball of paper over his shoulder without a break in stride, and a woman sitting on a stack of bricks nearby darted forward to scoop it up as a souvenir. As suddenly as it began, the show was over, and the crowd began straggling away. Only the woman who had retrieved the scrap of paper seemed prepared to stay. I felt like crying.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “I was sitting next to Shirin the first night you came down to the cellar. Bonnie?”
“I remember you, Bonnie, I just didn’t recognize you. You look older.”
“I am older,” she assured me in all seriousness.
We stood there awkwardly through a long moment.
“Shirin didn’t hold out much hope for you,” Bonnie told me.
“Not at first anyway.”
Bonnie shrugged away my qualifying phrase. “She thought you were too fix
ed.”
I pondered the various meanings of that word, and evidently so did Bonnie, for she soon added a clarification: “Too set in your ways.”
I nodded.
“Like, for example, here you are, you’ve smashed the fossil to bits, and you’re not even going to look at it.”
I glanced at the mess on the bricks. “Bonnie, it’s just a bunch of crushed calcium carbonate.”
“Yeah, that’s what she meant. That’s just the kind of thing she’d expect you to say.”
Well, goddamn. Tonight was definitely my night to be abused and chivvied about. With an exhausted sigh, I turned my attention to the debris beside me and sensed rather than saw Bonnie withdrawing a bit to give me some space.
What was I supposed to be seeing here, if there was anything to be seen? Or: How was I supposed to be looking at it? What had Shirin said about it? I didn’t think the memory was there at all, then it suddenly leaped to mind. She said, “I want to show you how to read the future.” Then she observed that Charles would have done it better and that the point of the exercise needed to be “more fully developed.”
She wanted to show me how to read the future. I closed my eyes and tried to listen for what she would say. What words would not surprise me coming from her mouth on this subject?
Suddenly I heard her say, “The universe is all of a piece, Jared.” It was so clear that I opened my eyes, half expecting to see her standing in front of me, but only Bonnie was there, sitting on a nearby stack of bricks and gazing up at the stars. I closed my eyes again, thinking, “So the universe is all of a piece. What does this tell me about anything?”
I let her speak: “This tells you that the flight path of a goose over Scandinavia has something to do with a man dying in a hospital room in New Jersey—but it takes some figuring to find out what it is. This tells you that what’s hidden inside a fossil two hundred million years old has something to do with Jared Osborne. This too takes some figuring. This kind of figuring is the diviner’s specialty, Jared, though anyone can learn to do it. The diviner is just a special tracker, a tracker of events and relations. Think about what you want right now. What are you looking for?”
That was easy. “I’m looking for you.”
“Your search begins with this fossil, Jared. You could easily have told me its future when I asked you to, but you were too cowardly to try. Now you know its future, don’t you.”
“Yes, it’s future is dust. It had no other future from the moment Charles handed it to me. Even if I hadn’t smashed it, it had no other future. One day, in a week or a million years, it was going to become rubble, and no other destiny was ever possible for it.”
“The universe is all of a piece, Jared. Charles bought this fossil for you because he knew it had a message for you—a message of some kind, he couldn’t have guessed what, at that point. Ask for that message now, Jared. Ask this fossil what it has to do with you. What is it trying to show you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, predictably.
“Become a diviner now, Jared. You’re looking for something. Cut open a bird and examine its entrails, consult your dreams, take up geomancy—or look at the remains of this fossil. Look at it and ask your question.”
I looked at and asked: Where is Shirin? I suppose it took half a second to realize that I had the answer, about as long as it once took me to realize that I’d actually filled that inside straight flush. I nearly fell over backward with illumination, nearly floated off the ground as I came in touch with the fountainhead of meaning and being. If Bonnie hadn’t been nearby, I think I would have called out helplessly to the universe that in that moment had taken notice of me. As it was, my eyes flooded with tears and my arms and legs began to tremble uncontrollably.
“Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot,” the fossil debris said to me. “Look closely, look closely—look anywhere you like! Do you see any Shirin here? Any Shirin at all here? Idiot! Idiot! Shirin is not to he found in the rubble! She isn’t there!”
I waited a long, long time, till I was sure I’d be able to walk without wobbling and to talk without sobbing. It must have taken twenty or thirty minutes, and I thought Bonnie might have left, but no, she was still there. After sweeping the rubble away with my hand, I walked over and told her I’d learned what the fossil had to tell me. She saw with a glance that this was the truth, and graciously didn’t press for details.
“I’m glad,” she said. Then: “Do you want this?”
I said yes and held out my hand, and she dropped into it the little ball of paper that the conjuror Giinter had tossed over his shoulder.
“I’ve got to run,” she said, sliding down off her pile of bricks. “Do you need a ride back to your hotel?”
I didn’t bother to explain that I was no longer being accommodated there, I just told her no, “And thanks for making me face the fossil. I would’ve left it undone otherwise.”
“Oh, you know what Shirin always said. The universe is all of a piece.”
“I never heard her say that with my own ears, Bonnie, but I’m glad to have heard it now.”
She hurried into the night and I followed in her wake more slowly. At the first street lamp I came to, I paused and worked open the little ball of paper, just to make sure it was as blank as it was supposed to be. On it were penciled an even dozen words:
Shirin will live—not forever, of course, but long enough for you.
A brief intermission
Half an hour later I was beginning to regret turning down Bonnie’s offer of a ride. I’d wanted to be alone, but now I was groaning for a chance to take my shoes off for ten minutes. At this hour there was nowhere to head but the park. It had occurred to me as a remote possibility that Shirin might be there, but this was just a pipe dream born of booze rather than opium. By the time I actually arrived, I had nothing in mind but stretching out on a bench and letting go, and if I couldn’t find an isolated bench, I’d find an isolated glade and let the beetles see how far they could get with putting me underground. In the event, I skipped the isolation and took the bench.
It was my first great lesson in homeless living: If you’re going to go the park-bench route, you’d better be ready to sleep like the dead. I was ready to do that when I crashed at four in the morning, but by seven I only wished! was dead. I was now personally enlightened as to why bums will take booze over food anytime. If somebody had stuck a bottle of screwtop in my hand, they wouldve had a helluva time getting it back.
Around eight I gave up the struggle and limped out in search of coffee, aspirin, and breakfast. The first place I came to was a working-man’s joint, and I looked sufficiently wasted that they just pretended I was invisible till I showed them some money. I soaked up some caffeine, some painkiller, and as many carbohydrates as I could get into my system and tried to figure out my next move. If my divination was to be trusted, I knew where Shirin was not: She was not buried under a million tons of rubble at the site of the Schauspielhaus Wahnfried.
City officials claimed the theater was empty when it blew up, but this was improbable, to say the least. If the theater was empty, why would Herr Reichmann bother to blow it up? No, Shirin was in the theater when it blew up but somehow managed to escape. Of course there was an escape route there—the bomb shelter running from the sub-subcellar of the theater to an adjacent government building. I hadn’t overlooked the existence of the shelter, I just hadn’t figured it into my reconstruction of the event, because you can’t outrun a bomb blast. When, without warning, a ceiling explosively collapses on you, the best reflexes in the world will not get you up out of a chair—much less up out of a chair and into a shelter four paces away. Only in the movies do things like this happen in slow motion. Of course, the operative words here are “without warning.” If someone had been on hand to give her a few seconds of warning, then this would account for her survival. And of course there was someone on hand to give her a warning—me, though naturally I have no recollection of it, if that’s what happened.
Succes fou
The government building was there, it was open, and people were dragging around in the dull way people do in government buildings all over the world. The stairs down to the subbasement were also still there, as was the middle-aged guardian at his desk. He watched me approach with a suspicious squint appropriate for someone he didn’t recognize. I wasn’t interested in him, I was interested in the door to the bomb shelter, which was now very securely barricaded against access, with a pair of two-by-fours screwed into place across it. I went over to inspect it, and the guardian barked at me in German, which I ignored.
I left after a minute to think things over. The workmanlike way to remove the barricade would be with a screwdriver, but I didn’t think the watchdog would allow me the leisure for that. The fastest way to remove it would be with a power saw, but I didn’t think the watchdog would help me find an electrical outlet. The fairly quick, nasty way to remove it would be with a crowbar, and I figured I could get that done before the watchdog managed to summon reinforcements. In retrospect, all this reasoning sounds completely cuckoo, but at the time, hungover, still jet-lagged, and operating on three hours of sleep on a park bench, I judged it a perfectly sensible and appropriate response to the situation. I returned in an hour with a pry bar—not quite a traditional crow, but one I thought would do the trick—cunningly hidden in the sleeve of my jacket. When I reached the barricade, I whipped it out, jammed it into place, and knew in a millisecond how wrong I was. For all the effect I was able to produce, I might as well have been trying to pry a beam off the Eiffel Tower.