by John Pelan
As I stood by in silence I began to wonder what was wrong. Our meetings usually consisted of a perennial philosophical conversation, but today Marco had nothing to say. I studied his face as he wrote, and saw that he looked exhausted and even depressed. There was something else, too: a queer haunted, almost hunted, look around his eyes.
“How are classes?” he asked, startling me.
“Some good, some not,” I answered nonchalantly. “Teaching philosophy to disinterested freshmen is like asking your cat to come to you. They just don't give a shit.”
At this he paused in his writing and seemed to smile to himself, but his expression bespoke more bitterness than amusement. “Philosophy,” he murmured. “The crown of the intellectual disciplines. The one discipline whose goal is to comprehend all the rest.” He seemed about to say more, but then a troubled look crossed his face and he returned to his writing, leaving me to wonder why I was suddenly uneasy in his presence.
At length he set his pen down. “Do you have a few minutes before your next class?”
“A few. What's up?”
He hesitated, then said, “I want to show you something. Something I think will interest you very much.”
“Very mysterious,” I said.
He didn't laugh. Without a word he stuffed his books and notebook into his bag and we headed for the stairs.
2
In his eight-by-twelve room on the sixth floor of the dormitory, Marco held out a spiral notebook to me. I looked at him cautiously.
“Take it,” he said. “Look on the forty-sixth page.”
I took the notebook and examined it. It app eared to be nothing special, just an ordinary seventy-two-page spiral notebook with a red cover. In fact, it was the same notebook I had seen him writing in earlier, and I wondered why he hadn't shown it to me then.
The first page was crammed with his minute handwriting, and from the snippets I caught before turning to the next page I could see that the notebook was some sort oi personal journal filled with Marco's thoughts on quantum phvsics, history, and other subjects I couldn't even identify. The pages were hand numbered in the upper right-hand corner.
Remembering that I was supposed to be looking for page forty-six, I began to flip slowly through the notebook. Although the primary subject of the notebook was obscure to me, I discerned that he was conducting his own private inquiry into a certain matter, an inquiry that encompassed ideas from fantastically diverse fields of knowledge. He made great use of quotations from other writers, and I caught snatches of a theoretical treatise on quantum physics by Niels Bohr, a monograph by an obscure astronomer, the Vedanta Sutras of Sankara, and the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
On page forty-five were two quotes, one from a book with a strange name that was vaguely reminiscent of Hindu deities, and the other from a story by H. P. Lovecrait. I had heard of Lovecraft, even though I had never read any of his writings, but this other work was completely unfamiliar to me.
“What is all this?” I asked, forgetting to pretend I wasn't reading as I turned the pages. “What are you getting at here?”
“It will help you to understand if you turn to the next page,” he said, and something about his voice caused me to look up at him. His face and body were tensed, and I saw a bead of sweat run down his temple. The expression in his eyes was unreadable. I stared at him for a long moment before finally looking back down and turning the page.
I don't know what I was expecting, but it was most certainly not an elaborate drawing. Rendered in the same blue ink Marco used to record his thoughts was an incredibly intricate mandala, with shapes and forms and shadings so lush and vivid they seemed to reach out from the page. I knew that the creation of mandalas had been developed into an exquisite art form in many eastern religious traditions, but the one I was seeing now was even more breathtaking than those I had encountered in my studies of Buddhism and Hinduism. I stared at it for a moment with a feeling of wonder and admiration. Was this yet another talent of my amazing friend? If so, he was an artist of genius.
I was about to ask him to explain himself when the lines along the outer edge of the mandala began to blur. Thinking my eyes must be tired, I blinked twice and was astonished to see that the blurring had now become a shimmering. Like waves from a stone thrown into a pond, the shimmering began to spread in concentric rings, moving not outward but inward, converging toward the mandala's central point. In a few short seconds the effect had taken over the entire picture, so that I seemed to be seeing it through ringed waves of summer-pavement heat.
Dumbfounded, I tried to look up at Marco but found that I couldn't. My eyes were locked against my will on the increasingly obscene drawing, and without warning 1 felt a wave of revulsion wash over me like rotten seawater. The sensation was so strong that I felt I would vomit, yet struggle as I might, I could not look away. The nausea increased when I saw dark, angular shapes begin to appear at the edges o” the drawing and move back and forth like tiny fangs.
Then in an instant all motion stopped. A dark spot no bigger than a pinhead formed at the center of the picture and began to grow, appearing to eat away at the very page, until I felt I was actually looking through it into a black abyss seething with half-seen forms. Living forms. Hungry forms. I could see sharp protuberances, points, spikes, in all directions, and I heard them clicking and grinding together. Beneath this sound was another, a firm, monotonous undertone that seemed variously to be a gibbering, a hissing, a screaming, a roaring. Suddenly a flash of comprehension that seemed more like a darkness than an illumination blossomed somewhere in the tiny corner of my mind that I could still call my own, and I realized that I was staring into a nightmare abyss of endless teeth.
Then I felt the attention of a massive and malevolent intelligence turned upon me, and as the first of trillions of teeth began to sink into my mind, I knew with absolute, horrible certainty that this nightmare abyss was also starirg into me.
3
“What the hell happened?” I gasped. I was lying on Marco's bed as he looked for something in his medicine cabinet. He ignored me as he brought out a plastic container, uncapped it, and shook two tiny white pills into his hand.
“Take these,” he said, handing them to me with a bottle of water from his refrigerator. I swallowed them without thinking and repeated my question. “What happened, Marco? What happened to me?” We both knew my anger was a defense against the fear I didn't want to acknowledge.
I was terrified, in a true, deep sense of the word that I had never imagined. Marco had grabbed the notebook out of my hands just as I was on the verge of being swallowed by whatever was reaching out for me.
He explained that he had been obliged to rip it from my grasp, even though I was making horrified, guttural sounds of revulsion at it. The room and the normal world had come back quickly, but as if from a great distance, rather like those occasional mornings when I wake to the feeling that yesterday was aeons ago.
Marco sat down at his desk and looked at the notebook that lay there, now closed. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” he hissed to himself. “It might have killed you!”
“What might have killed me!” I yelled. I could hear the hysteria rising again in my own voice.
“Just calm down,” he said, turning his full attention upon me. “I gave you a couple of muscle relaxers. You'll feel more calm in a few minutes.” He took a deep breath and let it all out, sinking deep into his chair. Even in my near-shock condition I could sense the hopelessness he radiated.
After a long silence he started to speak, his gaze on the far wall. “Jason, do you think people want truth? Do people truly want to know the reality of their lives?”
Conversations of this sort made up much of my life at that time, and either the familiarity of a philosophic discussion, or perhaps the drug Marco had given me—or perhaps a combination of the two—began to have a calming effect. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but he went on as if I weren't there.
“To know w
hy we are here, why we live and die, why it thunders and rains? Most of all, to know who and what we are. Is this not the primal human motivation?” My head was still clearing, and I had no idea what he was getting at.
“I've tried for many years,” he said quietly. 'I've devoted myself to the search for truth. A noble pursuit, to be sure. We all say we want it. Even nihilists think their insight is better than ignorance. But what if,” he said, turning to look at me for the first time since he had started this monologue, “what if this is all wrong? What if the thing people really want and need is illusion?” He warmed to his subject and leaned forward, gripping the edge of his chair. “What if the truth, the ultimate, all-encompassing truth of the universe, is unutterably terrible? What if reality itself is evil?”
I stared at him. Sweat stood out on his forehead and upper lip. His eyes bored into me, and for a split second I thought I could sense the same roaring black presence 1 had felt just moments before.
“What you're saying isn't new, and you know it,” I told him. “The idea has been around for millenia. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche expressed it just over a century ago “
“So have a thousand horror writers and college students,” he shot back, “but what I'm talking about isn't theory—it's real. You can't distance yourself from it just by recalling who first thought of it, or what he or she said about it. After what you've just experienced, you know something of what I mean.”
I had no reply, because he was right. Whatever had happened to me had made me, at least for the moment, more open to strange ideas. My usual self-absorption, my narcissism, my obliviousness to my surroundings as I indulged in my own interior monologue—all these defenses had been stunned, and in the unfamiliar calm of interior silence I thought I could hear the sound of something terrible approaching.
He must have seen the confusion on my face, because he cut his speech short and handed me the notebook. “Read it,” he said. “It will answer most of your questions. I probably don't need to tell you to avoid the mandala.” He took my arm and gripped it so tightly that I was sure he must be bruising me. “Do not, under any circumstances, look at that picture again.”
“But what… what is it?” I managed weakly. “Isn't it yours? Didn't you draw it?”
“In a way, yes. Read the notebook. We'll talk more when you finish it.”
I was in no shape to argue. I rose unsteadily to my feet and told Marco good-bye, wondering why I had the strange feeling that I wouldn't see him again. Before I really knew what I was doing, I was in the elevator and headed for the ground floor. Then I was walking out of the dormitory and across campus to my apartment. Then I was unlocking the door and stepping inside.
It was only then that I realized I was carrying the notebook. I dropped it like a snake, walked into the bedroom, collapsed onto the bed, and fell immediately asleep. While I slept I dreamed that Marco was standing outside my door talking with some strangers. I called to him that the door was unlocked, that he could come inside, but when I saw the knob begin to turn it dawned on me that he would bring the strangers inside with him, and I knew that I really didn't want to meet them.
Consciousness didn't return until the next morning.
4
The next week of my life was devoted to reading Marco's notebook, and it was the most grueling experience I have ever endured. This was partly due to the fact that the speculations on astronomy and physics were practically incomprehensible to me, but there was another reason as well: a new sense or faculty seemed to have been opened within me, a sense that was distressingly responsive to the dark suggestions unfolding on the pages before me. As I read, I began to understand the oppressive weight of the worldview under which Marco labored. I also noticed that the very same despair seemed to have taken root in my own heart, and was in fact being nourished by my reading.
Much of the notebook was filled with long quotations carefully transcribed by Marco from a wide array of books. Schopenhauer figured highly, as did Nietzsche. I had first encountered their harsh and bitter philosophies during my undergraduate years, but now it was as if I were truly understanding them for the first time. Recorded here was Schopenhauer's famous criticism of the assertion, so common among a certain variety of philosopher, that evil is merely the absence oi good: “I know of no greater absurdity,” he wrote, “than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.”
Also recorded was Nietzsche's amplificatioT of this idea:
Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous.… Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget-even sober spirits—that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degiee. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it fully would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured by how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure —or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be tiinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.
The quotes went on, page after page, interspersed with Marco's own notes and observations, and after two days of reading I began to despair of making heads or tails of it all. The notebook seemed to be merely a particularly pessimistic collection of aphorisms and observations. But then I came to a quote from the Indian philosopher Sankara, and the outline of the puzzle began to take shape in my mind. Sankara wrote, “With half a stanza I will declare what has been said in thousands of volumes: Brahman is real, the world is false, the soul is only Brahman, nothing else.”
I had long been acquainted with the Hindu idea that the material world is actually maya, illusion, a mirage resting upon the absolute reality which the Vedantic Hindus call Brahman. But the Eastern philosophies all teach that release from illusion and the subsequent realization of ultimate reality is a wonderful experience. The very word moksa, which the Hindus use to refer to this experience, means “liberation.” Marco, on the other hand, seemed to be perverting the Eastern beatific vision by positing that the uniform reality underlying physical existence is an utter nightmare. And if “the soul is only Brahman”—I couldn't bear to follow this line of thought to its conclusion.
Of the scientific line of thought interwoven with the philosophy, all I could comprehend was that Marco was struggling with some unresolved issue in quantum physics. The mathematics was beyond me, but from the sparse text notes I could gather enough to grasp the bare essence of the matter, which had something to do with the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. I read that the equations used in quantum mechanics work— everything from television to the hydrogen bomb attests to that—but no satisfactory explanation for their meaning, for their implications at the macroscopic level of existence, had yet been established.
On the subatomic level, I read, particles flash into and out of existence for no discernible reason, and the behavior of any single particle is apparently arbitrary and usually unpredictable. If there is a cause or “purpose” behind this behavior, it is one that the human mind is perhaps not structured to comprehend. In other words, for all we know, the only ruling principles at the most basic level of physical reality may well be what we call madness and chaos.
This predicament of knowledge had remained essentially unchanged for seventy years, and Marco had the audacity to believe that he'd begun to solve the riddle hat had haunted the keenest scientific minds for nearly a century. Unfortunately, his ideas were mostly expressed in mathematical terms that were incomprehensible to me, and so I was left with a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been a revolutionary theory.
As I read through the notebook I could fee;! revulsion rising inside me. At times it became so strong that I was forced to stop for several hours; once for more than a day. Finally I realized that what I was feeling could only be described as horror, a word whose referent
I had never really known. Marco's comment about the human need for illusion began to make sense to me, for if this puzzle pointed to reality, then I would rather be deceived.
It was with great trepidation that on the sixth day of reading I turned to the forty-fifth page of the notebook, the last page before the one containing the drawing that had begun this nightmare. Slowly I read through the first of the two quotes, the one from the book with the Hindu-sounding title (whose name I have long since forgotten). As its significance became clear to me, I felt the words themselves begin to sink into my mind like barbs.
Foolish soul, wilt thou comprehend the All, the great Central Mystery? Man's place is the middle. Thou ap-proachest the Gate in both the Greatest and the Least. In the face of the night sky, at the core of a dust mote—the same One. Wretched is he who hears the call, but more wretched still the one who answers it.
The final quotation was from a story by H. P. Lovecraft, and in the margin beside it Marco had written, “The Capstone.”
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
5