OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  "How do you work it out?"

  "In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational--and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."

  "Voluntary euthanasia?"

  "Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself-the state would do it."

  "Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as idealism? Why--it's a sin--!"

  "Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."

  "How many people would do it?"

  I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another--my own--before long--"

  "Good God! I'm sorry--Phil--!"

  I laughed and he relaxed--visibly.

  "The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve--"

  "No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own instincts.

  Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."

  "Appalling," Tom said.

  "Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."

  We sat awhile.

  "What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"

  "Woodsy," I answered.

  I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"

  "Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."

  "The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert.

  And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."

  "Not many factories, anyhow," I said.

  "No? Why?"

  "Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."

  "Cities, do you think?"

  "Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."

  "Villages? Small towns?"

  "Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."

  "Why?"

  "That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"

  "How come they'd all be bright?"

  "Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."

  "Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."

  "You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."

  "Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"

  "Yeah."

  "Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."

  "Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of society-defeating hordes of nitwits--

  as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight.

  Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."

  "Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."

  "Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net result is genetic decline."

  "What else-in the better world?"

  "No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses--without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."

  "And what would those manners be?" "Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."

  "You're welching!"

  "Not exactly. I suspect--in the better world--sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."

  "Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."

  "People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids--not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people.

  Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."

  "It's hard to believe," Tom said.

  "Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth--these days."

  We went on talking for a long while about the better world.

  As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.

  By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists-right?"

  "No."

  "Doesn't it follow--in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."

  "The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting neuroses and psychoses--individually. And to stop the massive neuroses and psychoses of nations and races."

  "So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."

  "Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."

  "But what in hell would people do?"

  "Oh--they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule--which nobody practices anyhow--is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct--what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it--that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life--as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."

  "Biological immortality," Tom said.

  "Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of inst
inct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."

  "Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."

  "Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."

  "And have been, you think, for a long while?"

  "Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"

  "Sure."

  "In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision.

  We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the bottom--because human vision is inverted."

  "It is."

  "We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--

  inverted."

  "So what?"

  "So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion.

  Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven."

  "An argument for empiricism."

  "Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is--an argument for refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul--call it what you will--until the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological future of men on earth.

  Then look over some people who, as a group, reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.

  "I've pointed out--and brighter men have pointed out before me--that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma, orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible with gospels--the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific, materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more religious, in the worst sense of that word--more superstitious--

  more compulsive--or more absurd."

  "What are you driving at?"

  "Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect, it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith. Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual--it ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by noting the Russian technique of debate.

  Pure theology. Pure nonsense."

  "I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.

  ' I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. The calm, collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works. It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."

  Tom sat stiff for a minute or so. "Essays?"

  "Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."

  "Golly."

  "Why 'golly'?"

  "We need that tome."

  "Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would take about five hundred years before people began to understand generally the ideas he elicited."

  "More books might help shorten the interval."

  I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a byline.

  Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again."

  "You just write off your whole civilization--like that."

  "It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."

  "Usefully."

  "Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose."

  Tom looked at his watch--and sighed. "Gotta go."

  "I thought we were to have a long evening together."

  "So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper.

  There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it."

  We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures.

  "You seem all right," he said.

  ' I'm all right."

  "I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it."

  "Thanks."

  "Need anything?"

  He meant medicine. I said I didn't.

  We both waved and a cab stopped.

  He thanked me rather formally for dinner.

  "So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."

  "I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores."

  "I mean for yourself."

  "Hope isn't for yourself," I said.

  "Night!"

  His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.

  The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.

  I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.

  A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose.

  "Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--"

  All that
was coming up was the stone moon.

  Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.

  I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.

  I wanted to spit in them.

  I had an impulse to look around for a tooth--something to have mounted for a watch charm. I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist. I didn't feel so lonely after that.

  10

  It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment.

  I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work.

  Then the phone rang.

  I was sure it would be Ricky.

  Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up.

  Ricky would just be missing me.

  I jumped over to the phone.

  It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas.

  "Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps.

  "Yeah--me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky.

  "This is Gwen. Can you talk?"

  "Gwen?"

  "We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault."

  The redheaded girl at Hattie's--the one who looked studious and unaffected--the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one.

  "Oh," I said. "Sure."

  "I'm not--interrupting--anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor--and you sat up late. I just asked her."

  "I was working."

  "And I was hoping you were lonesome."

  "Well, I am, as a matter of fact."

  "Goody! I'll take a cab."

  I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help--and solitude eating me.