[The Holy Guardian Angel appears.]
EINSTEIN
[Seeing Angel]: The unified field …
JOYCE
[Seeing Angel]: The eternal cycle …
BABCOCK
[Seeing Angel]: 358: My secret Self, my adversary, my devil, my redeemer …
CROWLEY
[Piously, to Angel]: The Rosy Cross, the eternal embrace!
[The cock crows; the Golden Dawn arises.]
JOYCE
[Intuiting the structure in time]: Children … It reproduces continually …
EINSTEIN
[Reasoning the structure in space-time]: Unity … It’s plus one and minus one …
BABCOCK
[Feeling the Force]: Fucking … It’s making love to itself all the time …
CROWLEY
ARARITA. ARARITA. ARARITA.
[The Föhn stops blowing. These our actors, as foretold, are all spirits and vanish into air, into thin air.]
JOYCE
The flowers come back every spring. Earth to earth, dust to dust, merde to merde. Every spring the flowers come back….
EINSTEIN
The nitrogen cycle.
BABCOCK
Through the dark underworld to the Golden Dawn.
CROWLEY
[Airily]: ’Tis new to you …
Joyce awoke first, hearing a birdsong in the garden. The newday sun on his face told him that it was mid-morning at least.
With tentative step, still coming back from infinity, he rose to look out the window. The garden was green as chemical dye, luminescent: lingering after-effect of the drug. From the street, voices: from a single lark on a birch branch, the song that had wakened him. It was a clear sunbright Swiss spring day, the air no longer stagnant with the wind of witchcraft.
“By God,” he said softly. It was the same world that Adam saw, naked and astonished: a loving presence.
“Is it morning?” Babcock asked, stirring half-awake in his chair.
“It is the first day of the rest of the universe,” Joyce said pensively.
Babcock sat up, eyes wide with mute questions. “My God,” he said.
“Yes,” Joyce said. “It was quite an evening, wasn’t it?”
“Did you see the Holy Guardian Angel?” Babcock asked, wholly awake, standing to stretch.
“I saw … many things,” Joyce said. “I saw, most certainly, how to write this new novel that has been haunting me.”
“I think,” said Babcock, “that I saw God and died.”
Einstein was arising from his chair now, also. “What was it Jones said about the Holy Guardian Angel, long ago?” he asked. “Something to the effect that it might come as a new scientific theory, or a work of art, or just a change of life toward compassion or religion? My God,” he added.
Joyce turned from the window, his eyes huge and amused behind the thick glasses. “I think we all saw God and died,” he said. “Each in our own way.”
“When did Crowley leave?” Einstein asked.
“Toward dawn,” Babcock said. “You two had already started to doze. I had a few words with him, I remember, while you were both already snoring.”
“Oh?” Joyce asked. “And what was the essence of that conversation, if you care to say?”
Babcock arose and smiled at the golden sunlight. “I told him about a doctor I met on the train two nights ago—the doctor you mentioned yourself a few times, named Jung. I said I would like to spend some time here, with Jung, before returning to London and the next stage of my Initiation.”
“You intend to continue your Initiation?” Joyce asked.
“When I am ready,” Babcock said. “When Dr. Jung thinks I am ready—that is.”
Einstein whistled, or sighed, a long astonished breath. “‘For He is like a refiner’s fire,’” he quoted.
Joyce turned. “And what did you get out of last nights entertainment?” he asked Einstein.
“It all came together,” Einstein replied simply. “I could see all of it, every piece, and how each related to the others. My papers on relativity are just the beginning. There is a unified field that I have to work on, as soon as I finish this paper on relativity of acceleration.” He grinned with pixie glee. “It may take me twenty years, or longer, but it will be worth it. Can you imagine? Our ideas about space are as primitive as the ancient ideas about Earth being flat. Space is curved, too. Every movement is a movement in orbit, around a mass: gravity and inertia are reifications of the curvature of space. And that’s only the beginning of what I’m beginning to see….”
“So you have no hard feelings about the drug and the incantations and all the other Stone Age shaman’s tricks Crowley used?” Joyce asked.
“None whatever,” Einstein said. “I think I learned more physics in those hours than in all my life before last night. How about yourself?”
“No hard feelings,” Joyce replied, “but if I ever see Crowley coming again, I’ll head in the other direction. One night in the caves of Eleusis is enough for a lifetime, as the Greeks knew.”
Einstein was pacing again, but more slowly. “It was as if our brains were washed out with soap,” he said. “As if—mein Gott—we were born again.”
“Yes,” Joyce said, “born again. That expression comes from the Eleusinian rituals I just mentioned. Digenes, the twice-born, were those who had gone through the whole night, in the cave of Demeter, being initiated. No historian claims to know what went on in there, but I think we can all make a good guess, can we not?”
“Those chants Crowley used,” Einstein said. “Could they possibly be the same after twenty-five hundred years?”
“Not the same,” Joyce said. ‘It was very bastard Greek, with Egyptian and Latin fragments here and there. They probably came down through the Gnostics and other heretical sects with a lot of distortion over the ages…. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the words were not exactly those used in the Eleusinian initiations. Babcock,” he said suddenly, “I won’t ask you to break your Oath, but it would not be unethical to answer two questions that occur to me. Does the Mason Word have eight letters?”
“Yes,” said Babcock.
“And the Cabalistic value of 72?” Joyce pursued.
“Yes.”
“You need tell me no more. I believe Jones was telling the truth about this Order being forty-five hundred years old.” Joyce smiled. “Just like Dur to Turicum to Zürich. The word is the clue to everything.”
“Well,” Babcock said, picking up his briefcase. “I want to thank you two remarkable gentlemen for everything. But I really must be off to see Dr. Jung.”
“He will find you a delightful case,” Joyce said laughing. “Half of your unconscious is conscious already.”
“No,” Babcock said. “It is not that simple. ‘You can empty infinity from it, and infinity remains,’ as Crowley said—quoting the Upanishads.”
“Yes,” Joyce said. “Infinity remains….”
“There is always one more hunchback,” Einstein said, smiling gently.
“Good luck, Babcock,” Joyce said with his formal manner again.
“Good luck, Sir John,” Einstein added, shaking the younger man’s hand as they went to the door.
Joyce stood alone, staring at the bookcase. “Flowers,” he muttered. “Blume. Bloom?”
Einstein returned. “Well, Jeem, what the devil do you think really happened to us?”
“I am no chemist,” Joyce said carefully, “but I will accept your metaphor about washing out the brain. I suspect that such chemicals are the universal solvents of alchemy. They dissolve the reflex arcs in the brain, so that our old ideas and old selves drown in an ocean of new signals.”
“Something like that,” Einstein said. “Well, do you really think that impossible novel of yours is finally possible?”
“It is inevitable,” Joyce said flatly. “I have at last found the structural groundplan that goes underneath everything else. Under the Odyssey, under Hamlet,
under Moses in the wilderness, under the colors and arts and body organs and all the other allegorical structures. The simple basic human truth that will hold it all up.” He laughed again. “And the critics will take decades to dig it out, if they ever do.”
“What are you talking about?” Einstein asked.
“The real theme of my book, the theme I’ve been trying to define for months and years while this was growing slowly in the back of my head.” Joyce smiled radiantly.
“So? What is it, for heaven’s sake?”
“The parable of the Good Samaritan,” Joyce said. “The simple human story that is so ordinary nobody can see it until they have their noses rubbed in it.”
“The ordinary,” Einstein said. “Of course, to you, it would have to be the ordinary.”
“Yes,” Joyce said. “Listen: we will always remember last night, because it was extraordinary. But suppose it had been ordinary. Just four men talking about this and that. And suppose one of us died this morning of a brick falling off a roof? Would not the other three remember last night, in the light of that tragedy, just as intensely as we remember the initiation we underwent? Don’t you understand? Nobody sees the ordinary until it is too late. I am—by God and by Jesus and by Allah—going to make them see it, if it takes me as long as it takes you to work out your unified field theory.”
“Well, then,” Einstein said, “we all found what we were looking for. But it was different for each of us. I suppose it always is.”
“I must be going myself,” Joyce said suddenly, “before Nora begins worrying again that I died drunk in a gutter.”
“Remember me when you return to Trieste.”
“I will, Professor.” Joyce stopped on his way to the door. “By the way, what time is it—in this system of coordinates, that is?”
Einstein removed his watch and looked at it carefully. “Exactly thirty-two minutes after eleven.”
A DELL TRADE PAPERBACK
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981 by Robert Anton Wilson
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