by John Norman
Henry was very young then, only seven or eight, and he wanted back to the basement. So we brought him back, late at night, when the neighbors would be in bed, and father carried him below. Henry made his little noises, his contented-child noises, and we knew that we had done the right thing. Too, it was expensive to keep him in the institution, and no one knew, or very few knew, he was still in the house, so there wasn’t much wrong with keeping him there. You don’t think so, do you? Sometimes people would look at us in a way we did not like, but they never spoke of Henry. Clearly they were afraid of him. We grew more afraid, too, as he grew older. We did not let anyone except the family into the basement.
We kept Henry there, in the basement. Only the family, and a doctor, knew he was there.
He seemed content with that habitat, the darkness, in particular, for he seemed to have some sense of light, or some sense of simple radiation, through the skin perhaps, which he did not care for, and the damp, and the small things that might move in the darkness. We think he may have eaten some of them. He was born without eyes, and retarded. His skin was pulpy, and rather slick, moist, in fact. He liked the basement, and would insist on remaining there. It was not that we minded. Henry was not pleasant to look at, with the large head, hairless, the smoothness where one thought his eyes should be. There were small holes on the side of his head, and he certainly seemed to be able to hear, or feel vibrations, or sense, in some respects. You must understand that it wasn’t cruelty on the family’s part that he was kept in the basement. It was Henry’s choice, as much as ours, maybe more so, though it was convenient that he was kept out of sight. You can’t blame us, can you? What would you have done? Pretty much the same, I would suppose. A neighbor had once seen him on the sofa, a friend of my mother’s, when she was still alive, in the parlor, lying there, not easy to make out at first, and had screamed, and run away. So Henry stayed in the basement. Perhaps we had hoped he might die sooner there, except father, but that is not the sort of hope that one talks much about, not the sort of hope that one confesses before the candles, when one puts the coin in the slot, lights the candle, and kneels there, praying there, before the statue, that someone else’s will be done, when you really want your will to be done, and hope that someone else will notice, someone important, and do that, because you only asked that the other’s will be done. Surely that should count for something, one’s selflessness, and such. Else what would be the point of it?
So why did Henry continue to live, for so many years? To be sure, we never saw him die. It was only that one day he was not there in the basement any longer. He was gone. No one saw him leave. I think he may be somewhere, not really dead. Or maybe dead, but somewhere else.
There is the anomaly, you see.
And there was no blood on the stairs.
Father tried to teach Henry, and Henry would listen carefully, or seem to, but nothing much came of it. Henry could hear, we were sure, but he could not make human noises, and, of course, he could not see. Father would put a little water into his hand, and say “Water,” or touch his arm in a certain way, or tap the palm of his hand in a certain way, and the same with other objects, bread, straw, the rope and such. But Henry would not repeat any of this, nor, as far as we could tell, understand any of it. Father would leave him then, and go to his room and sometimes cry, and Henry would remain sitting there, on the floor of the basement.
We know, or suppose, that rocks cannot think. They don’t have a central nervous system, for example. On the other hand, if a rock could think, I am not sure we would understand its thinking. Surely it would have to be very different from ours. What sense would it make of the universe? Would it have a sense of its place in the meaning of things, or would it be a self-contained universe, like that of one’s own sensations, one’s own room, one’s own basement, so to speak, a fixed, heavy, stable, contented universe. Plants have obviously some irritability, but, too, one supposes they cannot think, or, if they could, it seems unlikely we could understand it. It would be very different from our thinking, discursive, divisional, naming, numbering, dividing and conquering with semantic weapons. What are the thoughts of a blade of grass, of a tree? There is nothing there we would recognize as thought, I would suppose, but, doubtless, there is something there. And we would not understand it, or I would suppose not. Maybe it would be like hearing a color or seeing a sound. Things get more complicated, as one inches up the phylogenetic scale. That’s the scale where we put ourselves at the top, which, one supposes, is each species’ privilege, ours as well as any other’s. An amoeba, for example, will not ingest its own pseudopodium though the pseudopodium is organic, but will draw back from contact with it. Is this thought, or some sense of self, or physical or chemical disaffinities, like the repulsion of like poles? Can coelenterates think? One suspects they can feel. Perhaps the grasshopper is aware that the small boy has twisted its legs from its body. Does it object? Rats can think. They have the rudiments of a tradition, warning young rats away from remembered poisons. Mice can learn. That has been shown. We have respect for primates, or some of them, chimpanzees, for example, and dolphins puzzle us, and make us uneasy. Certainly we can think, and we can know this from the inside, from within the walls of the basement, so to speak. Are there other basements? Are there other ways to think? Are we actually at the top of the phylogenetic scale, on the summit of which we have complacently enthroned ourselves? Does the ladder tower above us, with rungs we cannot see? Are there other scales, other ladders? I ask these questions because, of late, I have thought more and more about Henry, and the anomaly.
The basement is not a pleasant place, at least for us, though some life forms might find it congenial. Henry did, as far as we can tell. The basement is a damp place. It is dark. It has a dirt floor, and dirt walls. The house is old. We never finished the basement. One supposes it has its own life forms, tiny things, trivial, not important.
When Henry grew older, he used to sit for long hours, not moving, maybe like the rock, the tree, things like that. He was retarded. He was not simply ignorant; he was stupid.
I am not even sure Henry was human. Maybe he was more like those bodies, kept alive on machines.
I think he liked father. Sometimes he would reach out with his pudgy fingers, to touch him, it seemed tenderly.
We know the universe exists for us, and that something has made it for us, and that we are the best thing, and the highest thing, in the universe, except maybe for the maker of it, who is like us, very much like us, and things it made, too, like us, very much like us. That is comforting, to know that all of this, these galaxies and universes, and mysteries, are all for us. Otherwise they would be very scary.
The world, you see, is like a watch, and the parts fit together. And if it is like a watch, then there must be a watchmaker. It is very simple. And very clear. How the parts go together, or mostly. But I have wondered sometime if the world is really so much like a watch. Maybe it is like something else, like a plant, or a spore, or a fungus, or an egg.
Father died five years ago.
In the last year, when father was very ill, he would come into the basement to sit with Henry. He did not try to teach Henry any longer. Henry could not learn. Or we supposed not. Once, in the last days, a few days before the end, Henry put out again his pudgy fingers and touched father, so tenderly, or seemingly so. Oddly, now, it seemed that it was he who was pitying father, and not the other way around. It seemed, oddly, as though he were sad, and were trying to comfort father. I do not think that he could have known father was ill, or I suppose not. How could he have known? Perhaps, instead, after all these long years, he sensed how much pain he had caused father, and the rest of us, how much torment, how much grief, and inconvenience, but I do not think Henry could have understood any of that. He felt for my father’s hand, and pressed one finger into it, and described in my father’s palm a small, turning, crawling line. My father told us about this, but, at the time, he did no
t make anything out of it. It made no sense. Still, it was almost, my father told us, at that time, as if Henry were trying to tell him something, or teach him something. Much as my father, years earlier, had tried to teach him, and by such similar, primitive methods. But father, of course, at that time, could no more understand what Henry meant, if he meant anything, than Henry could fathom the simple signals and devices of his own earlier, futile tutelage.
In the last night, before he died, my father was delirious, his consciousness perhaps disordered by some of the very drugs given to him to alleviate his pain. Then he seemed to have a moment of clarity, and half rose from bed. But the clarity was illusory, for he cried out, laughing, “We are the cattle of the worm god! That is our meaning! That is why we have been placed on earth, to feed his children!”
We tried to quiet him, and he lay back.
“Are you all right?” we begged.
“I am content,” he said. “It is good to have lived. Love life. It is beautiful.”
He died shortly thereafter.
Henry is gone now. I think we would have seen him if he had crawled through the kitchen. He must have done so, but I do not believe it. It is not simply because there was no blood on the steps.
It is rather because of the anomaly.
In the wall of the basement there was an opening, a round hole, about eighteen inches in diameter, leading into a long, dark, damp tunnel. The walls of the tunnel were slick, as though coated with a whitish mucous. The whole had not been there a few hours earlier, when I had taken his pans to the basement. I touched Henry to tell him the food and water were there, but he only looked up, lifting his placid, eyeless face to me. It seemed radiant. He smiled. That was an hour or so before his absence was noted.
I do not think anything human made that hole.
I wonder, sometime, if Henry did not have some sort of understanding, perhaps one very different from ours. And that something understood him, as well. Perhaps something very different from us cared for him, and loved him, in ways we could not understand. Perhaps it gathered Henry onto itself, perhaps the only one of our kind so elevated, or blessed.
When I had the courage I took a flashlight and crawled into the tunnel. It was several yards long, and, ascending, opened into the garden where the young Henry, on the rope held by my father, had played.
It was then night, and I looked up from the hole, at the stars.
Of Dreams and Butterflies
It is natural to distinguish between reality and illusion. The usual way this is done, given the fact that illusions, dreams, and such, can occasionally possess great force and vivacity, so to speak, to borrow two expressions from the troublesome 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who looked into these matters, and was good at backgammon, is basically in terms of a sort of epistemic authoritarianism possessed by reality, a tendency to cross borders and trespass, whether we like it or not, an experiential stubbornness and intrusiveness, an experiential invasiveness and violence, so to speak, which insolently imposes itself upon us, one over which we have no control—and coherence. In short, we can’t do much about reality. I can’t build a brick wall by thinking about it, but I could be injured if I walk into one. Reality seems to be spontaneous, so to speak, and simply there, to be dealt with. I can think about a peanut-butter sandwich but the peanut-butter jar remains in the pantry. To be sure, there are some thoughts we can’t help either, and which simply show up, which impose themselves on us, such as Susan in her slip, or less. But clearly there is a serious difference between thinking about Susan, and Susan, or, at least, we commonly suppose so. So, to summarize this point, we usually distinguish between reality and illusion in virtue of two criteria: involuntariness and lawfulness; reality happens to us; we cannot control it; and, secondly, reality is coherent; it fits together; we don’t expect strawberry jam from the cold-water faucet, and, if we get it, we grow suspicious. Erasers which talk to us cast doubt on their own credibility. Reality, you see, stands on its own two feet, and keeps its balance. Illusions on the other hand, whereas they may occasionally share a certain spontaneity or “thereness” with reality, tend to be far less stable, far less coherent. They come and go in a way that trees, as far as we know, don’t. An obvious example is the dream, which fails to cohere with waking life, often luckily.
There is a story about a Chinese philosopher, perhaps you have heard it, who allegedly dreamed for three consecutive nights that he was a butterfly and awakened on the third morning wondering if he were a man dreaming he was a butterfly or if he were a butterfly dreaming he was a man. This is much like the story of the butterfly who allegedly dreamed for three consecutive nights that he was a man and awakened on the third morning wondering if he were a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man dreaming he was a butterfly.
Without attempting to resolve this issue as to who was what, or which was which, which task we willingly consign to interested zoologists, please note the lesson implicit in these two illuminating, if eccentric, anecdotes.
If illusions were indistinguishable from what we normally take as reality, with respect to stability, givenness, coherence, and such, then we would have, for all practical purposes, as far as we could tell, two realities, perhaps quite different from one another. Why should we not, logically, partake of two lives, in two worlds, entering each as we awaken from the other? Presumably we would have no sense of which, if either, or both, were real.
I mention these matters in order to contextualize, however briefly, and inadequately, a story told to me in the course of a long walk I once took in the company of a friend of mine, who is a practicing clinical psychologist. It deals with one of his cases, one which, I gather, he wished to share with someone, but one which he felt it would be injudicious to introduce into the professional literature. I think the reason for that will be shortly evident. In any event, I withhold his name, first, in the interests of privacy, and, secondly, in virtue of nature of the case itself, in which it seems, rather obviously, an anomaly is involved. He has, however, I hasten to mention, authorized this account. Had he not done so I would have been reluctant to bring it to the attention of the public. You will shortly see why.
The case dealt with what appeared to be either a hoax or an unusually extreme mental aberration. There was no question of institutionalizing the individual in question, whom we shall call Paul, because he appeared to be, other than for his supposed aberration, in no way dissociated from reality. He functioned effectively and pleasantly in his work and personal relationships. Indeed, in most respects it seems he would have been regarded as a congenial, moral, productive, and healthy human being. It was one of those rare cases in which either there was nothing whatsoever the matter with him, or something very much the matter with him, categorically and devastatingly so.
Initially my friend, after his first dealings with Paul, which were in all respects routine and reassuring, was convinced that Paul was in little, if any, need of counseling, but, of course, there remained an interest in why he had sought counseling in the first place, which seemed to require some explanation, and suggested that it might be worth while scheduling an additional appointment or two. Paul did not impress my friend as the sort of fellow whose interests in counseling were likely to be either superficial or academic. Presumably there was something involved here which was not altogether obvious. Paul’s difficulties, if they may be so termed, as it turned out, when he at last felt sufficiently at ease with my friend to speak more freely, had to do with a series of unusually vivid dreams. This, in itself, would be nothing unusual, but the reports on these dreams were unusually graphic, and suggested the complexity, richness, and detail of a carefully prepared, meticulous fabrication. This was not the way that dreams were remembered. At one point, my friend was prepared, with disgust, to dismiss Paul as the conscious perpetrator of some sort of pointless and inexplicable joke, or hoax, but, as it gradually became clear, or at least seemed to, that Paul
was desperately, helplessly, even tragically, serious about these peculiar episodes, my friend began to suspect that he was dealing with something far more serious than a prank or fabrication, that his patient was profoundly and seriously disturbed.
Paul, you see, seemed to believe in these dreams.
At the risk of inviting not only skepticism but derision on the part of the reader, I will briefly, and bluntly, state the nature of Paul’s delusion, as it was explained to me by my friend.
Paul, it seems, believed himself to be living two lives, one he shared with us, in our time and place, and one he did not share with us, though perhaps he shared it with others, in another time and place.
This was the nature of his delusion.
When he, fearing and fighting sleep as he might, eventually fell asleep, it seemed he awakened, as nearly as we can tell, as a simple peasant, a young man of his own age, in 14th century France. When he fell asleep at the end of a long day of toil in that life, he would awaken in his bed, in the life with which we are familiar, in his apartment in Manhattan.
Putting aside the more obvious possibilities of pointless fabrication and such, this delusion has its fascinations. It is easy to see, given certain suppositions, research, and such, how he might have somehow, subconsciously, generated these dreams. An analogy would be a fixed series of self-induced hallucinations, but that would be only an analogy, as what we are dealing with here is a series of dreams. One does not commonly think of hallucinating in one’s dreams, certainly not in any familiar sense of hallucination. My friend’s major interest here, aside from the awesome detail and clarity of these dreams, was what end these dreams might possibly serve in Paul’s psychic life. Why, so to speak, was he doing this? It did not seem they were wish fulfillments, at least in any familiar or comprehensible sense of such things. He found these dreams unwanted, and disturbing. He was not, in this other life, the dream life, an aristocrat, a holder of power, a brave knight, an esteemed burgher, a rich merchant, or such. It seems he was only an ignorant, indeed, illiterate, peasant, confined, it seemed, to a life of toil, filth, poverty, misery, superstition, and ignorance.