Sorcerer's Apprentice

by Charles Johnson

  Naturally, you have left your life outside the door. Like any life, it’s a messy thing, hardly as orderly as art, what some call life in the fast lane: the Sanka and sugar-doughnut breakfasts, bumper-to-bumper traffic downtown, the business lunches, and a breakneck schedule not to get ahead but simply to stay in one place, which is peculiar, because you grew up in the sixties speeding on methadone and despising all this, knowing your Age (Aquarian) was made for finer stuff. But no matter. Outside, across town, you have put away for ninety minutes the tedious, repetitive job that is, obviously, beneath your talents, sensitivity, and education (a degree in English), the once beautiful woman—or wife—a former model (local), college dancer, or semiprofessional actress named Megan or Daphne, who has grown tired of you, or you of her, and talks now of legal separation and finding herself, the children from a former, fright-eningly brief marriage whom you don’t want to lose, the mortgage, alimony, 1RS audit, the aging, gin-fattened face that once favored a rock star’s but now frowns back at you in the bathroom mirror, the young woman at work born in 1960 and unable to recall John Kennedy who, after the Christmas party, took you to bed in her spacious downtown loft, perhaps out of pity because your mother, God bless her, died and left you with $1,000 in debt before you could get the old family house clear—all that shelved, mercifully, as the film starts, first that frosty mountaintop ringed by stars, or a lion roaring, or floodlights bathing the tips of buildings in a Hollywood skyline: stable trademarks in a world of flux, you think, surefire signs that whatever follows—tragedy or farce—is made by people who are accomplished dream merchants. Perhaps more: masters of vision, geniuses of the epistemological Murphy.

  If you have written this film, which is possible, you look for your name in the credits, and probably frown at the names of the Crew, each recalling some disaster during the production, first at the studio, then later on location for five weeks in Oklahoma cow towns during the winter, which was worse than living on the moon, the days boiling and nights so cold. Nevertheless, you’d seen it as a miracle, an act of God when the director, having read your novel, called, offering you the project—a historical romance—then walked you patiently through the first eight drafts, suspicious of you at first (there was real money riding on this; it wasn’t poetry), of your dreary, novelistic pretensions to Deep Profundity, and you equally suspicious of him, his background in sitcoms, obsession with “keeping it sexy,” and love of Laurel and Hardy films. For this you wrote a dissertation on Derrida? Yet you’d listened. He was right, in the end. He was good, you admitted, grudgingly. He knew, as you—with your liberal arts degree—didn’t, the meaning of Entertainment. You’d learned. With his help, you got good, too. You gloated. And lost friends. “A movie?” said your poet friends. “That’s wonderful, it’s happening for you,” and then they avoided you as if you had AIDS. What was happening was this:

  You’d shelved the novel, the Big Book, for bucks monitored by the Writers Guild (West), threw yourself into fast-and-dirty scripts, the instant gratification of quick deadlines and fat checks because the Book, with its complexity and promise of critical praise, the Book, with its long-distance demands and no financial reward whatsoever, was impossible, and besides, you didn’t have it anymore, not really, the gift for narrative or language, while the scripts were easy, like writing shorthand, and soon—way sooner than you thought—the films, with their life span shorter than a mayfly’s, were all you could do. It’s a living, you said. Nothing lasts forever. And you pushed on.

  The credits crawl up against a montage of Oklahoma farm life, and in this you read a story, too, even before the film begins. For the audience, the actors are stars, the new Olympians, but oh, you know them, this one—the male lead—whose range is boundless, who could be a Brando, but who hadn’t seen work in two years before this role and survived by doing voice-overs for a cartoon villain in The Smurfs; that one—the female supporting role—who can play the full scale of emotions, but whose last memorable performance was a commercial for Rolaids, all of them; all, including you, fighting for life in a city where the air is so corrupt joggers spit black after a two-mile run; failing, trying desperately to keep up the front of doing-well, these actors, treating you shabbily sometimes because your salary was bigger than theirs, even larger than the producer’s, though he wasn’t exactly hurting—no, he was richer than a medieval king, a complex man of remarkable charm and cunning, someone both to admire for his Horatio Alger orphan-boy success and to fear for his worship at the altar of power. You won’t forget the evening he asked you to his home after a long conference, served you scotch, and then, from inside a drawer in his desk removed an envelope, dumped its contents out, and you saw maybe fifty snapshots of beautiful, naked women on his bed—all of them second-rate actresses, though the female supporting role was there, too—and he watched you closely for your reaction, sipping his drink, smiling, then asked, “You ever sleep with a woman like that?” No, you hadn’t. And no, you didn’t trust him either. You didn’t turn your back. But, then again, nobody in this business did, and in some ways he was, you knew, better than most.

  You’d compromised, given up ground, won a few artistic points, but generally you agreed to the producer’s ideas—it was his show—and then the small army of badly paid performers and production people took over, you trailing behind them in Oklahoma, trying to look writerly, wearing a Panama hat, holding your notepad ready for rewrites, surviving the tedium of eight or nine takes for difficult scenes, the fights, fallings-out, bad catered food, and midnight affairs, watching your script change at each level of interpretation—director, actor—until it was unrecognizable, a new thing entirely, a celebration of the Crew. Not you. Does anyone suspect how bad this thing really looked in rough cut? How miraculous it is that its rags of shots, conflicting ideas, and scraps of footage actually cohere? You sneak a look around at the audience, the faces lit by the glow of the screen. No one suspects. You’ve managed to fool them again, you old fox.

  No matter whether the film is yours or not, it pulls you in, reels in your perception like a trout. On the narrow screen, the story begins with an establishing wide shot of an Oklahoma farm, then in close-up shows the face of a big, tow-headed, brown-freckled boy named Bret, and finally settles on a two-shot of Bret and his blond, bosomy girl friend, Bess. No margin for failure in a formula like that. In the opening funeral scene at a tiny whitewashed church, camera favors Bret, whose father has died. Our hero must seek his fortune in the city. Bess just hates to see him go. Dissolve to cemetery gate. As they leave the cemetery, and the coffin is lowered, she squeezes his hand, and something inside you shivers, the sense of ruin you felt at your own mother’s funeral, the irreversible feeling of abandonment. There was no girl with you, but you wished to heaven there had been, the one named Sondra you knew in high school who wouldn’t see you for squat, preferring basketball players to weird little wimps and geeks, which is pretty much what you were back then, a washout to those who knew you, but you give all that to Bret and Bess, the pain of parental loss, the hopeless, quiet love never to be, which thickens the screen so thoroughly that when Bess kisses Bret, your nose is clogged with tears and mucus, and then you have your handkerchief out, honking shamelessly, your eyes streaming, locked—even you—in a cycle of emotion (yours) which their images have borrowed, intensified, then given back to you, not because the images or sensations are sad, but because, at bottom, all you have known these last few minutes are the workings of your own nervous system. That is all you have ever known. You yourself have been supplying the grief and satisfaction all along, from within. But even that is not the true magic of film.

  As Bret rides away, you remember sitting in the studio’s tiny editing room amidst reels of film hanging like stockings in a bathroom, the editor, a fat, friendly man named Coates, tolerating your curiosity, letting you peer into his viewer as he patched the first reel together, figuring he owed you, a semifamous scriptwriter, that much. Each frame, you recall, was a single frozen image, l
ike an individual thought, complete in itself, with no connection to the others, as if time stood still; but then the frames came faster as the viewer sped up, chasing each other, surging forward and creating a linear, continuous motion that outstripped your perception, and presto: a sensuously rich world erupted and took such nerve-knocking reality that you shielded your eyes when the harpsichord music came up and Bret stepped into a darkened Oklahoma shed seen only from his point of view—oh, yes, at times even your body responded, the sweat glands swaling, but it was lunchtime then and Coates wanted to go to the cafeteria for coffee and clicked off his viewer; the images flipped less quickly, slowed finally to a stop, the drama disappearing again into frames, and you saw, pulling on your coat, the nerve racking, heart-thumping vision for what it really was: the illusion of speed.

  But is even that the magic of film? Sitting back in your seat, aware of your right leg falling asleep, you think so, for the film has no capacity to fool you anymore. You do not give it your feelings to transfigure. All that you see with godlike detachment are your own decisions, the lines that were dropped, and the microphone just visible in a corner of one scene. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see the audience laugh out loud at the funny parts, and blubber when Bret rides home at last to marry Bess (actually, they hated each other on the set), believing, as you can’t, in a dream spun from accelerated imagery. It almost makes a man feel superior, like knowing how Uri Geller bends all those spoons.

  And then it is done, the theater emptying, the hour and a half of illusion over. You file out with the others, amazed by how so much can be projected onto the tabula rasa of the Big Screen—grief, passion, fire, death—yet it remains, in the end, untouched. Dragging on your overcoat, the images still an afterglow in your thoughts, you step outside to the street. It takes your eyes, still in low gear, a moment to adjust to the light of late afternoon, traffic noise, and the things around you as you walk to your Fiat, feeling good, the objects on the street as flat and dimensionless at first as props on a stage. And then you stop.

  The Fiat, you notice, has been broken into. The glove compartment has been rifled, and this is where you keep a checkbook, an extra key to the house, and where—you remember—you put the report due tomorrow at nine sharp. The glove compartment, how does it look? Like a part of your body, yes? A wound? From it spills a crumpled photo of your wife, who has asked you to move out so she can have the house, and another one of the children, who haven’t the faintest idea how empty you feel getting up every morning to finance their lives at a job that is a ghastly joke, given your talents, where you can’t slow down and at least four competitors stand waiting for you to step aside, fall on your face, or die, and the injustice of all this, what you see in the narrow range of radiation you call vision, in the velocity of thought, is necessary and sufficient—as some logicians say—to bring your fists down again and again on the Fiat’s roof. You climb inside, sit, furiously cranking the starter, then swear and lower your forehead to the steering wheel, which is, as anyone in Hollywood can tell you, conduct unbecoming a triple-threat talent like yourself: producer, star, and director in the longest, most fabulous show of all.

  POPPER’S DISEASE

  I.

  I visit my patients frequently, particularly those on farms like Anna Montgomery. She’s poor, as everyone knows, and lives with eleven cats in a dilapidated farmhouse near Murphysboro, too poor to pay my bills—that’s true, except in molasses cookies, gossip about her children in Missouri, and hot cups of milk tea—but come winter, her roof buckles under the weight of snow, her plumbing freezes, and I dutifully make the long drive from Carbondale to dig a path to Anna’s door, and check her cupboard, then her pulse.

  Now, I do not mention these weekly visits to the poor to impress you, or to suggest that without Dr. Henry Popper’s services these people would die (many problems, Lord knows, are beyond the pale of physics), but to explain how I came to be on a lonely country road after the severest snowstorm in the history of southern Illinois, and to assure you that, for all the crackpots who report unearthly phenomena, I am the most reliable of men.

  House calls help my patients, obviously, but they help me, too. They take me away for hours. They take me, now that it’s out in the open, away from my wife, Mildred. She’s fifty,’ Swedish, still has her looks, and gives piano lessons to our paper boy, Gary Freeman—I think it’s Gary this Sunday. He’s fifteen, the son of Bob Freeman, our pharmacist and one of my friends. “You’re only in the way,” says Mildred, and I daresay she’s right. She doesn’t grudge my Saturday night poker games at the Court House with George Twenhafel, the mayor, and Judge Hal Withers, who started doing push-ups, against my advice, and had some sort of attack. They’re white, I should add, and I’m not, except in the sense that perhaps everyone these days in America is white, insofar as to ask, “Who am I?” is to ask, “By what social forces have I been shaped?” While logic would have it that I am Popper, perhaps you are Popper, too—or, more precisely, aren’t we all tarred by the same cultural brush? Of course, Twenhafel, Withers, and I so cautiously avoid the topic of race during our get-togethers that the conversation seems to be about nothing but race. I’m not sure I understand them, and sometimes I’m convinced they don’t understand me. Yet I have thought this puzzle through since my student days at Tuskegee, then Harvard, and it comforts me to believe we share the same cultural presuppositions—that history, for example, is linear, not circular, reason is preferable to emotion, and that one event “causes” another, although this is clearly, as many scientists have shown, an almost superstitious act of faith.

  So my labor up frost-covered hills, alongside thick, unfenced woods, through cornfields bleached by snow gives Mildred and Gary a brief moment to practice “Fiir Elise,” and gives me four hours to myself, my black medical bag beside me—dear old satchel of tricks, tools, all Western methodology in a portmanteau, my pipe crackling softly, and steamy car window parted slightly so I don’t fall asleep. It is pleasant and quiet, out here on the road with the sky very blue, the wind cold, and the air clear. During these drives I pull hard on my pipe and ponder nothing as ordinary as my old woman’s odd ways, but instead scientific problems that have puzzled me most of my life—the ontogenesis of personality, for example, which is fully explained by the famous French neurobiologist Henri Ey in Études psychiatriques (Vol. III, 1954). There can be little doubt that personality is the product—no—the historical creation of society. The world and man, according to Ey, engender one another, but this implied—and here my thoughts shift as quickly as gears on my Buick—that, ultimately, the most intimate features of a man’s personality, those special aspects he believed individual and subjective and unique—kinks and quirks—had their origin, like Oxydol and doorknobs, in the public sphere, probably in pop culture. In other words, what we took to be essential in man throughout history might be accidental. A startling thesis, I’d have to say. But no more startling than the possibility that no man can escape the ceiling his culture sets for him, its special strengths and sicknesses. The case could be put in these terms: Certain aberrations in an Age might be so universal as to be unquestioned, and not recognized as problems for a thousand years. You’ll think this mad, and I did, too, driving ten miles an hour, heavy snow swirling down; but I had been in half the sickrooms of southern Illinois, seen patients as physically healthy as prizefighters suddenly founder, then fail, and for no material reason, far as I could see, as if, strange to say, the malady lay in the invisible realm of values and belief.

  Being an old man, I know theories are as plentiful as blackberries, so I’d be the last person to take such a playful hypothesis for true. These thoughts, however, kept my mind occupied during the drive to Anna Montgomery’s. So occupied, in fact, that I was only faintly aware of the road sheering downhill, something streaking above the trees overhead, then static and a soft, miniature voice in my radio. The snow around me, it appeared, was melting. My foot shook on the accelerator. Then my engine got the hiccups,
coughed, sputtered, and stopped cold. A shadow fell. Something blocked out the sun. The ground rumbled like eight-point-nine on the Richter scale, and I thought, Earthquake! They happen each spring in southern Illinois, but wasn’t this winter? Cranking the starter key, slamming the stick into reverse, I saw through the frosty windshield—in a shock that made me whimper and rub my sleeve against the glass—a tremendous ship, two pie plates stuck together, hurtling soundlessly toward me, low, burning the crisp November air black with radiation. It zigzagged back and forth, snapping off a colonnade of tall-shafted pines atop a hill, then toppled Wayman Presley’s fifty-foot cross (a local landmark of sorts) like a matchstick, made a hundred-degree turn without slowing down, then slogged into the earth. The explosion was stupendous, an earth-rocking blitz that ripped the roof off my car and threw me to one side of the road. Then all was quiet. For an instant I didn’t know what it was hit me. My carhood was oxidized. My radiator boiled over. Faintly, the ship’s relays and circuits clicked. Its surface burned first brick-red, then beryllium. And then something called to me from inside.

  II.

  You can well imagine the dread and despair this caused me. Flying saucers, I have read, were psychic phenomena, products of a troubled mind, particularly a mind broken by peering too long at the Abyss, but here before me in a field of brown slush, beneath a cindery sky, was a vessel the likes of which I’d never seen.(A complex ship powered by the synthesis of plutonium and 4Yb, an ytterbium isotope. No time to relate this now. You’ll find details elsewhere in this dossier.) That meant I was crazy. My mind had snapped—the result, I reasoned, of long hours at the hospital, too little sleep, talking cheerfully to patients only I knew would be dead before daybreak. What puzzled me was why lunacy had taken so long in coming. But crazy or not, I heard something squeal from inside. I was, as I say, still a physician. I picked up my bag, took two Pervitin, for I was still dazed, and forded weeds to the ship’s entrance—a sort of orifice that opened with a quick, vegetable contraction as I came near. It looked real. It felt real. Quite possibly, it was real. Cautiously, I climbed inside. Behind me the hole closed with a hiss, a sphincteral snap so suggestive of the lower regions, of entombment, caskets and crypts that for a moment I could not move. The wail grew louder. A shiver passed through my back. If my intuition was right, this ship was older than the world. The entrance blended into a maze of propellant tanks, hatches, cables, crawl spaces: a bathysphere, or so I thought at first. So far all right.