Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  Crompton turned his gaze inward. ‘Dan?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Stack said.‘I’m practicing introspection.’

  ‘There’s someone here wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Tell them to go away,’ Stack said.

  ‘Tell them yourself,’ Crompton said, and dived down into his own unconscious for a brief and well-deserved nap.

  Stack reluctantly took over the body and its various sensoria. ‘Yeah, what is it?’

  ‘Daniel Stack!’ the great voice from the sky bellowed. ‘This is the time of your reckoning. I am the spokesman for the men you have murdered. Do you remember them, Dan? There was Argyll, Lanigan, Lange, Tishler, and Wey. They have been waiting a long time for this moment, Dan, and now –’

  ‘What was that last name?’ Stack asked.

  ‘Wey. Charles Xavier Wey.’

  ‘I never killed anybody by that name,’ Stack stated. ‘The others, yes. Wey, no.’

  ‘Could you have forgotten?’ the voice enquired.

  ‘Are you kidding? Do you think I’m blasé or something, not to remember who I’ve killed. Who is this Wey and why is he trying to hang a bum rap on me?’

  There was a brief silence broken only by the hiss of rain falling into the fiery fissure. Then the voice said, ‘The case of Mr. Wey will be looked into later. But now, Dan Stack, here are your dead come to greet you!’

  Again there was silence. Then an irritable voice from somewhere could be heard to say, ‘All right, black out the garden set. Christ, isn’t anyone on the ball around here?’

  Then there came darkness of a density like unto infinite layers of marmoset fur.

  42

  Alarmed by the proceedings, Crompton took over control of the body again from Stack. Crompton saw that he was standing in a large, high-ceilinged room painted buff and brown, with tall thin windows and a subtle aroma of legality. A placard at the rear read: superior court of karmic instrumentality, section viii, justice o. t. grudge presiding. It looked like any American small-town courtroom: rows of wooden benches for spectators and interested parties; tables and chairs for lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. The judge’s bench was raised to dominating height, and to its right was the witness stand.

  The bailiff called out, ‘All rise.’

  Justice Obadiah Grudge came in briskly, a small, mid-dleaged man, mostly bald, with rosy cheeks and glinty blue eyes. ‘Sit down, if you please,’ he said. ‘We are today considering the case of Daniel Stack, a sentient being whose loose ends are presently to be tied up, if I may be permitted the colloquialism, in a manner appropriate and peculiar to the Law of Causality as it is commonly understood in this corner of the galaxy. Come forward, Mr. Stack.’

  Crompton said, ‘I am appearing for him, your honor. He is an aspect of my personality, my ward, as you people would understand if you looked over the details of the case. As such he cannot be considered a discrete individual in his own right. Stack is not in fact a proper person or personage as defined by common usage in the school of hard knocks, if I may be permitted the analogy. He is a mere aspect of a greater personality; of myself, with all modesty, from whom he became detached due to circumstances beyond our control. Hence it is our contention that ‘Daniel Stack’ cannot be tried as an individual since his individualism so-called is merely a facet of myself, to whom he stands in the relationship of shadow to object, if I may coin a phrase.’

  The judge asked, ‘Are you putting yourself forward, Mr. Crompton, to stand for Stack’s alleged crimes?’

  ‘In no way, your honor! I, Alistair Crompton, have committed no such crimes, therefore I could not be tried for them even if I so wished. But I maintain that Stack cannot be tried either, for the reasons of nonindividuality previously stipulated, and because he has no body peculiar to himself upon which punishment could be visited.’

  ‘No body?’ asked Judge Grudge.

  ‘None, your honor. Stack’s own body has perished. He is a temporary lodger in the body of myself. Alistair Crompton. I am in the process of integrating myself, which might be viewed as a sentence of death upon whatever meager individualism Stack possesses, since he will cease to exist thereafter except as a symbolically manifested aspect of myself. Since Stack’s body has perished and his personality will soon cease to exist, I plead habeas corpus: there is no mind of body here answerable for the alleged crimes of Daniel Stack.’

  The judge chuckled. ‘That’s a clutch of pretty arguments, Mr. Crompton. But I need not even consider them, for they are beside the point. The most interesting consideration you raise is the question of what is part of something else and what is discrete, complete and competent in itself. But that is merely a philosophical question. The legal position is quite clear, and has been established by precedents too numerous to cite. Suffice it to say that, legally, everything may be considered complete and entire on one level, yet part of something else on another level. Therefore your position, or mine, is qualitatively no different from Dan Stack’s. We are all responsible for what we do, Mr. Crompton, no matter how minuscule our qualifications to uniqueness and wholeness.’

  ‘But your honor, where does that leave me? I am in the unfortunate position of sharing my body with Stack. Therefore any judgment passed upon him will be visited also – and most unfairly – upon me, as well.’

  That’s the human situation, Mr. Crompton,’ the judge said gently.

  ‘But I am innocent of Stack’s alleged crimes. It is fundamental to the tradition of jurisprudence from which we both spring that the innocent shall not suffer with the guilty, even at the cost of freeing the guilty!’

  ‘But you are not innocent,’ Judge Grudge pointed out. ‘You are responsible for Stack, and he for you.’

  ‘But how can that be, your honor? We were physically and mentally separated when Stack was doing his alleged crimes.’

  ‘Schizophrenia is no excuse under karmic law,’ the judge stated. ‘All aspects of a common mind/body are responsible for each other. Or to put it in simpler language, the left hand is liable to punishment when the right hand steals the jam.’

  ‘Exception,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Overruled,’ the judge said. ‘Let Stack come forth and the trial begin.’

  43

  Crompton relinquished control. Stack took over.

  ‘Daniel Stack?’ the judge asked.

  ‘Yes, your honor,’ Stack said.

  ‘Here are your accusers.’ The judge gestured at a bench directly in front of him. Upon that bench sat four men who looked like they had been in a major car accident about five minutes ago. They were bloody and wounded, and they looked pretty grim about it, just like in a horror movie.

  Stack walked over to the bench. Accused and accusers looked each other over. Then Stack nodded in greeting, and the others nodded back.

  ‘Well now,’ Stack said, ‘I never thought I’d be seeing you fellows quite so soon. How you been keeping?’

  Abner Lange, the oldest of the victims, said, ‘We’re okay, Dan. What about yourself?’ He spoke with difficulty due to the ax blow that had staved in his face.

  ‘Well, I’m in a peculiar situation,’ Stack said. ‘But it’d take me too long to tell you about it. We might as well get down to business. Do you boys have some complaint against me?’

  The men on the bench looked at each other uneasily. Then Abner Lange said, ‘Well, Dan, we’re here on account of you killed us. We are the inescapable consequences of your actions, and therefore we constitute a major portion of your undischarged karma. That’s what they told me it was about, but I don’t claim to completely understand it.’

  ‘I don’t understand it at all,’ Stack said. ‘Just what is it you fellows want?’

  ‘Well, hell,’ Lange said, ‘I don’t know. They just told us to come down here and speak our piece.’

  Stack rubbed his chin. He was genuinely perplexed. He couldn’t think of anything to do for these fellows. He said, ‘Well, boys, what can I tell you? That’s the way it is.�
�

  One of the victims, Jack Tishler, a tall man with a bullet hole obliterating most of his nose, said, ‘Goddamit, Dan, maybe it’s none of my business but I do believe that you’re supposed to show repentence or something like that.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ Stack said. ‘I’m sorry. I do apologize for having killed you fellows.’

  ‘I don’t think that is quite what they had in mind,’ Lange said. ‘A man kills a man, he ought to say something more than a mealymouthed ‘sorry.’ And anyhow, you’re not sorry, are you?’

  No, I’m not,’ Stack admitted. ‘I was just trying to be polite. Can you give me one good reason why I should actually feel sorry?’

  The victims thought for a while. Then Roy Argyll said, ‘Well, there’s the matter of our widowed women and orphaned children. How about them, Dan?’

  Stack grinned and said, ‘You’ll be talking about your heartbroken third cousins and pet hound dogs next. You fellows never gave a damn about all that when you were alive. Why are you so concerned now?’

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Jim Lanigan remarked to Abner Lange.

  ‘Dan always was a good talker,’ Lange said.

  Stack asked, ‘Would any of you give a damn if it was you that killed me?’

  ‘Sheet no,’ Abner Lange said; ‘I’d be happy to do it for you now, if only I could!’

  Stack turned to the judge. ‘Well, there’s where it’s at, your honor. I’ve always maintained that murder should be properly understood as a crime without a victim, since nobody gives a damn before or after and it’s mostly a matter of luck who kills and who gets killed. So I respectfully submit that I fail to see what all the fuss is about and I move that we have a couple of drinks together and forget the whole business.’

  ‘Mr. Stack,’ Judge Grudge said, ‘you exhibit a moral obtuseness that makes me want to fwow up, if I may be permitted the colloquialism.’

  ‘Well, your honor,’ Stack said, ‘meaning no disrespect, I beg to differ with you about my so-called moral obtuseness. From my viewpoint you are morally effete due to the exaggerated and disproportionate importance you give to how sentient creatures die. You’re kidding yourself, judge; we all have to go and it don’t make much difference how we do it. And besides, who are you to sit in judgment over another man’s code of values and sense of the appropriate?’

  ‘I de judge,’ the judge said pleasantly. ‘That’s how come I get to sit up here and pass judgment on you, Dan. I want to tell you that it has been interesting to hear your obvious rationalizations; and your feeble flights into discursive philosophy have given me something to giggle about later with my friends at the Righteousness Club. It remains only my not unenjoyable task to pass sentence upon you.’

  Stack stood firm and erect, his eyes fiercely fixed upon the judge’s. He folded his arms, displaying scorn.

  ‘Und zo,’ the judge said, ‘having heard all of the evidence and having weighed and considered it in my mind, I render now the following verdict: that you will be taken from this place to a place of punishment, and there you shall be hung upside down over a cauldron of boiling yak turds and forced to listen to Franck’s Symphony in D Minor played on a kazoo until the karmamometer shows that all your seeds are cooked and that you are in a good state of acculturation.’

  Stack staggered back, a look of horror on his face. ‘Not the kazoo!’ he pleased. ‘How in God’s name did you find out about the kazoo?’

  ‘Not for nothing are we the acknowledged masters of psychological methodology,’ the judge said. ‘For passing along that little gem of a concealed phobia we are indebted to Mrs. Martha Stack. Stand up and take a bow, Martha!’

  Stack’s foster-mother stood up in the back of the courtroom and waved her umbrealla. Her hair had been hennaed and teased for the occasion.

  ‘Ma,’ Stack cried, ‘why did you do it?’

  ‘It’s for your own good, Dan’l,’ she said. ‘I’m right happy to help you toward redemption, and these good people said that little details such as that could help them reach the soft, loving, God-fearing core that we all know is within you struggling to get out.’

  ‘Christ,’ Stack said, grinding his teeth, ‘I had forgotten what a dummy you are.’

  ‘Well, I do apologize if I’ve caused you any difficulties,’ Mrs Stack said. ‘At least they don’t know about the lace knickers and the little plastic watering can.’

  ‘Ma!’

  Mrs. Stack said, ‘I am well-meaning but clumsy. It has been that way for me since childhood. Let me tell you a touching little anecdote –’

  ‘Some other time,’ said Judge Grudge. ‘Bailiffs! Come carry this lout away to his just torments!’

  Four burly men in waterproof glen-plaid business suits came through a side door and seized Stack. Crompton was fighting to take over control of the body long enough to lodge a plea of insanity. (If all else failed, he was planning to go insane. Crompton didn’t mind the kazoo, but he did have a a deep-set phobia against being suspended upside down over a cauldron of boiling yak turds.)

  At this precise moment the sound of a gong could be heard, shocking in its piercing sweetness.

  44

  The double doors at the entrance to the courtroom swung open. In marched a procession of silver-robed priests with shaven heads and intaglio begging bowls. To the solemn accompaniment of timpani and celestia they chanted obscure and deep-throated mantras until they reached the judge’s bench. Here they stopped and made deep genuflections of an unearthly intricacy and grace. This complete, the most venerable of them stepped forward.

  He nodded to the judge.

  He bowed to Dan Stack!

  ‘Welcome, welcome, thrice welcome, O Avatar,’ the venerable priest said to Stack. ‘We of the Immanent Brotherhood want to take this opportunity of thanking you for all the trouble you’ve gone to going into manifestation for us. It was really extremely kind of you. We are aware that it is all part of your bodhisattva vow, and predestined anyhow, but we want you to know that we really do appreciate it.’

  ‘Hunh,’ Stack said noncommittally.

  ‘We have prepared a very nice room for you at the temple, despite your greatly respected indifference to such things. As for food, we know that you are perfectly content with whatever we give you, or nothing at all, which makes it difficult for us to arrange pleasing menus for you. But we will do our best. You will find that the affairs of humans haven’t changed much since your last incarnation on Earth. Same game, different players.’

  Judge Grudge intervened at this point. ‘Now look here, padre, I don’t mean any disrespect of religion, and I know that you people have your own way of doing things. But it so happens that that fellow you call an avatar is a guilty convicted cold-blooded murderer and I just thought you might want to know that.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the venerable priest, ‘is misunderstanding. Good joke!’

  ‘I fail to get it,’ the judge said.

  ‘This person Daniel Stack,’ the priest said, ‘is not the being we have come here to honor. Oh, no! Stack is merely the vehicle, the outer shell through which the Avatar will soon burst. …’

  ‘That should be all right,’ the judge said. ‘It sounds even more final than yak turds.’

  Crompton managed to gain control of the body at this point. ‘Now look,’ he said, ‘you’ve got this all wrong. First of all, it isn’t Stack’s body. It’s my body. I am Alistair Crompton, and I am trying to integrate my personality components.’

  ‘We know all about you,’ the priest said. ‘Our Wise Ones, in their caves in Tibet and their A-frames in California, have previewed the entire sequence. We have sympathized with the misplaced obsessive emotionality you have thrown into your delusional activities.’

  ‘What do you mean, ‘delusional’? I know what I’m doing!’

  The priest shook his head gently. ‘Whatever you think is wrong. I suppose you feel that you live your own life and strive to achieve your goals?’

  ‘Well, of course!’

  ‘But
that is not the case at all. Actually, you have no independent life of your own. You do not live, you are lived! You are a completely automatic mechanism with a built-in I-reflex. Your life has no meaning since you are not even a person. You are nothing more than a short-lived, inconsistent, and accidental collection of tendencies. Your only possible relevance is as the unwitting vehicle for the purpose of bringing forth the Avatar.’

  ‘Who is this Avatar? You’re not talking about Loomis, are you?’

  ‘You and Loomis and Stack are stages of development, nothing more. You have been brought together as it was directed eons ago in the Codicil to the Secret Documents of Mankind, for the sole purpose of bringing forth the bodhisattva Maitreya whom you know under the terrestrial name of Barton Finch.’

  ‘Finch!’ Crompton cried. ‘But he’s a moron!’

  ‘That shows how much you know about it,’ the priest said.

  ‘You’re really serious about this?’

  ‘Entirely so.’

  ‘You really claim that the whole point of my life has been to bring Finch into the world?’

  ‘That’s beautifully put,’ the priest said. ‘And you will be honored as an immediate precursor of the superman. Your own personality has served its cosmic purpose now, which should come as a great relief to you. Now you may rest, Crompton, you and Loomis and Stack, for your karmic obligations are discharged and you have won freedom from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, pleasure and pain, hot and cold. You are released from the Wheel of Life! Isn’t that great?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Crompton asked suspiciously.

  ‘I mean that you have achieved Nirvana.’

  ‘And what is Nirvana?’ Crompton demanded.

  There was a stirring in the ranks of priests and disciples when he said this, for rarely does anyone get a chance to demonstrate his esoteric understanding by being given a direct question like this, unlike in the old Zen days when there were plenty of straight men around.