"Real for you," Bill said.
"What more can reality give?"
"Well, I mean," Bill said, "I don't believe it."
"The problem does not lie with our experience in this matter," Tim said. "It lies with your belief-system. Within the confines of your belief-system, such a thing is impossible. Who can say, truly say, what is possible? We have no knowledge of what is and isn't possible; we do not set the limits—God sets the limits." Tim pointed at Bill; his finger was steady. "What one believes and what one knows depend, in the final analysis, on God: you can't will your own consent or refusal to consent; it is a gift from God, an instance of our dependence. God grants us a world and compels our assent to that world; he makes it real for us: this is one of his powers. Do you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, was God Himself? You don't believe that, either. So how can I prove to you that Jeff returned to us from the other world? I can't even demonstrate that the Son of Man walked this Earth two thousand years ago for us and lived for us and died for us, for our sins, and rose in glory on the third day. Am I not right about that? Do you not deny that also? What do you believe, then? In objects you get into and drive around the block. There may be no objects and no block; someone pointed out to Descartes that a malicious demon may cause our assent to a world that is not there, may impress a forgery onto us as an ostensible representation of the world. If that happened, we would not know. We must trust; we must trust God. I trust in God that he would not deceive me; I deem the Lord faithful and true and incapable of deceit. For you that question does not even exist, for you will not grant that He exists in the first place. You ask for proof. If I told you this minute that I have heard God's voice speaking to me—would you believe that? Of course not. We call people who speak to God pious and we call people to whom God speaks lunatics. This is an age where there is little faith. It is not God who is dead; it is our faith that has died."
"But—" Bill gestured. "It doesn't make any sense. Why would he come back?"
"Tell me why Jeff lived in the first place," Tim said. "Then perhaps I can tell you why he came back. Why do you live? For what purpose were you created? You do not know who created you—assuming anyone did—and you do not know why, assuming there is a why. Perhaps no one created you and perhaps there is no purpose to your life. No world, no purpose, no Creator, and Jeff has not come back to us. Is that your logic? Is that how you live out your life? Is that what Being, in Heidegger's sense, is to you? That is an impoverished kind of inauthentic Being. It strikes me as weak and barren and, in the end, futile. There must be something you can believe, Bill. Do you believe in yourself? Will you grant that you, Bill Lundborg, exist? You will grant that; fine. Good enough. We have a start. Examine your body. Do you have sense organs? Eyes, ears, taste, touch and smell? Then, probably, this percept-system was designed to receive information. If that is so, it is reasonable to assume that information exists. If information exists, it probably pertains to something. Probably, there is a world—not certainly but probably, and you are linked to that world through your sense organs. Do you create your own food? Do you out of yourself, out of your own body, generate the food that you need in order to live? You do not. Therefore it is logical to assume that you are dependent on this outer world, of whose existence you possess only probable knowledge, not necessary knowledge; world is for us only a contingent truth, not an ineluctable one. What does this world consist of? What is out there? Do your senses lie? If they lie, why were they caused to come into being? Did you create your own sense organs? No, you did not. Someone or something else did. Who is that someone who is not you? Apparently you are not alone, the sole existent reality; apparently there are others, and one of them or several of them designed and built you and your body the way Carl Benz designed and built the first motorcar. How do I know there was a Carl Benz? Because you told me? I told you about my son Jeff returning—"
"Kirsten told me," Bill corrected him.
"Does Kirsten normally lie to you?" Tim said.
"No," Bill said.
"What do she and I gain by saying that Jeff has returned to us from the other world? Many people will not believe us. You yourself do not believe us. We say it because we believe it is true. And we have reasons to believe it is true. We have both seen things, witnessed things. I don't see Carl Benz in this room but I believe he once existed. I believe that the Mercedes-Benz is named after a little girl and a man. I am a lawyer; I am a person familiar with the criteria by which data is scrutinized. We—Kirsten and I—have the evidence of Jeff, the phenomena."
"Yeah, but that phenomena you have, all of them—they don't prove anything. You're just assuming Jeff caused it, caused those things. You don't know."
Tim said, "Let me give you an example. You look under your parked car and you find a pool of water. Now, you don't know that—the water—came from your motor; that is something you have to assume. You have evidence. As an attorney, I understand what constitutes evidence. You as an auto-mechanic—"
"Is the car parked in your own parking slot?" Bill said. "Or is it in a public parking lot, like at the supermarket."
Slightly taken aback, Tim paused. "I don't follow you."
"If it's your own garage or parking slot," Bill said, "where only you park, then it's probably from your car. Anyhow, it wouldn't be from the motor; it'd be from the radiator or the water pump or one of the hoses."
"But this is something you assume," Tim said. "Based on the evidence."
"It could be power-steering fluid. That looks a lot like water. It's sort of pinkish. Also, your transmission, if you have an automatic transmission, uses the same kind of fluid. Do you have power steering?"
"On what?" Tim said.
"On your car."
"I don't know. I'm speaking about a hypothetical car."
"Or it could be engine oil," Bill said, "in which case, it wouldn't be pink. You have to distinguish whether it's water or whether it's oil, if it's from the power-steering or the transmission; it could be several things. If you're in a public place and you see a puddle under your car, it probably doesn't mean anything because a lot of people park where you're parked; it could have come from the car parked there before you. The best thing to do is—"
"But you're only able to make an assumption," Tim said. "You can't know it came from your car."
"You can't know right away, but you can find out. Okay; let's say it's your own garage and no one else parks there. The first thing to figure out is what kind of fluid it is. So you reach under the car—you may have to back it out first—and dip your finger in the fluid. Now, is it pink? Or brown? Is it oil? Is it water? Let's say it's water. Well, it could be normal; it could be overflow from the relief system of your radiator; after you turn off an engine, the water gets hotter sometimes and blows out through the relief pipe."
"Even if you can determine that it is water," Tim said, doggedly, "you can't be sure it came from your car."
"Where else would it come from?"
"That's an unknown factor. You're acting on indirect evidence; you didn't see the water come from your car."
"Okay—turn the engine on, let it run, and watch. See if it drips."
"Wouldn't that take a long time?" Tim said.
"Well, you have to know. You should check the level in the power-steering system; you should check your transmission level, your radiator, your motor oil; you should routinely check all those things. While you're standing there, you can check them. Some of them, like the level of fluid in the transmission, have to be checked while the motor's running. Meanwhile, you can also check your tire pressure. What pressure do you carry?"
"In what?" Tim said.
"Your tires." Bill smiled. "There're five of them. One in your trunk; your spare. You probably forget to check that when you check the others. You won't find out you've got no air in your spare until you get a blowout someday and then you'll find out if you have air in your spare. Do you have a bumper jack or an axle jack? What kind of car are you driving?"
"I think it's a Buick," Tim said.
"It's a Chrysler," I said quietly.
"Oh," Tim said.
After Bill departed for his trip back to the East Bay, Tim and I sat together in the living room of the Tenderloin apartment, and Tim talked openly and candidly to me. "Kirsten and I," he said, "have been having a few difficulties." He sat beside me on the couch, speaking in a low voice so that Kirsten, in the bedroom, would not hear.
"How many downers is she taking?" I said.
"You mean barbiturates?"
"Yes, I mean barbiturates," I said.
"I really don't know. She has a doctor who gives her all she wants ... she gets a hundred at one time. Seconal. And also she has Amytal. I think the Amytal is from a different doctor."
"You better find out how many she's taking."
Tim said, "Why would Bill resist the realization that Jeff has come back to us?"
"Lord only knows," I said.
"The purpose of my book is to provide comfort to heartbroken people who have lost loved ones. What could be more reassuring than the knowledge that there is a life beyond the trauma of death, just as there is life beyond the trauma of birth? We are assured by Jesus that an afterlife awaits us; on this the whole promise of salvation depends. 'I am the Resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.' And then Jesus says to Martha, 'Do you believe in this?' to which Martha responds, 'Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.' Later, Jesus says, 'For what I have spoken does not come from myself; no, what I was to say, what I had to speak, was commanded by the Father who sent me, and I know that his commands mean eternal life.' Let me get my Bible." Tim reached for a copy of the Bible which lay on the end table. "First Corinthians, fifteen, twelve. 'Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people. But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of all who have fallen asleep.'" Tim closed his Bible. "That says it clearly and plainly. There can be no doubt whatsoever."
"Guess so," I said.
"So much evidence turned up at the Zadokite Wadi. So much that sheds light on the whole kerygma of early Christianity. We know so much, now. In no way was Paul speaking metaphorically; man literally rises from the dead. They had the techniques. It was a science. We would call it medicine today. They had the anokhi, there at the wadi."
"The mushroom," I said.
He eyed me. "Yes, the anokhi mushroom."
"Bread and broth," I said.
"Yes."
"But we don't have it now."
"We have the Eucharist."
I said, "But you know and I know that the substance is not there, in the Eucharist. It's like the cargo cults where the natives build fake airplanes."
"Not at all."
"How is it different?"
"The Holy Spirit—" He broke off.
"That's what I mean," I said.
Tim said, "I feel that the Holy Spirit is responsible for Jeff coming back."
"So then you reason that the Holy Spirit does still exist and always existed and is God, one of the forms of God."
"I do now," Tim said. "Now that I've seen evidence. I did not believe it until I saw the evidence, the clocks set at the time of Jeff's death, Kirsten's burned hair, the broken mirrors, the pins stuck under her fingernails. You saw her clothes all disarranged that time; we had you come in and see for yourself. We didn't do that. No living person did that; we wouldn't manufacture evidence. Do you believe we would do that, contrive a fraud?"
"No," I said.
"And the day that those books leaped out of the bookshelf and fell to the floor—no one was there. You saw that with your own eyes."
"Do you think the anokhi mushroom still exists?" I asked.
"I don't know. There is a vita verna mushroom mentioned in Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis, Book Eight. He lived in the first century ... it would be about the right time. And this citation was not something he derived from Theophrastus; this was a mushroom he saw himself, from his direct knowledge of Roman gardens. It may be the anokhi. But that's only a guess. I wish we could be sure." He changed the subject, then, as was his custom; Tim Archer's mind never stayed on one topic for long. "It's schizophrenia that Bill has, isn't it?"
"Yep," I said.
"But he can earn a living."
"When he's not in the hospital," I said. "Or spiraling into himself and on the way to the hospital."
"He seems to be doing fine right now. But I note—an inability to theorize."
"He has trouble abstracting," I said.
"I wonder where and how he'll wind up," Tim said. "The prognosis ... it's not good, Kirsten says."
"It's zero. For recovery. Zilch. Zip. But he's smart enough to stay off drugs."
"He does not have the advantage of an education."
"I'm not sure an education is an advantage. All I do is work in a record store. And I wasn't hired for that because of anything I learned in the English Department at Cal."
"I've been meaning to ask you which recording of Beethoven's Fidelio we should buy," Tim said.
"The Klemperer," I said. "On Angel. With Christa Ludwig as Leonora."
"I am very fond of her aria," Tim said.
"'Abscheulicher! Wo Eilst Due Hin?' She does it very well. But no one can match Frieda Leider's recording years ago. It's a collectors' item ... it may have been dubbed onto an LP; if so, I've never seen it. I heard it once over KPFA, years ago. I never forgot it."
Tim said, "Beethoven was the greatest genius, the greatest creative artist the world has ever seen. He transformed man's conception of himself."
"Yes," I said. "The prisoners in Fidelio when they're let out into the light ... it is one of the most beautiful passages in all music."
"It goes beyond beauty," Tim said. "It involves an apprehension of the nature of freedom itself. How can it be that purely abstract music, such as his late quartets, can without words change human beings in terms of their own awareness of themselves, in terms of their ontological nature? Schopenhauer believed that art, in particular music, had—has—the power to cause the will, the irrational, striving will, to somehow turn back onto and into itself and cease to strive. He considered this a religious experience, although temporary. Somehow art, somehow music especially, has the power to transform man from an irrational thing into some rational entity that is not driven by biological impulses, impulses that cannot by definition ever be satisfied. I remember when I first heard the final movement of the Beethoven Thirteenth Quartet—not the 'Grosse Fuge' but the allegro that he added later in place of the 'Grosse Fuge.' It's such an odd little bit, that allegro ... so brisk and light, so sunny."
I said, "I've read that it was the last thing he wrote. That little allegro would have been the first work of Beethoven's fourth period, had he lived. It's not really a third-period piece."
"Where did Beethoven derive the concept, the entirely new and original concept of human freedom that his music expresses?" Tim asked. "Was he well-read?"
"He belonged to the period of Goethe and Schiller. The Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment."
"Always Schiller. It always comes back to that. And from Schiller to the rebellion of the Dutch against the Spanish, the War of the Lowlands. Which shows up in Goethe's Faust, Part Two, where Faust
finally finds something that will satisfy him, and he bids the moment stay. Seeing the Dutch reclaiming land from the North Sea. I translated that passage, once, myself; I wasn't satisfied with any of the English translations available. I don't know what I did with it ... that was years ago. Do you know the Bayard Taylor translation?" He rose, approached a row of books, found the volume, brought it back, opening it as he walked.
"'Below the hills, a marshy plain
infects what I so long have been retrieving:
that stagnant pool likewise to drain
were now my latest and my best achieving.
To many millions let me furnish soil,
though not secure, let free for active toil:
green, fertile fields, where men and herds go forth
at once, with comfort, on the newest earth,—
all swiftly settled on the hill's firm base,
raised by a bold, hard-working populace.
In here, a land like Paradise about:
up to the brink the tide may roar without,
yet though it gnaw, to burst with force the limit,
by common impulse all men seek to hem it.
Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence,
this wisdom's ultimate and true:
he only earns his freedom and existence—'"
I said, "'Who daily conquers them anew.'"
"Yes," Tim said; he closed the copy of Faust, Part Two. "I wish I hadn't lost the translation I made." He then opened the book again. "Do you mind if I read the rest?"
"Please do," I said.
"'Thus here, by dangers girt, shall glide away
of childhood, manhood, age, and vigorous day.
And such a throng I fain would see,—
stand on free soil among a people free!
Then dared I hail the Moment fleeting,
"Ah, linger still—thou art so fair!"'"
"At that point God has won the bet in heaven," I said.
"Yes," Tim said, nodding.
"'The traces cannot, of mine earthly being,
in aeons perish: they are there!—
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer Page 12