Teddy suddenly reached forward and scratched the calf of his leg. “Well, it would take me too much time to name all the places, because we took our car and drove fairly great distances.” He sat back. “My mother and I were mostly in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Oxford, England, though. I think I told you in the gym I had to be interviewed at both those places. Mostly the University of Edinburgh.”
“No, I don’t believe you did,” Nicholson said. “I was wondering if you’d done anything like that. How’d it go? They grill you?”
“I beg your pardon?” Teddy said.
“How’d it go? Was it interesting?”
“At times, yes. At times, no,” Teddy said. “We stayed a little bit too long. My father wanted to get back to New York a little sooner than this ship. But some people were coming over from Stockholm, Sweden, and Innsbruck, Austria, to meet me, and we had to wait around.”
“It’s always that way.”
Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. “Are you a poet?” he asked.
“A poet?” Nicholson said. “Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
Nicholson, smiling, reached into his jacket pocket and took out cigarettes and matches. “I rather thought that was their stock in trade,” he said. “Aren’t emotions what poets are primarily concerned with?”
Teddy apparently didn’t hear him, or wasn’t listening. He was looking abstractedly toward, or over, the twin smokestacks up on the Sports Deck.
Nicholson got his cigarette lit, with some difficulty, for there was a light breeze blowing from the north. He sat back, and said, “I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch—”
“ ‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ ” Teddy said suddenly. “ ‘Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.’ ”
“What was that?” Nicholson asked, smiling. “Say that again.”
“Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,” Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. “I still have some water in my ear from my swimming lesson yesterday,” he said. He gave his ear another couple of claps, then sat back, putting his arms up on both armrests. It was, of course, a normal, adult-size deck chair, and he looked distinctly small in it, but at the same time, he looked perfectly relaxed, even serene.
“I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch of pedants up at Boston,” Nicholson said, watching him. “After that last little set-to. The whole Leidekker examining group, more or less, the way I understand it. I believe I told you I had rather a long chat with Al Babcock last June. Same night, as, a matter of fact, I heard your tape played off.”
“Yes, you did. You told me.”
“I understand they were a pretty disturbed bunch,” Nicholson pressed. “From What Al told me, you all had quite a little lethal bull session late one night—the same night you made that tape, I believe.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “From what I gather, you made some little predictions that disturbed the boys no end. Is that right?”
“I wish I knew why people think it’s so important to be emotional,” Teddy said. “My mother and father don’t think a person’s human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very—very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I’m inhuman.”
Nicholson flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. “I take it you have no emotions?” he said.
Teddy reflected before answering. “If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used them,” he said. “I don’t see what they’re good for.”
“You love God, don’t you?” Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. “Isn’t that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock—”
“Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don’t love Him sentimentally. He never said anybody had to love Him sentimentally,” Teddy said. “If I were God, I certainly wouldn’t want people to love me sentimentally. It’s too unreliable.”
“You love your parents, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do—very much,” Teddy said, “but you want to make me use that word to mean what you want it to mean—I can tell.”
“All right. In what sense do you want to use it?”
Teddy thought it over. “You know what the word ‘affinity’ means?” he asked, turning to Nicholson.
“I have a rough idea,” Nicholson said dryly.
“I have a very strong affinity for them. They’re my parents, I mean, and we’re all part of each other’s harmony and everything,” Teddy said. “I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time . . . But they don’t love me and Booper—that’s my sister—that way. I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.” He turned toward Nicholson again, sitting slightly forward. “Do you have the time, please?” he asked. “I have a swimming lesson at ten-thirty.”
“You have time,” Nicholson said without first looking at his wrist watch. He pushed back his cuff. “It’s just ten after ten,” he said.
“Thank you,” Teddy said, and sat back. “We can enjoy our conversation for about ten more minutes.” Nicholson let one leg drop over the side of the deck chair, leaned forward, and stepped on his cigarette end. “As I understand it,” he said, sitting back, “you hold pretty firmly to the Vedantic theory of reincarnation.”
“It isn’t a theory, it’s as much a part—”
“All right,” Nicholson said quickly. He smiled, and gently raised the flats of his hands, in a sort of ironic benediction. “We won’t argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish.” He crossed his heavy, outstretched legs again. “From what I gather, you’ve acquired certain information, through meditation, that’s given you some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in India, but more or less fell from Grace—”
“I wasn’t a holy man,” Teddy said. “I was just a person making very nice spiritual advancement.”
“All right—whatever it was,” Nicholson said. “But the point is you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I—”
“That’s right,” Teddy said. “I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating.” He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. “I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again anyway—I mean I wasn’t so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn’t met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn’t met that lady. I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to. My father thinks I’m a freak, in a way. And my mother—well, she doesn’t think it’s good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks it’s bad for my health.”
Nicholson was looking at him, studying him. “I believe you said on that last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?”
“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”
Nicholson didn’t say anything.
“But I could get out of the finite dimensions fairly often wh
en I was four,” Teddy said, as an afterthought. “Not continuously or anything, but fairly often.”
Nicholson nodded. “You did?” he said. “You could?”
“Yes,” Teddy said. “That was on the tape . . . Or maybe it was on the one I made last April. I’m not sure.”
Nicholson took out his cigarettes again, but without taking his eyes off Teddy. “How does one get out of the finite dimensions?” he asked, and gave a short laugh. “I mean, to begin very basically, a block of wood is a block of wood, for example. It has length, width—”
“It hasn’t. That’s where you’re wrong,” Teddy said. “Everybody just thinks things keep stopping off somewhere. They don’t. That’s what I was trying to tell Professor Peet.” He shifted in his seat and took out an eyesore of a handkerchief—a gray, wadded entity—and blew his nose. “The reason things seem to stop off somewhere is because that’s the only way most people know how to look at things,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they do.” He put away his handkerchief, and looked at Nicholson. “Would you hold up your arm a second, please?” he asked.
“My arm? Why?”
“Just do it. Just do it a second.”
Nicholson raised his forearm an inch or two above the level of the armrest. “This one?” he asked.
Teddy nodded. “What do you call that?” he asked.
“What do you mean? It’s my arm. It’s an arm.”
“How do you know it is?” Teddy asked. “You know it’s called an arm, but how do you know it is one? Do you have any proof that it’s an arm?”
Nicholson took a cigarette out of his pack, and lit it. “I think that smacks of the worst kind of sophistry, frankly,” he said, exhaling smoke. “It’s an arm, for heaven’s sake, because it’s an arm. In the first place, it has to have a name to distinguish it from other objects. I mean you can’t simply—”
“You’re just being logical,” Teddy said to him impassively.
“I’m just being what?” Nicholson asked, with a little excess of politeness.
“Logical. You’re just giving me a regular, intelligent answer,” Teddy said. “I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”
Nicholson removed a flake of tobacco from his tongue with his fingers.
“You know Adam?” Teddy asked him.
“Do I know who?”
“Adam. In the Bible.”
Nicholson smiled. “Not personally,” he said dryly.
Teddy hesitated. “Don’t be angry with me,” he said. “You asked me a question, and I’m—”
“I’m not angry with you, for heaven’s sake.”
“Okay,” Teddy said. He was sitting back in his chair, but his head was turned toward Nicholson. “You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?” he asked. “You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all that was in it. So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are. I mean if you vomit it up, then you won’t have any more trouble with blocks of wood and stuff. You won’t see everything stopping off all the time. And you’ll know what your arm really is, if you’re interested. Do you know what I mean? Do you follow me?”
“I follow you,” Nicholson said, rather shortly.
“The trouble is,” Teddy said, “most people don’t want to see things the way they are. They don’t even want to stop getting born and dying all the time. They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice.” He reflected. “I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,” he said. He shook his head.
At that moment, a white-coated deck steward, who was making his rounds within the area, stopped in front of Teddy and Nicholson and asked them if they would care to have morning broth. Nicholson didn’t respond to the question at all. Teddy said, “No, thank you,” and the deck steward passed them by.
“If you’d rather not discuss this, you don’t have to,” Nicholson said abruptly, and rather brusquely. He flicked his cigarette ash. “But is it true, or isn’t it, that you informed the whole Leidekker examining bunch—Walton, Peet, Larsen, Samuels, and that bunch—when and where and how they would eventually die? Is that true, or isn’t it? You don’t have to discuss it if you don’t want to, but the way the rumor around Boston—”
“No, it is not true,” Teddy said with emphasis. “I told them places, and times, when they should be very, very careful. And I told them certain things it might be a good idea for them to do . . . But I didn’t say anything like that. I didn’t say anything was inevitable, that way.” He took out his handkerchief again and used it. Nicholson waited, watching him. “And I didn’t tell Professor Peet anything like that at all. Firstly, he wasn’t one of the ones who were kidding around and asking me a bunch of questions. I mean all I told Professor Peet was that he shouldn’t be a teacher any more after January—that’s all I told him.” Teddy, sitting back, was silent a moment. “All those other professors, they practically forced me to tell them all that stuff. It was after we were all finished with the interview and making that tape, and it was quite late, and they all kept sitting around smoking cigarettes and getting very kittenish.”
“But you didn’t tell Walton, or Larsen, for example, when or where or how death would eventually come?” Nicholson pressed.
“No. I did not,” Teddy said firmly. “I wouldn’t have told them any of that stuff, but they kept talking about it. Professor Walton sort of started it. He said he really wished he knew when he was going to die, because then he’d know what work he should do and what work he shouldn’t do, and how to use his time to his best advantage, and all like that. And then they all said that . . . So I told them a little bit.”
Nicholson didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t tell them when they were actually going to die, though. That’s a very false rumor,” Teddy said. “I could have, but I knew that in their hearts they really didn’t want to know. I mean I knew that even though they teach Religion and Philosophy and all, they’re still pretty afraid to die.” Teddy sat, or reclined, in silence for a minute. “It’s so silly,” he said. “All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don’t remember it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it. It’s so silly.”
“That may be. That may be,” Nicholson said. “But the logical fact remains that no matter how intelligently—”
“It’s so silly,” Teddy said again. “For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk up to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously.” Teddy looked at Nicholson. “That could happen,” he said. “My sister’s only six, and she hasn’t been a human being for very many lives, and she doesn’t like me very much. That could happen, all right. What would be so tragic about it, though? What’s there to be afraid of, I mean? I’d just be doing what I was supposed to do, that’s all, wouldn’t I?”
Nicholson snorted mildly. “It might not be a tragedy from your point of view, but it would certainly be a sad event for your mother and dad,” he said “Ever consider that?”
“Yes, of course, I have,” Teddy said. “But that’s only because they have names and emotions for everything that happens.” He had been keeping his hands tucked under his legs again. He took them out now, put his arms up on the armrests, and looked at Nicholson. “You know Sven? The man that takes care of the gym?” he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. “Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died,
he’d have a very, very bad night’s sleep, because he’s very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He’d know it was only a dream.”
Nicholson nodded. “What’s the point, exactly?”
“The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only, he wouldn’t know it. I mean he wouldn’t wake up till he died himself.” Nicholson, looking detached, was using his right hand to give himself a slow, sensuous massage at the back of the neck. His left hand, motionless on the armrest, with a fresh, unlighted cigarette between the fingers, looked oddly white and inorganic in the brilliant sunlight.
Teddy suddenly got up. “I really have to go now, I’m afraid,” he said. He sat down, tentatively, on the extended leg attachment of his chair, facing Nicholson, and tucked in his T shirt. “I have about one and a half minutes, I guess, to get to my swimming lesson,” he said. “It’s all the way down on E Deck.”
“May I ask why you told Professor Peet he should stop teaching after the first of the year?” Nicholson asked, rather bluntly. “I know Bob Peet. That’s why I ask.”
Teddy tightened his alligator belt. “Only because he’s quite spiritual, and he’s teaching a lot of stuff right now that isn’t very good for him if he wants to make any real spiritual advancement. It stimulates him too much. It’s time for him to take everything out of his head, instead of putting more stuff in. He could get rid of a lot of the apple in just this one life if he wanted to. He’s very good at meditating.” Teddy got up. “I better go now. I don’t want to be too late.”
Nicholson looked up at him, and sustained the look—detaining him. “What would you do if you could change the educational system?” he asked ambiguously. “Ever think about that at all?”
“I really have to go,” Teddy said.
“Just answer that one question,” Nicholson said. “Education’s my baby, actually—that’s what I teach. That’s why I ask.”
“Well . . . I’m not too sure what I’d do,” Teddy said. “I know I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t start with the things schools usually start with.” He folded his arms, and reflected briefly. “I think I’d first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I’d try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that . . . I guess, even before that, I’d get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them. I mean even if their parents just told them an elephant’s big, I’d make them empty that out. An elephant’s only big when it’s next to something else—a dog or a lady, for example.” Teddy thought another moment. “I wouldn’t even tell them an elephant has a trunk. I might show them an elephant, if I had one handy, but I’d let them just walk up to the elephant not knowing anything more about it than the elephant knew about them. The same thing with grass, and other things. I wouldn’t even tell them grass is green. Colors are only names. I mean if you tell them the grass is green, it makes them start expecting the grass to look a certain way—your way—instead of some other way that may be just as good, and may be much better . . . I don’t know. I’d just make them vomit up every bit of the apple their parents and everybody made them take a bite out of.”
For Esmé, With Love and Squalor Page 17