His next words seemed to confirm my suspicions.
“Blake is very important,” he whispered, as though confiding a great truth.
I shrugged.
“Try telling that to my students. Most of them don’t read anything except the funnies.”
Sam nodded.
“Do you ever get the feeling that some of them aren’t exactly real?”
I frowned. Once again he’d thrown me for a loop.
“What?”
“Don’t you ever feel that there are some of them who just don’t get it? Who never will get it? I’m sure you’re a great teacher, Phil. An inspirational teacher. But I’ll bet that when you look around the class, you see maybe five or ten people out there who just aren’t picking up the signals you’re sending. You know? They don’t get it, because they don’t have it.”
“Don’t have what?”
Sam gave me his meaningful look again.
“Soul,” he said.
It was the first time for years I had heard the word except in a religious context. “Soul” was one of those loose, capacious words we used so much, into which we could pour our feelings without having to analyze them at all. If you liked something, it had soul. If you didn’t, it hadn’t. A neat way of not thinking, but one which had also worn badly with the passing years. I felt slightly sickened by Sam’s hippie one-upmanship, with its unearned suggestions of superior insight and more radical consciousness.
“Some of my students are more gifted than others, of course,” I replied stiffly. “Some are going to get the credits they need to get into a four-year college, others will wind up delivering mail or driving a bus. My job is to educate them up to the level of their abilities, not pick out the brightest and best and stroke their egos.”
Sam smiled and shook his head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” I shot back.
He tossed his head slightly. The smile disappeared.
“It’s not something you can discuss over a beer. Words are such little things, Phil. You should know that.”
“Words happen to be my business,” I replied huffily.
Again he didn’t seem to hear me.
“All those nights we sat up tripping together,” he said, gazing dreamily at the tabletop. “What happened then was real, wasn’t it? Realer than anything you’d ever felt before. But you could never talk about it after, never describe what you’d seen and heard. You had to have been there. You had to have lived through it.”
I eyed him coldly.
“I don’t do drugs any more, Sam.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I haven’t touched them since that night we were just talking about.”
Given what I’d heard about the dope intake of our boys in Vietnam, I found this hard to believe. But it was none of my business.
“OK,” I said, “so what was it that happened that night? You didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. In fact you hardly said anything about it.”
Sam smiled and nodded.
“Sure, I know. It took me months to come to terms with it at all. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. It was all too new, too overwhelming. It wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really mastered it.”
Our eyes met.
“Is that why you volunteered to become a rifleman?” I asked.
Sam grinned delightedly.
“That’s right, man! You understand!”
He spoke with such feeling that I was almost reluctant to disappoint him.
“I just figured that since you’d done two oddball things, they might be linked.”
He nodded, still grinning.
“I had to put it to the test.”
I stared at him.
“By risking your life?”
He nodded.
“If what I learned that night was true, you see, then I possessed a secret which would give me the power of life and death over every single person on the planet.”
So he was crazy after all. I felt slightly disappointed, but also relieved.
“That’s why it was important to make sure,” he went on in the same conversational tone, “and the only way to do that was to lay my own life on the line. If I survived, against all the odds, that would prove I was right.”
My only wish was to get the hell out of there, but I controlled myself. If I walked out now, leaving him with a sense of unfinished business, I might never hear the end of this. Better to let him get it off his chest now.
“So what’s this all about, Sam?”
He didn’t reply for a moment.
“Remember that argument I had with Larry?” he murmured. “I said that God either wasn’t omnipotent or He wasn’t loving, but you couldn’t have it both ways? Well, I was wrong. You can have it both ways. And that night I was shown how.”
“Uh huh,” I prompted.
He sat looking at me.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” I asked.
He laughed.
“It’s not something that can be told, man.”
“But you said I was someone you could tell,” I retorted, childishly pleased to have caught him out.
Sam turned over the bar tab and wrote a phone number on the back. He pushed it across the table toward me.
“Come out and see us some time,” he said. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful. A good place to kick back and get your head together.”
I tried to keep a straight face.
“So what’s the deal on this place? Is it some kind of commune?”
“Kind of. We’ve got some land, all the basic stuff you need for survival. There’s about twenty of us hanging out there. They’re nice folks. You’d like them. Some great-looking chicks, too.”
I imagined a rag-taggle group of aging hippies camping out in some clearing in the woods, their hand-knit clothes reeking of woodsmoke, a pack of grimy children crawling around their feet while they strummed out-of-tune guitars and cultivated a cozy sense of moral superiority.
“I’d really like for you to join us, Phil,” Sam continued seriously “That would complete the circle. And for you it would mean a whole new life, something you can’t even begin to imagine now. But first you have to change. That’s the key to the whole thing. The old must pass away before the new can be born. First you change, then you are changed.”
I had had enough.
“I have changed,” I replied calmly. “I’ve changed a lot. Not in the twinkling of an eye, after ODing on acid, but day in, day out. That’s the kind of change I believe in, the kind that lasts.”
“My kind of change outlasts everything,” Sam said softly. “Even death.”
This was intended as a challenge, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. I had made my point. Now it was time to throw in the sweetener and get this guy out of my life forever.
“I really admire you, Sam,” I said. “I like it that you’re still tackling the big questions, the big issues. We were all like that once, but most of us have lost it somewhere along the way. I think it’s great that you’re still out there on the edge, but personally I can’t live like that. It turns out I work best with my feet on the ground. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that. Maybe you’re more flexible. All I know is the kind of change you’re talking about would break me.”
Sam looked at me solemnly a long moment. Then he smiled, as if dismissing the whole matter.
“Well, it’s been good to talk to you, Phil.”
“Sure has,” I agreed heartily. “If you’re ever in town again, give me a call.”
The idea was to reduce everything that had been said to the level of a banal social encounter. I knew he wasn’t likely to pass through the Twin Cities again.
Sam shook his head decisively.
“Next time, you’ll call me.”
I edged out of the booth, gathering my things around me, asserting my separate existence.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.
“I came to see you, Phil.”
This time I couldn’t ignore him.
“You came all this way just to have a beer with me in a bar?”