I could be right, he granted. But he did feel he had gotten into some genuine state. And after the jackals left he continued experimenting with it, thinking that lions might be next, probably would be next.
I was in his mind. He was determined not to die, because of me.
He had set his arm and had tried to set his ankle break. In neither case had the skin been broken.
He had the full canteen. He would limit himself to three mouthfuls of water a day. He had retrieved one of the two food parcels he had brought before the jackals came and ate the other along with the horse. He had mistakenly used up one trip to the horse for the purpose of gathering anything he could use for shielding against the sun. He’d gotten more than he could use. My tent was unworkable and he had torn the canvas off it to use for protection. He couldn’t explain to me why it was unworkable, and I concluded finally that in his pain and panic he’d given up too soon on it.
His supply of food consisted of scones, dried pears, biltong, some mongongo nuts, and one orange. The idea, of course, was to husband this, something made easier by his discovery that when he went into what he was calling his interval state, when he was willing himself to be deidentified, he would lose both hunger and pain.
Then he went for a highly summary and bland account of the next eight days. He rested, he slept, he practiced his interval state, he was lucky, the Herero found him. He had had dreams he could tell me about.
I knew I was being maneuvered. There was more to be gotten at. But I let him think I was accepting the diversion of talking about dreams.
It was transparently a diversion away from the experience or visions or messages other people had alluded to his having talked sketchily about, that is, away from the very things that had made his misadventure so momentous.
He remembered two vivid dreams, both about the earth in the future. In one of them mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, and the earth has been converted into a mortuary planet. Various features of the old, inhabited earth have been sold to members of the galactic elite as personal family monuments. The Eiffel Tower is one, Niagara Falls is another. The remnant population of the earth is totally employed in monument-tending. In the other dream the earth seems to be given over totally to art. He dreamed he was having lunch next to a gigantic fountain while metal sculptures slid across the sky overhead on cables, their arms or wings spread. But he did see these as purely literary dreams with nothing noetic about them, didn’t he? Certainly, he said.
Finally we went back to the chronology. Along about the fourth day there was a new dimension to his interval state.
It may have been a hallucination, he said. You’ll think so.
It was a sinking inward and experiencing the body as a polity, was the way he put it after a lot of groping for words. He experienced the body as a confederation of systems that were in their own ways conscious or sentient, sentient being the better word for it. Anyway, it was a set of systems the mind could enter into a relationship with, an indescribable relationship, but friendly.
My position was that this was not, strictly speaking, a hallucination at all. It was more an inner dramatization of something that he already intellectually understood to be the case in a primal way — e.g., cells signal back and forth, certain organs could be looked at as city-states. In short, the idea that the body is a hierarchy of systems is something that got dramatized dot dot dot.
Ah, but not a hierarchy, he said. Not a hierarchy. Don’t make me say things I didn’t say.
I had to watch my limits. When I asked So did you enter into shall we say a new or friendlier relationship with these elements? all I got was a shrug and a longish look of disapproval.
In a moment he was benign again. I was free to have any interpretation I liked on anything he said. He wasn’t placing a great deal of stress on anything.
What other revelations were there? I asked.
He was silent. I thought this might be as much as he was going to say.
He wanted to tell me something before we went on. He would make it brief. If he were a writer this would be a short story he might write. You have a husband and wife. They are like night and day in terms of health.
I was hearing a fable.
The husband never gets sick and the wife is permanently ailing. You read the story and you observe that the husband never complains and the wife is always complaining.
He has nothing to complain about, with his good health, I said. Or are you trying to get at a chicken and egg proposition?
Listen to the story. The husband praises things, appreciates things, says so all the time. He might go so far as to praise his tools, his saw, say, his log-lifter. They live in the country. His wife is mired in not liking much of anything, aside from her ailments. He’s like the Basarwa are, apologizing to the animals they kill and praising the totem of the genus, thanking it.
I let him take his time. I had wanted him to talk, and now he was.
The husband goes out of his way to try to demonstrate to his wife that she lacks a certain thing, which you could call gratitude. He has a philosophy of gratitude of a certain explicit or even crude sort, which he rightly or wrongly thinks may be at the heart of the difference between them, his better luck. But a thing about his philosophy of gratitude is that it has to be spontaneous, or come spontaneously, to work. It can’t be a rote thing like saying grace. He feels all he can do is exemplify what he feels, because, and this may be irrational, he feels that if he instructs her or catechizes her into it, not only will it not work for her but he himself might then lose the benefits of his attitude to the world. By the way, both of them are atheists, so this is not about religion. But how this story ends is a problem. One way it could end would be his telling her, and her laughing. And then they both begin to decline.
I said Well, didn’t you say they were both elderly to begin with?
Maybe I implied it. But in my mind, in my story, they are.
A fable, I thought. No, a parable, god help me.
But I am very good with dreams and parables.
I said So the husband says goodbye to a hardy old age. I don’t know what to say, really, except that I think this is your way of telling me not to ask you about things you feel prohibited from telling me for cosmic reasons of some kind, to which I say what you once said to me and made my hair stand on end with: Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. That was you, wasn’t it, from Bertrand Russell? I loved it. Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. Loyalty to this is why you stipulated that they’re atheists, and why you wince when I use the word revelations, I guess. I think this story is silliness. If only the wife is smart enough to read his body language and copy him they can live another what? nineteen months beyond their allotted span, or something? I am sorry, but this is just plain Don’t bother me, in spades, and I hate it, hate it, hate it, reject it. I don’t care.
I said I can’t help reading between every line, can I?
So there are certain private magnificent things you could tell me, but if I were perfect I wouldn’t make you tell me. Because of the consequences, and so on. But I’m not perfect. Tell me this: will you be punished by some vaguely female force or image or power if you tell me everything? I’m just guessing here, but tell me. And don’t think I don’t love you for telling me this story, which is an act of friendship as well as being whatever else it is.
Go back a step, I said. Try and see this just as documentation for someone you love.
He really groaned.
I said Tell me the worst thing you’re not supposed to tell me, as I construct it, because something might happen we both would hate.