Eleanor and Ralph were waiting for them. Marcella, smiling, slipped on by them. “Don’t forget the wirecopy tonight,” Ralph snapped, drumming a metal rule on his knuckles. Himebaugh had decided the evening paper was neither soon enough nor comprehensive enough for his purposes, now demanded the teletype copy in its entirety every evening.
“And please, Mr. Miller, no photographs tonight,” said Mrs. Norton bluntly, fingering the gold disc.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry about the other night. I thought I was being a help. But, if you like, I’ll bring the negatives and turn them over to the group.”
“I’d appreciate that,” she said, but there was no melting there. He left before they could progress beyond these petty complaints to the real thing that was irking them. Off to Mick’s. For charred hamburgers.
The blossoming spiritual affair between Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton was, to be sure, one of the more fascinating products of the cult. And it was odd, because under ordinary circumstances, they would probably never even have spoken to each other. Both avoided others, were excessively polite and formal when necessarily in public. She, childless and middle-aged, was a good teacher, but uncompromising and not a popular one. He, a bachelor a few years her senior, was a brilliant file cabinet lawyer who avoided cases that must come to court, and Miller could never remember having seen the guy do more than tip his hat and mutter a delicate “hello” to a woman. But a disaster had thrown them together, two innocents surprised in a fever, and now their logbooks, their respective systems, were drawing their timid souls together in holy intercourse. In fact, their two systems did fit together in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below. The funny thing was, though, Ralph’s system was the one on the bottom.
Because they were reading each other’s logbooks — excitedly, voraciously, as though they were lovel-etters — Miller had to take what was for the given moment left over, jumping back and forth in time and between the two authors. The disrupted chronology was no problem in Eleanor’s case, for behind her writings of fifteen years ago there was the same essentially whole ontology that governed her most recent messages; if there was a difference, it was one of gradual growth, greater profundity, a stripping away of early pseudoscientific imagery related to space travel and biological transmutations, and an approach to that kind of all-embracing mysticism that characterized the poets of all faiths. But, read out of order, it was hard to make any sense at all out of Himebaugh’s schemata; their parts arose separately from their several points of origin, founded always in some concrete event in the world, discarded as they curved away from each other, altered, revised with each discovery of new data. Stylistically, Eleanor’s writings changed as a young author’s might, from an early awkward manner whose mystery was provided by broken phrases and harsh juxtapositions, through a florid “literary” period, acquiring finally her present mastery of vocabulary and syntax, a unique, albeit eclectic, style of her own. Himebaugh’s writings, at least those Miller read, covered a much narrower time span, only about four years, though he had disaster clippings that were a lot older, and his writing ways were constant: pedantic, precise, and abbreviated. The only change of note was a gradual adoption of new symbols, shrinking yet more his ever-spare use of language.
There were enormous differences between them. While Eleanor was, essentially, a gentle mystic who found peace of soul in the denial of all dualisms, particularly that of life and death, Ralph was terrorized by a haunting vision of the worst half of all dichotomies, obsessed by the horror of existence qua existence. In Eleanor’s messages from the higher aspects, Miller found, through all personal trials, an uncompromising rejection of constructive thinking: wisdom could only be intuited; contrarily, in Himebaugh’s disaster scrapbooks and derivative graphs, one encountered a total commitment to the precision tools of logic, of science, of mathematics, the patient step-by-step addition of simple premises or single actions to arrive, hopefully, at complex totalities, the larger truths beyond phenomena.
So, what was it united them? Partly, to be sure, it was the lonely need for compurgators they both felt, and partly it was their mutual recognition of superior intellects. They both shared, as well, that extreme intensity in the private project that characterizes all introverts, and both had staked their lives on some unspecified but cataclysmic event to which they believed their own destinies linked — each lent credence, that is, to the other’s central hope. And it was also true that, though Eleanor championed the intuitive life, her behavior was reassuringly rational, while Ralph’s rationalism reached to the superreal, became a kind of rational advocacy of the irrational.
But yet it was more than that, for there was a structural objective bond between them, too, as Miller had begun to perceive in conversations with each of them separately and in watching their behavior at the nightly meetings. Requisite to any understanding of either of them, of course, was an acceptance of their canonical faith in their own private ways to truth. It was all too easy to see Eleanor’s self-styled divine dispatches as mere responses, conscious or unconscious, to her own psychic needs of the given moment, and forget that she herself never doubted that they truly came to her from higher forces in the universe — by way of her gift of “extrasensory perception,” as she described it. Her transports were real, and though the envisioned truth was too grand for memory to contain it, she was convinced she had brought back with her from ecstasy partial images of it, and these she and the dense world possessed forever in her logbooks. If she did not live in perpetual communion with those mighty souls of the seventh aspect, it was only because of a fault in spiritual discipline. In like manner, while composed of what looked like arbitrary first principles, founded upon ambiguities he did not see as such, flawed by the confusions of the numerologists, and limited by his emotionally derived specter, “the destroyer,” Ralph’s system was nevertheless for him a new science, and if he did not yet embrace the whole truth of the universe, it was only because he still lacked all the data, lacked some vital but surely existent connection — in short, had not yet perfected his system. They shared, that is, this hope for perfection, for final complete knowledge, and their different approaches actually complemented each other, or at least seemed to. Eleanor’s practical difficulty, after all, was in relating her inexpressible vision of the One to the tangible particulars of in-the-world existence, and it was here where Himebaugh’s constructions and proofs, founded on the cold data of newspaper reports, seemed to be of value, providing her shortcuts, as it were, to the relevant material within the impossible superfluity of sense-data, and enriching her own vision with new and useful kinds of imagery. Similarly, Himebaugh’s major frustration, as he had explained it some time ago to Miller, was that his additive process never seemed to end, it was apparently impossible ever to ascend to that last telling sum, and he had welcomed this final figure, so-called, toward which he could more accurately direct his computations.
Moreover, for Ralph Himebaugh, the One, if his universe of screaming particles could be so described, was the mindless spreading blot of death — the emptiness was not beautiful but black — and Eleanor, the mystagogue, had provided Ralph, the belovèd disciple, a new kind of hope: if that blot, what she called “density” or the “force of darkness,” were indeed mindless and random, how did he account for the very mathematical system he himself employed? If all were haphazard, where did order, however tenuous it might seem, come from? If all were irrational, how explain reason? As day, she covered and penetrated his night. Couldn’t he see that there must be an affirmative, an ascendant, a disciplining force in the universe? That if there were darkness and density, there must also be light?