But is even that the magic of film? Sitting back in your seat, aware of your right leg falling asleep, you think so, for the film has no capacity to fool you anymore. You do not give it your feelings to transfigure. All that you see with godlike detachment are your own decisions, the lines that were dropped, and the microphone just visible in a corner of one scene. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see the audience laugh out loud at the funny parts, and blubber when Bret rides home at last to marry Bess (actually, they hated each other on the set), believing, as you can’t, in a dream spun from accelerated imagery. It almost makes a man feel superior, like knowing how Uri Geller bends all those spoons.
And then it is done, the theater emptying, the hour and a half of illusion over. You file out with the others, amazed by how so much can be projected onto the tabula rasa of the Big Screen — grief, passion, fire, death — yet it remains, in the end, untouched. Dragging on your overcoat, the images still an afterglow in your thoughts, you step outside to the street. It takes your eyes, still in low gear, a moment to adjust to the light of late afternoon, traffic noise, and the things around you as you walk to your Fiat, feeling good, the objects on the street as flat and dimensionless at first as props on a stage. And then you stop.
The Fiat, you notice, has been broken into. The glove compartment has been rifled, and this is where you keep a checkbook, an extra key to the house, and where — you remember — you put the report due tomorrow at nine sharp. The glove compartment, how does it look? Like a part of your body, yes? A wound? From it spills a crumpled photo of your wife, who has asked you to move out so she can have the house, and another one of the children, who haven’t the faintest idea how empty you feel getting up every morning to finance their lives at a job that is a ghastly joke, given your talents, where you can’t slow down and at least four competitors stand waiting for you to step aside, fall on your face, or die, and the injustice of all this, what you see in the narrow range of radiation you call vision, in the velocity of thought, is necessary and sufficient — as some logicians say — to bring your fists down again and again on the Fiat’s roof. You climb inside, sit, furiously cranking the starter, then swear and lower your forehead to the steering wheel, which is, as anyone in Hollywood can tell you, conduct unbecoming a triple-threat talent like yourself: producer, star, and director in the longest, most fabulous show of all.
POPPER’S DISEASE
I.
I visit my patients frequently, particularly those on farms like Anna Montgomery. She’s poor, as everyone knows, and lives with eleven cats in a dilapidated farmhouse near Murphysboro, too poor to pay my bills — that’s true, except in molasses cookies, gossip about her children in Missouri, and hot cups of milk tea — but come winter, her roof buckles under the weight of snow, her plumbing freezes, and I dutifully make the long drive from Carbondale to dig a path to Anna’s door, and check her cupboard, then her pulse.
Now, I do not mention these weekly visits to the poor to impress you, or to suggest that without Dr. Henry Popper’s services these people would die (many problems, Lord knows, are beyond the pale of physics), but to explain how I came to be on a lonely country road after the severest snowstorm in the history of southern Illinois, and to assure you that, for all the crackpots who report unearthly phenomena, I am the most reliable of men.
House calls help my patients, obviously, but they help me, too. They take me away for hours. They take me, now that it’s out in the open, away from my wife, Mildred. She’s fifty,’ Swedish, still has her looks, and gives piano lessons to our paper boy, Gary Freeman — I think it’s Gary this Sunday. He’s fifteen, the son of Bob Freeman, our pharmacist and one of my friends. “You’re only in the way,” says Mildred, and I daresay she’s right. She doesn’t grudge my Saturday night poker games at the Court House with George Twenhafel, the mayor, and Judge Hal Withers, who started doing push-ups, against my advice, and had some sort of attack. They’re white, I should add, and I’m not, except in the sense that perhaps everyone these days in America is white, insofar as to ask, “Who am I?” is to ask, “By what social forces have I been shaped?” While logic would have it that I am Popper, perhaps you are Popper, too — or, more precisely, aren’t we all tarred by the same cultural brush? Of course, Twenhafel, Withers, and I so cautiously avoid the topic of race during our get-togethers that the conversation seems to be about nothing but race. I’m not sure I understand them, and sometimes I’m convinced they don’t understand me. Yet I have thought this puzzle through since my student days at Tuskegee, then Harvard, and it comforts me to believe we share the same cultural presuppositions — that history, for example, is linear, not circular, reason is preferable to emotion, and that one event “causes” another, although this is clearly, as many scientists have shown, an almost superstitious act of faith.
So my labor up frost-covered hills, alongside thick, unfenced woods, through cornfields bleached by snow gives Mildred and Gary a brief moment to practice “Fiir Elise,” and gives me four hours to myself, my black medical bag beside me — dear old satchel of tricks, tools, all Western methodology in a portmanteau, my pipe crackling softly, and steamy car window parted slightly so I don’t fall asleep. It is pleasant and quiet, out here on the road with the sky very blue, the wind cold, and the air clear. During these drives I pull hard on my pipe and ponder nothing as ordinary as my old woman’s odd ways, but instead scientific problems that have puzzled me most of my life — the ontogenesis of personality, for example, which is fully explained by the famous French neurobiologist Henri Ey in Études psychiatriques (Vol. III, 1954). There can be little doubt that personality is the product — no — the historical creation of society. The world and man, according to Ey, engender one another, but this implied — and here my thoughts shift as quickly as gears on my Buick — that, ultimately, the most intimate features of a man’s personality, those special aspects he believed individual and subjective and unique — kinks and quirks — had their origin, like Oxydol and doorknobs, in the public sphere, probably in pop culture. In other words, what we took to be essential in man throughout history might be accidental. A startling thesis, I’d have to say. But no more startling than the possibility that no man can escape the ceiling his culture sets for him, its special strengths and sicknesses. The case could be put in these terms: Certain aberrations in an Age might be so universal as to be unquestioned, and not recognized as problems for a thousand years. You’ll think this mad, and I did, too, driving ten miles an hour, heavy snow swirling down; but I had been in half the sickrooms of southern Illinois, seen patients as physically healthy as prizefighters suddenly founder, then fail, and for no material reason, far as I could see, as if, strange to say, the malady lay in the invisible realm of values and belief.
Being an old man, I know theories are as plentiful as blackberries, so I’d be the last person to take such a playful hypothesis for true. These thoughts, however, kept my mind occupied during the drive to Anna Montgomery’s. So occupied, in fact, that I was only faintly aware of the road sheering downhill, something streaking above the trees overhead, then static and a soft, miniature voice in my radio. The snow around me, it appeared, was melting. My foot shook on the accelerator. Then my engine got the hiccups, coughed, sputtered, and stopped cold. A shadow fell. Something blocked out the sun. The ground rumbled like eight-point-nine on the Richter scale, and I thought, Earthquake! They happen each spring in southern Illinois, but wasn’t this winter? Cranking the starter key, slamming the stick into reverse, I saw through the frosty windshield — in a shock that made me whimper and rub my sleeve against the glass — a tremendous ship, two pie plates stuck together, hurtling soundlessly toward me, low, burning the crisp November air black with radiation. It zigzagged back and forth, snapping off a colonnade of tall-shafted pines atop a hill, then toppled Wayman Presley’s fifty-foot cross (a local landmark of sorts) like a matchstick, made a hundred-degree turn without slowing down, then slogged into the earth. The explosion was stupendous, an earth-rocking blitz that ripped the roof off my car and threw me to one side of the road. Then all was quiet. For an instant I didn’t know what it was hit me. My carhood was oxidized. My radiator boiled over. Faintly, the ship’s relays and circuits clicked. Its surface burned first brick-red, then beryllium. And then something called to me from inside.