"It's not the best recording," I said. "Columbia uses a peculiar microphone placement; they have microphones scattered around throughout the orchestra, with the idea of bringing out the individual instruments. The idea is good, but it does away with hall ambiance."
"It bothers her that I'm stepping down," Tim said. "As bishop."
"You should think about it longer," I said. "Before you do it. Are you sure it's this medium that you want to consult? Isn't there someone in the church you go to when you have a spiritual crisis?"
"I will be consulting Jeff. The medium acts as a passive agent, much in the fashion that a telephone acts." He went on, then, to explain how misunderstood mediums are; I half-listened, neither impressed nor caring. Kirsten's hostility had upset me, even though I had become used to it; this amounted to more than her chronic bitchiness. I can tell a red freak when I see one, I said to myself. The personality change, the hair-trigger response. The paranoia. She is crapping out on us, I said to myself. She is going down the drain. Worse, she is not going down the drain alone; her nails are dug deep in us and we go perforce along. Shit. This is just dreadful; a man like Tim Archer should not have to put up with this. I should not have to.
Kirsten opened the bedroom door. "Come in here," she said to Tim.
"I will in a minute," Tim said.
"You will come in here now."
I said, "I'll take off."
"No," Tim said, "you will not take off. I have further things to discuss with you. Is it your contention that I should not step down as bishop? When my book comes out about Jeff, I will have to step down. The church will not allow me to publish a controversial book of that sort. It is too radical for them; put another way, they are too reactionary for it. It is ahead of its time and they are behind the times. There is no difference between my stand on this issue and my stand on the Vietnam War; I bucked the Establishment on that, and I should-theoretically-be able to buck the Establishment on the issue of life beyond the grave, but with the war I have support from the youth of America. But in this matter, I have support from no one."
Kirsten said, "You have my support but that doesn't matter to you."
"I mean public support. The support of those in power, those who control human minds, unfortunately."
"My support means nothing to you," Kirsten repeated.
"It means everything to me," Tim said. "I could not-I would not-have dared to write the book without you; I would not even have believed without you. It is you who gives me my strength. My capacity to understand. And from Jeff, when we have contacted him, I will learn about Jesus Christ one way or another. I will learn if the Zadokite Documents do, in fact, indicate that Jesus spoke only secondhand of what he had been taught ... or possibly Jeff will tell me that Christ is with him, or he with Christ, in the other world, the upper realm, where we all go eventually, where he is now, reaching across to us as best he can, God bless him."
I said, "You see this business with Jeff, then, as a sort of opportunity. To clear up your doubts one way or another about the meaning of the Zadokite-"
"I think I have made that clear," Tim interrupted, peevishly. "That is why it is so crucial. To talk to him."
How strange, I thought. To use his son-make calculated use of his dead son-to determine an historical issue. But it is more than an historical issue: it is Tim Archer's entire corpus of faith, the summation, for him, of belief itself. Belief or the falling away of belief. What is at stake here is belief versus nihilism ... for Tim to lose Christ is for Tim to lose everything. And he has lost Christ; his statements to Bill that night may have been Tim's last defense of the fortress before that fortress fell. It may have fallen then, or perhaps before then; Tim argued from memory, as if from a page. A written speech spread out before him, as when, in the celebration of the Last Supper, he reads from the Book of Common Prayer.
The son, his son, my husband, subordinated to an intellectual matter-I could never, myself, view it that way. This amounts to a depersonalization of Jeff Archer; he is converted into an instrument, a device for learning; why, he is converted into a talking book) Like all these books that Tim forever reaches for, especially in moments of crisis. Everything worth knowing can be found in a book; conversely, if Jeff is important he is important not as a person but as a book; it is books for books' sakes then, not knowledge, even, for the sake of knowledge. The book is the reality. For Tim to love and appreciate his son, he must-as impossible as this may seem-he must regard him as a kind of book. The universe to Tim Archer is one great set of reference books from which he picks and chooses as his restless mind veers on, always seeking the new, always turning away from the old; it is the very opposite of that passage from Faust that he read; Tim has not found the moment where he says, "Stay"; it is still fleeing from him, still in motion.
And I am not much different, I realized; I, who graduated from the English Department at U.C. Berkeley-Tim and I are of a kind. Has it not been the final canto of Dante's Commedia that struck off my identity when I first read it that day when I was in school? Canto Thirty- three of Paradiso, for me the culmination, where Dante says:
"I beheld leaves within the unfathomed blaze Into one volume bound by love, the same That the universe holds scattered through its maze. Substance and accidents, and their modes, became As if fused together, all in such wise That what I speak of is one simple flame."
The superb Laurence Binyon translation; and then C. H. Grandgent comments on this passage:
"God is the Book of the Universe."
To which another commentator-I forget which one-said, "This is a Platonist notion." Platonist or otherwise, this is the sequences of words that framed me, that made me what I am: this is my source, this vision and report, this view of final things. I do not call myself a Christian but I cannot forget this view, this wonder. I remember the night I read that final canto of Paradiso, read it-truly read it-for the first time; I had that infected tooth and I hurt hideously, unbearably, so I sat up all night drinking bourbon-straight-and reading Dante, and at nine A.M. the next day I drove to the dentist's without phoning, without an appointment, showed up with tears dripping down my face, demanding that Dr. Davidson do something for me ... which he did. So that final canto is deeply impressed onto and into me; it is associated with terrible pain, and pain that went on for hours, into the night, so there was no one to talk to; and out of that I came to fathom the ultimate things in my own way, not a formal or official way but a way nonetheless.
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. "
Or however it goes. Aeschylus? I forget, now. One of the three of them who wrote the tragedies.
Which means that I can say with all truthfulness that for me the moment of greatest understanding in which I knew spiritual reality at last came in connection with emergency root-canal irrigation, two hours in the dentist chair. And twelve hours drinking bourbon-bad bourbon at that-and simply reading Dante without listening to the stereo or eating-there was no way I could eat-and suffering, and it was all worth it; I will never forget it. I am no different, then, from Timothy Archer. To me, too, books are real and alive; the voices of human beings issue forth from them and compel my assent, the way God compels our assent to world, as Tim said. When you have been in that much distress, you are not going to forget what you did and saw and thought and read that night; I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing; I read and I remember; I did not read Howard the Duck or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comix that night; I read Dante's Commedia, from Inferno through Purgatorio, until at last I arrived in the three colored rings of light ... and the time was nine A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson's office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast, not even coffee, and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist's receptionist.