The Man in the Tree

Chapter Twenty-two

Tom Cooley left his job in 1976, moved back to Amherst where he still had friends, and retired on a small pension. With this and his income from several rental properties he had acquired in the sixties, he was financially secure, and for a number of years his health was good. He went on annual hunting trips with his cronies, did a little fishing and continued to read "Amusement Business" from cover to cover.

In the fall of 1982, camped in the Adirondacks, one evening he felt tired and out of sorts. The next morning he missed a clear shot at a six-point buck; the gun seemed to dip in his hands at the moment he squeezed the trigger. On the way back to camp with his friends, he slipped and fell heavily. The next day he noticed that he was having trouble holding things. When he tried to chop some kindling, the hatchet flew out of his hand and narrowly missed Al Jacobs' leg.

Cooley realized that something was seriously wrong. When he got back to Amherst he went to a doctor, who sent him to a V.A. hospital for tests. In December the doctor told him, "Mr. Cooley, what you've got is something called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. You may have heard of it as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a progressive muscular weakness, and there just isn't any treatment for it. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's the way it looks."

"How long have I got?" Cooley asked.

"I'd say three or four years, five at the outside."

A few months after this interview, Cooley found a notice in the back of "Amusement Business": "Big John Kimberley would like to hear from carnival friends, 1964-65." There was a box number in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Cooley's hands were now so weak that he could see the time coming when he would not be able to dress and feed himself. His legs were also affected; he could not walk far without tiring. Dr. Seward had been after him to go into the V.A. hospital again, but Cooley knew that once he did that he would never get out again.

There was no way he could aim and fire a gun, or use any other weapon. He thought of letter bombs, but that was too chancy; someone else might open the letter. He thought of poisons, of fire, of bacterial cultures, and rejected them all. He slept badly. In his dreams, Gene Anderson was guillotined, drowned, garroted, crushed by falling trees, and always he stood up again unharmed.

One evening he called a taxi and went to see Al Jacobs. They talked a little about hunting; then Cooley brought up his problem in a casual way.

"What are you telling me -- you want to wire some guy's car? That's easy."

"No, not a car. I was thinking maybe under a chair."

"With a timer?"

"No, that's no good. I've got to be there when it happens."

"Right in the same room? You could do it with a shaped charge, if that's what you want. The explosion goes straight up. You could be sitting next to him, and it wouldn't knock your hat off."

"How would I fire it?"

Jacobs shrugged. "Dozens of ways. The simplest thing would be just a wire and a push-button. Or you could use a radio control -- no wires."

"What would it cost?"

Jacobs scratched his chin. "Tom, it wouldn't be easy for me to get this stuff. The radio control, if you decide to go that way, I'll have to make that myself. Say five thousand."

Gene Anderson stood at his window, looking down at the lights along the driveway and in the parking area. The gate was open; here came a car, black behind the cones of its headlamps. Another was turning off the highway behind it. He had just finished dressing, in a suit and tie; it was the first time he had worn such an outfit in more than a year.

Behind him, on his writing chair, were some penciled notes headed "Toward a New Religion." He had not shown these to anyone, even to Maggie. It was curious and a little unsettling to think how his attitudes had changed over the years, as if belief were a function of metabolism. In his teens, he had dismissed religion as a mental aberration; now, although he found the answers of organized religion full of absurdities, the questions absorbed him.

He had one advantage over all the others who speculated about the unseen world: he knew that it existed. Several times, by accident, he had managed to bring through from another world some object which was not merely a copy of something existing in this world. Among these was a little volume by Marco Pallis which did not appear in any catalog or index. In this world, Pallis had written many works on metaphysics and religion, but not "The Phenomenology of Mind."

Gene treasured this book, in its warped boards and faded green cloth, because it was itself evidence that the author's central postulate was true: the universe was an infinite manifold in which every possible thing existed: "God is free to do, and must do, everything that is possible." Somewhere in that vast flowering of creation, that n-dimensional dandelion globe of branching and rebranching realities, there were worlds in which Gene Anderson had never been born, others in which he was not a giant, others in which he had not killed Paul Cooley. . . .

He looked at his watch; it was time to go down.

The housewarming party, in his opinion, was an evil of doubtful necessity. "You can stand them for one evening," Irma had said, but he was not sure about that. They had invited all the local people who had had anything to do with the house, and their flowery wives. Little Larry Einarson, the architect, was there, and Russell Beck, the prime contractor, along with a crowd of subcontractors; then there was Dan Ankeny, the real estate broker; Sidney Webbet, of St. Petersburg Trust and Guaranty; and various friends and relatives whose names he had not quite caught. The men were red-faced, painfully close-shaven and recently barbered; one or two of them were already glassy-eyed.

When he stood up, Gene's head was on a level with the heads of people on the raised portion of the living room, and when he sat down he was about as tall as people standing beside him, and that should have been all right, but people were still uneasy in his presence; they came over one or two at a time and said a few words -- usually the same few words -- then looked embarrassed and went away.

Maggie, in a white dress that showed off her tan, was talking to the publisher of the "St. Petersburg Times" and his rotund wife; Pongo and Irma had been here earlier but had disappeared. Hired waiters came and went with trays of highballs; a few people had brought plates from the buffet into the living room and were dripping vinaigrette sauce on the rugs.

"Mr. Anderson, please tell me, where did you get that marvelous wood carving? Is it one of yours?" The art critic of the "Times," a pale young man with black-rimmed glasses, was pointing to a modern-looking piece that resembled the buttocks of a woman.

"No, I got it in the Seychelles," Anderson said. He did not add that the "sculpture" was the fruit of a Coconut palm.

"Well, it's simply marvelous. I'd like to do a column about it, and of course, about all the other wonderful things you have here. I know how you feel about publicity, but -- "

"I'd really rather not. You understand."

"Of course." The critic, whose name was Phelps or Phillips, shrugged with manly regret and drifted off, munching a canape.

A gray-haired man with a solemn expression was coming toward him. "Hello, Cliff," said Anderson. "Did you just get here?"

"Yes, my plane was late, but I've got that information you wanted. I could of phoned, but I thought you'd rather have me tell you in person."

"Yes, of course."

"Can we go someplace private?"

Anderson stood up and looked around. There were people on the balcony, in the dining room; there were even a few sitting on the benches in the garden. "Come on," he said, and led the way back through the hall to the infirmary, where he sat on the end of the examination chair and offered Cliff Guthrie a stool.

Guthrie said, "First off, I ought to tell you that I had to spend all the money you gave me. There was the guy in IRS, and then we had to find somebody in the Veterans Administration, so it was expensive."

"That's all right."

"Well, we located him. There are plenty of Thomas Cooleys, but this one was born in Portland, Oregon, and the dates match, and he gives his occupation as retired police officer, so it's got to be him. He's sixty-nine now. He's living in Amherst, Massachusetts, and he was in a veterans' hospital for a while last year. Sorry if that's bad news."

"No, it's okay," Anderson said. "Thanks, Cliff."

In the kitchen, the phone rang and Irma answered it. "Yes, it is," she said. "Who is this?" She listened a moment, then put the phone down.

"Who was it?" Pongo asked.

"I don't know. Some man asked if this was John Kimberley's residence, and I said yes, because that's the name Gene used in the carnival; then he hung up. That's funny."

"Maybe he'll call back."

Margaret found herself standing beside a large gray-haired man with mournful eyes. "My name is Cliff Guthrie," he said. "I haven't seen you around here before."

"No, I'm new. Margaret Morrow -- I'm Gene's secretary. Have you known him long, Cliff?"

"About a year. I was an examiner with IRS. We were auditing his returns, and I saw him several times. After I retired last March, I came around just to pay a social call. He was pretty cordial, considering what a rough time we gave him."

"And now he invites you to his parties?"

"That's right. I've done some work for him, too." He stared at the highball in his hand. "It isn't the work, though -- that isn't why. I just like to be around him."

"I know what you mean."

Anderson moved across the living room, past a group of men talking about fishing:" . . . thirty-five yards of hundred-pound test, and, man, I mean he snatched it . . . "At the end of the raised area Linck was holding forth to a little group: "Yes, even the pumpkin. Do you know that carriages and lanterns have essentially the same shape? If you look at a carriage with two lanterns, there it is three times, one big one and two little ones. And even in automobiles, up to about nineteen thirty. Well, it has been shown that this form is based on the seed-pod of a Chinese plant."

Anderson paused to listen. Linck's group included one of the insurance people, the publisher Orris Kilian and his wife, and a man whose name he had forgotten -- one of the subcontractors, probably. The publisher's wife was saying something about the mystery of folk tales. Linck answered, "I think what you feel when you say a story like that is mysterious is that there's another story behind it. For instance, 'Beauty and the Beast.' That is mysterious, because it is covering up another story, the Amor and Psyche myth, and that one is mysterious too, perhaps, because it's covering up still another story that we don't know about."

"Who was the man who made that movie of 'Beauty and the Beast'?" the publisher asked.

"Cocteau."

"Cocteau, right. Wasn't he a fag? Why do you suppose so many -- "

Anderson' moved on. He knew the question and the answer already. He walked through the garden, past a man and a woman seriously engaged in kissing; he let himself into the dark workshop, out again at the back, and began to climb the hill. Behind him the house spilled its yellow lights out over the garden and the lawn: it was like someone else's house, in another country. The trees closed around him with their cool breath. He climbed as far as the footbridge, crossed it, and sat down on the far side, looking at the stars.

He remembered nights in the South Pacific when there had been, incredibly, more stars than this. It was really better to be on the ocean, he and Pongo the only sparks of human life in the great vacancy; then you saw the world clearly and knew just how large it was. But even here, knowing that St. Petersburg and the beaches were only ten miles away, it was good to look up at the night sky and feel the great globe massively turning under his body. The earth turned under the stars, and as it turned the little sparks that were human souls dimmed and brightened, like candles lighted and snuffed, endlessly, over and over, around the turning world.

If it was true, as the physicists seemed to be saying, that consciousness did not merely observe reality but helped to create it, then perhaps science was an impiety, and the original sin might have been, not eating the fruit of the tree, but cutting it down -- forcing God to disclose the structure of the rings which until then had not existed.

And if Western civilization were to be destroyed, if all that knowledge were lost in the cataclysm that was surely coming, would the universe then revert to a simpler model? The sky a crystal hemisphere over a flat earth? Sometimes he felt he could almost believe it. What if it were only human knowledge and belief that held the whole fabric together: with that gone, would time unroll again to the beginning? Would God walk again in the garden, in the cool of the evening?

It is a little after two o'clock. Pongo is in his living room, watched by the marmoset as he turns the pages of a bikers' magazine. Here is a photograph of a man with the usual beard and tattoos straddling a Harley-Davidson; swastikas and silver dollars are sewn to his black leather vest. Behind him stand two long-haired young women, bare to the belly. All three are smiling. The two women have big fruity breasts, pale and soft in the sunlight. The message seems to be that if you are a real man, you will wear black leather and ride a big bike; then the big-chested women will crowd around you and smile. Pongo's right buttock is itching, but he is too lazy to scratch it. He thinks about an afternoon at the Club de Pesce in Cartagena -- '73 was that, or '74? They were sitting on the terrace in the shade of the flowering trees, looking out across the bay at the rusty hulk of a Colombian naval cruiser. It was hot even under the trees, but there was a little wind from the water. The smiling indio waiter in his purple jacket had just served them a pompano en papillote, brown and tender in the husk of charred paper. He remembers the smell of the fish, and the water too bright to look at. Now he sees the two women sitting down at the next table, in the sun. Gene, with his back turned, does not see them. He tries to capture that first moment, but it will not come clear -- just the two women sitting down, and that one has glossy dark hair, the other a cap of short champagne-colored curls. The sun is behind her, and he sees that one breast is outlined clearly through her thin orange blouse; it is almost a perfect half-sphere, like a little grapefruit, and the nipple, thick and erect, is the size of a pencil eraser.

Irma, upstairs in the big house, is looking at one of the ads in "The New Yorker." Two tanned young people stand under a tree. They are both barefoot. The young man leans on a branch with his forearms crossed over an open book; the flap of the book jacket has been folded in to keep his place if he should decide to put the book down. There is a ring on the third finger of his left hand. He looks patiently at the young woman, who hangs onto the branch with one hand, while, with the other, she brushes a hibiscus blossom against her chin. She does not look at him, but at something off-camera, perhaps the sunset (this would account for the pumpkin color of their skins); perhaps she is making up her mind whether to give the young man any reason to put down his book. She is a slightly disheveled blonde with a biteable lower lip. Her adolescent breasts are concealed by two triangles of cloth, one blue, one violet: She also wears a gauzy floral skirt in the same colors. Behind them are two wicker chairs and a low wicker table on the brown-sugar sand; on the table are two artfully decorated rum drinks, maybe rum Alexanders, each with its straw; a pair of sunglasses; and another hibiscus blossom: beyond all that lies the baby-blue sea.

Margaret is sitting on her bed with pillows behind her. She has just had a shower, and feels cool and clean. She picks up a copy of "Cosmopolitan"; on the cover is a vapid teenager in a purple dress with the zipper pulled down to reveal the inner slopes of two melony breasts. One has been retouched to look much smaller than the other: why is that? She opens the magazine toward the back and finds photos of women in purple woolly wraps, a purple mohair sweater, a purple knitted tam. There is a two-page cigarette ad showing the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. The water is purple. The eye-shadow in the cosmetic ads is purple. She reads a mail-order ad: "Yes, CONNECTING will show you how to find love the day you receive it -- not after you've lost 20 pounds, not after you've spent money on a new wardrobe, not after you've been rejected by fifty other men, but the day you receive it! Just the way you are." Then a diet article.

Linck is in the bathroom, a room he thoroughly approves of because it has a tub long enough to stretch out in, a rubberized headrest, and a reading light. He runs his bath, hot with a little admixture of cold, until it is within a few inches of the drain; then he turns off the hot, turns the cold water on full. Probably because of the frostbite he suffered as a child, his toes are less tolerant of heat than the rest of his body, and he has worked out this method of dividing his bathwater into zones.

When the tub is full he steps into it, carrying his bathtub book -- today it is "The Pound Era," by Hugh Kenner -- and lowers his buttocks with care into the water. When he is seated in the tub with his legs drawn up, he propels himself gently backward and lowers his body, with grunts of pleasure, until it is submerged.

In the few moments after he sits in the tub and before he lies down, he has noticed, as he always does in this house, that the light from the wall behind him makes visible certain curious turbulent shadows in the water. At first he supposed that oils from his skin, liberated by the heat, were swirling out into the tub; but by holding his forearm a few inches under the surface, he has been able to determine that the shadows come from a level higher than his submerged body, and it is now his opinion that these squirming ideograms are caused by the sudden admixture of the hot and cold zones of the bathwater.

It is interesting how often the bathtub has figured in the history of science, politics, and art: Archimedes, for instance, and the Shang emperor about whom he has just been reading, who inscribed on his tub the characters that Pound translated, "Make it new." Why on his tub? Was it because the emperor, like Linck himself, this person, this physical body who lies here now submerged and displacing water like Archimedes, liked to philosophize in his tub?

Now the shapes at the bottom of the water have paled almost to invisibility, but they are still there, no longer ideograms but slowly elongating serpents. The Manichaeans believed that God was visible in light, Satan in darkness. In the struggle between them, the elements had been mingled; the whole world was a mixture of darkness and light, good and evil. At certain moments Linck finds this a very plausible theory, the more so because without this mingling there would be no contrast and no borders; the perceptible universe could not exist.

On the bottom of the tub there is another shadow, a drifting chain of three lozenges, each one surrounded by two bright arcs, mathematically perfect, that intersect at the points of the lozenge. When he looks for the source of this shadow, he finds that it is a floating hair. It is curious, he thinks, that this marvelous and perfect appearance should be generated by nothing more than a hair, probably a pubic hair.

Alone in his room in the secure yellow-white light, Gene Anderson takes three coins from the cup on the desk. He throws them six times: they yield the hexagram Tui, "The Joyous, Lake."

He finds it in the 'text. Tui is the hexagram of "the joyous" and of success, which comes through gentleness. When men's hearts are won by gentleness, says the oracle, they will accept hardships and even death. This is the Judgment. The Image, the second trigram, tells him that knowledge becomes a vitalizing force through stimulating conversation with congenial friends.

There is a moving line, an old yin, in the third place. This tells him that if a man is empty inside, idle pleasures will fill the void. The next two lines are old yang. The first tells him that inner peace can come only from the renunciation of base pleasures; the second, that danger comes in the form of "disintegrating influences" even to the best of men.

As always, the I Ching's response is apposite, and as always, it is ambiguous. He forms another question: "What is this danger?" and casts the coins again. They yield the hexagram Pi, "Union." Again the response is apposite: it says that for union to take place, there must be a central figure for the others to rally around: but if that man has no real calling, he will only bring about confusion.

Year by year the layers of coldness have folded around him, numbing the pain to a distant pinprick. Sculpture, painting, that whole world, is now like a nest of bright objects laid away in cabinets. People are interesting, clever little mechanisms, with their bright eyes, their flushes and smiles.

It is not that they are unintelligent. Taken one by one, they are as smart as they need to be, but in their numbers they are a terrible swarming mass, grinding everything to smaller and smaller bits.

For months he has been carrying in his mind the solution to humanity's problem -- a way of saving the world. He knows it is possible, and he is almost persuaded that he can do it himself. When he examines his motives, he sees that for the most part they are selfish: the lust for glory; the desire for great accomplishment, for a sense of superiority; the urge to save his own life. On the other side, he is afraid of giving up his peace and privacy, perhaps forever; he is afraid of failure; he is afraid of revealing himself as a megalomaniac and narcissistic fool. Which is worse, to save humanity for the wrong reasons -- or to let it perish through cowardice?