The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

11

I LEARNED OF her suicide by hearing it from Tim on the phone. My little brother had come over to the house to visit me; it was on Sunday, so I didn't have to go to the Musik Shop that day. I had to stand there and listen to Tim telling me that Kirsten had "just slipped away"; I could see my little brother, who had really been fond of Kirsten; he was assembling a balsawood model of a Spad Thirteen-he knew the call was from Tim but, of course, he didn't know that now Kirsten, along with Jeff, was dead.

"You're a strong person," Tim's voice sounded in my ear. "I know you will be able to stand up to this."

"I saw it coming," I said.

"Yes," Tim said. He sounded matter-of-fact but I knew his heart was breaking.

"Barbiturates?" I said.

"She took-well, they're not sure. She took them and timed herself. She waited. Then she walked in and told me. And then she fell. I knew what it was." He added, "Tomorrow she was supposed to go back to Mount Zion."

"You called-

"The paramedics came," Tim said, "and they took her right to the hospital. They tried everything. What she had done was build up the maximum amount in her system already, so that what she took as the overdose-"

"That's how it's done," I said. "That way pumping her stomach doesn't help; it's already in the system."

"Do you want to come over here?" Tim said. "To the City? I would really appreciate your being here."

"I have Harvey with me," I said.

My little brother glanced up.

To him I said, "Kirsten died."

"Oh." He nodded, and, after a moment, returned to his balsawood Spad. It's like Wozzeck, I thought. Exactly like the end of Wozzeck. There I go: Berkeley intellectual, viewing everything in terms of culture, of opera, of novel, oratorio and poem. Not to mention play.

"Du! Define Mutter ist tot!"

And Marien's child says:

"Hope hope! Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!"

It will break you, I thought, if you keep this up. The little boy assembling a model airplane and not understanding: double horror, and both happening to me now.

"I'll come over there," I said to Tim. "As soon as I can find someone to take care of Harvey."

"You could bring him," Tim said.

"No." Reflexively, I shook my head.

I got a neighbor to take Harvey for the rest of the day, and, shortly, I was on my way to San Francisco, driving over the Bay Bridge in my Honda.

And still the words of Berg's opera percolated obsessively through my mind.

"The huntsman's life is gay and free,

Shooting is free for all!

There would I huntsman be,

There would I be. "

I mean, I said to myself, George Buchner's words; he wrote the damn thing.

As I drove, I cried; tears ran down my face; I turned on the car radio and pressed button after button, station after station. On a rock station I picked up an old Santana track; I turned up the volume and, as the music rebounded throughout my little car, I screamed. And I heard:

"You! Your mother is dead!"

I narrowly missed rear-ending a huge American car; I had to swerve into the lane to my right. Slow down, I said to myself. Fuck this, I thought; two deaths are enough. You want to make it three? Then just keep driving the way you're driving: three plus the people in the other car. And then I remembered Bill. Dingaling Bill Lundborg, off in an asylum somewhere. Had Tim called him? I should tell him, I said to myself.

You poor miserable fucked-up son of a bitch, I said to myself, remembering Bill and his gentle, pudgy face. That air of sweetness, like new clover, about him, him and his dumb pants and dumb look, like a cow, a contented cow. The Post Office is in for another round of their windows smashed, I realized; he will walk down there and start hitting the great plate glass windows with his fists until blood runs down his arms. And then they'll lock him up again in one place or another; it doesn't matter which because he doesn't know the difference.

How could she do it to him? I asked myself. What malice. What abysmal cruelty, toward us all. She really hated us. This is our punishment. I'll always think I'm responsible; Tim will always think he's responsible; Bill likewise. And of course none of us is, and yet in a sense all of us are, but anyhow it is beside the point, after the fact, null and moot and void, totally void, as in "the infinite void," the sublime non-Being of God.

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, "The world is awful." Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: "The world is awful." That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said. Black girl I knew. Not rats with her; it's rats for me-for her, she said, it was spiders; viz: "If spiders could talk." That time she got the runs while we were up in Tilden Park and we had to drive her home. Neurotic lady. Married to a white guy ... what was his name? Only in Berkeley.

Viz, a short form of Visigoths, the noble Goths. Visitation, as in, Visitation from the dead, from the next world. That old lady bears some real responsibility for this; if any one single person done did it she done did it. But that's killing the Spartan runners; now they have me doing it myself, after all the warnings. WARNING: THIS LADY IS NUTS. Get out of my way. May you all be fucked forever, all of you in your washed big cars.

I thought: "Destructive War, thy limits know; here, tyrant Death, thy terrors end. To tyrants only I'm a foe, to virtue and her friends, a friend." And then it says it again: "Here, tyrant Death." It's a great title; it's not a parody. That's what did it, Tim using my title and, of course- in his usual chickenshit fashion-not bothering or remembering to tell her. In fact, telling her that he thought of it. He probably thinks so. Every valuable idea in the history of the world was thought into being by Timothy Archer. He invented the heliocentric solar system model. We'd still have the geocentric one if it hadn't been for him. Where does Bishop Archer end and God begin? Good point. Ask him; he'll tell you, quoting from books.

No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up, I thought. That's how it should have been worded. I'll suggest that to Tim for Kirsten's gravestone. Teaching school in Norway, the Swedish cretin. A million nasty things I said to her, in the guise of play. Her brain recorded them and played them back to her, late at night when she couldn't sleep, while Tim snoozed on; she couldn't sleep and took more and more downers, those barbiturates that killed her; we knew they would: the only issue was whether it would be an accident or a purposeful overdose, assuming there is a difference.

My instructions required me to meet with Tim at the Tenderloin apartment before going on with him, then, to Grace Cathedral. I had expected to find him red-eyed and distraught. However, to my surprise, Tim looked stronger, more powerfully put-together, even in a literal sense larger, than I had ever seen him before.

He said, as he put his arms around me and hugged me, "I have a terrible fight on my hands. From here on in."

"You mean the scandal?" I said. "It'll be in the papers and on the news, I guess."

"I destroyed part of her suicide note. The police are reading what's left. They've been here. Probably they'll be coming back. I do have influence but I can't keep the news quiet. All I can hope for is to keep it retained as speculation."

"What did the note say?"

"The part I destroyed? I don't remember. It's gone. It had to do with us, her feelings about me. I had no choice."

"Guess so," I said.

"As to it being suicide, there is no doubt. And the motive is, of course, her fear that she had cancer again. And they're aware that she was a barbiturate addict."

"Would you describe her that way?" I said. "An addict?"

"Certainly. That's not disputed."

"How long have you known?"

"Since I met her. Since I first saw her taking them. You knew."

"Yes," I said. "I knew."

"Sit down and have some coffee," Tim said. He left the living room for the kitchen; automatically, I seated myself on the familiar couch, wondering if any cigarettes could be found anywhere in the apartment.

"What do you take in your coffee?" Tim stood at the kitchen doorway.

"I forget," I said. "It doesn't matter."

"Would you rather have a drink?"

"No." I shook my head.

"Do you realize," Tim said, "that this proves Rachel Garret right."

"I know," I said.

"Jeff wanted to warn her. Warn Kirsten."

"So it would seem."

"And I'm going to die next."

I glanced up.

"That's what Jeff said," Tim said.

"Guess so," I said.

"It will be a terrible fight but I will win. I am not going to follow them, follow Jeff and Kirsten." His tone rang with harshness, with indignation. "This is what Christ came to the world to save man from, this sort of determinism, this rule. The future can be changed."

"I hope so," I said.

"My hope is in Jesus Christ," Tim said. "'While you still have the light, believe in the light and you will become sons of light.' John, twelve, thirty-six. 'Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me.' John, fourteen, one. 'Blessings on him who comes in the name of the Lord!' Matthew, twenty-three, thirty-nine." Breathing heavily, his great chest rising and falling, Tim, gazing at me, pointed at me saying, "I'm not going that way, Angel. Each of them did it intentionally, but I will never do it; I will never go like that, like a sheep to slaughter."

Thank God, I thought. You are going to fight.

"Prophecy or no prophecy," Tim said. "Even if Rachel were the sibyl herself-even then I wouldn't walk toward it willingly, like a dumb animal, to have my throat cut, to be offered up." His eyes blazed, hot with intensity and fire. I had seen him this way sometimes at Grace Cathedral when he preached; this Tim Archer spoke with the authority vested in him by the Apostle Peter himself: through the line of apostolic succession, unbroken in and for the Episcopal Church.

As we drove to Grace Cathedral in my Honda, Tim said to me, "I see myself falling into Wallenstein's fate. Catering to astrology. Casting horoscopes."

"You mean Dr. Garret," I said.

"Yes, I mean her and Dr. Mason; they're not doctors of any kind. That wasn't Jeff. He never came back from the next world. There is no truth in it. Stupidity, as that poor boy said; her son. Oh Lord; I haven't called her son."

I said, "I'll tell him."

"It will finish him off," Tim said. "No, maybe it won't. He may be stronger than we give him credit for. He could see through all that nonsense about Jeff coming back."

"You get to tell the truth," I said, "when you're schizophrenic."

"Then more people should be schizophrenic. What is this, a matter of the emperor's new clothes? You knew, too, but you didn't say."

I said, "It's not a matter of knowing. It has to do with evaluation."

"But you never believed it."

After a pause, I said, "I'm not sure."

"Kirsten is dead," Tim said, "because we believed in nonsense. Both of us. And we believed because we wanted to believe. I have not that motive now."

"Guess not."

"If we had ruthlessly faced the truth, Kirsten would be alive now. All I can hope is to put an end to it here and now ... and accompany her at some later date. Garret and Mason could see that Kirsten was sick. They took advantage of a sick, disturbed woman and now she's dead. I hold them responsible." He paused and then said, "I had been attempting to get Kirsten to go into the hospital for drug detox. I have several friends who're in that field, here in San Francisco. I was well aware of her addiction and I knew that only professionals could help her. I had to go through this myself, as you know ... with alcohol."

I said nothing; I merely drove.

"It's too late to stop the book," Tim said. "Couldn't you phone your editor and-"

"The book is their property now."

I said, "They're a totally reputable publishing house. They would listen to you if you instructed them to withdraw the book."

"They've sent out promotional prepublication material. They've circulated bound galleys and Xerox copies of the manuscript. What I'll do-" Tim pondered. "I'll write another book. That tells about Kirsten's death and my reevaluation of the occult. That's the best avenue for me to pursue."

"I think you should withdraw Here, Tyrant Death."

His mind, however, had been made up; he shook his head vigorously. "No; it should be allowed to come out as planned. I've had years of experience with these matters; you should face up to your own folly-my own, I am referring to, of course-and then, after you've faced up to it, set about correcting it. My next book will be that correction."

"How much was the advance?"

Glancing swiftly at me, Tim said, "Not much, considering its sales potential. Ten thousand on my signing the contract; then another ten thousand when I delivered the completed manuscript to them. And there will be a final ten thousand when the book is released."

"Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Half to himself, reflecting, Tim said, "I think I'll add a dedication to it. A dedication to Kirsten. In memoriam. And say a few things about my feeling for her."

"You could dedicate it to both of them," I said. "Both Jeff and Kirsten. And say, 'But for the grace of God-' "

"Very appropriate," Tim said.

"Add me and Bill," I said. "While you're at it. We're part of this movie."

" 'Movie'?"

"A Berkeley expression. Only it's not a movie; it's the opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg. They all die except the little boy riding his wooden horse."

"I'll have to phone in the dedication," Tim said. "The galleys are already back in New York, corrected."

"She finished, then? Her job?"

"Yes," he said, vaguely.

"Did she do it right? After all, she wasn't feeling too well."

"I assume she did it correctly; I didn't look them over."

"You're going to have a Mass said for her, aren't you?" I said. "At Grace?"

"Oh, yes. That's one of the reasons I'm-"

"I think you should get Kiss," I said. "It's a group, a very highly thought of rock group. After all, you had been planning a rock mass anyhow."

"Did she like Kiss?"

"Second only to Sha Na Na," I said.

"Then we should get Sha Na Na," Tim said. We drove for a time in silence.

"The Patti Smith Group," I said suddenly.

"Let me ask you," Tim said, "about several things regarding Kirsten."

"I am here to answer any question," I said.

"At the service, I want to read poems that she loved. Can you give me the names of a few?" He got from his coat pocket a notebook and gold pen; holding them, he waited.

"There is a very beautiful poem about a snake," I said, "by D. H. Lawrence. She loved it. Don't ask me to quote it; I can't quote it just now. I'm sorry." I shut my eyes, trying not to cry.