The Entity, page 38
“Oh, Carlotta,” he sighed.
He had seen her buck and heave alone in bed. Jerry was amazed at the coincidence. Two women, both the center of his existence. Both insane. Did he have some inner compulsion to be pulled into this hallucinatory state?
Jerry slumped down on the bench. The moon had gone behind the city hall. It was dark in the cell. He knew his existence was at stake. He wondered where he was going to find the strength to cut himself loose from Carlotta. Yet he knew, for the sake of his own sanity, he had to do it.
Eight days after she had been admitted into the hospital, Carlotta was discharged. She was driven to the house on Kentner Street by Billy. It was a slow, silent, funereal ride, punctuated by occasional stops to add water to the radiator, which still leaked. For both of them it was a journey back to hopelessness.
Entering the living room, Carlotta was shocked to find that Kraft and Mehan were not there. No students were there. And no equipment. Everything had been dismantled and taken away.
Carlotta looked at Billy. His eyes were downcast, sheepish. He had not been able to prepare her. Now he said, simply: “They’re gone, Mom.”
Carlotta shook her head vaguely. She could not figure it out. She was frightened. They had promised to help. Why had they deserted her? If they ran out of money, they should have told her. She would have understood.
Her hair, shaved in a few patches, was covered with a bandana. A dull pain still throbbed behind her temples.
“You look white,” Billy said.
“I feel dizzy.”
Carlotta sat down on the couch.
“You better lie down,” Billy advised.
“Let me go to bed,” she said softly.
Carlotta undressed and slipped under the covers. The dizzy spells came back, as they did from time to time, ever since she had been struck over the right side of the head. Nausea rolled up like a wave and then disappeared again.
“Don’t go away, Bill.”
“I won’t, Mom. I’ll never go away.”
Gradually the room stopped spinning and things seemed to settle down onto the ground again.
She drifted in and out of sleep. Occasionally she would open her eyes. Once she saw the girls looking down at her. Then they went away. It grew darker. She felt herself falling. In a panic she reached out. She felt a hand hold hers. A warm hand.
“I’m here, Mom,” Billy said.
She nodded, her face drenched in perspiration. Billy gently dabbed at her face with a soft cloth. She held his hand against her cheek for a while, then drifted again into sleep.
The house darkened. The crickets chirped. A melodious sound. A dull ache filled the world. Jerry was gone. The darkness was everywhere, infinite and cold. Jerry was gone. She felt cut in half, on the bottom of a huge, frozen ocean. Nothing was normal anymore. Or ever would be.
Carlotta moaned softly in her sleep. Visions of Jerry came and went. She saw him lying beside her, champagne in his hand. Then he bent over her, kissed her, his lips cold and wet. She remembered pulling his bathrobe from the closet. She opened her eyes and wiped the tears from her face. In the darkness she saw that the walls and ceiling looked strange. They were covered with the peculiar cork-boards. They had left them intact.
Then with a hideous chill she remembered why the corkboards were plotted all over with white crosses. It was a photographic grid to map the monster who—
There was a crackling sound.
She looked. Nothing. It was cold. The night had turned to a vacuum, a cold vacuum like outer space. It caught at her throat, turned her skin to fiery pricks of pins and needles. She dimly heard Billy in the kitchen humming softly.
Another crack.
She sat up. It sounded as though the walls were shifting.
Then a piece of corkboard ripped from the wall. A nail, suddenly released, sprang to the floor, rolled over and over, and the sound died slowly in the darkness. The corkboard bounced slowly on the edge of the bed, then slipped down to the floor, fell once or twice, and was still.
Two cracks.
She turned. A rip shot up through the corkboard on the opposite wall. Nails sprang in a cluster through the air. Fragments of cork spit out at her. The segment of wall became visible as the cork was pried away, torn away, until it bounced through the room and fell against the door.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” She was enveloped by the soft, vicious, laughter.
Cracks shot all over the walls. Cork disintegrated. Planes of the cork revolved like spinning constellations across the room. Nails showered down upon the floor. Bits of plaster added snow to the maelstrom. Everything floated, swam dizzily, around and around the room, settling slowly, iridescently, as the cork began to glow blue and green.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
They flew faster and faster, colder and colder. Carlotta lost sight of the bare plaster walls, the air was so full of soundless, flying bits of cork, nails, white tape, and pieces off her dresser. They grew more and more iridescent, until she saw swarming jewel-like pieces coagulate into a whirlpool over the bed.
“Welcome home, cunt!”
22
On the fourth of April, Dr. Shelby Gordon, the chairman of the department of psychology, acting on a memo from Dean Osborne, removed two rooms from the division of parapsychology and transferred them to the behavioral psychology division.
“They need the space,” he told Dr. Cooley. “It’s the same equipment, the sinks, the outlets, the—”
Dr. Cooley was livid.
“So my laboratory has become the domain of the rat psychologists,” she fumed. “Where does that leave me?”
“You can put all your equipment in your office,” the chairman said. “And utilize the classrooms on a revolving basis. With other lecture classes.”
“I need a lab,” she said angrily.
Dr. Gordon was unusually evasive. Her old-time friend seemed embarrassed. He avoided her glance.
“This is Dean Osborne’s doing, isn’t it?” she asked.
He said nothing.
“After all these years, Shel, you can tell me something,” she said. “It’s his idea to squeeze us out, isn’t it?”
“I suppose he has you on a low priority, sure.”
“But I only had three rooms and an office.”
“Well, what can I say, Elizabeth? This isn’t my decision. It’s the dean’s cafeteria. We have to eat what he serves.”
Dr. Cooley nervously lit a cigarette.
“You expect me to roll over and play dead?” she said.
“I’m not sure what you can do, Elizabeth.”
“I’ll go over his head.”
“I advise you not to.”
“Why not? I can’t conduct my research the way I need to. I have a right to be heard.”
The chairman turned in his swivel chair. He saw that she was dead serious.
“Elizabeth. Don’t go to the academic senate. Why do you want to get involved in a circus like that?”
She paced the floor, smoking rapidly.
“Because that’s what it is, a matter of academic freedom,” she said. “Hell, we could be a hundred percent wrong about that house in West Los Angeles, but they didn’t simply curtail the project. They went ahead and took our space away. You know as well as I do what’s next.”
“Get off your high horse. It’s a legitimate transfer of space.”
“Crap. Do you realize I’m in one of the last parapsychology divisions left in a major university? Do you know why? Because I’ve been very careful. I avoid frauds like the plague. I keep out of everybody’s way, I make no noise. My standards for reliability would make Freud blush for shame. Well, I’m not going to be swept into the dustbin like a piece of crap, because that’s what they’re doing. They hate parapsychology and everything it stands for.”
“Elizabeth—”
“When’s the next meeting?”
“You’re going to alienate the dean. That’s a fatal mistake.”
“I have no choice.”
The chairman threw down a file folder. Papers cascaded from a neat pile onto the floor.
“Well,” he said finally, “good luck. But I don’t think you’ll win.”
She smiled.
“I’ll win. Academic freedom is the ultimate weapon.”
In a large room, bathed in the sunlight filtering through palms set in wooden boxes near the windows, the academic senate congregated. More than three hundred men and women of varying ages and racial antecedents, sporting a wide variety of dress and hair styles. The women, in the main, were carefully dressed and coiffed in the conservative mode. Some of the men sprouted a wide fringe of beard around small chins, some affected bushy outgrowths to their ears, some grew their hair down to their shoulders, and others clipped it back until the scalp was visible through the crew cut. But otherwise their manners were identical: polite, reserved, formal. A great sense of frustration and tension was masked by their restraint, and only the twitching legs, the nervous gesture at the eyebrows, the crumpled agenda bulletin in their hands revealed their inner agitation. These meetings were not looked-forward-to events in their busy university lives.
A thin, prematurely balding man stepped to the podium.
“The next speaker on the agenda, Department of Psychology, Dr. Elizabeth Cooley.”
He stepped away. Several faculty members, coming in late, tried to sneak into the back row, but one of them caught his foot in a chair and made a loud noise extricating himself.
Dr. Cooley, wearing a small corsage, stepped forthrightly to the platform. Before her were elected representatives of the English Department, the Fine Arts Department, the History Department—every department in the university. Here, everyone was equal. Anyone could speak his mind. The group before her represented the last chance for her division. The regents and the chancellor would never waste a minute on her case. With dismay, she saw Kraft and Mehan enter the senate room. She hoped they would have the astuteness to remain out of this.
“Mr. President, fellow members of the senate. The issue which I wish to present before you today would not have been necessary but that it involves the most fundamental principle of our institution, and that is the right to free and independent research.”
The faculty members became quiet. It was an issue which inflamed almost all of them. Some for ideological reasons. Others, because they knew that a threat to one of them was a threat to all. They had learned years ago to band together to resist attempts at dividing them, cutting them apart, and misusing the university for a thousand political or economic reasons.
“I am the director of a rather small and experimental division within the Department of Psychology,” she continued. “We have been granted the right to autonomous research and publication for over ten years, and for that privilege we have been extremely grateful.”
She spoke well, in a moderate, dignified fashion. She had to. Her survival was at stake.
“However,” she said, “changes are being implemented which will effectively terminate our existence as an independent unit. That decision was not reached by the chairman of the department as the rules of the university stipulate. Nor was it reached by a curriculum committee operating under its responsibilities as set forth by the graduate school. Instead, that decision was unilaterally imposed upon us by Dean Osborne of the graduate school in a memo of April fourth.”
Many of the faculty did not like Dean Osborne. He did not have a Ph.D. but an Ed.D., a degree in education, which many felt was beneath the dignity of an administrator. Already Dr. Cooley could feel support swinging sympathetically to her side.
“Had there been a consensus of the department, had even the reason been explained to us, we might have accepted it. But this was not what happened. Without any prior warning two of our three laboratories have been taken from us in mid-semester. We have permanently lost our classroom facilities. And there is no doubt that ultimately we are going to be eliminated as a functioning division.”
Dr. Cooley paused, looked up from her notes, and saw Dr. Weber in the third row. The faculty members listened with rapt attention.
“What I am asking of the senate is a vote to request the dean of the graduate school to rescind his memo of April fourth, and return to us our facilities until the matter can be fairly heard by an impartial board of review, or until he drops the action.”
There was a sympathetic murmur through the crowd.
She turned to the sea of faces ranged before her.
“I would welcome discussion at this point,” she said.
A thin man from the Latin-American studies program stood up. He seemed to tremble in his right hand.
“Perhaps we should know the nature of the dispute,” he said, “before we unilaterally accept Dr. Cooley’s proposition. It seems to me you have to prove that it causes an ideological dispute. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of relocation of space and classrooms. We all have to contend with that.”
Dr. Cooley silently cursed him. But certainly, it would have come up anyway. She took a deep breath and hoped she would be both articulate and sympathetic to the intellectual assembly.
“The area that we study is unique in all the psychological sciences in one aspect only. All branches of psychology, as you probably know, are rooted in behavioral or social sciences, which rely on physical or statistical data. The precise nature of our investigation involves psychic research,” she said directly. “It is an area of study systematically excluded from the traditional areas of psychology. You will not find it in the textbooks, in seminars, in government grant projects, or in any experimental program except ours.”
The thin man sat down. But the damage was done. Some whispered conversations went back and forth through the rows of cafeteria chairs assembled for the occasion.
A tall woman with red hair piled high on her head stood up. She held what seemed to be a typewritten report in her hand. Dr. Cooley realized that it was the transcript of a lecture by Kraft and Mehan. How had she gotten it? Someone had orchestrated this afternoon against her. She looked at Dr. Weber, who pretended to be lighting an already-lit pipe.
“I have here a paper from the parapsychology division,” the woman said. “It will give you an insight, I think, into the reasoning behind the dean’s directive.”
The woman raised her spectacles from a lanyard around her neck. At last Dr. Cooley recognized the woman. Her name was Henderson. She was chairman of the behavioral psychology division. Rat psychology. Of course—she wanted those two rooms. Besides, rat psychology was the most absurdly narrow discipline since science was born. Everything they did was measured, dissected, weighed, analyzed, charted, graphed, until their students resembled trained robots weighing dead mice. The woman began to read from the paper, in a low, controlled voice, pausing only slightly to let her sarcasm be recognized without being too overt about it.
“The first of the authors,” the woman began, reading from the title page, “who is described as the most advanced student within the division of parapsychology, is a former electrical engineer. The second author has a degree in philosophy and is a sensitive.”
“A sensitive what?” someone asked.
“A sensitive. He is, according to the article, receptive to thought transference from human agents.”
“You mean a mind-reader?”
“Yes.”
The faculty seemed restless, anxious to get on with it. From a case of academic freedom, which had stirred them to the prospect of a dignified, even heroic fight against the forces of the materialist world, the whole affair had degenerated into a fight over another of the questionable programs established as a sop to the students’ mania for the occult and the exotic.
“Both authors have no degree in clinical psychology or training in any other related scientific discipline. In fact they were admitted to the graduate program simply on the basis of demonstrated interest in the subject of parapsychology.”
“Hypnotized the dean,” someone murmured.
The woman lowered the journal.
“Now the problem is not what Dr. Cooley has led us to believe. The controversy does not center around an ideological battle, but it centers around an experiment these two students have conducted. An experiment in which a woman suffered, as a direct result, a severe concussion and lacerations, and was treated for a possible skull fracture right here in the university clinic. Now, this woman was a registered patient of the psychiatric clinic, she was under their jurisdiction, and Dean Osborne simply exercised his option and cut the program. Dr. Cooley is raising a smoke screen. It has nothing to do with academic freedom.”
Dr. Cooley stepped to the podium. This time she faced a hostile audience.
“The problem is not so simplistic as is suggested by Dr. Henderson, who by the way, will take over our laboratories once we are moved out.”
Dr. Cooley cleared her throat lightly. She saw Kraft and Mehan in the back row, humiliated, depending on her as they never had before.
“If it were a matter of terminating a program, why did the dean cut out not only the funds and availability of equipment used in that particular project, but remove, in effect, every ongoing experiment in our division, reducing us to a series of theory classes?”
She let the question circulate among their minds. She felt them growing more attentive once again.
“If the physical education department teaches Yoga—which it does—and someone breaks his toe during class, does the whole division get cut down to ten percent capacity? If the political science department raises the hackles of some local politician because of an experimental class in the ghetto—is the whole department shut down? Of course not. The experimental wing of any discipline is its lifeblood, its youth, and its future. Whatever may happen with those experimental programs may be catastrophic, neutral, or even spectacularly successful. But the right to experiment, to conduct free and open inquiry, no matter how bizarre it may seem to the established powers of the discipline—and let me remind you, Dean Osborne’s background is in education, not psychology—is the single most fundamental right we share. Without it, we are thrown into the jungle of interference, politics, pressures from economic groups. I need not tell you what that implies for the university as a whole. It is the principle that we must defend. Tomorrow some dean will unilaterally declare your course unfit and, without procedural review or explanation, cancel it. It’s that simple.”
