The Dissertation, page 57
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
“I may take that as an activity,” he went on. “Before, when I was working, I used to say I’d like to sleep for a thousand years, and you can do that if you want. I might end up taking a job with the government. They’re all white-collar jobs, and they train you, The hardest part is making up your mind.”
His son, a lad of about fourteen, took loud issue with him here: “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to join up with Hannibal and fight the honkies! “
He dragged them off to the War pavilion, which his mother said they’d already seen five times. I would have liked to browse in the pavilions also, but my resolution drew me on.
Each pavilion has inscription areas where spirits who are considering applying can have their inquiries answered in depth and their qualifications assessed. The Performing Arts pavilion, for example, has several small theaters, Rebeca said, and she has visited it two or three times to help audition dancers. But no spirit may enter an inscription area until he has had at least one general counseling session, and every twelfth pavilion is staffed with Selection personnel for this purpose. We got down at the first one we came to.
All through Reception and so far into Selection I had been making inquiries of my three lovely companions and listening to their answers and explanations, but now, as we were waiting for one of the Spanish-speaking counselors to be free to see me, my mother asked me a question: “Why don’t you want to go to Learning, Camilito? What activity is it you want to enroll in first?”
I smiled at her. I could see by her strained expression that she was already divining my thoughts. Rebeca and Rosario also looked at me in anticipation, and I put my arms out to include all three, surely the three most charming ladies who ever showered their affection and concern on one poor fellow.
“I have to see my father,” I said softly. “I have to go to Victim for a while.”
They set up a wall of protest. I would be lost. Was I as foolish as my father? Hadn’t I suffered enough already?
I replied, smiling. I told my mother that I hoped to find, not lose myself, and Rebeca that while I didn’t understand my father’s wager, I knew he was no fool. To Rosario I said I had decided to take her advice, which I thanked her for giving, and that in my case, if not in all cases, suffering seemed to be an incidental charge to the business of becoming human.
“I must see him. I made the decision the instant we left earth. It may be, also, that he needs me, or would at least be cheered by seeing me.”
My mother nodded, weeping, and my aunt Rosario said I was a man, and though my grandmother Rebeca snorted and said men were all fools, ninnies, or worse, she looked at me with respect.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve enough Burlando blood in you to trick them, I suppose. But you ought to think it over carefully all the same.”
That was the interviewer’s caution, He would neither ask nor question my motives for choosing Victim. Most newly-arrived spirits assumed the Astral Plane included some place of suffering. Few had any urge to go there. None whom he had interviewed in his near century of service possessed such definite information about it as did I. If I wanted Victim, so be it. He did wish, however, to point out that the minimum voluntary commitment was seven years. I might, of course, return to my earthly body at any time so long as it remained in operation, but he felt morally bound to give me a few caveats. My body might cease to function at any time. Even if I returned to it, it would surely cease to function someday, at which time I would have to serve out the remaining portion of my sentence. I had no hope whatsoever of confounding astral regulations on that score, and should not take my grandfather’s experience as a precedent. (At this he flapped the elaborate print-out concerning me that his computer had thumped out and stared at me gravely.) Above all, he wished to warn me that Victim was not a place of recreation. Its inclusion among the Astral Activities was justified only because the general plan demanded that all human activities be offered. In the course of his training as a counselor he had visited Victim’s confinement facility and had seen victims in use at several activities. He personally would do anything in reason to avoid sharing the victim’s lot. I ought to think it over with great care.
I asked him if I would be able to spend time with my father, and he replied that which activities victims were dispatched to was a matter of hazard but that they were free to move about the confinement facility during recuperation periods. I told him my mind was made up, and he produced commitment forms, advising me that for a voluntary commitment, three witnesses were required.
Human life, my examiners, takes meaning only through the acts of human beings. I wished to give my life this meaning: that seven years of suffering count lightly beside the hope of true illumination. I craved to receive the past from my father’s lips so that I might return self-reliant to the present. The world to come showed me the way. The witnesses were at hand. I had the will, I signed.
94. My father
Human examiners, perhaps your spirit has at one time or another been weighted down with care or sorrow, or with weariness of life. Most humans know such heaviness now and then, and when it is truly grave, the human spirit can in no wise soar or range about as normally it’s able. Burdened and crushed, the spirit can but drag on. Such heaviness is infused into every spirit when he arrives in Victim, and that is why he may be taken out for use in this or that activity with slight concern lest he escape. Poured full of sorrow, care, and weariness, he wants but to sprawl immobile, and when he has to move his inclination is to creep. It’s best, though, to summon strength and go erect. There’s less risk of self-pity in that posture, and self-pity can corrode a spirit utterly. Those were my first pointers on victimhood, given me in the outer lock by a mad Russian on his second stretch.
From Selection I was teleported at light-speed across the vast expanses of the Astral Plane into the processing rooms of Victim. There my identity was cheeked and my spirit leadened. Then I was dropped into the outer lock, a horizontal cylinder some thirty meters long and about the diameter of a railway car. The great central confinement pen of Victim is ringed by three magnetic fields, and victims are locked in and out of it in lots of one hundred.
There was one other inside, sitting at the far end from me near the door to the first inner lock, and when I had crawled over to him, he addressed me first in Russian, then in German, then in French. I answered to the latter, and he asked how and why I’d come.
He had a broad, flat face with Tartar cheekbones and narrow eyes—a hard case indeed, I thought—but when I’d finished my brief story, he grinned fraternally, showing a wide glitter of white teeth, and welcomed me. Victim, he said, got deal-makers, gamblers, and madmen volunteers, the latter being either freaks or dreamers. The dreamers were the most valuable of all. I was clearly one, and so was he.
“I came in through Risk,” he went on, “but don’t let that confuse you. There are personal dreamers such as you and universal dreamers. I have a universal dream.”
His dream was nothing less than the permanent abolishment of cruelty, which, along with love, is the basic quality of the human spirit. That dream had driven him back to Victim for his second hundred-year term.
He was Prince Alexei Borisovich Sukasin, an ancestor, I think, of Rebeca’s seducer (see Chapter 2). He had been to bed with the Czaritza Catherine II, though that was no special distinction, considering the number of other Guards officers who could claim as much. Between his inheritance and her gifts he had owned over five thousand serfs, whom he abused in a manner extraordinary even in those despotic times. He had served with Suvorov against Pugachev’s rebellion, slaughtering innumerable Cossacks—women and children, prisoners and wounded, as well as armed combatants. He had lived without remorse and “died” without repentance, and had continued in the same fashion after reaching the next world.
He joined War, the only activity, he judged, fitting for a man of his class, but found it tame and, whenever he got leave, gambled his spirit for sojourns in crueler activities. Risk, he explained, is open to all and offers the chance to visit activities or to switch permanently without going through the time-consuming and uncertain transfer process. One receives credit up to a century in Victim and plays against the house at roulette or chemin de fer or craps.
“At first I won. I spent my leaves in Rape or Murder.” He paused, letting this sink in, before abandoning himself again to the slavic passion for breastbaring. “Then I lost my stake and was sent here.”
In Victim he became converted and developed his dream.
“After you’ve been raped or murdered once or twice, you invariably develop one of two attitudes. Either you resolve to pass the favor on to someone else—and there are many former victims in the activities of cruelty—or you resolve never to be cruel again yourself. I have gone a step further. I have resolved to see cruelty eradicated from both chambers of the universe.”
The people in justice, he said, spent all their energy trying to reform life on earth and thus wasted their efforts. The problem resided in the Astral Plane’s devotion to human freedom. People were allowed to become torturers and victims.
“Freedom must be abolished,” Prince Alexei declared, “if cruelty is to disappear.”
The victims were as much to blame as anyone else. Victims inspired cruelty in others, and everyone who entered Victim did so by choice. The gamblers in Risk secretly longed for victimhood, though few realized it. Victim and Risk would have to be abolished, along with Murder, Rape, Resentment and Revenge, Insult and Abuse, Orgies and Abominations, etc. And since cruelty was learned on earth, as he knew from experience, recyclement would have to be abolished and life on earth allowed to cease.
“The practice of sending spirits back there must be abolished. They must not be put back, even into plants. Plants evolved into animals and animals into humans, and every human has some cruelty in him. No form of life on earth must be permitted.”
I suggested that love also might be learned on earth as well as cruelty. If so, he answered, we would have to learn to do with out it.
“We must have no more cruelty!”
After serving his sentence, Prince Alexei made no effort to select another activity but remained in Prorogation, agitating the spirits there to make a revolution and move the next world from the principle of free choice. The authorities in no way interfered with him, for he received no support. Everyone was perfectly content with how the next world is arranged. In the end his obsession drove him to Risk with the idea of wagering another hundred years and running it up to a large enough sum to buy every last spirit out of Victim.
“Let the torturers torture themselves. Let the murderers murder each other.”
He lost everything on the first spin of the wheel.
I pointed out to him that without free choice and its consequences he would never have experienced conversion or conceived his dream, much less had hope of realizing it, but he said that didn’t matter any longer. Now that one spirit had glimpsed the solution to the problem, freedom might very well be abolished.
“I know you personal dreamers. You hope to improve, or even save yourselves. You think of a million tiny increments. One person. Another person. With me, it’s everything or nothing. When these hundred years are up, I’ll go back and try again. Sooner or later I’ll get lucky.”
He went on about a roulette system he was attempting to perfect, and had managed to get me thoroughly confused over it when the door at the far end of the lock opened and a triple file of victims began trudging in. They wore the bodies issued to them for their tours of torment and moved very slowly, some helping each other along. Prince Alexei explained to me in a whisper that it was a point of honor among victims to bring one’s body in oneself, and he went on to give me the advice mentioned in the first paragraph of this note.
We rose as the first rank approached, led on by two guards, and as we did to the fellow on the right, who was all streamed in blood with twenty trenched gashes on his head, groaned and fell forward. I jumped to catch him, but one of the guards pushed me roughly back.
“Hands off him, pig!” Sukasin shouted. “You can’t abuse us here! Learn your rights, Fuertes,” he said to me. “Ill treatment’s not allowed in the confinement.”
At this the one who’d fallen looked up at me, amazed. Then the spirit stepped from the wounded body, and it was my turn for amazement.
“Yes,” he said softly. “I am the father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of.”
And I answered: “It was your spirit, Father, that compelled me here.”
Well-read examiners, Homer and Virgil are misinformed. Ghosts can embrace each other. Shades can make that abrazo which the hispanic culture offers as the most profound form of greeting. We stood in each other’s arms until those near us jostled us. Then my father pushed me gently back.
“Welcome to the pit, Camilo. I’m glad and sad to see you. But we’ll talk later.” He bent and took the wrists of the body he’d been wearing. “Here. Help me lug these guts inside.”
The guards had swung the door open. I took the body’s ankles and trudged behind my father into the next lock and toward the central pen of Victim.
95. Good fortune
I spent three months in Victim. During that time I held the dirty end of the stick in most of the activities of cruelty. These notes are not the place to give the details, but I will say (by way of furnishing a rough idea) that my least disagreeable assignment was to Insult and Abuse, where I wore a deformed dwarfsbody and did degrading things all day while people laughed and pointed. The worst was a “water cure” in Torture, from which I was unable to bring my body back. In short, I got a ninety-day dip into a concentrate of misery, and I can look forward to another six years and nine months of the same at some time in the future. Nevertheless, I do not regret my enlistment. On the contrary, I regard it as a piece of great good fortune.
Careful readers of these notes will have remarked that I am endowed with a normal human capacity for cruelty. A little victimhood and the expectation of a good deal more to come has made me most reluctant to exercise this capacity. Some victims envy their tormentors and crave to replace them. My reaction was a limitless contempt. Cruelty, moreover, taps the same source of energy as love, so that curtailing your capacity for one augments your capacity for the other. This is, of course, no secret. Some people seem to know it from birth. Others find it out more or less naturally. I had to go to Victim to learn it, but it is a good lesson to come by, late or soon, no matter in how stern a school.
The same reader will, likewise, have noticed that I have certain pretensions to knowledge. Yet suffering of one kind or another makes up a great portion of what goes on in the universe, and I knew little of it hitherto. My pretensions are a little less outlandish for the experience of victimhood.
But my enlistment in Victim was fortunate mainly in that it put me in my father’s company.
Few terms are batted about so remorselessly these days as “generation gap.” Because this world changes ceaselessly, fathers and sons are fated to be somewhat separated by their experience. Because this world is changing swiftly now, the “gap” is now wider than usual. But I was separated from my father physically. He was blown into the next world before I had much chance to grow apart from him emotionally. So while my coevals moaned of the defects in their all-too-palpable pops, my complaint—never voiced aloud—was that my perfect father had been vaporized. I didn’t envy those coevals: their fathers, as I met them in flesh or in description, weren’t worth having around. I suspect they envied me, but I also suspect it is relatively easy to feel filial piety for an honorable absent father, a shipwrecked hero like Telemachus’s father, for example, or a murdered hero like Hamlet’s and mine. In any case I was, am, and will stay a loving son. Adoring dependence gave way to an inchoate sense of loss, which has now given way to understanding. The object of unquestioning adulation has become the object of compassionate respect. Those interested in father-son conflict must seek elsewhere. Perhaps a certain novelist might treat the theme were he to biograph his medical old man, but I lack experience of it and use no imagination.
A thousand times during the years between his “death” and our meeting in Victim I longed to see my father. As I grew, so did that longing. With what pleasure and profit, for example, I might have discussed my studies with him! I made his life and times the subject of -my first important researches. And the reader knows how distressing it was for me that his spirit remained unreachable. On his side, success and fame had insulated him against my calls, but having come to Victim, he regretted that. Our three months together were no disappointment. A “gap” may separate you and your kids, unfortunate examiners, but not me and my father. It is the vanity and self-indulgence of both generations, I think, that keeps the famous “gap” unbridged, and there is nothing like victimhood to make one scrap petty considerations. We stood together in adversity. I heard the story of his mature years (retold in text above) and his speculations on the universe (see note 99). I told him of my own triumphs and disasters. Our spirits looked on each other in all their human strength and frailty. What else befell me was a small price for such good fortune.
96. Not obsessed with politics
The experience of centuries has revealed certain truths about the value of political influence. Those who lack it are generally bound to obey the law, work for a living, and pay taxes. For those who have it, on the other hand, these bonds relax. For some they dissolve entirely. To the extent that one possesses political influence, furthermore, one is able without sacrifice to help one’s friends and without risk to hurt one’s enemies. One is, therefore, gratified in proportion to one’s political influence with the baboonish presentment of one’s countrymen’s and women’s buttocks, metaphorically or physically, as the case and taste may be. Political influence is, hence, a valuable commodity.
