The Dissertation, page 59
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
“What great ‘discoveries’ we make! The law I’ve just ‘discovered’ was published two millennia ago: ‘First shall be last; and the last shall be first.’ And there are earlier though slightly different formulations: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’ Also: ‘Wisdom comes only through suffering.’ The mechanism of spiritual balance was discovered long ago. The problem is almost everyone has to rediscover it for himself and then try to remember it.”
He looked at me soberly. “Your mother was born wise, Camilo. Oh, I had a merry time, on earth and in this world too, but I only got glimpses of the secret. She knew it from the first and lives by it. And you know what I’m hoping?” Here he grinned. “I’m hoping that a hundred years in Victim may teach me something. I’m hoping I can halt these crazy swings. Maybe after a hundred years here I’ll be ready for Love.”
100. Back
After I had been in Victim for about two and a half months, my father urged me to return to earth and my body.
“It’s not that I want my biography written,” he said. “And we both know you’ll have to come back here in a few years anyway. But I think you ought to finish your earthly avatar. You’ve learned things here and in La Bondadosa that can be put to good use on earth. And if you can manage to remember that you’ve got six-plus years of victimhood ahead of you, you might have a very profitable life. Awareness of suffering ahead sharpens the lessons of suffering past.”
I might have added that I had left an important relationship in a very poor state of disarray and ought to do something to recompose it, but I was in no need of convincing. I hadn’t progressed nearly so far as my father in accepting Victim, and there had never been any danger of my enjoying it. All I had been waiting for was his leave to go and the completion of my researches. As these were nearly done, I advised a guard the next time we were taken out that I had a body functioning on earth and wished to exercise my right to return to it.
Spirits who choose assignment as guards in Victim have, I should say, about the same level of intelligence as their counterparts in earthly confinement facilities, and not one whit more compassion. “No one gets out of here till his time is up,” was the reply. “Move it on!”
Sensitive examiners, you will appreciate my apprehension. I hadn’t truly missed earth and my body until I had cause to believe I might never return to them. I hadn’t truly felt the weight of victimhood till then. But I had my father beside me and made a show of self-control for him.
“You’re not the Director, are you?” I said coldly. “He makes the rules, not you. Check with your superiors.”
“Don’t tell me my job, victim. I’ll check if I feel like it. Move it on!”
But if guards are sullen, stupid creatures in both houses of this bicameral universe, they are also slaves of rule. It took two weeks for my release to come through, but my release came.
I took leave of my father in an outer lock. He was bound for Resentment and Revenge with a lot of fifty, all wearing tall, sturdy blond bodies, all dressed in jackboots and black uniforms-ersatz Nazis to be thrown in among a horde of vengeful Jews.
“About an average tour,” he said. “I’ll bring this hulk back under my own power. Remember me, and this place, Camilo.”
We embraced then, and it was I who wept, though my suffering was over for a time.
Above, in the processing room, my spirit was lightened. Then I sped to the twin exit portals of the Astral Plane.
I stopped first in Prorogation to see my mother, but an official there told me she had passed through to Love.
“There was never any doubt of her acceptance,” he said. “A case of waiting for a vacancy, someone recycling back.”
I pray my father may join her there someday.
It was nightfall when I reached Tinieblas. The streets were already nearly deserted. Sirens wailed hysterically along the Via Venezuela. Lit by floodlights, the six-storey portrait of General Genghis Manduco loomed against the façade of the university Law Faculty like the effigy of a pagan deity.
The prison wing of San Bruno Hospital was packed with smashed bodies, but none of them was mine. I flew about the hospital searching, but could find my body nowhere. I feared I’d come too late, that my body had failed and been buried, that I would have to return to Victim with my avatar unfinished. Then I heard two nurses talking about a patient in a coma whom the President of Costaguana was taking out by plane.
The light-blue Costaguanan Air Force transport was already airborne from Monteseguro when I reached it, banking high into the west, where a faint glow of sunset glimmered. Inside I found my body right enough, strapped down and plugged with tubes and needles, tended by a doctor and two nurses, watched over by lovely, sad-eyed Liz. The briefcase in which I’d stuffed the manuscript of this dissertation lay on the floor beside her. There are all kinds of loyalty, and some kinds mean more than others.
I confess to a sentimental urge to stay and watch that scene, but my earthly life looked to be potentially too pleasant to take any more chances with. I slipped inside, felt at once deathly cold, and then may have lost consciousness. I heard one of the nurses say, “His eyelids fluttered.” I tried to open them but couldn’t. I lay absolutely still, awake but with my eyes closed, unable to remember anything. Then memory returned, though everything that touched upon the next world seemed only a dream, a vision, a fantasy.
At length I managed to open my eyes and saw Liz looking down at me. She straightaway called for the doctor and then began to weep and laugh at once, and there occurred such a general bustling about that I felt powerfully like closing my eyes again and sleeping for a while. I held onto my strength, however, though being back in my injured body had brought me a great feebleness, and when things had calmed and Liz was bending over me again, I decided to see if I could speak. After a few tries I was able to ask her pardon.
The End of the Dissertation
January, 1971—September, 1974
ALSO BY R.M. KOSTER
The Prince
R.M. KOSTER
PAPERBACK 978-1-4863-0117-5
PRAISE FOR THE PRINCE
“The Prince got to me … I liked its swaggering adventuresomeness, its magnificent vanity, its almost comic sense of cruelty.”
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
“The most extraordinary first novel by an American in years … R.M. Koster offers something for everyone: adventure, sex, politics, poetry, violence, fantasy, jokes, realism, tragedy, horror, calm, sadness, beauty, wisdom—and characters who live and language that soars.”
—Life
“Koster is that rare thing: a writer from the heart, passionate and uncompromising.” —John le Carré
R. M. Koster, The Dissertation
