Authors: Paul Auster
Their language is incomprehensible to Kepler at first, but within several weeks he has mastered enough to grope his way through a simple conversation. He begins by acquiring nouns, the this and the that of the world around him, and his speech is no more subtle than a child’s.
Crenepos
is woman.
Mantoac
are the gods.
Okeepenauk
refers to an edible root, and
tapisco
means stone. With so much to
absorb all at once, he is unable to detect any structural coherence to the language. Pronouns do not seem to exist as separate entities, for example, but are a part of a complex system of verb endings that shift according to the age and sex of the speaker. Certain frequently used words have two diametrically opposed meanings—top and bottom, noon and midnight, childhood and old age—and there are many instances in which the meanings of words are altered by the facial expression of the speaker. After two or three months, Kepler’s tongue grows more adept at producing the strange sounds of this language, and as the morass of undifferentiated syllables begins to separate into smaller, more definable units of sense, his ear becomes sharper, more finely adjusted to nuance and intonation. Remarkably enough, he begins to think that he can hear traces of English when the Humans speak—not English as he knows it, precisely, but cut-off pieces of it, remnants of English words, a kind of transmogrified English that has somehow slid into the crevices of this other language. A phrase such as Land of Little Water, for example, becomes a single word, Lano-li-wa. Wild Men becomes Wi-me, and Flat World becomes something that resembles the word
flow
. At first, Kepler is inclined to dismiss these parallels as coincidence. Sounds overlap from one language to another, after all, and he is reluctant to let his imagination run away with him. On the other hand, it seems that roughly every seventh or eighth word of the Humans’ language follows this same pattern, and when Kepler finally puts his theory to the test by making up words and trying them out on the Humans (words he has not been taught, but which he forms by the same method of paring and decomposition he used to construct the others), he finds himself speaking a number of words that the Humans recognize as their own. Encouraged by his success, Kepler begins to advance certain ideas about the origins of this strange tribe. The legend about the moon notwithstanding, he feels that they must be the product of some prior intermingling of English and Indian blood. “Stranded in the immense forests of the New World,” Barber writes, following the thread of Kepler’s argument,
“perhaps faced with the threat of extinction, a band of early colonists might well have asked admittance into an Indian tribe to ensure their survival against the hostile forces of nature. Perhaps those Indians were the ‘Others’ who appeared in the legends he had been told, Kepler thought. If so, then perhaps a group of them split off from the main body and headed out West, eventually settling in Utah. Taking this hypothesis one step further, he reasoned that the story of their origins was probably composed
after
their arrival in Utah, as a way of drawing spiritual comfort from their decision to live in such a barren place. For nowhere in the world, Kepler thought, does the earth look more like the moon than it does here.”
It is not until he becomes fluent in their language that Kepler understands why they have saved him. The Humans are diminishing, they explain, and unless they can begin to increase their numbers, the whole nation will disappear into nothingness. Silent Thought, their wise man and leader, who left the tribe the previous winter to live alone in the desert and pray for their deliverance, was told in a dream that a dead man would save them. They would find the body of that man somewhere in the cliffs that surround the settlement, he said, and if they treated it with the proper medicine, the body would come back to life. All these things happened exactly as Silent Thought said they would. Kepler was found, he was resurrected, and now it is up to him to become the father of a new generation. He is the Wild Father who fell from the moon, the Begetter of Human Souls, the Spirit Man who will rescue the Folk from oblivion.
At this point, Barber’s writing begins to stumble badly. Without the least pang of conscience, Kepler turns native and decides to stay with the Humans, forever renouncing the thought of returning to his wife and son. Shifting from the precise, intellectual tone of the first thirty pages, Barber indulges himself in a number of long and flowery passages of lascivious sexual fantasies, a teenager’s masturbatory lust run wild. The women do not resemble North American Indians so much as Polynesian sex toys, beautiful,
bare-breasted maidens who give themselves to Kepler with laughing, joyous abandon. It is pure make-believe: a society of prelapsarian innocence populated by noble savages who live in complete harmony with each other and the world. It does not take Kepler long to decide that their way of life is vastly superior to his own. He shucks off the trappings of nineteenth-century civilization and enters the stone age, happily throwing in his lot with the Humans.
The first chapter ends with the birth of Kepler’s first Human child, and when the next chapter opens, fifteen years have passed. We are back on Long Island, witnessing the funeral of Kepler’s American wife through the eyes of John Kepler, Jr., who is now eighteen years old. Resolving to uncover the mystery of his father’s disappearance, the young man sets out the following morning in true epic fashion, determined to devote the remainder of his life to the quest. He travels to Utah, and for the next year and a half he tramps around the wilderness searching for clues. With miraculous good luck (none too plausible as presented by Barber), he finally stumbles upon the Humans’ settlement in the rocks. It has never occurred to him that his father could still be alive, but lo and behold, when he is introduced to the bearded chief and savior of this small tribe, which now numbers almost a hundred souls, he recognizes this man as John Kepler. Struck with stupefaction, he blurts out that he is Kepler’s long-lost American son, but Kepler, calm and impassive, pretends not to understand him. “I am a spirit man who came here from the moon,” he says, “and these people are the only family I have ever had. We will be happy to give you food and lodging for the night, but tomorrow morning you must leave us and continue on your journey.” Crushed by this rejection, the son turns his thoughts to revenge, and in the middle of the night he slips from his bed, crawls up to the sleeping Kepler, and plunges a knife into his heart. Before an alarm can be sounded, he runs off into the darkness and disappears.
There is only one witness to the crime, a twelve-year-old boy named Jocomin (Wild Eyes), who is Kepler’s favorite son among
the Humans. Jocomin chases after the murderer for three days and three nights, but he does not find him. On the morning of the fourth day, he climbs to the top of a mesa for a view of the surrounding countryside and there, just minutes after giving up hope, he encounters none other than Silent Thought, the aged medicine man who left the tribe years before to live as a hermit in the desert. Silent Thought adopts Jocomin and gradually initiates him into the mysteries of his art, training the boy over long and difficult years to acquire the magical powers of the Twelve Transformations. Jocomin is a willing and able student. Not only does he learn how to heal the sick and communicate with the gods, but after seven years of constant work, he finally penetrates the secret of the First Transformation, mastering the forces of his body and mind to such an extent that he can turn himself into a lizard. The other tranformations follow in rapid succession: he becomes a swallow, a hawk, a vulture; he becomes a stone and a cactus plant; he becomes a mole, a rabbit, and a grasshopper; he becomes a butterfly and a snake; and then, last of all, conquering the most strenuous of the transformations, he turns himself into a coyote. By now, nine years have passed since Jocomin came to live with Silent Thought. Having taught his adopted son everything he knows, the old man tells Jocomin that the moment has come for him to die. Without uttering another word, he wraps himself in his ceremonial garments and fasts for three days, at which point his spirit flies out of his body and travels to the moon, the place where the souls of the Humans dwell after death.
Jocomin returns to the settlement and lives there as the chief for a number of years. But hard times have fallen on the Humans, and as drought gives way to pestilence, and pestilence gives way to discord, Jocomin dreams a dream in which he is told that happiness will not return to the tribe until his father’s death has been avenged. After consulting with the council of elders the next day, Jocomin leaves the Humans and travels east, going into the world of the Wild Men to search for John Kepler, Jr. He takes on the
name of Jack Moon and works his way across the country, eventually coming to New York, where he finds a job with a construction company that specializes in building skyscrapers. He becomes a member of the topmost crew on the Woolworth Building, an architectural marvel that would stand as the tallest structure in the world for close to twenty years. Jack Moon is a superb laborer, undaunted by even the most tremendous heights, and he quickly gains the respect of his co-workers. Outside of his job, however, he keeps to himself and makes no friends. All his spare time is devoted to tracking down his half-brother, and this task takes him nearly two years to accomplish. John Kepler, Jr. has become a prosperous businessman. He lives in a mansion on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights with his wife and six-year-old son and is driven to work every morning in a long black car. Jack Moon stakes out the house for several weeks, at first intending to kill Kepler pure and simple, but then he decides that he can mete out a more proper vengeance by abducting Kepler’s son and carrying him back to the land of the Humans. He does this without being detected, snatching the boy from his nanny one afternoon in broad daylight, and at that point the fourth chapter of Barber’s novel comes to an end.
Back in Utah with the boy (who in the meantime has become deeply devoted to him), Jocomin discovers that everything has changed. The Humans have vanished, and their empty houses are devoid of any sign of life. For the next six months he hunts high and low for them, but with no success. At last, realizing that his dream has betrayed him, he accepts the fact that his people are all dead. With grief in his heart, he decides to remain there and look after the boy as his own, all the while hoping for a miracle of regeneration. He renames the boy Numa (New Man) and tries not to lose courage. Seven years go by. He passes on the secrets he learned from Silent Thought to his adopted son, and then, after three more years of steadfast work, he manages to bring about the Thirteenth Transformation. Jocomin turns himself into a woman, a young and fertile woman who seduces the sixteen-year-old adolescent.
Twins are born nine months later, a boy and a girl, and from these two children, the Humans will once again populate the land.
The action then shifts back to New York, where we find Kepler, Jr., desperately searching for his lost son. One clue after another leads him nowhere, but then, by pure chance—everything in Barber’s book happens by chance—he is put on the trail of Jack Moon, and bit by bit Kepler begins to piece the puzzle together, realizing that his son was taken from him because of what he did to his father. There is no choice for him but to go back to Utah. Kepler is forty years old now, and the hardships of desert hiking are a strain on him, but he doggedly pushes on with his journey, horrified at the thought of returning to the place where he killed his father twenty years before, but knowing that he has no choice, that this is the place where he will find his son. A full moon is poised dramatically in the sky for the last scene. Kepler has come within range of the Humans’ settlement and is camped out in the cliffs for the night, holding a rifle in his hands as he watches for signs of activity. On a neighboring outcrop of rocks, not fifty feet away from him, he suddenly sees a coyote standing with its silhouette against the moon. Fearful of everything in this remote and barren territory, Kepler impulsively points his rifle at the animal and pulls the trigger. The coyote is killed with one shot, and Kepler cannot help congratulating himself on the accuracy of his aim. What he does not realize, of course, is that he has just killed his own son. Before he has time to stand up and walk over to the felled animal, three other coyotes leap out at him from the darkness. Unable to defend himself against their attack, he is chewed to pieces within a matter of minutes.
So ends
Kepler’s Blood
, Barber’s one and only attempt at a work of fiction. Given his age at the time he wrote it, it would be unfair to judge his effort too harshly. For all its shortcomings and excesses, the book is valuable to me as a psychological document, and more than any other piece of evidence, it demonstrates how Barber played out the inner dramas of his early life. He doesn’t
want to accept the fact that his father is dead (hence Kepler’s rescue by the Humans); but if his father is not dead, then there is no excuse for his not having returned to his family (hence the knife that Kepler, Jr., thrusts into his father’s heart). But the thought of that murder is too horrible not to inspire revulsion. Whoever thinks such a thought must be punished, and that is precisely what happens to Kepler, Jr., whose fate is worse than any other character’s in the book. The whole story is a complex dance of guilt and desire. Desire turns into guilt, and then, because this guilt is intolerable, it becomes a desire to expiate itself, to submit to a cruel and inexorable form of justice. It was no accident, I think, that Barber’s later scholarship was devoted to exploring many of the same issues that appeared in
Kepler’s Blood
. The lost colonists of Roanoke, the accounts of white men living among Indians, the mythology of the American West—those were subjects that Barber dealt with as a historian, and no matter how scrupulous and professional he was in treating them, there was always a personal motive behind his work, a secret conviction that he was somehow digging into the mysteries of his own life.