The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (13 page)

"On the phone, you hinted—"

"Yes," Kirsten said. She seated herself on the bed, reached for her purse, opened it and took out a package of Player's Cigarettes; smiling at me, she lit a cigarette.

"I thought you quit," I said.

Reflexively, she put out the cigarette. "I still do it now and then, out of habit." She continued to smile at me, in a wild, yet veiled, mysterious way.

"Well, what is it?" I said.

"Look over there on the table."

I looked. A large notebook lay on the table.

"Open it," Kirsten said.

"Okay." I picked the notebook up and opened it. Some of the pages showed nothing but most of them had been scribbled on, in Kirsten's handwriting.

Kirsten said, "Jeff has come back to us. From the other world."

Had I said, then, at that moment: Lady, you are totally crazy—it would have made no difference, and I do not castigate myself because I failed to say it. "Oh," I said, nodding. "Well; what do you know." I tried to read her handwriting but I could not. "What do you mean?" I said.

"Phenomena," Kirsten said. "That's what Tim and I call them. He sticks needles under my fingernails at night and he sets all the clocks to six-thirty, which was the exact moment he died."

"Gee," I said.

"We've kept a record," Kirsten said. "We didn't want to tell you in a letter or over the phone; we wanted to tell you face-to-face. So I waited until now." She raised her arms in excitement. "Angel, he came back to us!"

"Well, I'll be fucked," I said mechanically.

"Hundreds of incidents. Hundreds of the phenomena. Let's go down to the bar. It started right away after we got back to England. Tim went to a medium. The medium said it was true. We knew it was true; nobody had to tell us but we wanted to be really certain because we thought possibly—just possibly—it was only a poltergeist. But it isn't! It's Jeff!"

"Hot damn," I said.

"Do you think I'm joking?"

"No," I said, with sincerity.

"Because we both witnessed it. And the Winchells saw it, too; our friends in London. And now that we're back in the United States, we want you to witness it and record it, for Tim's new book. He's writing a book about it, because this has meaning not just for us but for everyone, because it proves that man exists in the other world after he dies here."

"Yes," I said. "Let's go down to the bar."

"Tim's book is called
From the Other World.
He's already gotten a ten-thousand-dollar advance on it; his editor thinks it'll be his bestselling book by far."

"I stand before you amazed," I said.

"I know you don't believe me." Her tone, now, had become wooden, and edged with anger.

"Why would it enter my head not to believe you?" I said.

"Because people don't have faith."

"Maybe after I read the notebook."

"He—Jeff—set fire to my hair sixteen times."

"Wow."

"And he shattered all the mirrors in our flat. Not once but several times. We would get up and find them broken but we didn't hear it; neither of us heard anything. Dr. Mason—he's the medium we went to—said that Jeff wants us to understand that he forgives us. And he forgives you, too."

"Oh," I said.

"Don't be sarcastic with me," Kirsten said.

"I'll really truly try not to be sarcastic," I said. "It is as you can see a great surprise to me. I am left without words. I'll certainly recover, later on." I moved toward the door.

Edgar Barefoot, in one of his lectures on KPFA, discussed a form of inferential logic developed in India by the Hindu school. It is very old and has been much studied, not just in India but also in the West. It is the second means of knowledge by which man obtains accurate cognition and is called
anumana,
which is Sanskrit for: "Measuring along some other thing, inference." It has five stages and I will not go into it because it is difficult, but what is important about it is that if these five stages are correctly carried out—and the system contains safeguards by which one can determine precisely whether he has indeed carried them out—one is assured of going from premise to correct conclusion.

What especially dignifies
anumana
is step three, the illustration
(udaharana);
it requires what is called an invariable concomitance (
vyapti,
literally "pervasion"). The
anumana
form of inferential reasoning will only work if you can be absolutely certain that you indeed possess a
vyapti;
not a concomitance but an invariable concomitance (for example, late at night you hear a loud, sharp, echoing popping sound; you say to yourself, "That must be an auto backfiring because when an auto backfires, such a sound is created." This precisely is where inferential reasoning—reasoning, that is, from effect back to cause—breaks down. This is why in the West many logicians feel that inductive reasoning as such is suspect, that only deductive reasoning can be relied on. The Indian
anumana
strives for what is called a sufficient ground; the illustration requires an actual—not assumed—observation at all times, holding that no concomitance can be assumed
which fails to be exemplified
). We in the West have no syllogism exactly equal to the
anumana
and it is a shame that we do not, because had we such a rigorous form by which to check our inductive reasoning, Bishop Timothy Archer might well know of it, and had he known of it he would have known that his mistress waking up to find her hair singed does not, in fact, prove that the spirit of his dead son has returned from the other world, from, in essence, beyond the grave. Bishop Archer could and did fling around such terms as
hysteron proteron
because that logical fallacy is known in Greek—which is to say, Western—thought. But the
anumana
is from India. The Hindu logicians distinguished a typical fallacious ground that wrecked the
anumana;
they called it
hetvabhasa
("merely the appearance of a ground") and this deals with only one step in the
anumana
out of five. They found all sorts of ways to fuck up this five-stage structure, any one of which a man with Bishop Archer's intelligence and education would have—or should have—been able to follow. That he could believe that a few weird unexplained events proved that Jeff was not only still alive (somewhere) but communicating with the living (somehow) shows that, like Wallenstein with his astrological charts during the Thirty Years War, the faculty of accurate cognition is variable and depends, in the final analysis, on what you want to believe, not what is so. A Hindu logician living centuries ago could have seen at a glance the basic fallacy in the reasoning that argued for Jeff's immortality. Thus the will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict. This is all I can assume, based on what I now was seeing.

I suppose we all do it, and do it often; but this was too glaring, too basic, to ignore. Kirsten's lunatic son, palpably schizophrenic, could show why asking a computer for the largest number short of two is an unintelligible request, but Bishop Timothy Archer, a lawyer, a scholar, a sane adult, could see a pin on the bedsheet beside his mistress and leap to the conclusion that his dead son was communicating with him from another world; moreover, Tim was writing it all up in a book, a book that would first be published and then read; he not only believed nonsense, he believed it in a public way.

"Wait'll the world hears about this," Bishop Archer and his mistress declared. Winning the heresy confrontation perhaps had convinced the bishop that he could not err; or, if he erred, no one could pull him down. He was wrong in both respects: he could err and there were people who could pull him down. He could pull himself down, for that matter.

I saw all this clearly as I sat with Kirsten at one of the bars in the St. Francis Hotel that day. And there was nothing I could do. Their fixed idea, being not a problem but a solution, could not be reasoned away, even though, finally, it amounted to a further problem on its own. They had tried to solve one problem with yet another. That is not how you do it; you do not solve one problem with another, greater problem. This is how Hitler, who uncannily resembled Wallenstein, had tried to win World War Two. Tim could admonish me about
hysteron proteron
reasoning to his heart's content—and then fall victim to the merely occult nonsense-stuff of popular paperback books. He might as well have believed that Jeff had been brought back by ancient astronauts from another star system.

I hurt, thinking about this. I hurt in my legs; I hurt throughout. Bishop Archer, who
hysteron-proteron
ed me up and down the street, he being a bishop, I being a young woman with a B.A. from Cal in liberal arts—I had one night heard Edgar Barefoot talk about this
anumana
Hindu thing and I knew more or could do more than the Bishop of California; and it didn't matter because the Bishop of California was not going to listen to me any more than he was going to listen to anybody else, over and beyond his mistress, who, like himself, was so steeped in guilt and so messed up by intrigue and deceit—emanating from their invisible relationship—that they had long since ceased to be able to reason properly. Bill Lundborg, shut up in jail now, could have set them straight. A taxi driver picked at random could have told them they were calculatedly destroying their lives—not just by believing this, although that alone was sufficiently destructive, but by deciding to publish it. Fine. Do it. Wreck your goddamn life. Cast charts of the stars, cast horoscopes while the most destructive war in modern times is raging. It will earn you a place in the history books—as a dunce. You get to sit on the tall stool in the comer; you get to wear the conical cap; you get to undo all the social activist shit you ever engineered in concert with some of the finest minds of the century. For this, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., died. For this you marched at Selma: to believe—and to say publicly that you believe—that the ghost of your dead son is pushing pins under the fingernails of your mistress while she is asleep. By all means publish it. Be my guest.

The logical error, of course, is that Kirsten and Tim reasoned backward from effect to cause; they did not see the cause—they saw only what they called "phenomena"—and from these phenomena they inferred Jeff as the secret cause operating in or from "the other world." The
anumana
structure shows that this inductive reasoning is not reasoning at all; with the
anumana
you begin with a premise and work through the five steps to your conclusion, and each step is airtight in relation to the step before it and the step after it, but there is no airtight logic involved in inferring that broken mirrors and singed hair and stopped clocks and all that other crap reveals and, in fact, proves another reality in which the dead are not dead; what it proves is that you are credulous and you are operating at a six-year-old level mentally: you are not reality-testing, you are lost in wish fulfillment, in autism. But it is an eerie kind of autism because it revolves around a single idea; it does not invade your general field, your total attention. Outside of this one spurious premise, this one faulty induction, you are clear-headed and sane. It is a localized madness, allowing you to speak and act normally the rest of the time. Therefore no one locks you up because you can still earn a living, take baths, drive a car, take out the trash. You are not crazy in the manner that Bill Lundborg is crazy, and in a certain sense (depending on how you define "crazy") you are not crazy at all.

Bishop Archer could still perform his pastoral chores. Kir­sten could still buy clothes at the best stores in San Francisco. Neither of them would smash the windows of a U.S. Postal Service substation with their bare fists, You cannot arrest someone for believing that his son is communicating to this world from the next, or believing, for that matter, that there
is
a next world. Here the fixed idea shades off into religion generally; it becomes part of the other-worldly orientation of the revealed religions of the world. What is the difference between believing in a God you can't see and your dead son whom you can't see? What distinguishes one invisibility from another invisibility? Nonetheless, there is a difference, but it is tricky. It has to do with the general opinion, a slippery area; many people believe in God but few people believe that Jeff Archer sticks pins under Kirsten Lundborg's fingernails while she is asleep—that is the difference, and when put that way the subjectivity of it is plain. After all, Kirsten and Tim have the goddamn pins, and the burned hair, and the broken mirrors, not to mention the stopped clocks. But the two of them are making a logical error, for all that. Whether the people who believe in God are making an error I don't know, since their belief-system cannot be tested one way or another. It simply is faith.

Now I had been formally asked to sit in as a hopeful spectator to further "phenomena," and were they to occur I could, along with Tim and Kirsten, vouch for what I witnessed and add my name to Tim's forthcoming book—a book that, his editor had said, would undoubtedly outsell all his previous books based on less sensational material. But I could not be disinterested. Jeff had been my husband. I loved him. I wanted to believe. Worse, I sensed the psychological motor driving Kirsten and Tim to believe; I did not want to shoot their faith—or credulity—down because I could see what cynicism would do to them: it would leave them with nothing—leave them, once more, with staggering guilt, a guilt neither could cope with. I found myself, then, in a position where I had to comply, at least
pro forma.
I had to allege belief, allege interest, allege excitement. Neutrality would not be enough: enthusiasm was required. The damage had been done in England, before I was brought in on this. The decision was already made. If I said, "It's bullshit," they would continue on anyhow, but bitterly. Fuck the cynicism, I thought to myself as I sat with Kirsten that day at the St. Francis bar. There is nothing to be gained and a lot to lose, and anyhow it doesn't matter; Tim's book is going to get written and published—with or without me.