The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (23 page)

I rejoiced in Tim's newfound lucidity. But I felt deeply pessimistic. I viewed his clearheadedness as a surfacing of his basic determination to survive. This is a good thing. You cannot fault the drive to endure. The only question that frightened me was: had it come soon enough? Time would tell.

When the ship is saved—if it is saved—necessary jettison gives the right of general salvage to the owner or owners of the goods. This is an international rule of the seas. This is an idea basic to human beings, of whatever place of origin. Tim consciously or unconsciously understood this. In doing what he was doing, he partook of something venerable and universally accepted. I understood him; I think anybody would. This was not the time to whine over lost battles involving the issue of whether or not his son had returned from the next world; this was the time for Tim to fight for his life. He did so, and he did the very best he could. I watched, and where possible I helped. It failed in the end, but not for want of effort, not for a failure of trying, a decline of nerve.

This is not expedience. This is rousing oneself to a final defense. To view Tim in his final days as a cheap man devoted to animal survival at all costs—abandoning all moral conviction—is to misunderstand totally; when your life is at stake, you act in certain ways if you are smart, and Tim acted in those ways: he dumped everything that could be dumped, should have been dumped—he bared his dog-tooth and offered to bite, and that is what a man does in the sense of man the creature who is determined to survive, and to hell with the cargo. Upon Kirsten's death, Tim stood in danger of imminent death himself and he understood it, and for you to understand him in that final period you must take his realization into consideration and you must also understand that his perception, his realization, was correct. He was, as the therapists put it, in touch with the reality situation (as if there is some kind of distinction between "situation" and "reality situation"). He desired to live. So do I. Presumably, so do you. Then you should be able to figure out what Bishop Archer had in mind during the period following Kirsten's death and preceding his own, the first a given, the second an ominous but dubitable possibility, not a reality, not then, at least, although from our standpoint now, as hindsight, we can comprehend it as inevitable. But this is the famous nature of hindsight: to it everything is inevitable, since everything has already happened.

Even if Tim regarded his own death as inevitable, willed by prophecy, willed by the sibyl—or by Apollo, speaking through the sibyl as a mouthpiece—he was determined to confront that fate and put up the best fight he could manage. I think that is quite remarkable and to be lauded. That he jettisoned a whole lot of claptrap that he once believed in and preached is of no importance; should he have hugged all that crap and died in a curled-up abreactive posture, his eyes shut, his dog-tooth not bared? I am of firm conviction in this; I saw it; I fathomed it. I saw the cargo go. I saw it heaved overboard the instant Dr. Garret's first prophecy came true. And I said, Thank God.

I think, though, he should have withdrawn that goddamn book from publication, that
Here, Tyrant Death,
as I had titled it. But he did have thirty thousand dollars riding on it, and perhaps this determination to let it get into print was simply further evidence of his practicality. I don't know. Some aspects of Tim Archer remain a mystery to me, even to this day.

It simply was not Tim's style to abort a mistake before it happened; he let it happen and then—as he put it—he filed a correction in the form of an amendment. Except insofar as his physical survival was involved; there he calculated activity in advance. There he looked ahead. The man who had run through his own life, outpacing himself, outdistancing himself as if urged on by the amphetamines he daily swallowed—that man now all at once ceased to run, turned instead, gazed at fate and said, as Luther is supposed to have said but did not, "Here I stand; I can do not otherwise
(Hier steh' Ich; Ich kann nicht anders).
" The German ontologist Martin Heidegger has a term for that: the transmutation of inauthentic Being to true Being or
Sein.
I studied that at Cal. I didn't think I would ever see it happen, but it did and I did. And I found it beautiful but very sad, because it failed.

Within my mind I conceived of the spirit of my dead husband penetrating my thoughts and being highly amused. Jeff would have pointed out to me that I viewed the bishop as a cargo ship, a freighter, baring its dog-tooth, a mixed metaphor which would have kept Jeff in a state of rapture for days; I would never have heard the end of it. My mind had begun to go, due to Kirsten's suicide; at work, comparing the content of shipments to the listings on the invoices, I barely noticed what I did. I had withdrawn. My fellow workers and my boss pointed this out to me. And I ate little; I spent my lunch hour reading Delmore Schwartz, who, I am told, died with his head in a sack of garbage that he had been carrying downstairs when he suffered his fatal heart attack. A great way for a poet to go!

The problem with introspection is that it has no end; like Bottom's dream in A
Midsummer Night's Dream,
it has no bottom. From my years at Cal in the English Department, I had learned to make up metaphors, play around with them, mix them, serve them up; I am a metaphor junkie, over-educated and smart. I think too much, read too much, worry about those I love too much. Those I loved had begun to die. Not many remained here; most had gone.

"
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingring here;
Their very memory is far and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
"

As Henry Vaughan wrote in 1655. The poem ends:

"
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective (still) as they pass,
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.
"

By "glass" Vaughan means a telescope. I looked it up. The seventeenth century minor metaphysical poets constituted my specialty, during my school years. Now, after Kirsten's death, I turned back to them, because my thoughts had turned, like theirs, to the next world. My husband had gone there; my best friend had gone there; I expected Tim to go there, soon, and thus he did.

Unfortunately, I began now to see less of Tim. This for me acted as the worst strike of all. I really loved him but now the ties had been severed. They got severed from his end. He resigned as Bishop of the Diocese of California and moved down to Santa Barbara and the think tank there; his book, which in my eternal opinion should have been suppressed, had come out to indict him as a fool; this combined with the scandal about Kirsten: the media, despite Tim's tampering with evidence, had caught on to their secret relationship. Tim's career with the Episcopal Church ended suddenly; he packed up and left San Francisco, surfacing in (as he had put it) the private sector. There he could relax and be happy; there he could live his life without the repressive strictures of Christian canon law and morality.

I missed him.

A third element had blended in to terminate his relationship with the Episcopal Church, and that of course consisted of the goddamn Zadokite Documents, which Tim simply could not leave alone. No longer involved with Kirsten—she being dead—and no longer involved with the occult—since he recognized that for what it was—he now concentrated all his credulity on the writings of that ancient Hebrew sect, declaring as he did in speeches and in interviews and articles that here, indeed, lay the true origins of the teachings of Jesus. Tim could not leave trouble behind him. He and trouble were destined to join company.

I kept abreast of developments concerning Tim by reading magazines and newspapers; my contact came secondhand; I no longer had direct, personal knowledge of him. For me this constituted tragedy, more perhaps than losing Jeff and Kirsten, although I never told anyone that, even my therapists. I lost track, too, of Bill Lundborg; he drifted out of my life and into a mental hospital, and that was that. I tried to track him down but, failing, gave up. I was either batting zero or a thousand, whichever way you want to compute it.

Whichever way you want to compute it, the results came out to this: I had lost everyone I knew, so the time had arrived to make new friends. I decided that retail record selling was more than a job; for me it amounted to a vocation. Within a year, I had risen to the post of manager of the Musik Shop. I had unlimited powers to buy; the owners put no ceiling on me, none at all. My judgment alone determined what I ordered or did not order, and all the salesmen—the representatives of the various labels—knew it. That earned me a lot of free lunches and some interesting dates. I started coming out of my shell, seeing people more; I wound up with a boyfriend, if you can abide such an old-fashioned term (it would never be employed in Berkeley). "Lover" I guess is the word I want. I let Hampton move into my house with me, the house Jeff and I had bought, and began what I hoped was a fresh, new life, in terms of my involvements.

Tim's book,
Here, Tyrant Death,
did not sell as well as had been expected; I saw remaindered copies at the different bookstores near Sather Gate. It had cost too much and rambled on too long; he would have done better to shorten it, insofar as he had written it—most of it, when I finally got around to reading it, struck me as Kirsten's work; at least she had done the final draft, no doubt based on Tim's bang-bang dictation. That was what she had told me and probably it was the case. He never followed it up with an amending sequel, as he had promised me.

One Sunday morning, as I sat with Hampton in our living room, smoking a joint of the new seedless grass and watching the kids' cartoons on TV, I got a phone call—unexpectedly—from Tim.

"Hi, Angel," he said, in that hearty, warm voice of his. "I hope this isn't a bad time to call you."

"It's fine," I managed to say, wondering if I really heard Tim's voice or if, due to the grass, I was hallucinating it. "How are you? I've been—"

"The reason I'm calling," Tim interrupted, as if I had not been speaking, as if he did not hear me, "is that I'll be in Berkeley next week—I'm attending a conference at the Claremont Hotel—and I'd like to get together with you."

"Great," I said, immensely pleased.

"Can we get together for dinner? You know the restaurants in Berkeley better than I do; I'll let you pick whichever one you like." He chuckled. "It'll be wonderful to see you again. Like old times."

I asked him, haltingly, how he had been.

"Everything down here is going fine," Tim said. "I'm extremely busy. I'll be flying to Israel next month; I wanted to talk to you about that."

"Oh," I said. "That sounds like a lot of fun."

"I'm going to visit the
wadi,
" Tim said. "Where the Zadokite Documents were found. They've all been translated now. Some of the final fragments proved extremely interesting. But I'll tell you about that when I see you."

"Yes," I said, warming to the topic; as always Tim's enthusiasm was contagious. "I read a long article in
Scientific American;
some of the last fragments—"

"I'll pick you up Wednesday night," Tim said. "At your house. Be formally dressed, if you would."

"You remember—"

"Oh, of course; I remember where your house is."

It seemed to me he was speaking ultra-rapidly. Or had the grass affected me? No, the grass would slow things down. I said, in panic, "I'm working at the store on Wednesday night."

As if he hadn't heard me, Tim said, "About eight o'clock; I'll see you then. Good-bye, dear." Click. He had rung off.

Shit, I said to myself. I'm working until nine Wednesday night. Well, I will just have to get one of the clerks to fill in for me. I am not going to miss having dinner with Tim before he leaves for Israel. I wondered, then, how long he would be over there. Probably for some time. He had gone once before, and planted a cedar tree; I remembered that: the news media had made quite a bit of it.

"Who was that?" Hampton said, seated in jeans and a T-shirt before the TV set, my tall, thin, acerbic boyfriend, with his black-wire hair and his glasses.

"My father-in-law," I said. "Former father-in-law."

"Jeff's father," Hampton said, nodding. A crooked grin appeared on his face. "I have an idea as to what to do with people who suicide. I think it should be a law that when they find someone who's suicided, they should dress him up in a clown suit. And photograph him that way. And print his picture in the newspaper like that, in the clown suit. Such as Sylvia Plath. Especially Sylvia Plath." Hampton went on, then, to recount how Plath and her girlfriends—according to Hampton's imagination—used to play games in which they'd see who could stick their head in the oven of the kitchen stove the longest, meanwhile all of them going "tee-hee," giggling and breaking up.

"You're not funny," I said, and walked from the room, into the kitchen.

Hampton called after me, "You're not sticking your head in the oven, are you?"

"Go fuck yourself," I said.

"—with a big red rubber bulb for a nose," Hampton was droning on, mostly to himself; his voice and the racket of the TV set, the kids' cartoons, assailed me; I put my hands over my ears to shut out the noise. "Head out of the oven!" Hampton yelled.

I walked back into the living room and shut off the TV set; turning to face Hampton I said, "Those two people were in a lot of pain. There's nothing funny about someone who's in that much pain."

Grinning, Hampton rocked back and forth, seated curled up on the floor. "And big floppy hands," he said. "Clown hands."

I opened the front door. "I'll see you. I'm going for a walk." I shut the door after me.

The front door swung open. Hampton came out on the porch, cupped his hands to his mouth and called, "Tee-hee; I'm going to stick my head in the oven. Let's see if the babysitter gets here in time. Do you think she'll get here in time? Anybody want to make a bet?"