Sorcerer's Apprentice Page 7

  ALĒTHIA

  God willing, I’m going to tell you a love story. A skeptical old man, whose great forehead and gray forked beard most favor (when I flatter myself) those of that towering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, I am hardly a man to conjure a fabulation so odd in its transfiguration of things, so strange, so terrifying (thus it now seems to me) that it belongs on the pale lips of the poetic genius who wrote Essentials and that hallucinatory prose-poem called Cane. But even though I’m an old man (I know my faults: failing memory, an infernal Faustian leer), I can still tell a first-rate tale of romance.

  The girl always came late to my evening seminar—Kant this semester—sashaying seductively, pulled into the room by rental-library books held close to her chest, clomping in black leather boots around the long table to sit, her brown knees pressed together, left of my lectern. When she first “appeared” to me, I believe I was stalking Kant, thumbs hooked in my vest, by way of a playful verse attributed to Bishop Berkeley:

  There was a young man who felt God

  Must find it exceedingly odd

  When he finds that this tree

  Continues to be

  When there’s no one about in the Quad.

  “Dear sir, your astonishment’s odd;

  I am always about in the Quad.

  And, therefore, this tree

  Will continue to be

  As observed by yours, faithfully, God.”

  Lecturing, I seldom noticed her, only a dark blur, a whiff of sandalwood, but this winter, after thirty years of teaching, years as outwardly calm as those of a monk or contemplative, devoted to books, my study of Kant led to a nearly forgotten philosopher named Max Scheler, who said—and this shook me deeply—“Contemplation of essence, the fundamental approach to Being peculiar to metaphysical knowledge, demands an attitude of loving devotion,” so yes, I did see Wendy Barnes, but with the flash of clear vision, the focus, the gasp of recognition that slaps you, suddenly, when a tree drawing in a child’s book (the dome of leaves, I mean) recomposes itself as a face. My mouth wobbled. If I had been standing, I would have staggered. I forgot my lecture; I sent my Kant scholars home.

  Legging it back to my office in Padelford Hall, a building as old—so I put it to myself—as a medieval fortress, I could not pull my thoughts together. Shame, I thought. O shameful to have hot flashes for a student. My room of papers (half-finished books that had collapsed on me in mid-manuscript, or changed as I was chasing them), closed ’round me comfortably when I slumped behind my desk, flipping through my gradebook. The girl Wendy, an Equal Opportunity Program student, was failing—no fault of mine—but it saddened me all the same, and now I suppose I must tell you why.

  Time being short, I must explain briefly, hoping not to bore you, that a Negro professor is, although reappointed and tenured, a kind of two-reel comedy. Like his students, like Wendy, he looks back to the bleak world of black Chicago (in my case), where his spirit, if you will, fought to free itself—as Hegel’s anxious Spirit struggles against matter—from a life that led predictably to either (a) drugs, (b) a Post Office job, (c) Marion Prison, (d) Sunset Cemetery (all black), or (e) the ooga-booga of Christianity. And what of college? There, like a thief come to table, he hungrily grabs crumbs of thought from their genuine context, reading Hume for his reasoning on the self, blinking that author’s racial slurs, “feeling his twoness,” as Du Bois so beautifully put it in a brilliant stroke of classic Dualism, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body.” Regardless, he puts his shoulder to the wheel, pushing doggedly on as I did: a dreamy, first-generation student in a paint-by-numbers curriculum, fed by books for Negro uplift—the modern equivalent, you might say, of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians (which I swore by). Not exactly biography, these odd books from the Negro press, and with titles like Lives That Lift—written by blacks to inspire blacks—but myths about men who tried, in their own small way, to create lives that could be, if disciplined, the basis of universal law. He embraces—and this is the killing part—the lofty balderdash of his balding, crabbed-faced teachers about sober Truth and Science when they, shaken by Wittgenstein, had in fact lost faith and were madly humping their teaching assistants.

  So, I mean to say, that Scheler, the night before in my study, pulled me up short. Lately, I live alone in three untidy, low-ceilinged rooms I rent in Evanston near Northwestern University. I get up at three each morning, read Hebrew, Greek, or Sanskrit at my roll-top desk, but no tabloids or lurid newspapers. Nights, I soak in a hot bath of Epsom salts, never forget my thought exercises—perceptual tricks pulled from Husserl’s Ideen—and eat my dinners (no meat or eggs) in a nearby diner, slowly because I have an ulcer, bad digestion, and a bathroom cabinet spilling open with pills for migraines, stomach cramps, and potions (Dr. Hobson’s Vegetable Prescription, McClean’s Tar Wine Compound) for rest. At fifty, I sleep poorly. So it has been for years. Barricaded in by books, bleary with insomnia, I read Scheler’s Philosophical Perspectives, my medicines beside me on my desk, and it came to me, sadly—I felt sad, at least, as if I’d misunderstood something any salesgirl knew instinctively—that living for knowledge, ignoring love, as I had, was wrong, because love—transcendental love—was knowledge. True enough, “love” is on the lips of every sentimental schoolgirl (or boy), and cheapened by maudlin songwriters. A thoughtful man doubts, and rightly so, these vulgar reports.

  But Scheler wrote—if I’ve got this right—that Mind, revealed by Kant to be only a relation in the worldweb, was a special kind of window, a gap in Being, an opening that, if directed toward another, allowed him (or her) to appear—like Plato’s form of “The Good”—as both moral and beautiful. The implications, I daresay, were staggering, for Nature, contrary to common sense, needed man to clarify its meaning. (Of course, there was a paradox in this: To say “Man clarifies Nature” is to say, oddly, that “Nature clarifies Nature,” because man is a part of Nature, which suggests, stranger still, that man—if self-forgetful—is not an actor or agent at all.) Scheler’s happy term alethia, “to call forth from concealedness,” advanced the theory that each man, each moment, each blink of the eye, was responsible for obliterating the petty “Old Adam” and conjuring only those visions from perceptual chaos that let be goodness, truth, beauty. So what? So this:

  How a better scholar would interpret this, I do not know; but to a plodding, tired man like myself, alēthia meant the celebration of exactly that ugly, lovely black life (so it was to me) I’d fled so long ago in my childhood, as if seeing beauty in every tissue and every vein of a world lacking discipline and obedience to law were the real goal of metaphysics; as if, for all my hankering after Truth in the Academy, Truth had been hidden all along, waiting for my “look” in the cold-water flats between Cottage Grove Avenue and the Rock Island right-of-way.

  I was under the spell of this extravagant idea when Wendy Barnes came barreling into my office, sore as hell, banging the door against my wall, and blew noisily up to my desk. “You know what my adviser, the punk, just pulled on me?” She was chewing gum with her mouth open, punishing the wad as if it might be her adviser.

  “There now,” I said, professorial. I pushed back my swivel chair. “Tell me about it.”

  She slammed shut the door with her hip, then threw herself into a chair. Here then was Wendy in a loose white blouse and open-top brassiere, with a floss of black hair, a wide, thick mouth, and a loud, vibrating voice. I judged her to be twenty-five. She had large, uncanny eyes that sometimes looked brown or sepia, sometimes black with no iris like blobs of oil, sometimes hard and gray like metal. And what of her character? She might have been one of three sassy, well-medicated blues singers backing up James Brown down at the Regal. I thought her vulgar. “I’ve got to get a B to stay in school.” She dipped into her purse for a pack of Kools—“Or they kick me out, see?—then lit a cigarette. Her hands shook, hobbling the flame of her match; then she lifted her head, slanting her eyes at me. “I’ll do anyt
hing to get that grade.”

  “Anything?” I asked. “Perhaps an incomplete for—”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” She blinked away cigarette smoke curling up her wrist. “Like, I been here goin’ on six years now, and if nothing else, I know how this place works. Like, I ain’t got nothin’ against you, but I ain’t about to go back to no factory, or day-work. If I don’t ace this course—are you listenin’?—I’m gonna have to tell your chairman Dick Dunn and Dean David Mc-Cracken that you been houndin’ me for trim.”

  “Me?” I looked up. “Trim?”

  “Look”—from my desk she lifted a fountain pen—“I’ll give you an ostensive definition.” Uncapping it, she slowly slid the pen back into the cap. “See?”

  Lord, I thought. 0 Lord.

  “Like, it’s nothin’ personal, though.” She was at pains to keep this catastrophe on a friendly basis. Aboveboard. “But if I flunk,” she said, “you’re finished.” Then, like a trap door, Wendy’s face sprang open in a beautiful smile. She touched my hand. “I can be nice, too, you know, once you get to know me.”

  I didn’t believe her. She’d have to be crazy to say this. It was, for a timid Negro professor who never thought of using his position for leverage, an all-hands-to-the-pump panic. My heart started banging away; I could not snap the room into clarity. She was armed with endless tricks and strategies, this black girl, but Wendy was nobody’s fool—she used Niggerese playfully, like a toy, to bait, to draw me out. She was a witch, yes. A thug. But she had me, rightly or wrongly, at bay. I drew deeply for air. I asked, fighting to steady my voice, “You’d do this?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Her nose twitched. “Mrs. Barnes’s baby daughter is strictly business tonight.” And then: “Say what you’re thinkin’.”

  My voice shattered. “I haven’t done anything! Nothing! Not to you. Or anyone! Or—”

  “So don’t be stupid.” She was standing now, crushing out her cigarette. Her blouse pulled tightly against her bosom. “My mama only got as far as second grade, but she always said, ‘If you gonna be accused of somethin’, you might as well do it.’” She smiled. Deep in my stomach I felt sick. What I felt, in fact, was trapped. Rage as I might, I felt, strangely, that this disaster was somehow all my own doing. Now she opened the office door. “Can we go someplace and talk? Do you hang out?”

  Although I do not “hang out” (I checked my fly to make sure), she pulled me in tow downstairs to her sports car, clicked on her tape deck, then accelerated along the Lake Michigan shoreline, her speedometer right on seventy, damned near blowing off both doors, then tooled down Wacker Drive. She drove on, head back, both wrists crossed on the wheel. My square black hat crushed against the roof, hands gripped between my knees, I listened, helplessly, to Michael Jackson on station WVON, then saw the silver hood nose into Chicago’s squalid Fifth Police District. What was this woman thinking? Were we stopping here? In this sewer? Wendy parked beneath the last building on a side street. Lincolns, Fleetwoods, EI Dorados were everywhere. Onto the sidewalk braying music spilled from an old building—hundreds of years old—that looked from below like a cinder block. I sucked in wind. “You live here?”

  She gave a quick hiss of laughter. “Are you afraid?” Her eyes, small as nails, angled up to mine.

  “Yeah, I know you, Professor. We’re really ‘gods fallen into ruin,’ right? Ain’t that what you said in class? Didn’t you read that when you were a lonely, fat little boy? And you wasted all those years, learned twelve foreign languages, two of them dead ones, you dimwit, wanting Great Sacrifices and trials of faith, believing you could contribute to uplifting the Race—what else would a fat boy dream of?—only to learn, too late, that nobody wants your goddamn sacrifices. For all the degrees and books, you’re still a dork.” Waving her cigarette, she talked on like this, as if I had been perfectly blind my whole life. “Civil rights is high comedy. The old values are dead. Our money is plastic. Our art is murder. Our philosophy is a cackle, obscene and touching, from the tower. The universe explodes silently nowhere, and you’re disturbed, you fossil, by decadent, erotic dreams, lonely, hollowed out, nothing left now but the Book—that boring ream of windy bullshit—you can’t finish.” Her hair crackled suddenly with electricity. “Or maybe one last spiritless fuck, you passéiste, with a student before you buy the farm. Yeah,” she said, opening her door, “I know you, Professor.”

  I was too stunned to speak. If I’d known she was this smart, I’d have given her an A the first week of the term. Wendy pulled me, tripping, holding my head ducked a little, down cement steps into a hallway of broken glass and garbage, then into a long apartment so hazed with the raw, ugly scent of marijuana hashish congolene and the damp smell of old cellars that I could taste as well as smell these violent odors as they coalesced, take hold of them in my hands like tissue. For a moment I was dizzy. Someone was sprawled dead drunk in the doorway. Sound shook the air. The floorboards trembled. Yet what most confounded me were the flashy men in white mink jackets who favored women, the women who looked, in this pale, fulgurating light, like men. Meaning was in masquerade. I felt my head going tighter. Let me linger too long and I would never regain the university. Remembering what she’d said, I felt tired, fat, and old. Damned if I seduced her. Damned if I didn’t. Ten, maybe fifteen dancers, like dark chips of paint peeled from the shadows, swept me from my briefcase and Wendy. Someone pressed a pellet into my palm. That scared me plenty. But what moved invisibly in this hazy room, this hollow box of light, this noise-curdled air, was more startling than the seen. Music. It played hob with my blood pressure. It was wild, sensual, clanging and languid by turns, loud and liquid, an intangible force, or—what shall I say?—spirit angling through the air, freed by cackling instruments that lifted me, a fat boy and student still, like a scrap of paper, then dropped me, head over heels, into a dark corner by a man or boy—I could not tell which—snorting white powder off a dollar bill. He had a dragon tattooed on his left arm, long braids like a Rastafarian, and a face only a mother could love. Lapping up the last of the powder, he gave me an underglance. “What you lookin’ at, chief?” “Nothing,” I said. “You gettin’ high?” “No,” I said. “You drinkin’?” “No.” “You queer?” “No!” “Then what the fuck you doin’ here?”

  What had brought me here? Even I was no longer sure what brought me. I became aware that my palm was empty. Lord. My hand had brought the pellet to my lips without telling my brain. O Lord. Hours passed. Twice I tried to raise my arm, but could not budge. Neither could I look away. Silently, I watched. Helplessly, I accepted things to smoke, sniff, and swallow—blotter acid Budweiser raw ether Ripple. The room turned and leaned. Slowly, a new prehension took hold of me, echoing like a voice in my ear. That man, the one in the Abo Po, lightly treading the measure, was me. And this one dressed like Walt (or Joe) Frazier was me. If I existed at all, it was in this kaleidoscopic party, this pinwheel of color, the I just a function, a flickerflash creation of this black chaos, the chaos no more, or less, than the I. There was an awful beauty in this. Seer and seen were intertwined—if you took the long view—in perpetuity. As it was, and apparently shall ever be, being sang being sang being in a cycle that was endless. I gazed, dizzily, back at the girl. She danced now fast, now slow. I followed her minutely as she moved. And then, perhaps I suffered hypnosis, or yet another hallucination, but my eyelids lowered, relaxing her afterimage into an explosion of energy, a light show in the blink, the pause before the world went black, and I suddenly saw Wendy—not as the girl who shotgunned me with blackmail back at Padelford Hall, who made me jump like a trained seal; who stood outside me as another subject in a contest of wills—but, yes, as pure light, brilliance, fluid like the music, blending in a perfectly balanced world with the players Muslims petty thieves black Jews lumpenproles Daley-machine politicians West Indians loungers Africans the drug peddlers who, when it came to the crunch, were, it was plain, pure light, too, the Whole in drag, and in that evanescent, drugged instant, I di
d indeed desperately love her.

  Hours later, when I came out of this drug coma, the building was full of daylight, quiet, the loud party long past. Things, no longer hazed, had a stylized purity of line. Was there more to come? Was I done? I wondered if I had dreamed the connectedness of Being the night before, or if now, awake, I dreamed distinctions. I didn’t know where I was for an instant. My bones felt loose, unlocked in my body. Through misty eyes I saw Wendy in an upholstered chair nearby, her arms around one brown knee, one bare foot on my briefcase, looking at me sadly, then away. I was twisted in covers on the mattress of a low bed, under a bare electric bulb, wearing only long flannel underwear limp from my sweat. Her bedroom was rayed by sunlight, cool as a basement. She sighed, a long stage sigh: “You poor fool.” Her voice was flat and tired. “You’re still thinking like a fat boy.” She pulled off her blouse, her skirt, her other boot, and threw her cigarette still burning into a corner. As she lay down, her cold feet flat against me, I lifted my arm to let her move closer, and at last let my mind sleep.

  MOVING PICTURES

  You sit in the Neptune Theater waiting for the thin, overhead lights to dim with a sense of respect, perhaps even reverence, for American movie houses are, as everyone knows, the new cathedrals, their stories better remembered than legends, totems, or mythologies, their directors more popular than novelists, more influential than saints—enough people, you’ve been told, have seen the James Bond adventures to fill the entire country of Argentina. Perhaps you have written this movie. Perhaps not. Regardless, you come to it as everyone does, as a seeker groping in the darkness for light, hoping something magical will be beamed from above, and no matter how bad this matinee is, or silly, something deep and maybe even too dangerous to talk loudly about will indeed happen to you and the others, before this drama reels to its last transparent, frame.