Читать книгу The Second Baptism of Albert Simmel - Rodney Clapp - Страница 6

In successive days Al untangled what it was about the dream that made it so unsettling. It was not that it reminded him of Valerie. He never forgot Valerie. She came to mind on countless occasions daily—in the build and step of a woman who walked ahead of him, in a kitchen or bakery at the smell of fresh bread that she loved so much. The most routine thing could do it. On a bright, cloudless spring day he would think of their affectionate running argument: he said such days were “sunny,” while Val insisted they were better thought of as “blue-sky” days. But the more piquant, stabbing memories came with peculiar stimulants, on unpredictable occasions.

Once, for instance, he was drinking in a bar and a crusty guy in a fedora climbed on a small platform with an acoustic guitar. The bottleneck slide did it. The rattle and keening of the strings conjured the full scene. The very first time she heard the country blues, in a bar nearly identical to the one he was in, Valerie had stopped talking and was entranced by the musician. A tear welled up in one eye. Albert was captivated by the music, but at that moment even more by this beautiful woman. He saw the tear swell, then, like a salmon leaping a dam, clear her lower eyelid. It streaked down her cheek and she did not wipe away its track until the song was done.

So thoughts of her—reincarnated feelings of her—were nothing different, even if they were not entirely pleasant. Neither was it new or especially disturbing to meet Valerie in a dream. She had appeared in many dreams, as had his deceased father and grandfather. Yet she (like they) had never spoken. In the dreams and in the waking memories she had seemed a kind of ineffectual or—yes, a dead presence—something you coped with and worked around, but never really had to respond to or actively engage, exactly because it had no life or volition of its own.

Albert decided it was like someone who had a bum hand, bereft of movement and any sensation except frequent stabs of pain. You learned how to get along with one hand, you developed tricks and ploys to endure and sometimes avoid the pain. In the company of others possessing two healthy hands, when performing menial chores or making love, you were constantly reminded that you had only one hand, but the reminders were no longer piercing. They had dulled with time and familiarity. They had become, simply, a part of you. But then say that somehow the bad hand appeared to regain its vitality. Suddenly you could feel it as a whole, a palm and five functioning fingers. Now it seemed alien and alarming, something that had to be allowed and taken into account on its own. You sensed glimmers of joy and excitement at reopened possibilities, but at exactly that point you could not trust what was happening. Was the hand really returned, really alive? Or was this fitful self-delusion? As soon as you grasped the hand—or let it grasp you, let it stroke your face or rub your shoulder—would it go numb and limp and void? Would it prove again its real absence, the freshly crushing definitiveness of its loss?

That was what so disturbed Al about the dream. In it Valerie had appeared utterly, entirely alive. She looked and acted real apart from Al and Al’s memories or fantasies. As he reviewed it dozens of times, he realized that in the dream Val had even aged slightly in the five years since he had last seen her. Or seen her like this, alive. Or, that is, apparently alive. That was the weirdness and craziness of the dream and its aftermath. He knew she was gone. How could there be any doubt about her death? And yet he now found himself thinking of her differently, in a way that not only reawakened old feelings, well-rehearsed memories, but also intimated the potential of new feelings, of making new memories with Valerie. That was impossible, absurd. Any such feelings or hopes, however tentative and evanescent, could only disappoint, and disappoint bitterly. Like the one-handed man who thought he sensed a tingling of life, Al shook it off. For safety and sanity’s sake, he denied it. He distracted himself from awareness of it and forgot it.

At least, he tried to.

≤

Albert did much of his attempting to forget the dream on morning and evening commutes to and from Old Chicago. Walking to or away from the sub train station, he often fell into conversation with other pedestrians. But once they were aboard, the train’s rhythmic motion and sounds seemed to silence and lull passengers into a trance, if not slumber. On this particular morning, Al’s car included a mix of strange and familiar faces. Beside him sat an old man with an egregious comb-over. As the disheveled fellow nodded in and out of sleep, the lone lock of hair somehow stayed in a solid piece and swung like a scythe across his smooth pate. A man on the upper deck munched on a biscuit grasped in a crumpled paper bag. Two lovers at the front of the car faced Al, the man slouched with his legs flung wide, his arm casually laced around the woman. He monopolized the seat and probably, Al thought, the woman’s entire existence. She was curled up compactly, with a tired and resigned look. Burbles of conversation flowed about the coach in three different languages. Some children chattered loudly.

Albert looked ahead to another day of the most lucrative—if not actually lavishly paying—job he’d ever held. He tutored teenaged heirs of the constituency, as the inner-city wealthy class was known. In the days of plentiful, affordable petroleum, now receding into the obscurity of the past, there had been a steady drift away from books and widespread basic mastery of the sciences. Reading and learning, after all, required patience and arduous discipline. Why seek information or entertainment by these time-consuming, often monotonous, means when they were otherwise instantly and easily accessible? Education and enjoyment via imagistic, computerized media appeared vastly superior in their efficiency.

During the ongoing decades of the Descent (so-called because it plunged society into the more spartan, demanding period after the “peak” availability of oil), the constituency hoarded not only economic power but the dwindling reserves of petroleum, alongside the consequent ready supply of electricity. Of course, without affordable energy, the panoply of electronic devices that functioned on it was useless. Laptop computers, cell phones, televisions, video game players, and portable music devices by the millions gathered dust in attics or rotted in landfills. Not all were laid aside, however. In Old Chicago and other major cities around the country, the constituency still enjoyed the generous (if decreased) availability of energy and electricity. Constituents continued to depend on electronic technology. As they shunned the burdens of reading and the sciences over generations, their skills in these areas atrophied and faded. But in recent years there were second thoughts. Was it really prudent, constituents asked themselves as political conflicts flared, to entrust all their technical support to the subs who so grossly outnumbered them? Also, the mass entertainment and arts industry had long ago become unaffordable and infeasible. Movies hadn’t been made for decades; recorded and digitized music was a relic. Onerous as they had been, obsolete as they had become, traditional books reassumed value. Much of the constituency now wanted its young trained—for necessity and for pleasure—in literature and history, in math and the practical sciences.

That was why Albert rode the train six days a week: to ground constituent adolescents in what once had been known as the humanities, and teach them some basic algebra. Like Al, most tutors came from devout Christian or Jewish families. Poke McNearland, the longtime priest at St. Brendan’s, offered the most succinct explanation for this reality that Al had ever heard. Father McNearland pointed out that, as their adherents understood them, Judaism and Christianity were not philosophies or abstract systems of thought. Neither were they folk religions based on the perennial, timeless cycle of the seasons and life and death. Instead, Jews and Christians rooted their faiths in particular stories from the past. God had revealed himself and his aims uniquely in the characters of Moses and Jesus, in the events of the exodus from Egypt and the crucifixion. In turn, these stories, and other texts radiating around them, were contained in Scripture. Thus Jews and Christians (along with Muslims) really were “people of the book.” At least some of them must be able to read and continually refresh their communities of faith.

“Take it another step deeper, really deeper,” McNearland said. “God as we know God acts through time and space. But God can’t be contained in the world. You can’t put God in a box, even the biggest box. God can’t be captured on the surface of things, so we could say God is all depth. That’s why the bush that draws Moses to itself doesn’t only burn, but it speaks. It not only shows on the surface and by its appearances, it manifests from its depths.”

Often when Poke got rolling with an enthusiastic exposition, his eyes brightened and he smiled as if surprised and delighted by his own words. At least outside the pulpit, he might also veer into the salty language of his working class heritage. That was the case on this occasion. McNearland continued: “Think of this—the Gospel of John informs us that Jesus Christ is at his highest, his most exalted, when he is dying on a cross. Now, just by appearances and on the surface of things, how can you see the crucified Jesus as exalted? Bullshit! This is a naked and broken man under torture, enduring a horror. To see Jesus exalted on the cross, you have to know the story before the story. You have to know about the history of Israel and its expectation of a suffering servant messiah, its trust that God can work through ugliness and patient endurance. And you have to know the story after the story, that the Christ dying on a cross will be resurrected from the dead, and in his resurrection vindicated by God as the true messiah.”

“It is words,” Father McNearland concluded, “words of story and remembrance, that not only describe the surface of things—which after all is often bleak as hell—but also point to a deeper dimension of God’s will and intention, God’s spirit.”

With the muffled shrill of the train’s throaty horn, Al returned to the surface of things, to his mundane commute. Brakes squealed and the train slowed to a stop at one more commuter station before its destination in downtown Old Chicago. Al’s seatmate theatrically erected himself with a groan, as if standing up was almost a full day’s labor, and exited the car. A few others also stepped down onto the station platform, while several more climbed on the train. A bell rang urgently. The lumbering string of coaches clunked, jerked, and shuddered like a huge dog shaking itself awake. The train gathered speed and regained its pace. Static crackled over the car’s intercom. Al sat up straight, yawned to open his ears. It was time for the conductor to read the morning’s news.

≤

The constituency funded and fueled the train lines not only for its transportation, but for the ready movement of subs to engineer and build, cook and clean, tutor its children, and perform other menial tasks. Both constituents and subs wanted regular news, and with electronic media largely defunct, packed trains provided a natural venue for broadcasting in the Age of the Descent. There were, of course, other and more informal means for the distribution of information. But the constituency owned the railroads and very much liked the idea of providing and overseeing the sole extant form of mass media.

Today the conductor-newscaster began, as usual, with the weather. Forecasting had actually improved in recent years. Many means of scientific forecasting remained, and the Descent had returned all the population—subs and rural denizens especially, but constituents too—closer to nature. Weathermen reincorporated “folk methods” that scrutinized the movement and other behavior of bird flocks, various burrowing animals, and the massive buffalo herds resurgent on the Great Plains.

After a terse summary of the weather, the newsreader moved on to an account of recent regional robberies, sex crimes, and homicides. Then came a smattering of foreign news, which, today as usually, amounted to indirect (or not so indirect) hints why listeners were so fortunate to live in Old America rather than anywhere else in the world. Next came vital information about crops and the conditions for other foodstuffs. This was the part of the newscast where passengers were most likely to participatively jeer, as with this morning’s announcement of tomato rationing, or to cheer. And at this moment resounding clapping, foot-stomping, seatback-banging, and shouting greeted the excellent tidings that brewers had a temporary oversupply and beer prices would plummet tomorrow. The exuberant din drowned out not only the thumping and clacking of the train but the amplified voice of the reader. The newscaster shut up for a minute or two, until the enthusiastic approval wound down to an infrequent hoot. Finally the intercom crackled again. The newscaster spoke:

And now, the Headline of the Day.

Authorities announced this morning that Congress is repealing the National Anti-Natal Law. The repeal, proposed by President Willie Gleason, has been under debate for several months. The lifting of the NAN eliminates penalties for childbearing men and women under age twenty-eight.

“My colleagues have acted wisely,” said President Gleason, lauding approval of his proposal. “The anti-natal law may once have been necessary. It is no longer.”

The newscaster went on quoting the President. There was some murmuring and rustling among the passengers, but nothing approaching the raucous outburst for falling beer prices. While subs despised the NAN Law, they remained aware that there were constituents on the train with them. Outward celebration over the death of this controversial law might endanger jobs, if not more.

The Anti-Natal measure was implemented fifteen years earlier, forbidding any Americans to birth children before both the mother and father were already well into their childbearing years. The official rationale for the law was conservational, to hold down population growth and ease the human burden on Earth. Al and the other subs knew that was true—after all, the law applied to the constituency, too—but they also knew ecological righteousness was hardly the sole motivator behind it. Constituents wanted to preserve available petroleum energy, of which they were the primary remaining users. They also (and perhaps mainly) hoped to depress the birthrate among subs.

The law’s draconian penalties contributed to the spite for it: pregs, women under age twenty-eight who got pregnant, were sentenced to a minimum of eighteen months in prison; impregs, the males under twenty-eight who fathered their children, were liable to mandatory sterilization. But comparatively, that was just kindling in the burning hatred subs bore against the NAN policies. What fueled anger into an inferno of resentment was the law’s uneven enforcement. Relying on connections and superior legal and political resources, constituents usually escaped these severe punishments. Subs, by contrast, rarely avoided them.

In this light, Albert and other subs on the train were suspicious as they heard the newsreader quote the president and enumerate the official reasons for striking the law from the books. Officially, NAN policies were “no longer necessary” because alternative forms of energy were successfully under development and because “the great citizens of Old America” would now voluntarily, as a patriotic duty, keep birthrates low. This official account did not acknowledge that anti-natal law had become unacceptably difficult and expensive to enforce. Resentment of the law approached explosive heights, and prison populations had soared to unmanageable levels.

Not wanting to make potential trouble for himself, Al kept a well-practiced poker face as he heard this news. But inwardly, he imagined an ugly, hateful beast going down, and tingles of glee danced up his spine. He had known several people hurt by the NAN law. Two male friends, convicted, penalized, and no longer able to produce children, were spurned from marriage. One was reasonably content with his bachelorhood, if prone to bursts of anger and the occasional drunken binge. The other bitterly and constantly yearned for a spouse and family he would never have. Then there was Sharon Lorebain, who lived down the street from Albert’s boyhood home. Sharon had married when she was twenty-two and gotten pregnant a year or two later. A teenaged Al was walking down the street one morning when he saw Ms. Lorebain arrested, handcuffed wrists behind her back, screaming, stumbling, and being dragged across her yard. She disappeared from the neighborhood for several months. When she returned, she was pale and sullen. She never said if her offspring had been aborted or given out for adoption. She never said much of anything. Before long she and her husband separated, and now she lived alone, the hermit of Banneker Street, with dandelions and prairie grass obscuring her front door.

Then, of course, and damn it, Al thought of Valerie. He recalled how they had begun to talk of marriage. Each of them had been an only child, and both wanted two or three kids. Some day, they told each other. His father had often joked how easy it was to be an expert on childrearing until a child was born to you, and Al supposed he and Val had only ever thought of raising a family naively, with all the pristine wonder only the inexperienced and untried can enjoy. But he knew they had wanted children. He knew Val would have been a great mother. And he knew it would never be. She was gone, more cruelly lost to him and to the world than Sharon Lorebain reclused in the wasting house down the street.

Another commuter train roared on tracks parallel to Al’s own and a just few feet away. An instant eclipse closed and darkened his world, followed immediately by the batting of shadows and light, the zoetropic blur of faces flitting by on the other train. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the adjacent train passed. The sound faded to its earlier level, the air pressure dropped. Steady, unbroken sunlight reasserted itself and the visual horizon beyond his window expanded from two feet to a view across the street to a row of bungalows. It occurred to Albert that this violent and yet innocent passage must be something like the sensation of being born. He remembered a documentary film about childbirth he had once watched. He remembered the scene of a newborn shooting from its mother’s womb. It slid in a gush out of the uterus and plopped into the waiting physician’s hands. Stunned and blinking, the infant churned its fists and feet at the air, then expelled its first breath and realized that in this strange new medium it could make noise. The baby cried, and Al supposed the cry meant something like I’m here. But where am I?