Crompton Divided (25 page)

Stack reacts quickly by changing the meadow into a desert and charging in with Genghis Khan and his horde. Crompton mows them down with machine-gun fire from the destroyer he has just produced on the lake he has just created.

Stack simulates Submariner and sinks the cruiser. He decimates Crompton’s forces with hard-bitten Carthaginian cohorts. His troops devastate the countryside. They catch Loomis feasting in the greenwood and seem likely to destroy him. But at the last moment, who should join the fight but Finch, mounted on a white elephant at the right hand of King Asoka, marching with a colorful collection of mantra-singing bodhisattvas, arahants, and pratyekabuddhas. These forces refuse to kill anyone and confine themselves to scornful glances: they are easily obliterated by Stack’s fuzzy-wuzzies. But their interposition gives Loomis time to change into Owen Glendower and vanish into the mountains of Wales.

In the resulting confusion, Crompton takes charge. He transposes the situation into the American Civil War, producing the lines outside Richmond and splitting himself into Grant and Sherman. Stack’s feeble riposte is to turn into Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé and retreat toward Canada. He makes a stand at Mindanao, which falls, and then at Dien Bien Phu, which also falls.

Pressed to the utmost extremity, Stack is heard to mutter: ‘I’m a Freud that this day that began so Jung is getting Adler and Adler. …’

He goes down at last into a flaming pit of oblivion that Crompton has created for him. His qualities are reduced to notions, his essence is denied.

Loomis is looking for a truce now, his spaniel-brown eyes begging; but Crompton, full of end-state lust, impales him on a crimson derationalizer.

Finch doesn’t even wait to be struck down. To save Crompton from murder, he reverts to nothingness.

They are gone now, all gone. And now it is Crompton alone, thick breath sobbing in his throat, staring at the carnage and watching himself change change change into implacable archetypal killer weeping in his beer and throwing up all over his glen-plaid suit. A definitive Crompton for the ages!

But now, lo, Crompton himself is gone. He is here no longer with his schemes and desires, his hopes and fears, his talented nose and scrawny body.

There is someone else here. It is a new time, and now a new person has been created through the wonder of the alchemical marriage.

The new person opened his eyes and yawned and stretched, enjoying the sensations of light and color. Former possession of Alistair Crompton, tenanted for a while by Edgar Loomis, Dan Stack, and Barton Finch, the new person stood up and considered life and found it good. Integrated at last, like other men, he could not be multifarious, many-motived. At last he could strive for the important things in life – sex, money, love, and God – and still have time left for several hobbies.

What should he strive for first? How about money and God, and let love work itself out? How about going all out for love and money, and letting the God thing sit for a while?

He considered. No solution came to mind. He saw that there were many things to do, and many things to not do, and there were many reasons for doing and not doing each thing, and there was no clear way of knowing what was right and what was not.

The new person considered. A presentiment of disaster came over him. He was still stuck in the human situation! He said, ‘Hey, Alistair, fellows, are you still there? I don’t think this one is going to work either.’