The Children of Hamelin (45 page)

I raised my voice till my throat burned, screamed at them, above Harvey, above the murmurs and the shouts and the sounds of a mob lumbering to its feet: “Listen, you stupid bastards! Listen to this! ‘... once all hope has been destroyed by the Foundation, something beyond hope is possible: faith... Once faith is total... selfmotivation... is abolished... the Foundation becomes... a single organism in which the constituents are mindless cells... the egos of the members die... my ego exists as the “brain” of the gestalt organism—’”

“STOP! STOP! STOP! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”
Harvey was howling, waving his arms, his eyes rolling wildly. Everyone in the room seemed to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, baying like a pack of dogs.

“Dig it, suckers!” I shouted. “Dig this: ‘... the time will come when individual consciousness no longer exists, when every human mind will be concentrated in one great Super-Consciousness Commune, when death will be defeated, when the Consciousness-Commune will contain all of us, will contain every iota of consciousness on Earth, will be like a God....”

I threw aside the paper bag and waved the gray binder over my head. “Dig it! Dig it!” I screamed. “There’s your fucking Foundation in the man’s own words!
The Path to
Consciousness
by Harvey Brustein!”

Harvey’s knees went out from under him; he collapsed back into his chair like a deflated balloon. His glasses lay at the foot of the folding chair, his eyes were vacant and glazed. One great sob wracked his body. People were rushing up to him, pushing each other out of the way, knee-and-elbowing, milling around like panicked cattle.

“Dig it, you idiots!” I howled into the whirlwind. “Harvey sent this piece of puke into the literary agency where I work. He swallowed the agency’s con just like you swallowed his. Dig it, he’s crazy, he wants to rule the world, he wants to be God, he wants to gobble you up! Want to hear more? ‘It is given to few men to comprehend the nature of the universe, fewer still to transcend the limits of their own ego and live the ultimate truth. Therefore, it is the obligation of all of us who have achieved Total Consciousness to...’”

Suddenly, I realized that I had been speaking into silence. No one was even looking at me; they were all crowding around the dais where Harvey sat on his chair in a limp stupor. As I became aware that I was being ignored, I stopped reading and a strange hush seemed to sop up every sound in the room.

Ted was the first to step up onto the dais. Everyone else in the room was silent as he bent over Harvey and said quietly: “Did you write that book, Harvey?”

Harvey seemed to drift slowly back from the black pit inside; as he looked up at Ted, life started to come back into his eyes.

“Yes,” Harvey said.

“Are you okay now?” Ted asked, with almost a lover’s tenderness.

Harvey retrieved his glasses, put them on, sat up straighter in his chair. “Yes, I’m all right,” he said. Tone was coming back into his voice but there was still a certain dull flatness to it. He fished his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, stuck one in his mouth, lit it, exhaled smoke.

“I... I’m sorry I flew off the handle like that,” Harvey said. Slowly, his voice was reassuming its former cool power. He was projecting his voice out to all of them as he said: “I guess that proves I’m human too.” He even managed a ghost of a laugh. “I sent my book to a literary agency knowing I was no writer, and knowing the whole thing would have to be rewritten and thinking it would be treated confidentially. I guess I have some ego left after all, because I
did
feel awfully foolish having my rough draft read back to me...”

Doris stepped up onto the dais beside Ted, looked me square in the eye across the sea of people and said very loudly: “Tom Hollander, that was a thoroughly rotten thing to do.”

A semi-audible sound came off the crowd around the dais, like a thunderstorm gathering, like a crowd contemplating becoming a mob. Hackles went up on my neck. I smelled waves of ugliness coming off their bodies aimed at me. The imbeciles!

“Doris! For Chrissakes, weren’t you
listening!”

“We were listening,” Ted said coldly. His blue eyes were hard and shiny—perhaps too hard and too shiny like a brittle pane of glass over unfaceable fear.

“Well goddammit, what’s the matter with you people!” I shouted. “Harvey’s crazy! He’s stark raving nuts inside! A mongoloid idiot can see that!” I waved the book over my head like the proverbial bloody shirt. “This thing is a classic example of a crank book! Harvey’s a crank!”

Suddenly I noticed that Rich Rossi had been pushing his way through the mob towards me, his face red, his hands balled into fists. “Why don’t you shut your fucking—”

“Stop!” Harvey shouted. “No violence, Rich.” Rich obeyed his master’s voice. Way we both were feeling, Harvey had probably saved
someone’s
life.

“Look, look!” Ted shouted for attention. “Tom has read us a lot of stuff from Harvey’s book. Some of it sounded pretty good and some of it sounded pretty bad. So what does all that prove...?”

Harvey got to his feet. “It proves something pretty important,” he said. He smiled wanly. “First of all, I’m afraid it proves I’m not much of a writer. But
that
should remind all of you that I’m only human; when I set out to express myself in a book, I can fail. No doubt when I express myself at these meetings or even in therapy sessions, I fail to an extent too. Total Consciousness is beyond verbal formulas. And I too have faults, perhaps I haven’t achieved complete Total Consciousness yet myself. But Harvey Brustein is not what counts—”

Hog-grunts and whines of denial. Old Humble Harv! He had managed to turn humility into the highest form of arrogance—Old Humble Harv, simple human prophet of the Total Truth.

“No!” Harvey said. “I’m
not
what’s important—the
Foundation
is what counts. And the Foundation is all of us, not just me. We’re all imperfect, but the Foundation is our means for striving for the perfection of Total Consciousness. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what I was trying to say in my book. We must
all
merge our neurotic selves into the total community of the Foundation. As individuals, we can never be Totally Conscious—and that includes me, I need the Foundation as much as any of you. I’ve always insisted that I
wasn’t
a therapist and you
weren’t
my patients. We’re all equal
members
of the Foundation. We must put ourselves behind us. I’m an individual; don’t expect me to be perfect, you’re sure to be disappointed. But through the Foundation, we can all taste perfection. The deaths of our egos is not an end but a beginning—the beginning of a community consciousness greater and purer than our own!”

“We came here to vote on going to San Francisco,” Ted said. He turned his hot blue eyes on the crowd, challenged them with his size and his stance and his blind commitment. “I say let’s do what we came here to do! I say let’s vote
now!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

“Vote!”

“Come on, vote!”

Harvey held up his hand for silence: it descended like a curtain. “All right,” he said. “And before we vote, I want to thank you, all of you...”

As he said it, he stared across the room, and our eyes met. The thing in his eyes was neither hate nor triumph. It was as if Harvey was acknowledging a level of reality that only the two of us shared. On that level, he was my devil and I his. He had won and I had lost. But because we had fought on a plane above the reality of those we had fought over, there was a strange communion between us. We hated each other, each knew the other was mad, but in a strange curious way Harvey and I seemed to share the feeling that we were the only two real people in the room. The others were already shadows who had sold pieces of their souls. And how could the Smoker of Souls feel equality with his Dope?

“All in favor of moving the Foundation to San Francisco...?”

A forest of hands.

“Against?”

Only a pitiful few.

And Arlene’s was not among them.

The stairwell was warm and empty; down at the bottom was a door that led out into the cold. I stood alone on the landing at the top of the stairs. Behind me was light and warmth and the sounds of excited planning. I felt empty and drained and defeated. And alone.

I took one step down the stairs—

“Tom!”

I stopped, turned, saw Arlene framed in the doorway. I went back to her.

“You’ve changed your mind?”

Behind the armor of her glasses, her eyes were misty, forlorn, somehow terrified. But her jaw was a tight line of resolution.

“No,” she said. “I was hoping you would... It’s not too late... Harvey would understand... He’s beyond vindictiveness...”

“He’s beyond
anything
human,” I said bitterly. Then, more savagely: “What the fuck’s the matter with you, girl? You’re not stupid! You’re not crazy! You know what he is. How can you still go through with it?”

“I know what I am too,” she said wanly. “Yes, I know what Harvey is... but I also know what I need him to be. What we all need him to be. And he’s willing to try being that. Don’t you need something greater than yourself to believe in?”

“Maybe I do... sure I do! But I’ll be damned if I build me an idol out of shit and worship it for lack of anything better. And so will you, baby, so will you...”

“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered. “But I don’t have any choice...”

I reached into my pocket and fished out my apartment key. I held it front of her face silently, like a priest thrusting his crucifix at a vampire.

And like a vampire confronted with that image of its own unfaceable, Arlene gasped, sobbed, began to cry, hid her face in her hands, and fled back into her cave.

I didn’t follow her.

Instead, I descended the stairs, opened the door, and stopped outside. As I closed the door behind me, bitter cold hit me like a solid wall of chill—a chill that went through my coat, my clothes, my flesh, a chill in the center of my being, the marrow of my bones.

It had started to snow lightly. Though in a matter of hours the snow would be transmuted by New York’s fetid alchemy into a filthy black sludge, at this moment the flakes drifting down were white and clean and cold and pure.

The midaftemoon thaw had turned the snow covering the city into a morass of thick black sludge. Now, as the sun began to go down, the slush was starting to freeze into a turgid gray jelly; in a few hours it would be a treacherous sheen of gun-metal colored ice. I remembered the clean white snow that had fallen nearly a month ago, on the night I had put the Foundation behind me forever. Even then, I had known it would come to this—the clean white promise of new-falling snow always fated to become gray sludge, frozen into deadly city-ice, thawed, refrozen, thawed again, like a junkie’s dreams; and spring a lifetime away.

I stood shivering in my coat outside Ted and Doris’ place—or the gray-brown tenement that
had been
Ted and Doris’ place—watching Ted load the last of their stuff into the old VW bus he had bought for the trek to San Francisco, waiting to say goodbye.

Ted stuffed one last cardboard box into the bus, closed the big side door. Arlene and Doris, huddled in the building’s doorway against the cold, stepped out onto the sludgy sidewalk and stood by Ted at the front door to the bus.

The three of them stared awkwardly at me; I stared at them. They were already ghosts out of my past; I was certain I would never see any of them again. Our world-lines were diverging forever. And I knew they were thinking the same thoughts about me. I knew they knew and they knew I knew.

A long, terribly long, moment of silence.

“I... I wish you were coming along,” Ted finally said, his breath a plume of cold smoke from the heat-death of a universe.

“And I wish you were staying,” I said.

“I wish I
could
stay...” Arlene said.

“You—” I started to give her the same old argument I had given her the half-dozen times I had seen her since the Foundation vote. I gave up before I had started. It was all so pointless, so fucking pointless.

“Well... goodbye...” I said. “And... good luck. I hope... I hope you all wake up someday...”

“Don’t make it sound like a funeral,” Doris said, trying to force a ghost of the old Earth-mother smile and not making it.

I tried to smile too, but I didn’t do any better. From where I stood, it
was
a funeral; they were already dead. All that had made them human had been devoured by a Thing. Corpses. Zombies. Shadows. Perhaps they were thinking the same thing about me.

Maybe they were right.

Worst of all, maybe we were all right.

“Well...”

“Well...”

There was everything to say and no way to say it. There was nothing to say and a million ways to say it.

Ted opened the curb-side front door of the bus. Arlene climbed aboard, Doris after her. Ted walked around to the street-side of the bus, got in.

The motor whirred, coughed twice, and caught. Ted edged the bus away from the curb. He waved. Doris waved.

And then the bus pulled away from the curb and started off down the street, down the long street into the west. As the bus drove down the street and began to dwindle in the distance, I saw Arlene’s face staring back at me. She was too far away for me to guess at her expression; she was like a little lost doll.

Then the bus turned the corner and they were gone from sight forever.

And I was left behind. I was free. I grovelled at the feet of nothing greater than myself. I was free. I was alone.

Was it worth it?

As I stood there with the city’s filthy sludge freezing to obscene ice around me while Ted and Doris and Arlene drove off into the Foundation sunset, I felt as if everything I had ever been had been reduced to a single pinpoint of me-ness, the essence of Tom Hollander and nothing more, no past, no future, no excess baggage, no illusions. There was me and there was the universe. That was all. I owned nothing and nothing owned me.