The Life of Hope (7 page)

“The way I figure it,” said Big Bernie, “there’s nothing you can do. If they drop it, they drop it.”

“You just bend over and kiss me goodbye,” mumbled Little Bernie.

For a while Elspeth fought back, marching in anti-nuke demonstrations, writing letters to the government, that sort of thing, but in the past couple of years she’d abandoned all of it and assumed a position of resolute hopelessness.

“Can’t say as I blame her,” commented Mona. “It’s a no-win kind of thing.”

I missed her—not, so much, the grim Elspeth who ejected me into Hope (although I did miss that Elspeth, too) but the one who, when we were younger, made silly, grotesque faces and generally thumbed her nose at the world. The one who used to announce, for no real reason, “Peoples is good folks!” The one who …

Jonathon laid his hand on my shoulder. I was on my fourth Irish whiskey, rendering me intoxicated enough to make the connection. “Hey! Jonathon Whitecrow!” I said happily, brushing away tears. “How does it feel to be a hundred and seventy years old?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Talked to Ol’ Mossback lately?” I demanded, waving my hand in the air to indicate to Mona that I required yet another shot of booze.

“Why, um, yes. Just the other day as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, really? What did he have to say?”

“Well, not much. The water’s been hot as soup lately. And, of course, people keep peeing into it.”

“I see.”

“Sounds pretty fishy to me,” chortled Big Bernie.

Little Bernie said, “Geez, what a jerk.”

Jonathon Whitecrow lit one of his cigarettes reflectively. “Now that I think about it, he did say something interesting. As you know, Mossback and I share an interest in the human heart. His interest is purely scholastic, of course, mine being more, shall we say, professional. And I was saying that I often long for a purity of heart.”

“Me too, me too,” I put in eagerly.

“Well, Ol’ Mossback had this to say.” Jonathon Whitecrow
changed the timbre of his voice, as if imitating the fish. It was a completely foreign sound. “Take this lake. It’s got weeds in it, and rocks in it, and dead fish in it, and live fish shitting in it, and kingfishers and herons diving into it to kill fish, and people pissing in it, and everybody in it is either eating each other or screwing each other, right? It’s just a normal lake. A good old-fashioned lake. But it ain’t pure. The only pure lakes I ever heard about are the ones that have been killed by that acid rain.” Whitecrow returned to his normal voice. “Pretty smart, for a fish.”

Somehow I’d managed to cheer up. It was, I believe, the combination of a) Irish whiskey in quantity, b) Jonathon’s fish impersonation and c) Mona’s leaning on the bar to listen to b), affording me an excellent view of her breasts. At the end of the story they jiggled merrily.

“Whitecrow,” Mona said, “sometimes I think you are full of shit.”

“Too true,” said Jonathon Whitecrow.

“Speaking of that,” I asked, “where’s the John?”

Mona pointed toward one of the room’s many dark corners. “Over there, Paulie.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told all of them—they nodded back, except for the Kims who were locked in a soul-kiss. Then I stumbled off for the head.

The bathroom of The Willing Mind was ancient, made from green wood and yellow porcelain. It contained two sit-down toilets, side by side with no partition between them, and a huge stand-up urinal. It was this latter convenience that I used (perhaps I’d originally had other business to conduct, but one look at the loo convinced me against it—spiders, ants and other crawlers roamed about the enamel in hordes) and as I pissed I read the words carved into the rotting wood. Some of the inscriptions were new, a year or two old: “S.M. from the Soo was here,” one said; another, “Hope sucks.” Far more interesting were the older ones, faded to near-illegibility:

Owing to my usual drunkenness, and to my even more usual dullheadedness, it was only then, standing at the pisser, that I noticed the frequency with which certain names cropped up in the town of Hope, Ontario.

Then I turned around.

The Willing Mind’s interior decorator had decided against putting a real mirror in the washroom, probably because glass and drunkards don’t get along too well together, and instead had mounted a piece of sheet metal above the sink. The metal was scratched and bent, and when I turned around I saw my own distorted reflection, floating in a silver cloud. I began to tremble. The image of the naked monster in the night came back full force, an image that my mind had managed to lock away for the day. Even though the memory was vivid (so vivid that I could almost hear the music that accompanied it, the heart-twisting “Vocalise”) I was uncertain as to whether it had actually happened or whether it was some fabrication of the booze. “Oh, fuck,” I moaned aloud. Our little blue world was flying through space, and I felt as if I’d found the cockpit, there in The Willing Mind’s John.

I began to search for the radio, muttering over and over again, “Mayday. Mayday.”

Joseph Benton Hope had a way of scurrying about—furtive, hunched-over and almost panicky—as if a giant rock had been lifted, and a beetle disturbed. One autumn’s day in 1843 he scurried down Brattle Street, took a corner (keeping his frail body very close to the stonework) and entered a small private auditorium. This was the eighth occasion in the past two weeks that Benton Hope had entered this establishment, shoved some coins at the old woman in the booth, and taken a seat in the twenty-fifth, and last, row.

Joseph Benton Hope was very early, forty-five minutes, and all alone in the theater. He opened up his gilt-edged Bible (a huge thing with four generations of Hopes listed inside the cover) and read a line. Truth to be told, he only read two or three words. Then he tilted his head backward, shooting his Adam’s apple outward and shutting his tiny eyes (he still had two at the age of nineteen), and allowed the passage to sound somewhere within.

Joseph Benton Hope was the prize student at the Harvard Theological Seminary—at least, he had been up until a year or so back. Scholastically speaking, he was still, excelling in such disciplines as eschatology and hermeneutics, possessing an unprecedented knowledge of the Bible, but his thoughts had lately taken a turn that most of his instructors found unsettling. When Benton Hope had first entered the school at age fifteen, he had been heralded as a prodigy, a young boy perhaps blessed with the gift of prophecy. He had lectured to his fellow students passionately and convincingly—convincingly, for in those days his thoughts were of an immediate Second Coming. “Look
about,” Joseph Benton Hope had screamed, his voice hoarse, his blond hair slick and matted, “and know that His time is nigh!” His listeners, students and instructors alike, had nodded.

But the Second Coming had failed to materialize, and Hope seemed suddenly to tire of waiting on it. Joseph began to dream of Perfection.

Joseph Benton Hope realized that Perfection—“If by Perfection we mean a purity of heart, an absolute communion with our Heavenly Father, and a complete inexistence of sin”—was simply, even easily, attainable.

Joseph came up with the following regimen, designed to help purge sin from the spirit: repeated fasting for two days (only grains and nutmeats allowed on the third); continuous self-denial (three and one half hours of sleep nightly); exercise (a four-mile walk in the forenoon, six miles in the evening); prayer (five times daily, no small or petty entreaties); three hours of spiritual activity (Bible study and the reading of works of acknowledged theological merit) and contemplation. Joseph Benton Hope found this very effective; emptied of sin, his soul was purged of everything earthbound and sullied.

His teachers and peers wanted none of this. They wanted Beelzebubs and Lucifers. They wanted Hellfire so hot that they burned to hear of it.

The auditorium was perhaps half full now, some twenty minutes before the exhibition began. Benton Hope looked at the people with disdain. Most of them were Harvard men, young louts with rich fathers and small intelligences. Some were townsmen, laborers and farmers, and they found it for some reason incumbent to attend in their Sabbath finery. Joseph snorted haughtily, propelling a thin line of mucus on to his upper lip. He wiped it away and shifted in his seat. Hope realized, with dismay, that he was possessed of an erection.

Joseph Benton Hope was boyish in appearance, looking in all respects to be no older than fourteen. His face didn’t need shaving, and his voice was adolescently temperamental. His manly endowment was therefore anomalous. It was long and thick, ribbed with veins, and perpetually insistent on growing even larger. Joseph had been forced to adjust his tailoring, making sure that all his trousers were loose-fitting and roomy. Now,
in the theater, Joseph shifted and dug a fist into his groin covertly. He rifled the pages of his Bible and read. When next he looked up, the auditorium was all but full. Two weeks ago, when Benton Hope had first attended, he had been one of perhaps two dozen. Now there were close to four hundred, including many of the faculty. Benton Hope watched as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dashed through the door. Longfellow stopped, dusted himself and ran his fingers through his sideburns. Longfellow then proceeded into the auditorium, quickly and hurriedly, and Hope was reminded of the familiar Harvard doggerel—“With his hat on one whisker and an air that says ‘Go it,’ you have the great American poet.’ ” Joseph Benton Hope attended Longfellow’s special lectures on Goethe’s
Faust
(which was viewed as a trifle rebellious of him).

Then Dr. Charles X. Poyen walked out on to the stage. He was a small, silver-haired man, gracefully into his middle age, one of the university’s most distinguished lecturers. Poyen looked at the assembled (nodding briefly to Longfellow, who was having trouble choosing a place), and then Poyen said, “Good evening.” His accent was continental French.

Joseph Benton Hope had, of course, heard Poyen’s lecture before. It had to do with Franz Anton Mesmer and his discovery of the fluids (and the empathic balancing thereof) that are inherent in the human body. Not only had Hope heard it before, he had most of the speech written down on the endpapers of various textbooks. After some minutes, the lecture was concluded, and Hope refocused his attention.

Dr. Poyen asked for a volunteer. A young freshman with a peculiar, froglike face virtually bolted on to the stage. Poyen took the fellow by the elbow and stationed him so that his back faced the north. Poyen induced in the lad “human hibernation,” the state in which the subject’s magnetic fluids are most susceptible to the influence of another’s animal magnetism. The young man’s mouth dropped stupidly open, and his tongue pressed flatly against his lower lip. “Now,” said Poyen, “I would like to demonstrate the powers of the science of Phreno-Mesmerism.” The words rang in J. B. Hope’s ears, cloaked exotically in Poyen’s French accent—“ze poors of ze seance of Phreno-Mezmereezem.” Poyen touched his hand to the freshman’s
head and excited several phrenological sites. When Dr. Poyen touched the Organ of Veneration the young man folded his hands together as if in prayer. When Poyen excited the Antagonistical Site the subject snarled and brandished his fists.

At this point someone in the audience yelled, “You’re a croakus!” For the past several nights, such protests were made with increasing frequency. Dr. Poyen merely smiled, a trifle embarrassed, and quoted the great
philosophe
Voltaire: “Those who believe in occult causes are subjected to ridicule, but we ought rather to ridicule those who do not.”

Joseph Benton Hope was momentarily distracted by the bulge in his lap. He scowled at it, then looked again to the stage. The Veiled Lady had been introduced and stood in Joseph’s sight.

She was covered with silver drapery, all of her, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Poyen explained that this was to separate her from the material world. Benton Hope was reminded of a cocoon he’d found as a boy, and some part of his mind envisioned a glorious springtime emergence, even though the cocoon from his childhood had dried up and turned to dust. The Veiled Lady moved then, at least her mantle danced as if touched by a breeze. Joseph sat forward in his seat. He was certain that light was cutting through the veil, illuminating the woman within. He had the distinct impression of nakedness. The head of his penis pressed painfully against his trouser stays.

The Veiled Lady’s voice was soft, often unable to break free of the silver hood, forcing Poyen to repeat her words. “Ze Veiled Lady,” he announced, “needs an assistawnt!”

A young woman was propelled (by a crude type, Joseph thought, a well-dressed puttyhead with a braying laugh) toward the stage. The young woman was plump and golden-haired. Hope’s body was wracked with a strange sort of pain, one that emanated from his groin and tied his stomach in complicated knots.

The Veiled Lady raised an arm (Hope thought he spied breasts through the draperies) and touched the volunteer upon the forehead, immediately inducing human hibernation. Then she announced her intention of demonstrating the empathic relationship now established between the two sensibilities. This intention
was repeated by Dr. Poyen, although Benton Hope didn’t know why. (Benton Hope likewise didn’t know that his hearing had become preternaturally sensitive.)

The Veiled Lady drifted down to one end of the stage, and the young woman was placed at the opposite. Dr. Poyen, standing between them, produced the following objects: a glass ball, a pin and a piece of tree bark. He held them aloft, in the view of everyone (everyone except the young woman, who slumbered in peaceful human hibernation). The esteemed professor (of mathematics, by the way—J. B. Hope therefore assumed that this new world made some sort of arithmetical sense) explained that the volunteer was to enunciate any sensations she might have. Poyen handed the Veiled Lady the glass ball.