Nine Stories (23 page)

"How'd
it go? Was it interesting?"

"At
times, yes. At times, no," Teddy said. "We stayed a little
bit too long. My father wanted to get back to New York a little
sooner than this ship. But some people were coming over from
Stockholm, Sweden, and Innsbruck, Austria, to meet me, and we had to
wait around."

"It's
always that way."

Teddy
looked at him directly for the first time. "Are you a poet?"
he asked.

"A
poet?" Nicholson said. "Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you
ask?"

"I
don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally.
They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no
emotions."

Nicholson,
smiling, reached into his jacket pocket and took out cigarettes and
matches. "I rather thought that was their stock in trade,"
he said. "Aren't emotions what poets are primarily concerned
with?"

Teddy
apparently didn't hear him, or wasn't listening. He was looking
abstractedly toward, or over, the twin smokestacks up on the Sports
Deck.

Nicholson
got his cigarette lit, with some difficulty, for there was a light
breeze blowing from the north. He sat back, and said, "I
understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch--"

"
`Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,'
" Teddy said suddenly. "'Along this road goes no one, this
autumn eve."'

"What
was that?" Nicholson asked, smiling. "Say that again."

"Those
are two Japanese poems. They're not full of a lot of emotional
stuff," Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to
the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. "I
still have some water in my ear from my swimming lesson yesterday,"
he said. He gave his ear another couple of claps, then sat back,
putting his arms up on both armrests. It was, of course, a normal,
adult-size deck chair, and he looked distinctly small in it, but at
the same time, he looked perfectly relaxed, even serene.

"I
understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch of pedants up at
Boston," Nicholson said, watching him. "After that last
little set-to. The whole Leidekker examining group, more or less, the
way I understand it. I believe I told you I had rather a long chat
with Al Babcock last June. Same night, as, a matter of fact, I heard
your tape played off."

"Yes,
you did. You told me."

"I
understand they were a pretty disturbed bunch," Nicholson
pressed. "From What Al told me, you all had quite a little
lethal bull session late one night--the same night you made that
tape, I believe." He took a drag on his cigarette. "From
what I gather, you made some little predictions that disturbed the
boys no end. Is that right?"

"I
wish I knew why people think it's so important to be emotional,"
Teddy said. "My mother and father don't think a person's human
unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or
very-very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he
reads the newspaper. He thinks I'm inhuman."

Nicholson
flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. "I take it you have
no emotions?" he said.

Teddy
reflected before answering. "If I do, I don't remember when I
ever used them," he said. "I don't see what they're good
for."

"You
love God, don't you?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of
quietness. "Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I
heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock--"

"Yes,
sure, I love Him. But I don't love Him sentimentally. He never said
anybody had to love Him sentimentally," Teddy said. "If I
were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally.
It's too unreliable."

"You
love your parents, don't you?"

"Yes,
I do--very much," Teddy said, "but you want to make me use
that word to mean what you want it to mean--I can tell."

"All
right. In what sense do you want to use it?"

Teddy
thought it over. "You know what the word `affinity' means?"
he asked, turning to Nicholson.

"I
have a rough idea," Nicholson said dryly.

"I
have a very strong affinity for them. They're my parents, I mean, and
we're all part of each other's harmony and everything," Teddy
said. "I want them to have a nice time while they're alive,
because they like having a nice time . . . But they don't love me and
Booper--that's my sister--that way. I mean they don't seem able to
love us just the way we are. They don't seem able to love us unless
they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for
loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.
It's not so good, that way." He turned toward Nicholson again,
sitting slightly forward. "Do you have the time, please?"
he asked. "I have a swimming lesson at ten-thirty."

"You
have time," Nicholson said without first looking at his wrist
watch. He pushed back his cuff. "It's just ten after ten,"
he said.

"Thank
you," Teddy said, and sat back. "We can enjoy our
conversation for about ten more minutes." Nicholson let one leg
drop over the side of the deck chair, leaned forward, and stepped on
his cigarette end. "As I understand it," he said, sitting
back, "you hold pretty firmly to the Vedantic theory of
reincarnation."

"It
isn't a theory, it's as much a part--"

"All
right," Nicholson said quickly. He smiled, and gently raised the
flats of his hands, in a sort of ironic benediction. "We won't
argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish." He crossed his
heavy, outstretched legs again. "From what I gather, you've
acquired certain information, through meditation, that's given you
some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in
India, but more or less fell from Grace--"

"I
wasn't a holy man," Teddy said. "I was just a person making
very nice spiritual advancement."

"All
right--whatever it was," Nicholson said. "But the point is
you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from
Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I--"

"That's
right," Teddy said. "I met a lady, and I sort of stopped
meditating." He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked
his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. "I would
have had to take another body and come back to earth again anyway-I
mean I wasn't so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I
hadn't met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never
again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn't have had to get
incarnated in an American body if I hadn't met that lady. I mean it's
very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People
think you're a freak if you try to. My father thinks I'm a freak, in
a way. And my mother--well, she doesn't think it's good for me to
think about God all the time. She thinks it's bad for my health."

Nicholson
was looking at him, studying him. "I believe you said on that
last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience.
Is that right?"

"I
was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and
all that," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My
sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her
milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was
God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know
what I mean."

Nicholson
didn't say anything.

"But
I could get out of the finite dimensions fairly often when I was
four," Teddy said, as an afterthought. "Not continuously or
anything, but fairly often."

Nicholson
nodded. "You did?" he said. "You could?"

"Yes,"
Teddy said. "That was on the tape . . . Or maybe it was on the
one I made last April. I'm not sure."

Nicholson
took out his cigarettes again, but without taking his eyes off Teddy.
"How does one get out of the finite dimensions?" he asked,
and gave a short laugh. "I mean, to begin very basically, a
block of wood is a block of wood, for example. It has length,
width--"

"It
hasn't. That's where you're wrong," Teddy said. "Everybody
just thinks things keep stopping off somewhere. They don't. That's
what I was trying to tell Professor Peet." He shifted in his
seat and took out an eyesore of a handkerchief--a gray, wadded
entity--and blew his nose. "The reason things seem to stop off
somewhere is because that's the only way most people know how to look
at things," he said. "But that doesn't mean they do."
He put away his handkerchief, and looked at Nicholson. "Would
you hold up your arm a second, please?" he asked.

"My
arm? Why?"

"Just
do it. Just do it a second."

Nicholson
raised his forearm an inch or two above the level of the armrest.
"This one?" he asked.

Teddy
nodded. "What do you call that?" he asked.

"What
do you mean? It's my arm. It's an arm."

"How
do you know it is?" Teddy asked. "You know it's called an
arm, but how do you know it is one? Do you have any proof that it's
an arm?"

Nicholson
took a cigarette out of his pack, and lit it. "I think that
smacks of the worst kind of sophistry, frankly," he said,
exhaling smoke. "It's an arm, for heaven's sake, because it's an
arm. In the first place, it has to have a name to distinguish it from
other objects. I mean you can't simply--"

"You're
just being logical," Teddy said to him impassively.

"I'm
just being what?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of
politeness.

"Logical.
You're just giving me a regular, intelligent answer," Teddy
said. "I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of
the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use
logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of."

Nicholson
removed a flake of tobacco from his tongue with his fingers.

"You
know Adam?" Teddy asked him.

"Do
I know who?"

"Adam.
In the Bible."

Nicholson
smiled. "Not personally," he said dryly.

Teddy
hesitated. "Don't be angry with me," he said. "You
asked me a question, and I'm--"

"I'm
not angry with you, for heaven's sake."

"Okay,"
Teddy said. He was sitting back in his chair, but his head was turned
toward Nicholson. "You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of
Eden, referred to in the Bible?" he asked. "You know what
was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff. That was all
that was in it. So--this is my point--what you have to do is vomit it
up if you want to see things as they really are. I mean if you vomit
it up, then you won't have any more trouble with blocks of wood and
stuff. You won't see everything stopping off all the time. And you'll
know what your arm really is, if you're interested. Do you know what
I mean? Do you follow me?"

"I
follow you," Nicholson said, rather shortly.

"The
trouble is," Teddy said, "most people don't want to see
things the way they are. They don't even want to stop getting born
and dying all the time. They just want new bodies all the time,
instead of stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice."
He reflected. "I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,"
he said. He shook his head.

At
that moment, a white-coated deck steward, who was making his rounds
within the area, stopped in front of Teddy and Nicholson and asked
them if they would care to have morning broth. Nicholson didn't
respond to the question at all. Teddy said, "No, thank you,"
and the deck steward passed them by.

"If
you'd rather not discuss this, you don't have to," Nicholson
said abruptly, and rather brusquely. He flicked his cigarette ash.
"But is it true, or isn't it, that you informed the whole
Leidekker examining bunch--Walton, Peet, Larsen, Samuels, and that
bunch--when and where and how they would eventually die? Is that
true, or isn't it? You don't have to discuss it if you don't want to,
but the way the rumor around Boston--"

"No,
it is not true," Teddy said with emphasis. "I told them
places, and times, when they should be very, very careful. And I told
them certain things it might be a good idea for them to do . . . But
I didn't say anything like that. I didn't say anything was
inevitable, that way." He took out his handkerchief again and
used it. Nicholson waited, watching him. "And I didn't tell
Professor Peet anything like that at all. Firstly, he wasn't one of
the ones who were kidding around and asking me a bunch of questions.
I mean all I told Professor Peet was that he shouldn't be a teacher
any more after January--that's all I told him." Teddy, sitting
back, was silent a moment. "All those other professors, they
practically forced me to tell them all that stuff. It was after we
were all finished with the interview and making that tape, and it was
quite late, and they all kept sitting around smoking cigarettes and
getting very kittenish."

"But
you didn't tell Walton, or Larsen, for example, when or where or how
death would eventually come?" Nicholson pressed.

"No.
I did not," Teddy said firmly. "I wouldn't have told them
any of that stuff, but they kept talking about it. Professor Walton
sort of started it. He said he really wished he knew when he was
going to die, because then he'd know what work he should do and what
work he shouldn't do, and how to use his time to his best advantage,
and all like that. And then they all said that . . . So I told them a
little bit."