Peace on Earth (8 page)

“How much will he do it for?” I wondered. The servant put out his hand for the slug but I stopped him.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars more than Mr. Kramer if you
don’t
eat it,” I said, taking my notebook from my pocket. It was covered with the same green plastic as Adelaide’s checkbook.

The servant froze. In the face of the millionaire was hesitation, and I didn’t know whether or not we would start bidding now. My resources were certainly no match for Kramer’s. So I had to change tactics.

“How much will
you
eat it for, Adelaide?” I asked, opening my notebook as though I were about to write a check. This delighted him. The servant was no longer in the picture.

“I’ll give you a blank check if you swallow it without chewing and describe to me how it moves in your stomach,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Unfortunately I had breakfast already and I don’t eat between meals,” I said with a smile. “Anyway your bank account must be controlled by trustees.”

“No, you’re wrong! Chase Manhattan always honors my checks.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not hungry. Let’s return to fantasies.” This conversation had so absorbed me that I forgot all about my left side but it reminded me. We were moving away from the slug of contention when I tripped the millionaire and at the same time chopped him in the neck so that he fell flat on the grass. I relate this in the first person though it was my left foot and left hand that did it.

“Forgive me,” I said, thinking quickly, “but
that
was my fantasy.” I helped him up. He was not so much offended as stunned. It was obvious no one had ever treated him like that, either here or before the asylum.

“A clever fellow,” he said, brushing off the dirt. “But don’t do that again, because I might slip a disk. And start fantasizing about
you.”
He laughed an evil laugh. “So what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, of course, but why are you here?”

“To get a little rest.”

I saw Dr. House at the far end of the shady path. He lifted his hand, beckoned for me, then turned and went toward the pavilion.

“I have to go, Adelaide,” I said, slapping him on the back. “We’ll fantasize another time.”

From the open door came the pleasant coolness of air conditioning. The walls were pale green and the place as quiet as pharaoh’s tomb, with a thick carpet white like the fur of a polar bear. Dr. House was waiting for me in his office. Tarantoga was there too and seemed embarrassed. In his lap was a briefcase stuffed with papers which he sorted through while House pointed to an armchair. I sat down with a sinking feeling that I was getting into something I would not be able to get out of in one piece.

Dr. House sat at his desk reading a newspaper. Then Tarantoga finally found what he had been looking for.

“This is how it is, Ijon … I saw two attorneys, two of the best, to assess your situation from the legal point of view. I said nothing about your Mission, of course, and sketched your story only in the most general terms. A man gains access to certain highly secret information and must report it to a certain division of the government, but he is callotomized before he can do this, and part of what he learned is forgotten, residing no doubt in the right hemisphere of his brain. What is his duty now? What steps can the government take legally to retrieve the information? Both lawyers said it is a difficult case because it sets a precedent. If it is decided in court, expert witnesses will have to be called in, though their testimony might or might not be ignored. In any case without a subpoena you cannot be subjected to any examination or experiment, if that’s the route the government wishes to take.”

Dr. House raised his head from his paper.

“An amusing case,” he said, taking a bag of ginger cookies from a drawer, sliding them onto a plate and pushing the plate in my direction. “I realize, Mr. Tichy, that you are not amused, but every paradox of the
circulus vitiosus
variety is amusing. Do you know what lateralization is?”

“Of course,” I answered, frowning as my left hand reached for a cookie that I didn’t want at all. But wanting even less to make a fool of myself, I bit into it. “I’ve read plenty about it. In the average man the left hemisphere is dominant because it governs speech. The right is generally silent though it understands simple sentences and sometimes can even read a little. If left lateralization is not strong, the right hemisphere may be more independent and also have more linguistic ability. In rare cases there is almost no lateralization and then the centers of speech are found in both hemispheres, which can cause stuttering and other problems…”

“Very good.” House smiled at me approvingly. “From what I have been told I would conclude that your left brain, as we sometimes call it, is distinctly dominant, but that the right is unusually active. To be certain of this, though, I would need to examine you at length.”

“Where is the paradox?” I asked, trying inconspicuously to avoid my left hand because it was putting more ginger cookies into my mouth.

“The value of questioning your right brain depends on the degree of your right lateralization. We must first determine that degree, which means examining you, but to examine you we need your consent. In other words, the court experts could not go beyond what I am saying now: that the court’s decision depends upon the extent of the lateralization of Ijon Tichy, but that cannot be determined without examination. One must examine you to decide whether you can be examined. Do you understand?”

“Yes. What do you advise me to do, doctor?”

“I cannot advise you to do anything, because I am in the same boat as the court and the experts. No one in the world, including you, knows what your right brain holds. Your idea to use sign language has been done before but without significant results, because the right lateralization in those cases was too weak.”

“And that’s really all you can tell me?”

“You might put your left arm in a sling or better yet a cast. It betrays you.”

“What do you mean?”

Dr. House pointed at the plate of ginger cookies.

“The right brain usually likes sweets more than the left. There have been statistical studies. I wanted to show you how simply someone could establish your lateralization. As a right-handed person you would have reached for the cookies with your right hand—or not at all.”

“But why should I keep my arm in a cast? What good would that do?”

Dr. House shrugged.

“Very well. I shouldn’t say this but I will. You know about piranha?”

“The small carnivorous fish.”

“As a rule they don’t attack a man in the water. But if he has the least cut, one drop of blood is enough for them to attack. The language skills of the right brain are no greater than those of a three-year-old child, and usually less. With you, they are considerable. If that fact gets out, you are in serious trouble.”

“Perhaps he should just go to the Lunar Agency,” said Tarantoga, “and put himself in their hands. They owe him something, since he risked his neck for them…”

“That may not be the worst solution, but it is not a good one either. There is no good solution.”

“Why?” Tarantoga and I asked.

“Because the more they extract from the right brain, the more they’ll want, which could mean, to put it politely, a long isolation.”

“A month? Two?”

“Or a year or more. Normally the right brain communicates with the world through the left, in speech and writing. It has never happened that the right has learned, and fluently, a whole language. But the stakes are so high in your case that they will put more effort into this area of research than all the specialists combined have done to date.”

“Yet we must do something,” muttered Tarantoga.

Dr. House rose. “True, but not necessarily today. At the moment there’s no hurry. Mr. Tichy may stay here if he likes, for a couple of months. Perhaps in that time things will become clearer.”

Too late I learned how right Dr. House was.

Since no one can help me better than I myself, I have written down everything that has happened, read it into a tape recorder, burned all the notes, and now will put the recorder and the cassette in a jar and bury them under the cactus where I met the slug. I am speaking now to use up the end of the tape. The expression “I met the slug” seems wrong somehow. You can meet a cow, or a monkey or an elephant, but hardly a slug. Could this be because you can meet only a party who is able to take notice of you? I doubt that the slug noticed me although it moved its little horns. It’s not a question of size. No one says “I met a flea,” on the other hand one can meet a very small child. Why am I using the end of the tape for such nonsense? I’ll bury the jar and from now on write notes in a code I’ve thought up. I’ll call my right hemisphere It or maybe Andi, which is
and I,
I and I, but maybe that’s too transparent. The tape ends now and I’m reaching for the shovel.

JULY
8
TH
/ An awful heat wave. Everyone’s in pajamas or a bathing suit. Me too. Through Kramer I’ve met two other millionaires, Sturman and Padderhorn. Melancholiacs both. Sturman is about sixty, jowly, a big belly, bowlegs, and he whispers. Gives the impression that he’s telling secrets. He says his is a hopeless case. His depression worsened recently because he can’t remember why he got depressed in the first place. He has three daughters, all married and unfaithful, and photographers send him flagrante delicto photographs and he has to pay them off. Trying to be of help, I suggested that this might be the cause of his depression but he said no, he was used to it. I really don’t know why I’m putting this down. It’s not very interesting. Padderhorn doesn’t talk. Supposedly he merged with a Japanese company and it soured. A dull group. Gagstein’s the worst. He chuckles and drools. And exposes himself. I must avoid these characters. Dr. House tells me that tomorrow someone is coming whom I can trust as I trust him. A young intern, but in reality he’s an ethnologist and writing a work on millionaires in the context of small-group dynamics or something like that.

JULY
9
TH
/ Tarantoga has left and I am now alone with House, his assistant, and the millionaires who wander the park. House told me privately that he prefers not to learn the extent of my right lateralization because what is not known cannot be stolen. The assistant revealed to me after I swore I was no millionaire that he is doing fieldwork. He is studying the customs and attitudes of millionaires just as one might study the beliefs of a primitive tribe. The young ethnologist and I have had long evening conversations over a bottle of Teachers in the small laboratory, using beakers for glasses. I’ve also met a few other Croesuses. The most boring people in the world. The ethnologist agrees with me. He begins to fear that he will not be able to gather enough data here.

“You know what?” I told him. “You could do a comparative study: The Rich Then and Now. The state or foundations as patron of the arts is a recent phenomenon. In ancient Rome the patrons were private citizens. The protectors of art, muses, and so on. Rich men and princes took care of artists, sculptors, and painters. They took an interest. But these ones”—I pointed out the window with my thumb at the park, which was dark in the night—“are interested in nothing but market quotations. Take me, for example: I am fairly well known. Because of my travel books I’ve received a ton of letters, but among my millions of readers there has not been one millionaire. Why is that? Most millionaires, I’m told, live in Texas. We have three of them here. Even as lunatics they’re boring. What is the reason? The Roman rich were intellectually alive, but these are not. What did this? The market? Money? And how?”

“No, it’s something else. The rich of old were believers. They wanted to serve God, but without mortifying the flesh. Building a cathedral or supporting a painter, making a
Last Supper
possible or a
Moses,
or something big and splendid with a spire, in that they saw a dividend, Mr. Tichy, for they saw Him in it,” and he pointed to the ceiling, the sky. “And others followed their example. It became the thing to do. A prince, doge, or magnate surrounded himself with gardeners and coachmen, scribblers and painters. Louis XV hired Boucher to do portraits of naked women. Boucher’s third-rate, of course, but his work has survived, while the coachmen and gardeners have left nothing.”

“The gardeners produced Versailles.”

“The point is that those rich didn’t understand art but thought it was in their interest. Today, in the age of specialization, they couldn’t care less… What’s wrong? A chest pain?”

“No. I think I’ve been robbed.”

My hand was in fact on my heart, because the inside pocket of my jacket was empty.

“Impossible. There are no kleptomaniacs here. You must have left your wallet in your room.”

“No. I had it in my pocket when I came in. I know because I was going to show you a picture of me with a beard.”

“But there’s no one else here, and I haven’t even come near you…”

I had the glimmer of an idea.

“Please tell me exactly what I did from the time we entered.”

“You sat down, and I took the bottle from the cupboard. What were we talking about then? Kramer. You told me about the slug, but I wasn’t watching you, I was looking for clean beakers. When I turned, you were sitting … no, standing. Next to the tachistoscope. Over here. You were looking into it when I gave you your whiskey… We drank, and you went back to where you are sitting now.”

I got up and looked at the apparatus. A chair, a console, a black partition with a pair of eyepieces, side lamps, a screen, and the box of a projector. I turned on a switch and the screen lit up. I looked behind the partition: oxidized black plates. Between the partition and a black plate was a space no wider than a letterbox slot. I tried to get my hand in but it was too narrow.

“Any tweezers around here?” I asked. “As long as possible…”

“I don’t know. I don’t see any. Here’s a piece of wire.”

“Let’s have it.”

I twisted it into a hook, let it down into the crack, and touched something soft. After a few unsuccessful tries, a black leather corner appeared. I needed my other hand to grab it, but the hand refused. The young ethnologist helped me retrieve my wallet.