The Dark Design (46 page)

It tickled Peter at this moment to think that he was on the same boat with the man who had furnished the model for the fictional Umslopogaas. And he was also a deckhand for the man who had created Buck and White Fang, Wolf Larsen, the nameless subhuman narrator of
Beyond Adam,
and Smoke Bellew. It delighted him also that he talked daily with the great Tom Mix, unequaled in cinema flair and fantastic adventure except by Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. If only Fairbanks were aboard. But then it would also be delightful to have Doyle and Twain and Cervantes and Burton, especially Burton, aboard. And… The boat sure was getting crowded. Be satisfied. But then he never was.

What had he drifted off from? Oh, yes. Chance, another word for destiny.

He didn’t believe, as Mark Twain did, that all events, all characters, were rigidly predetermined. “From the time when the first atom of the great Laurentian sea bumped into the second atom, our fates were fixed.” Twain had said something like that, probably in his depressing
What Is Man?
That philosophy was an excuse for escaping guilt. Ducking responsibility.

Nor did he believe, as had Kurt Vonnegut, the late-twentieth-century avatar of Mark Twain, that we were governed entirely by the chemical makeup of our bodies. God wasn’t the Great Garage Mechanic in the Sky or the Divine Pill Pusher. If there was a God. Frigate didn’t know what God was and often doubted that He existed.

God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.

Still, we were born with different genetic combinations, and these did determine to some extent our intellect, aptitudes, leanings, reactions, in short, our characters. Character determines destiny, according to the old Greek, Heraclitus. But a person could change his/her character. Somewhere in there was a force, an entity, that said, “I won’t do it!” Or—“Nobody’s going to stop me from doing it!” Or—“I’ve been a coward but this time I’m a raging lion!”

Sometimes you needed an outside stimulus or stimulator, as had the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. But the Wizard only gave them what they had had all the time. The brains of mixed sawdust, bran, pins and needles, the silk sawdust-stuffed heart, and the liquid from the square green bottle marked
Courage
were only antiplacebos.

By thought you could change your emotional attitudes. Frigate believed that, though his practice had never matched his theory.

He’d been reared in a Christian Scientist family. But when he was about eleven his parents had sent him to a Presbyterian church, since they were having a fit of religious apathy then. His mother cleaned up the kitchen and took care of the babies Sunday mornings while his father read
The Chicago Tribune.
Like it or not, he went off to Sunday School and then the sermon.

So, he had gotten two contrary religious educations.

One believed in free will, in evil and matter as illusion, in Spirit as the only reality.

The other believed in predestination. God picked out a few here and there for salvation and let the others go to hell. No rhyme or reason to this. You couldn’t do a thing to change that. Once the divine choice had been made, it was done. You could live purely, agonizedly praying and hoping all your life. But when the end of life on Earth came, you went to your appointed place. The sheep, those whom God for some unexplainable reason had marked with His grace, went up to sit on His right side. The goats, rejected for the same mysterious reasons, slid down the prearranged chute into the fire, sinner and saint alike.

When he was twelve, he had had many nightmares in which Mary Baker Eddy and John Calvin had fought for his soul.

It was no wonder, when he was fourteen, that he had decided to blazes with both faiths. With all faiths. Still, he had been the epitome of the prudish puritan. No foul words escaped his lips; he blushed if told a dirty joke. He couldn’t stand the odors of beer or whiskey, and even if he’d liked them, he would have rejected them with scorn. And he’d have luxuriated in a feeling of moral superiority for doing so.

His early puberty was a torment. In the seventh grade he would be called on to stand up and recite, his face red, his penis thrusting against his fly, having risen at the trumpet call of his teacher’s large breasts. Nobody seemed to notice, but he was sure every time he stood up that he would be disgraced. And when he accompanied his parents to a movie in which the heroine wore a low-cut dress or displayed a flash of garter, he put his hand on his pants to hide the swelling.

The flickering light from the screen would reveal his sin. His parents would know what his thoughts were, and they would be horrified. He’d be ashamed to look in their faces forever after.

Twice his father talked to him about sex. Once, when he was twelve. Apparently, his mother had noticed some blood on his bath towel and spoken to his father, James Frigate, who, with a good deal of hemming and hawing and a twisted grin, had asked him if he was masturbating. Peter was both horrified and indignant. He had denied it, though his father acted as if he really did not believe him.

Investigation revealed, however, that, when bathing, Peter had not been peeling back his foreskin to wash under it. He had not wanted to touch his penis. As a result, the smegma had built up under the skin. How this could cause a bleeding neither he nor his father knew. But he was advised to wash thoroughly every time he took a bath. Also, he was told that jacking off rotted the brain, and he was given the example of the village idiot of North Terre Haute, a boy who publicly masturbated. With a grave face, his father told him that anybody who jerked off would become a drooling imbecile. Maybe his father believed that. So many of his generation did. Or maybe he’d just passed on that horrifying tale, purveyed for only God knew how many centuries or even millennia to scare his son.

Peter would find out that that was superstition, a reasoning from effect to cause, totally invalid. It was in a class with the belief that if you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while you were sitting in the outhouse, the devil would get you.

Peter hadn’t lied. He had not been indulging in the sin of Onan. Though why it was called Onanism he didn’t know, since Onan hadn’t masturbated. Onan had just used what Peter overheard his father refer to as the IC (Illinois Central) railroad technique. Pulling out in time.

Some of his junior high school acquaintances—the “racy” ones—bragged about beating their meat. One of these low-lifers, a wild kid named Vernon (died in a crash in 1942 while training to be an Air Force bombardier) had actually masturbated in the rear of a streetcar on the way home from a basketball game. Peter, watching, had been fascinated and sickened at the same time. The other kids had just giggled.

Once he and a friend, Bob Allwood, as puritanical as he, had been going home on a streetcar after a late movie. There was no one else aboard except the operator and a hard-looking peroxide blonde in the front seat. As the trolley came up toward the end of the line on Elizabeth Street, the operator had closed the curtain around himself and the blonde and turned the overhead light off. Bob and Pete, watching from the back of the car, saw the woman’s legs disappear. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Peter understood what was happening. The woman had to be sitting on the ledge in front of him, or on the control post itself, facing the operator, while he screwed her. Peter didn’t say a thing about it to Bob until after they’d gotten off the car. Bob had refused to believe it.

Peter was surprised at his own reaction. He’d been more amused than anything. Or perhaps envious was more appropriate. The “proper” reaction came later. That man and his doxy would go to hell for sure.

That was a long time ago. The time had come when Peter had laid a woman in front of the altar of an empty church, though he was drunk when he did it. This was in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Syracuse, and the woman had been Jewish. It had been her idea. She hated the religion because the tough Polish Catholic kids in the Boston high school she attended had roughed her up several times because she was a Jew. The idea of defiling the church had seemed like a good idea at the time, though next morning he sweated thinking of what would have happened if they’d been caught. But doing it in a Protestant church wouldn’t have appealed to him so much. Protestant churches had always seemed barren places to him. God wouldn’t be caught dead there, but He did like to hang around Catholic places of worship. Peter had always had a leaning toward Romanism and had twice been on the verge of converting. You could only blaspheme where God was.

Which was a curious attitude. If you didn’t believe in God, why bother to blaspheme?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he and Sarah had entered a number of apartment houses on a street whose name he couldn’t recall now. It had once been a very posh district where the rich had built huge, gingerbreaded, many-cupolaed houses. Then they’d moved out, and the houses had been made into apartments. Mostly affluent old people, widows and aged couples, lived there. The two of them had wandered through the halls of three buildings where all the doors were locked tight and not a sound except the muffled voice of TV sets was heard. They’d been on the third floor of the fourth building, and Sarah was down on her knees before him, when a door opened. An old woman stuck her head out into the hall, screamed, and slammed the door shut. Laughing, he and Sarah had fled out into the street and up to her apartment.

Later, Peter had sweated thinking about what would have happened if they’d been caught by the police. Jail, public disgrace, the loss of his job at General Electric, the shame felt by his children, the wrath of his wife. And what if the old woman had had a heart attack? He searched the obituary columns and was relieved to find that no one on that street had died that night. This in itself was a rarity, since Sarah said that she couldn’t look out of the window from her apartment without seeing a funeral procession going down that street.

He also looked for a report of the incident in the papers. If the old lady had called the police, however, there was nothing in the papers about it.

A thirty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t be doing stupid childish things like that, he had told himself. Especially if innocent people might be hurt. Never again. But as the years passed, he chuckled when he thought of it.

Though an atheist at fifteen, Frigate had never been able to rid himself of doubts. When he was nineteen, he had attended a revival meeting with Bob Allwood. Allwood had been raised in a devout fundamentalist family. He, too, had become an atheist, but this lasted one year. In that time, Bob’s parents had died of cancer. The shock had set him thinking about immortality. Unable to endure the idea that his father and mother were dead forever, that he’d never see them again, he had begun visiting revival meetings. His conversion had taken place when he was eighteen.

Peter and Bob used to see much of each other, since they had been playmates in grade school and had gone to the same high school. They argued much about religion and the authenticity of the Bible. Finally, Peter agreed to go with Bob to a mass meeting at which the famous Reverend Robert Ransom was preaching.

Much to Peter’s astonishment, he found himself deeply stirred, though he had come to ridicule. He was even more amazed when he found himself on his knees before the reverend, promising to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord.

That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood’s parlance, he had “backslid,” “fallen from grace.”

Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the passionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.

Allwood continued to argue with him, to “wrestle with his soul.” Peter remained adamant.

Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut, would be dust and less than dust.

What did it all mean? Without immortality, it meant nothing.

There were people who said that life was the excuse for life, its only reason.

These were fools, self-deluded. No matter how intelligent they might be in other matters, they were fools in this. Self-blinkered, emotional idiots.

On the other hand, why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches. Even the best were. He knew no saints, though he admitted that there might have been and might be some. It seemed to him that only saints would be worthy of immortality. Even so, he doubted the claims of some of those who had been awarded halos.