After the War (IV)

The room began to feel
crowded. There were now eight of us packed in and the gradual increase in temperature poised us all for competition; the larger plots of personal space providing diminishing returns of ventilation. Dr. Jiles, soggy eyes staring up, was asking about Dr. Prang’s marriage; a topic he seemed disinterested in. Apparently he remembered me and, ignoring Dr. Jiles mid-sentence, requested my assistance in fetching a glass of water for all of our friends.

On the way he asked me if I had ever learned another language; “Spanish, Japanese? Anything?”

“No. And yes Uncle Evan resented me for it.”

Dr. Prang laughed and we walked out the door and around the corner to his apartment, the heat in the hallway already exceeded that of the sitting room. I worried a bit about Lois. She must have been somewhere in the air conditioning. Or she may have been stuck in a musty cab somewhere. I wished that she would come home, despite the awkwardness it may present for Prang, the ex-president and the others. I don’t know why I even decided to stay in the sitting room with all those strangers. Part of it, I suppose, was to avoid thinking about not being able to write, but another part of me was fascinated by the entire scene: each (save Prang at times) had very carefully tended to their appearance and their interactions, spent years being polished by the stiff expectations of high society. Their humor compromised for edicate and expensive tastes; any faux pas fell to the floor like lead. I sat not so much admiring five Great personalities so much as I watched these same five clumsily interact.

“So, Julius.” Dr. Prang said nothing until we were in the hallway and out of earshot. “What do you think of the Altoona? Plan on living here long?”

“It’s alright so far. To be honest with you I won’t be all that comfortable if the ex-president is around all the time.”

“Oh, he’s harmless. The best thing to do is stop giving him a title like ‘The Ex-President’. Just call him Wes. He’s just a regular joe, I’m sure you can tell.”

“Yeah. I was surprised when I met him.”

“You don’t think you get to be a president by being your own man do you?”

“I guess not.”

“You should be more concerned with Bobby Quinn.” He said, looking back down the hall, as we entered the room. It was, of course, a complete mess floating above tactful and cosmopolitan décor. He had several ancient looking objects, souvenirs from his travels, positioned in a way that intimidated or welcomed depending on one’s tolerances. Books splayed open and half empty wine glasses sat upon every flat surface. “You see, some years ago, back after the Mississippi case he and I participated in a public forum on evolution. A sort of a townhall meeting in which his handpicked crowd could ask us questions. The idea was that it would be broadcast on the radio and Brother Quinn could, you know, further legitimize himself by taking some generous swipes at me. He was on quite an ego-trip.”

“How did that work out?” I asked.

“Not so well for him. You see, after I had sort of tripped up all of his arguments, or at least cast them into serious doubt or neutrality, he began to smear me. It was quite a mess really, because, you see, my reputation with the masses means virtually nothing. My livelihood is in academia and not celebrity, something Quinn cannot really attack.”

“So name-calling, or what?”

“In a sense, in a ‘Christian’ way he called me names. But he set it up for me to quite easily tear at his entire religion. I truly embarrassed him on a live broadcast and sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“I think he’s dangerous. As much as I think him a fool, something about him intimidates me. He follows ‘god’s’ rules and sometimes I think he makes them up as he goes along.”

“Yes.” I said, adding a queer observation I had made myself. “He has straight teeth with very sharp incisors.”

“What? . . . I suppose he does.”

“There’s a lot of other things too, I mean the suit and what not. But those teeth. They’re like villain teeth.”

“Well Dr. Jiles and Stanley aren’t better.”

We walked into the kitchen and Dr. Prang began to fill water glasses.

“I’m not really familiar with them,” I said.

“See, I think Dr. Jiles is harmless in much the same way that Bobby Quinn isn’t. Publicly anyway, she has none of his viciousness. Dr. Jiles, and I really hate to say it, but she is a fool. She’s a radio psychologist and she seems, to me anyway, to advocate some ideas that really help no one.”

“How’s that?” I had never heard of her.

“Well, she was sort of . .well, one of the founding fathers if you will of this snobby lexicon that is running around in psychology today. It’s not all lies but it all seems to come back to love for her.”

“I heard her mention ‘self-love’ to Stanley. I mean, maybe that works for some people . . “

“I don’t know. The problem, as I see it, and I’ve been studying what you might call the bigger picture of what she talks about, is that people need something to feel significant.”

“That’s very true.” Dr. Prang had finished filling water glasses, but we stayed in the kitchen to talk longer in private. Dr. Prang even sat down and relit his pipe, all the while talking:

“That’s why religions are created. They seem to be enforced for other reasons, but what is universal is this idea that people feel completely irrelevant. A notion that science doesn’t help us with particularly. But you have a God that will supposedly love you no matter what. Suddenly, that becomes all a person needs to be relevant. Do you understand?”

“Yes. And so, she’s a religious psychologist?”

“Not explicitly. She will mention faith. But what she really does is give people emotional tricks to either make them forget that they are in fact irrelevant, or lower their standards of significance. For instance, and please don’t take this as being from someone who thinks I have some kind of superiority over people, but take your average person. People you know, faithful people, people with loving relationships or whatever. Are they significant?”

“From the perspective of themselves and their community they may be. But from the universal sense, probably not I guess.”

“Exactly. See, if there is a God he doesn’t care about us. This whole universe is his creation and nothing about it requires him to pay any special attention to us. That’s a terrible feeling. And instead of confronting that and realizing the truth of things, Dr. Jiles and to a further extent Bobby Quinn, are just fooling people for long enough that they feel worthy to die.”

“I see.”

“Yeah. Well Stanley is no better. He’s rich, and I’m sure there is a smart guy in there somewhere because he has managed to keep his money. But he didn’t make any of it himself and I think that makes him feel irrelevant. He’s very dodgy in talking about what he even does. You should ask him when we get out there.”

“Maybe I will.”

He put the glasses on a tray and handed them to me. We left his apartment and headed back towards the great room.

“So, tell me more about this movie. You said that something was missing.”

“Well yes, something about the making of the swords themselves. And I’m having difficulty visualizing how exactly I will express it because it’s very intangible.”

“What about the swords? Their symbolic relationship to us . .the whole ‘Live by the sword and die by the sword’ or . . .”

“More that…Well. A sword can have imperfections in the very first layer. Some foreign object or just an unevenness. Steel is never perfect. But in swordmaking that flaw can be magnified, you know. As the sword is folded over into thousands of layers that flaw becomes a deep, almost important part of that sword as is.”

“But if it’s not perfection, will it even work?”

“That’s just the thing . . it may pass any test and appear perfect.” We rounded the corner. “But at some point, in a vital instant, the sword will fail.”

As we entered the great room the lights cut out and a lumbering, ambient noise I hadn’t even noticed previous grinded to a halt.

I also hadn’t noticed how little natural light illuminated the sitting room; the entire scene of Dr. Jiles, the ex-president, Bobby Quinn and Devonshire was in cave-like darkness and no one made a sound other than the rustling of Duchess in Wes Croughbah’s lap. A thin slice of light came from above, and illuminated a small square of carpet. By this we all maneuvered and positioned ourselves.

“Well?” A woman’s voice, Dr. Jiles “Are they going to come on again?”

Ah yes, everyone was waiting in limbo for the power to come back to life before investing themselves in the temporary black-out lifestyle. No one, especially not an inhabitant of the Altoona, would be foolish enough to be caught rounding up candles and flashlights only to have the overhead lights turn back on within moments.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could see that everyone had stood up. Stanley Devonshire walked halfway across the room to the doorway which Prang and I had entered through and grabbed a glass of water, His glass of water, and without comment he turned and walked back to his position near the ex-president. I tried to nod in acknowledgement or welcoming to no avail. He instead leaned toward Wes in a way that indicated he wanted to continue the conversation.

I walked all of the way into the room, intending to sit on the couch and wait for either the lights to come back on or this fascinating little group to disband to their respective battle stations in the face of this urban crisis. The bodyguards had moved in closer to the ex-president; somewhere in their training they were reminded of the possible threat of an intentional power outage. Everyone took their water glasses and very little was said for a moment. I tried to follow the conversation between both Dr. Prang & Dr. Jiles and Stanley & Wes and simultaneously avoid the social obviousness of the conversation I should be having with Br. Quinn.

“You know,” said Stanley “An outage like this is inevitable. There just isn’t the right market forces at work to keep it viable.”

“It’ll be alright Olivia, remember the black-out a year or two ago?” Albert said.

“But that was on a summer evening, I was asleep anyway. It will get oppressively hot in this building in a few moments.”

“True. But you know, in the bush, people I met all seemed to get along just fine without any power whatsoever. The first time they see an electric lightbulb they think of it as not only quite extraterrestrial, they see it as ludicrous. No use for it.”

“Yes Albert. I’m sure they do. They also share their living space with goats and spend much of the days squatting in mud.”

“Well . . . “ Dr. Prang responded.

Bobby Quinn cleared his throat, beamed at me for attention.