The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Valis) Read online

  I'm the one who got the phone call about Kirsten's suicide. We were still suffering over Jeff's suicide. I had to stand there and listen to Tim telling me that Kirsten had "just slipped away"; I could see my little brother, who had really been fond of Kirsten; he was assembling a balsawood model of a Spad Thirteen—he knew the call was from Tim but of course he didn't know that now Kirsten, along with Jeff, was dead.

  Tim differed from everyone else I ever knew in these respects: he could believe in anything and he would immediately act on the basis of his new belief; that is, until he ran into another belief and then he acted on that. He was convinced, for example, that a medium had cured Kirsten's son's mental problems, which were severe. One day, watching Tim on TV being interviewed by David Frost, I realized that he was talking about me and Jeff ... however, there was no real relationship between what he was saying and the reality situation. Jeff was watching, too; he did not know that his father was talking about him. Like the Medieval Realists, Tim believed that words were actual things. If you could put it into words, it was de facto true. This is what cost him his life. I wasn't in Israel when he died, but I can visualize him out on the desert studying the map the way he looked at a gas station map in downtown San Francisco. The map said that if you drove X miles you would arrive at place Y, whereupon he would start up the car and drive X miles knowing that Y would be there; it said so on the map. The man who doubted every article of Christian doctrine believed everything he saw written down.

  But the incident that, for me, conveyed the most about him took place in Berkeley one day. Jeff and I were supposed to meet Tim at a particular corner at a particular time. Tim drove up late. Running after him came a gas station attendant, furiously angry. Tim had filled up at this man's station and then backed over a pump, mashing it flat—whereupon Tim had driven off because he was late for his appointment with us.

  "You destroyed my pump!" the attendant yelled, totally out of breath and totally beside himself. "I can call the police. You just drove off. I had to run all the way after you."

  What I wanted to see was whether Tim would tell this man, a very angry but really a very modest man in the social order, a man at the bottom of the scale on which Tim, really, stood at the top—I wanted to see if Tim would inform him that he was the Bishop of the Diocese of California and was known all over the world, a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., a friend of Robert Kennedy, a great and famous man who wasn't, at the moment, wearing his clericals. Tim did not. He humbly apologized. It became evident to the gas station attendant after a bit that he was dealing with someone for whom large brightly colored metal pumps did not exist; he was dealing with a man who was, quite literally, living in another world. That other world was what Tim and Kirsten called "The Other Side," and step by step that Other Side drew them all to it: first Jeff, then Kirsten and, ineluctably, Tim himself.

  Sometimes I tell myself that Tim still exists but totally, now, in that other world. How does Don McLean put it in his song "Vincent"? "This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you." That's my friend; this world was never really real to him, so I guess it wasn't the right world for him; a mistake got made somewhere, and underneath he knew it.

  When I think about Tim I think:

  "And still I dream he treads the lawn,

  Walking ghostly in the dew,

  Pierced by my glad singing through ..."

  As Yeats put it.

  Thank you for your piece on Tim, but it hurt to find him alive again, for a moment. I guess that is the measure of greatness in a piece of writing, that it can do that.

  I believe it was in one of Aldous Huxley's novels that a character phones up another character and exclaims excitedly, "I've just found a mathematical proof for the existence of God!" Had it been Tim he would have found another proof the next day contravening the first—and would have believed that just as readily. It was as if he was in a garden of flowers and each flower was new and different and he discovered each in turn and was equally delighted by each, but then forgot the ones that came before. He was totally loyal to his friends. Those, he never forgot. Those were his permanent flowers.

  The strange part, Ms. Marion, is that in a way I miss him more than I miss my husband. Maybe he made more of an impression on me. I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me; you're the writer.

  Cordially,

  Angel Archer

  I wrote that to the famous New York Literary Establishment author Jane Marion, whose essays appear in the best of the little magazines; I did not expect an answer and I got none. Maybe her publisher, to whom I sent it, read it and flipped it away; I don't know. Marion's essay on Tim had infuriated me; it was based entirely on secondhand information. Marion never knew Tim but she wrote about him anyhow. She said something about Tim "giving up friendships when it served his purpose" or something like that. Tim never gave up a friendship in his life.

  That appointment that Jeff and I had made with the bishop was an important one. In two respects, official and, as it turned out, unofficial. Regarding the official aspect, I proposed and intended to carry off a meeting, a merger, between Bishop Archer and my friend Kirsten Lundborg who represented FEM in the Bay Area. The Female Emancipation Movement wanted Tim to make a speech on its behalf, a speech for free. As the wife of the bishop's son, it was thought I could pull it off. Needless to say, Tim did not seem to understand the situation, but that was not his fault; neither Jeff nor I had clued him in. Tim supposed we were getting together to have a meal at the Bad Luck, which he had heard about. Tim would be paying for the meal because we didn't have any money at all that year, or, for that matter, the year before. As a clerical typist in a law office on Shattuck Avenue I was the putative wage-earner. The law office consisted of two Berkeley guys active in all the protest movements. They defended in cases involving drugs. Their firm was called BARNES AND GLEASON LAW OFFICE AND CANDLE SHOP; they sold handmade candles, or at least displayed them. It was Jerry Barnes' way of insulting his own profession and making it clear that he had no intention of bringing in any money. Regarding this goal he was successful. I remember one time a grateful client paid him in opium, a black stick that looked like a bar of unsweetened chocolate. Jerry was at a loss as to what to do with it. He wound up giving it away.

  It was interesting to watch Fred Hill, the KGB agent, greeting all his customers the way a good restaurateur does, shaking hands and smiling. Hill had cold eyes. According to the talk on the street he had the authority to murder those under Party discipline who seemed restive. Tim paid hardly any attention to Fred Hill as the son of a bitch led us to a table. I wondered what the Bishop of California would say if he knew that the man handing us our menus was a Russian national here in the U.S. under a fake name, an officer in the Soviet secret police. Or perhaps this was all a Berkeley myth. As in the many preceding years, Berkeley and paranoia were bedfellows. The end of the Vietnam War was a long way off; Nixon had yet to pull out U.S. forces. Watergate still lay several years ahead. Government agents rooted about the Bay Area. We independent activists suspected everyone of conniving; we trusted neither the right nor the CP-USA. If there was any single hated thing in Berkeley it was the smell of the police.

  "Hello, folks," Fred Hill said. "The soup today is minestrone. Would you like a glass of wine while you decide?"

  The three of us said we wanted wine—just so long as it wasn't Gallo—and Fred Hill went off to get it.

  "He's a colonel in the KGB," Jeff said to the bishop.

  "Very interesting," Tim said, scrutinizing the menu.

  "They're really underpaid," I said.

  "That would be why he has opened up a restaurant," Tim said, looking around him at the other tables and patrons. "I wonder if they have Black Sea caviar, here." Glancing up at me, he said, "Do you like caviar, Angel? The roe of the sturgeon, although they do sometimes pass off the roe of Cyclopterus lumpus as caviar; however, that is generally of a reddish hue and larger. It is much cheaper. I don't care for it—lumpfish caviar, I
mean. In a sense, to say ‘lumpfish caviar' is an oxymoron." He laughed, mostly to himself.

  Shit, I thought.

  "What's wrong?" Jeff said.

  "I'm just wondering where Kirsten is," I said. I looked at my watch.

  The bishop said, "The origins of the feminist movement can be found in Lysistrata. ‘We must refrain from all touch of baubled love ...'" Again he laughed. "‘With bolts and bars our orders flout and—'" He paused, as if considering whether to go on. "‘And shut us out.' It's a pun. ‘Shut us out' refers both to the general situation of noncompliance and a shutting up of the vagina."

  "Dad," Jeff said, "we're trying to figure out what to order. Okay?"

  The bishop said, "If you mean we're trying to decide what to have to eat, my remark is certainly applicable. Aristophanes would have appreciated that."

  "Come on," Jeff said.

  Carrying a tray, Fred Hill returned. "Louis Martini burgundy." He set down three glasses. "If you'll excuse my asking—aren't you Bishop Archer?"

  The bishop nodded.

  "You marched with Dr. King at Selma," Hill said.

  "Yes, I was at Selma," the bishop said.

  I said, "Tell him your vagina joke." To Fred Hill I said, "The bishop knows a real old vagina joke."

  Chuckling, Bishop Archer said, "The joke is old, she means. Don't misunderstand syntactically."

  "Dr. King was a great man," Fred Hill said.

  "He was a very great man," the bishop said. "I'll have the sweetbreads."

  "That's a good choice," Fred Hill said, jotting. "Also let me recommend the pheasant."

  "I'll have the veal Oscar," I said.

  "So will I," Jeff said. He seemed moody. I knew that he objected to my using my friendship with the bishop in order to get a free speech—for FEM or any other group. He knew how easily free speeches got tugged out of his father. Both he and the bishop wore dark-wool business suits, and of course Fred Hill, famous KGB agent and mass killer, wore a suit and tie.

  I wondered that day, sitting there with the two of them in their business suits, if Jeff would go into Holy Orders as his father had; both men looked solemn, bringing to the task of ordering dinner the same intensity, the same gravity, that they brought to so much else: the professional stance oddly punctuated on the bishop's part with wit ... although, like today, the wit never struck me as quite right.

  As we spooned up our minestrone soup, Bishop Archer talked about his forthcoming heresy trial. It was a subject he found endlessly fascinating. Certain Bible Belt bishops were out to get him because he had said in several published articles and in his sermons preached at Grace Cathedral that no one had seen hide nor hair of the Holy Ghost since apostolic times. This had caused Tim to conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity was incorrect. If the Holy Ghost was, in fact, a form of God equal to Yahweh and Christ, surely he would still be with us. Speaking in tongues did not impress him. He had seen a lot of it in his years in the Episcopal Church and it struck him as autosuggestion and dementia. Further, a scrupulous reading of Acts disclosed that at Pentecost when the Holy Ghost descended on the disciples, giving them "the gift of speech," they had spoken in foreign languages which people nearby had understood. This is not glossolalia as the term is now used; this is xenoglossy. The bishop, as we ate, chortled over Peter's deft response to the charge that the Eleven were drunk; Peter had said in a loud voice to the scoffing crowd that it was not likely that the Eleven were drunk inasmuch as it was only nine A.M. The bishop pondered out loud—between spoonfuls of minestrone soup—that the course of Western history might have been changed if the time had been nine P.M. instead of nine A.M. Jeff looked bored and I kept consulting my watch, wondering what was keeping Kirsten. Probably she had gone in to have her hair done. She fussed forever with her blond hair, especially in anticipation of momentous occasions.

  The Episcopal Church is Trinitarian; you cannot be a priest or bishop of that church if you do not absolutely accept and teach that—well, it's called the Nicene Creed:

  "... And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified."

  So Bishop McClary back in Missouri was correct; Tim had, in fact, committed heresy. However, Tim had been a practicing lawyer before he became a rector of the Episcopal Church. He relished the oncoming heresy trial. Bishop McClary knew his Bible and he knew canon law, but Tim would blow golden smoke-rings around him until McClary would not know up from down. Tim knew this. In facing a heresy trial, he was in his element. Moreover, he was writing a book about it; he would win and, in addition, he would make some money. Every newspaper in America had carried articles and even editorials on the subject. Successfully trying someone for heresy in the 1970s was really difficult.

  Listening to Tim dilate endlessly, the thought came to me that he had calculatedly committed heresy in order to bring on the trial. At least, he had done it unconsciously. It was, as the term has it, a good career move.

  "The so-called ‘gift of speech,'" the bishop said cheerfully, "reverses the unity of language lost when the Tower of Babel was attempted; that is, its construction was attempted. When the day comes that someone in my congregation gets up and talks Walloon, well, that day I will believe that the Holy Ghost exists. I'm not sure he ever existed. The apostolic conception of the Holy Spirit is based on the Hebrew ruah, the spirit of God. For one thing, this spirit is female, not male. She speaks concerning the Messianic expectation. Christianity appropriated the notion from Judaism and when Christianity had converted a sufficient number of pagans—Gentiles, if you will—it abandoned the concept, since it was only meaningful to the Jews anyhow. To the Greek converts it made no sense whatsoever, although Socrates declared that he had an inner voice or daemon that guided him ... a tutelary spirit, not to be confused with the English word ‘demon,' which of course refers to an indubitably evil spirit. The two terms are often confused. Do I have time for a cocktail?"

  "They just have beer and wine here," I said.

  "I'd like to make a phone call," the bishop said; he dabbed at his chin with his napkin, rising to his feet and glancing about. "Is there a public phone?"

  "There's a phone at the Chevron station," Jeff said. "But if you go back there you'll trash another pump."

  "I simply do not understand how that happened," the bishop said. "I never felt anything or saw anything; the first I knew was when—Albers? I have his name written down. When he showed up in hysteria. Perhaps that was a manifestation of the Holy Ghost. I hope my insurance hasn't lapsed. It's always a good idea to carry automobile insurance."

  I said, "That wasn't Walloon he was speaking."

  "Yes, well," Tim said, "it also wasn't intelligible. It may well have been glossolalia, for all I know. Maybe there is evidence that the Holy Ghost is here." He reseated himself. "Are we waiting for something?" he asked me. "You keep looking at your watch, I only have an hour; then I have to get back to the City. The difficulty that dogma presents is that it Strickens the creative spirit in man. Whitehead—Alfred North Whitehead—has given us the idea of God in process, and he is, or was, a major scientist. Process theology. It all goes back to Jakob Boehme and his 'no-yes' deity, his dialectic deity anticipating Hegel. Boehme based that on Augustine. 'Sic et non,' you know. Latin lacks a precise word for 'yes'; I suppose 'sic' is the closest, although by and large 'sic' is more correctly rendered as 'so,' or 'hence,' or 'in that manner.' 'Quod si hoc nunc sic incipiam? Nihil est. Quod si sic? Tantumdem egero. Et sic—'" He paused, frowning. "'Nihil est.' In a distributive language—English is the best example—that would literally mean 'nothing exists.' Of course what Terence means is, 'it is nothing,' with 'id,' or 'it,' understood. Still, there is an enormous thrust in the two-word utterance 'nihil est.' The amazing power of Latin to compress meaning into the fewest possible words. That and precision are the two most admirable qualities of it, by far. English, however, has the greater vocabulary."
r />   "Dad," Jeff said, "we're waiting for a friend of Angel's. I told you about her the other day."

  "Non video," the bishop said. "I'm saying that I don't see her, the 'her' being understood. Look, that man is going to take a picture of us."

  Fred Hill, carrying an SLR camera with flash attachment, approached our table. "Your Grace, would it be all right with you if I took your picture?"

  "Let me take a picture of you two together," I said, standing up. "You can put it on the wall," I said to Fred Hill.

  "That would be fine with me," Tim said.

  During the meal, Kirsten Lundborg joined us. She looked unhappy and fatigued, and she could find nothing on the menu that pleased her. She wound up drinking a glass of white wine, eating nothing, saying very little, but smoking one cigarette after another. Her face showed lines of strain. We did not know it then, but she had mild and chronic peritonitis, which can be—and was very soon for her—very serious. She hardly seemed aware of us. I assumed she had gone into one of her periodic depressions; I had no idea that day that she was physically ill.