Book of the Dead (23 page)

For a moment Dawson was seized by a wave of vertigo. Everything seemed suddenly normal again.

It was a natural. One moment he had been sitting with friends watching God-knew-what on the tube, and in the next he was opening the front door to the local chapter of God’s militia. Both were basically reliable components of his mundane Suburban-American existence.

He opened the door wide and smiled broadly at the four of them. Their spokesperson, an attractive black woman in her early thirties, launched her well-rehearsed spiel. Her voice was dripping with rapt sincerity and eagerly earnest goodwill.

Dawson began to laugh. It was a reed-thin laugh, pitched far too shrilly.

The woman stopped speaking.

Two of her companions moved back a step.

Dawson’s laughter diminished, and the woman launched her spiel a second time.

“You have come to ask me,” he interrupted, “if I have made my peace with God. Is that it?”

He glared at them maniacally.

One of them gave an uncertain nod.

“Then let me assure you,” he went on in a voice made half of whisper and half of shout, “that He and I have never quarreled.”

He beamed into their uncomprehending faces.

“In fact,” he added, “I never even met the man!”

He slammed the door on them and turned to face his companions. He started laughing again, that same hysterical, high-pitched squeal.

“Can you believe it?” he shouted, “Jehovah’s Witlesses, out on a day like this!”

He continued laughing until he collapsed, weeping, to the floor. A shuddering mass of confusion and nothing more.

It was several minutes before Mike moved to help him to his feet. Then Mike guided him back to his chair in front of the television.

    
What I think it was, was the realization that there were still people in the world. People making choices. People choosing to continue to live, not merely to survive, as we were doing almost in absentia. It seems to me now that that is the difference between living and surviving: the making of choices.

Scott and Mike and I hadn’t made a conscious decision since the news had first interrupted our routine. Though, by mere luck, we had survived, we had ceased to be alive. We were merely zombies waiting for the ghouls to find us. How many were there like us? How long did any of them last?

The only thing that had saved us to that point was the fact that ghoulism—or whatever one might wish to call it—was not yet so widespread as it is now.

The only thing that saved us from that point on, I am now convinced, is the fact that the Witnesses found us first and woke us up.

They showed us that there were choices to be made simply by pursuing their own choice, which—pie in the sky or no—they must have known to be tremendously dangerous.

So perhaps they were out doing God’s good work, if it is neither vain nor ridiculous for me to think that our personal fate could possibly matter to a God who had permitted these horrors.

Scott was a Vietnam veteran, the kind who maintained a belief that the war had been right and just, and that the United States had wimped out in the end. His choice was to steal a car, his own being unavailable at the time, and make his way to the nearest army installation so that he might re-enlist.

Neither Mike nor Dawson tried to talk him out of this decision, though Scott was forty-four years old and had not kept himself in the best of shape.

Mike, who had grown up within a mile of Dawson’s residence, chose to seek the sanctuary of his old grade school. Though Mike had often complained that he had been scarred and victimized by the twin voices of God and discipline during his parochial school career, and though he had often claimed that the most terrifying presence he had ever encountered had been the enormous mass of his third-grade teacher, it was there, and to her in particular, that he felt compelled to turn in his greatest need of guidance and protection.

Dawson didn’t try to explain to Mike that, according to his own descriptions of the woman, she had been an ancient and obese heart-attack candidate those many years ago and was now, quite certainly, many years dead.

Sometimes the choices we make, especially under unbearable stress, don’t make any coherent sense. We will not allow another man to tell us that. It is the case of the drowning man attempting to mount the straw. Certainly it is imbecilic, but in such situations reason holds little sway. Even if you overcome the drowning man’s initial anger and make him understand, you will have succeeded only in robbing him of hope and making him more miserable yet. Unless you have a timber to offer him.

How could I have dissuaded either of them? What had I to offer them in place of their thin straws?

I let them both go.

Even Mike whose choice was, by far, the most foolish.

Even Mike whom I have loved like a brother for better than fifteen years.

Only when he was alone in the house was Dawson able to make his own choice. Once he had, he made his preparations rapidly and left. He did not bother to turn off the TV.

    
The only choices we are ever really left with are these three: be a leader, be a follower, or be an individual.

Many find security only where the self is given up, subsumed. Where Authority makes the decisions. Where rules are clear and strict. Where orders create Order and are not to be questioned.

      Others find it only where they are themselves the Authority and Order that fashions the rules and makes the decisions.

Scott may be safe now, following some well-armed, battle-wise sergeant or lieutenant amidst a throng of like-minded companions. But I doubt it.

Mike may be safe in the darkness of his old school, with his phantom Order protecting him from very real chaos. But that is even easier to doubt.

The Witnesses may still be knocking on peoples’ doors, waking people up, protected by some heavenly umbrella. But that, I find, is hardest to believe.

More likely by now they have knocked on one too many doors. Have made the big change. Are still out there making converts, but of a different sort. Their teeth revealed no longer by their God’s-gracious-grins, but by the godawful grimace of a hellacious hunger.

Yes. That I find easier to believe, but not to think about.

And I…? I have a goal. Straw or timber? How much farther? Can I make it? What will I find? Does it really matter?

[6]

“You know, a man can make it as far as he’s gotta go, if he knows how to handle time.

“A man can hold on the rungs of a tank-car ladder for better’n five hundred miles if he ain’t got no choice; if there ain’t no way for him to crawl to a better position, and the train don’t make no stops to allow him to relocate himself.

“But to do it he’s gotta get it straight in his head that no time is gonna pass while he’s hangin’ there.”

An eighteen-year-old Dawson looked on, listening closely. Incredulous, but wanting to believe.

“Now I’m not sayin’ that it’s gonna be easy, not by a long road, but it’s when things ain’t easy that a man’s gotta learn to assert his control. It’s when the world isn’t offerin’ any respite that a man’s gotta manufacture some of his own.

“Sure, when he’s hangin’ there, his hands and arms and legs and back aren’t about to start believin’ him. They’ll be keepin’ their own kinda time. But that ain’t where the battle’s gotta be fought.

“I figure if a man can’t keep his head from gettin’ bossed about by his muscles, well… we’d have been better off just stayin’ in the trees.

“But he can, and there’s the rub. If a man has a mind to, he can learn to keep his head still in time. And if he keeps time from passin’ up here,” dark, leathery fingers tapped a sunburned forehead, “then he can keep himself from givin’ his arms and legs the message that they are right: that he
has
been hangin’ on too long, that he
does
have too far left to go, that he
might as well
give up the ghost and let himself just slide on down beneath them merciless wheels.

“You see, the thing to remember about muscles is that they gotta get some message from the brain before they can do just about anything. So if a man can keep himself from believin’ his muscles’ complaints, he can keep himself from givin’ in to them. If he can keep his brain from believin’ that time is passing, he robs time of its meaning, and it stops altogether.

“Time ain’t nothin’ but a man-thought thing anyway, so if a man refuses to think it, it don’t happen for him.”

The weathered face flashed a mischievous smile.

“Course when the train finally does stop and that man finally does get off, it’s not just his muscles as’ll be arguin’ the case against him. Every man-clock at the place he lights will chime in at callin’ him a liar. But that man’s still got his ace card up his sleeve. He gives it any thought he’ll know there weren’t no human possible way that he coulda hung onto that ladder for upwards of six or seven hours, whatever it took to get him where he is. And that alone oughta put the proof to it. It’s gotta be the clocks and muscles that are wrong, cause there he is and still alive. He’d found a hole in time and slipped through that, ’stead of slidin’ down beneath them wheels a good bit back.

“And knowin’ that it works that way just makes it that much easier the next time he finds himself in that kinda spot.”

And Dawson found he could believe, needed to believe. He shook back his long hair and nodded in vigorous affirmation.

Leader, follower, or individual?

I like to think I made my choice when I was eighteen, and have simply deferred its actualization all these years.

Only once in my life did I experience a setting in which a person could be an individual while maintaining the advantages of living in a group. It was a marriage of independence and interaction, of freedom and support.

It was a brief stay. Afterwards I somehow allowed myself to fall back into the ways for which I had been trained and educated all my life. I permitted myself to accept a position in the lower echelon of the rat race I claimed to despise. I let myself be distracted from the truths I had claimed I had learned throughout that summer turning into fall.

I tell myself now that those truths, my belief in them, merely slept and did not die. I tell myself that I am now the prodigal son, hoping that some family remains for me to return to.

One week after his graduation from high school Daw-son was farther from home than he had ever been before. His backpack and sleeping bag were slung on his back, his right thumb was pointing to the horizon behind him, and his left hand held a sign that simply read: FURTHER.

By early August he had found himself staying at a hobo camp, “among members of America’s forgotten tribe,” as he was to record passionately in one of his many journals of the period. Like most Americans he had assumed that hoboism had long since dwindled and died. This was not the only illusion that these people would shatter, or drastically reshape, during his brief stay.

He discovered that not all hobos were hopelessly flawed individuals, failures incapable of living within the society that their lifestyles defied. Some of them were outcasts, surely, but many of them were escapees; people too proud and willful to consign themselves to the strictures and constraints of a more “acceptable” American existence.

Flawed? Certainly. Each in his own way. But no more so than many whom Dawson had met in other walks of life.

Failures? Not at the lives that they had finally chosen for themselves, whatever failures and incompatibilities might have led them to this choice. Therefore, perforce, their choice had been a wise one.

On the whole they were flexible, tolerant and compatible beyond any other class-group in his experience. They combined the habits of self-reliance and selfless cooperation in a way that Dawson had always suspected was too idealistic to be practiced in any real-world setting. And he felt that there was no setting based more in the real world than theirs.

It was there that he met Hoagie.

Hoagie was the most remarkable individual that Dawson had ever met. In his presence Dawson sometimes wondered if he had ever
really
met an individual before.

Hoagie was, by every evidence, only a handful of years older than Dawson, though the ruggedness of his appearance made it difficult to ascribe to him any particular age. He was an educated man, though he had adopted a manner of speech that required one to pay careful attention to the thoughts he was conveying in order to divine that fact. He was a man who had found contemporary American society wanting—“wanting far too much,” he would say—and so had discarded it as best he could. He was a man, so Dawson felt, of unparalleled wisdom, integrity and compassion.

All of this had quite an impact on Dawson at the time. He was, after all, a young man of semisheltered upbringing who had yet to have any of his personal wisdoms put to the acid test of living-it-out.

So Hoagie became a sort of hero to him.

He also became a steadfast friend.

Hoagie taught Dawson how to pick a freight; how to read the coded lettering on the flanks of the individual cars, so that he’d know where they had originated and where they were heading. He taught him how, and when, to mount a train; how to ride one; how to disembark; and what to do and where to go once he had done so. He taught him how to recognize and avoid the peculiar hazards of particular trains, railyards, and towns. And he taught him, without ever putting it into words, how to read the signs of another man’s intentions during an initial confrontation.