Case and the Dreamer (18 page)

“All right,” he went on, “all the evidence is that the new brain, the grey brain with its temporal lobes, was an explosive mutation and in terms of the species it was a beneficial one. Humanity isn’t the first animal to perform concerted actions, or to build elaborate structures, or to use tools; it’s a matter of degree. Mankind was able to do these things better, that’s all—a great deal better, and more of ’em. It wasn’t the first to achieve communication with its own kind, either, but again, it did it better than any competitor, and did it with a very large plus: the ability to transmit knowledge not only to contemporaries, but down through the generations. I mean, each tribe didn’t have to discover fire over and over again, or the arch, or the wheel, or Einstein’s general field theory. The height of knowledge we have now reached (whatever
that
is) we reached by standing on the shoulders of those who gone before us, and who were able to communicate it to us.”

Harry pointed to Leary’s empty cup, Leary nodded that big fine head, Harry beckoned the waiter and pointed again, all very swift and efficient, without Dr. Leary’s having to break his conversational stride. It pleased Harry. Communication. Oh indeed, humanity has come a long way.

“Beneficial mutation, right?” Leary demanded, and immediately, “Wrong! Wrong, because every single one of those survival, progressive miracles can be performed with only a fraction of the brain! Will you take my word for that, or you want the documentation? Because believe me friend, I have it: case histories of ninety percent recovery of function in people with half their brains removed, papers
on stereotaxia—electrical stimulation of discrete parts of both the forebrain and the old, old white brain under it, and documentation coming in daily in dozen lots of psychedelic experience … but I covered that in my lecture, and you don’t want to hear all that over again. No—I’m here to tell you that the explosive mutation produced more than the capabilities we are so proud of—much more. I don’t know how many times it has been said, by how many people, that we only use a fraction of the forebrain; some say a tenth, some say a third, some say two thirds, but I’m not going to get mired in argument over percentages. I’m simply stating a well-known and proven fact in biology: that if a living thing, plant or animal, has a limb or organ tied off or immobilized, that limb or organ, be it leaf or thyroid or good right arm is going to atrophy, drop off, die and rot, or what have you. And the same thing happens on a larger scale, in the case of that Class Three mutation is initially neither lethal nor beneficial.”

With tremendous slow emphasis, drawing all of that charisma into a tight beam and aiming it into Harry’s eyes, he said, “Unless we discover the function of that unused portion of the brain, then, just like the mottling of the skin under the hair of the animal I mentioned, that part of the brain will atrophy, wither away, dilute, disappear in thirty, three hundred, three thousand generations—a tick of time in the history of the species—never to be seen again in all the universe. Never!” And he struck the table so hard that the sugar bowl jumped, and so did Harry, and the waiter was afraid for a moment to put down the cappuccino. “Find it, use it,” said Leary. “Use it or lose it. Use it or lose it.” Harry thought he had tears in his eyes. He couldn’t know, for the tears in his own.

It was the saddest story ever heard. The towering, monumental, mountainous sadness of the concept—humanity having had, and having lost this unknown potential, while keeping, while building on, the part of itself it had already used—it was more than Harry could bear. It was infinitely more tragic than the idea of the total death of humanity. And—what would a future humanity be like, without that mysterious potentiality? Would it go on building bigger skyscrapers, bombs, frustrations and alienations? Would it become
cookie-cutter repetitive, with nothing left of its deepest humanness but flickering urges and unidentifiable images? Who could know, without knowing the nature of the thing that was lost?

He never could remember the rest of the evening; he never really tried, though because of it he understood far better than the general public what it was that drove Timothy Leary to do what he did, to become famous and then infamous and then well on the road to fame again; and he understood that it was the same thing that drove Metzner to seek his measure of the problem his own way, and Alpert, who became Baba Ram Dass, in yet another. But this was not their story.

The reason that this encounter had such an impact on Harry is that he was, by some quirk of nature, a sadness freak—a collector of sadnesses. Like the intergenerational growth of information, Harry’s sadnesses stood on the shoulders of sadnesses gone by. When the guys got together in college to slurp beer and tell dirty stories all night, Harry never told dirty stories, he told sad stories, like the one about the man making love to his wife who went on and on for an hour and a quarter before he was finished, and his wife said, “Gosh, honey, what took you so long?” And he answered, “Well, I couldn’t think of anybody.”

And the one he picked up in England, about the cheery warm pub, and a thin little girl came in and out of the freezing fog, all big eyes and little frayed coat. She sidles round to the bar and the cheery warm bartender says, “Wot’ll you ’ave?” and she says, “ ’Ow much is arf-pint o’ bitter?” and he says, “Tuppence,” and she says “Orl roight,” and he fills this little bitty glass while she dumps her purse on the bar. She starts to pick up the glass and he grabs a wrist like a chicken-foot and presses it back down. “Wite a minute, ’old on there,” he says, “Yon’s a penny and a button.” She puts her knuckles to her mouth and her eyes got bigger than ever. “Ow,” she says, “Oi’ve been ’ad fer a button!”

A few like that and the guys would throw empty beer cans at Harry and tell him to go home.

Harry cherished the true story of Humboldt and the parrot. Humboldt
was the 19th century German explorer for whom the Humboldt Currents are named, and Humboldt County in California. Deep in the rainforest in Brazil he encountered an Indian tribe; and in a village they had a talking parrot. But this parrot did not speak the language of this tribe; it came from another tribe, even deeper into the Matto Grosso, and this second tribe was extinct. This parrot was the only living thing on earth that spoke the language of that dead tribe; and it was only a parrot.

This was the shining central jewel in Harry’s sadness collection until that night at the Espresso. Though he never remembered the rest of the evening there, he did remember going to Susan afterward. She held him for a long time—not because she understood what was tearing him apart, because she didn’t, but probably because she had never seen him cry before.

Harry might have been able to live with it if it hadn’t been for the Man from Mars. No, that doesn’t sound right; it sounds like blame. There wasn’t anyone to blame, really, except maybe Harry himself, being what he was.

It isn’t easy to describe what happened that evening when the Man from Mars first talked to Harry. Correction again. Someone once said about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: it isn’t difficult to understand; it’s just impossible to believe. All right? This is what happened:

First of all, the Man from Mars wasn’t a man and he wasn’t from Mars. “The Man from Mars” is what Harry first called him, half kidding, half abjectly terrified, and since he never had another name for him, he stuck with “Man from Mars” though they both knew it was inaccurate. Second, the Man from Mars did something—Harry never knew what—that eliminated the terror completely. Finally, although he wasn’t invisible, Harry never saw him, and even when the Man pointed at something on a printed page or on one of the sketches or drawings or charts he asked Harry to make from time to time, Harry could never if his life depended on it describe what the hand (if it was a hand) or the finger (if it was a finger) looked like. It was as if something diverted his attention every time
he started to look at the Man. Yet the presence was very strong, very solid, very real. Well, it’s not all that strange, when you come to think of it. A normal person can be hypnotized and ordered not to see someone or something in a room, and he just plain cannot see it, even if you put it right in front of him under bright lights. Whether it was hypnosis or suggestion or something like them—or something infinitely better—Harry did not know, didn’t want to know. One thing was certain: nobody else saw (could see?) the Man, and no one but Harry ever heard his questions.

His questions … only once did the Man from Mars ever make a statement. He only asked questions. It seemed that he wanted to know about human beings, and he had chosen Harry to give the answers. Why Harry? Harry never knew, though he often thought that the Man might have made a better choice.
Only
Harry? Very probably not. Some of the questions he asked carried a freight of previous knowledge; in such cases, it wasn’t
the
answer he was after but Harry’s answer. Again: why Harry? Harry never knew.

So the Man from Mars appeared (funny word to use, under the circumstances) one evening when Harry was alone, and asked him, “Mind answering some questions?” and Harry, terrified, jumped up, looked this way, that way, round and back, and blurted: “Who said that? Where are you? What are you—a man from Mars or something?” It was eerie, because there was this sense of the real presence, right there in the room; not a voice from the street or from some other place in the house, and most certainly not a hallucination—he was just too real, too, well,
here
. It was exactly then that the man did whatever it was he did to erase Harry’s terror, and never again did Harry feel frightened of the Man. Not even awed. And he never wondered why.

“Mind answering some questions?”

“I guess not. Mind if I ask some?”

“Why should I object? What you want to know?”

Harry pondered. He felt quite comfortable. “How did you get in here? Where did you come from?”

“Do you want a precise answer?”

“Well, sure,” said Harry.

“Are you acquainted with the theory of nonfluent time and the present identity of all things, past and future?”

“Well, no,” said Harry.

“Then how can I possibly give you a precise answer?”

“Well, you must’ve come from somewhere!”

“Why?”

“Because you got here!”

“Isn’t ‘here’ somewhere?”

“Well, certainly.”

“Then does it satisfy you that I came from here?”

“No it doesn’t! You weren’t here before and you are now!”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, I never saw you. Heard you. I mean, I—I—oh hell, what do you want, anyway?”

“Mind answering some questions?”

Back to square one! And this is what was to happen every time Harry tried to get an idea of who or what the Man was, or why he wanted his questions answered. He was always let around in a circle by his own statements and responses. Sometimes it was a big circle and sometimes a little circle, but it went round and round until Harry learned that the only way was to give straight answers to the Man’s questions, and put a sharp curb on his own. Besides, you have to understand that he felt quite comfortable with the Man. Really.

Well, he asked questions. He asked questions about morals, about politics, about entertainment, about technology. He asked about pollution, war, religion, history, education, and finance. Sometimes Harry knew the answers and sometimes not; he began a notebook so he could go to the library for information. Sometimes the questions called for opinions; sometimes Harry had very strong ones, sometimes none, sometimes opinions he hadn’t known he had until he was asked.

Susan came in, that first night. She wanted to know who he was talking to. Clearly, she couldn’t see the Man from Mars. He said he was talking to himself. She didn’t believe him. He then said he was talking to the Man from Mars. She said nothing, just went to bed. This happened a number of times. About the third time he broke
down and told her the whole story. Shortly after that she moved out. These are very few words to write about Susan, but this isn’t her story; and anyway, nothing that happened was her fault in any way. But surely she knows that.

Another sadness for Harry.

He told the Man from Mars about his sadnesses, about what happened at the Espresso and about Humboldt and the parrot, and about the feral children. The feral children was for a long time the saddest thing he knew, until it was replaced by Humboldt and then by Leary’s Class Three mutation.

The feral children was, as a sadness, very difficult to explain. It was, as Harry once expressed it, something you could just reach with your fingertips, but never get a grip on. You could touch it did not grasp it.

Feral children are those who have been brought up by with animals. They round one up every few years in India, Africa, South America; there’s a very famous case of one picked up in France in the 18th century. If they’re captured when they are eleven or twelve years old, they have one thing in common: they can never be taught to speak. “Yes” and “No” and “Pass the salt,” sure; but the kind of verbal communication we take so much for granted is impossible to them. A brain surgeon might tell you that there is nothing detectibly wrong with them, but they just can’t learn speech. Now, learning speech is as close to miraculous as anything on this earth. Not for the accomplishment in itself, but because of who does it—little kids. There was a family Harry had read about who lived in India on one of those “stations” the English had during the Empire days. They had three little kids, five, six, seven, and a French tutor who would speak nothing to them but French, and an
amah
, a nursemaid, who knew no English and spoke only Hindi. Those kids could speak English and French and Hindi fluently, with no hesitation, depending on whom they were talking to. A gifted adult might do the same, but never in so short a time or without giving it total concentration and effort. A normal adult, well, just couldn’t. And a normal child can, and many do, what those English kids did.

Astronauts called that period of time in which it is possible to
launch a rocket at a certain target, taking into account all the variables, a “window.” Before the window is open, you can’t launch and get where you’re going. After it’s closed, you can’t launch. Well, it occurred to Harry that there may be a “learning window,” like that that makes it possible for normals to learn speech at a genius level, a window that opens on
something else
. It was here that his fingers touched the thing he couldn’t grasp—what that
something else
might be. Maybe ESP or telekinesis or that kind of thing, but maybe not—maybe something different, something entirely new, something as incomprehensible to a normal adult as the transistor or a sonnet would be to a Neanderthal—as incomprehensible as normal speech is to a feral child. The feral child had his speech window open for—how long is a speech window open? Months? Two years, three?—but there was nobody around to put anything into it. So in its own natural time, it closed, as it does for us all (except maybe a thin crack) and the finest teachers with the best teaching methods and devices can’t put anything through it ever again, except maybe for a little thin bits pushed into the crack.