Is That What People Do? (8 page)

At last I put into words what we were all thinking. “Friends,” I said, “this man appears to be a Mnemone.”

Mnemones as a distinct class came into prominence during the last year of the War Which Ended All Wars. Their self-proclaimed function was to remember works of literature which were in danger of being lost, destroyed, or suppressed.

At first, the government welcomed their efforts, encouraged them, even rewarded them with pensions and grants. But when the war ended and the reign of the Police Presidents began, government policy changed. A general decision was made to jettison the unhappy past, to build a new world in and of the present. Disturbing influences were to be struck down without mercy.

Right-thinking men agreed that most literature was superfluous at best, subversive at worst. After all, was it necessary to preserve the mouthings of a thief like Villon, a homosexual like Genet, a schizophrenic like Kafka? Did we need to retain a thousand divergent opinions, and then to explain why they were false? Under such a bombardment of influences, how could anyone be expected to respond in an appropriate and approved manner? How would one ever get people to obey orders?

The government knew that if everyone obeyed orders, everything would be all right.

But to achieve this blessed state, divergent and ambiguous inputs had to be abolished. The biggest single source of confusing inputs came from historical and artistic verbiage. Therefore, history was to be rewritten, and literature was to be regularized, pruned, tamed, made orderly or abolished entirely.

The Mnemones were ordered to leave the past strictly alone. They objected to this most vehemently, of course. Discussions continued until the government lost patience. A final order was issued, with heavy penalties for those who would not comply.

Most of the Mnemones gave up their work. A few only pretended to, however. These few became an elusive, persecuted minority of itinerant teachers, endlessly on the move, selling their knowledge where and when they could.

We questioned the man who called himself Edgar Smith, and he revealed himself to us as a Mnemone. He gave immediate and lavish gifts to our village:

Two sonnets by William Shakespeare.

Job’s Lament to God.

One entire act of a play by Aristophanes.

This done, he set himself up in business, offering his wares for sale to the villagers.

He drove a hard bargain with Mr. Ogden, forcing him to exchange an entire pig for two lines of Simonides.

Mr. Bellington, the recluse, gave up his gold watch for a saying by Heraclitus. He considered it a fair exchange.

Old Mrs. Heath exchanged a pound of goosefeathers for three stanzas from a poem entitled “Atalanta in Calydon,” by a man named Swinburne.

Mr. Mervin, who owns the restaurant, purchased an entire short ode by Catullus, a description of Cicero by Tacitus, and ten lines from Homer’s Catalog of Ships. This cost his entire savings.

I had little in the way of money or property. But for services rendered, I received a paragraph of Montaigne, a saying ascribed to Socrates, and ten fragmentary lines by Anacreon.

An unexpected customer was Mr. Lind, who came stomping into the Mnemone’s office one crisp winter morning. Mr. Lind was short, red-faced, and easily moved to anger. He was the most successful farmer in the area, a man of no-nonsense who believed only in what he could see and touch. He was the last man whom you’d ever expect to buy the Mnemone’s wares. Even a policeman would have been a more likely prospect.

“Well, well,” Lind began, rubbing his hands briskly together. “I’ve heard about you and your invisible merchandise.”

“And I’ve heard about you,” the Mnemone said, with a touch of malice to his voice. “Do you have business with me?”

“Yes, by God, I do!” Lind cried. “I want to buy some of your fancy old words.”

“I am genuinely surprised,” the Mnemone said. “Who would ever have dreamed of finding a law-abiding citizen like yourself in a situation like this, buying goods which are not only invisible, but illegal as well!”

“It’s not my choice,” Lind said. “I have come here only to please my wife, who is not well these days.”

“Not well? I’m not surprised,” the Mnemone said. “An ox would sicken under the workload you give her.”

“Man, that’s no concern of yours!” Lind said furiously.

“But it is,” the Mnemone said. “In my profession we do not give out words at random. We fit our lines to the recipient. Sometimes we find nothing appropriate, and therefore sell nothing at all.”

“I thought you sold your wares to all buyers.”

“You have been misinformed. I know a Pindaric ode I would not sell to you for any price.”

“Man, you can’t talk to me that way!”

“I speak as I please. You are free to take your business somewhere else.”

Mr. Lind glowered and pouted and sulked, but there was nothing he could do. At last he said, “I didn’t mean to lose my temper. Will you sell me something for my wife? Last week was her birthday, but I didn’t remember it until just now.”

“You are a pretty fellow,” the Mnemone said. “As sentimental as a mink, and almost as loving as a shark! Why come to me for her present? Wouldn’t a sturdy butter churn be more suitable?”

“No, not so,” Lind said, his voice flat and quiet. “She lies in bed this past month and barely eats. I think she is dying.”

“And she asked for words of mine?”

“She asked me to bring her something pretty.”

The Mnemone nodded. “Dying! Well, I’ll offer no condolences to the man who drove her to the grave, and I’ve not much sympathy for the woman who picked a creature like you. But I do have something she will like, a gaudy thing that will ease her passing. It’ll cost you a mere thousand dollars.”

“God in heaven, man! Have you nothing cheaper?”

“Of course I have,” the Mnemone said. “I have a decent little comic poem in Scots dialect with the middle gone from it; yours for two hundred dollars. And I have one stanza of a commemorative ode to General Kitchener which you can have for ten dollars.”

“Is there nothing else?”

“Not for you.”

“Well…I’ll take the thousand dollar item,” Lind said. “Yes, by God, I will! Sara is worth every penny of it!”

“Handsomely said, albeit tardily. Now pay attention. Here it is.”

The Mnemone leaned back, closed his eyes, and began to recite. Lind listened, his face tense with concentration. And I also listened, cursing my untrained memory and praying that I would not be ordered from the room.

It was a long poem, and very strange and beautiful. I still possess it all. But what comes most often to my mind are the lines

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

We are men: queer beasts with strange appetites. Who would have imagined us to possess a thirst for the ineffable? What was the hunger that could lead a man to exchange three bushels of corn for a single saying of the Gnostics? To feast on the spiritual—this seems to be what men must do; but who could have imagined it of
us?
Who would have thought us sufferers of malnutrition because we had no Plato? Can a man grow sickly from lack of Plutarch, or die from an Aristotle deficiency?

I cannot deny it. I myself have seen the results of abruptly withdrawing an addict from Strindberg.

Our past is a necessary part of us, and to take away that part is to mutilate us irreparably. I know a man who achieved courage only after he was told of Epaminondas, and a woman who became beautiful only after she heard of Aphrodite.

The Mnemone had a natural enemy in our schoolteacher, Mr. Vich, who taught the authorized version of all things. The Mnemone also had an enemy in Father Dulces, who ministered to our spiritual needs in the Universal Patriotic Church of America.

The Mnemone defied both of our authorities. He told us that many of the things they taught us were false, both in content and in ascription, or were perversions of famous sayings, rephrased to say the opposite of the original author’s intention. The Mnemone struck at the very foundations of our civilization when he denied the validity of the following sayings:

—Most men lead lives of quiet aspiration.

—The unexamined life is most worth living.

—Know thyself within approved limits.

We listened to the Mnemone, we considered what he told us. Slowly, painfully, we began to think again, to reason, to examine things for ourselves. And when we did this, we also began to hope.

And then one day, quite suddenly, the end came. Three men entered our village. They wore gray uniforms with brass insignia. Their faces were blank and broad, and they walked stiffly in heavy black boots. They went everywhere together, and they always stood very close to one another. They asked no questions. They spoke to no one. They knew exactly where the Mnemone lived, and they consulted a map and then walked directly there.

They were in Smith’s room for perhaps ten minutes.

Then the three policemen came out again into the street, all three of them walking together like one man. Their eyes darted right and left; they seemed frightened. They left our village quickly.

We buried Smith on a rise of land overlooking the valley, near the place where he had first quoted William James, among late-blooming flowers which had the glances of children and the mouths of old men.

Mrs. Blake, in a most untypical gesture, has named her latest-bom Cicero. Mr. Lind refers to his apple orchard as Xanadu. I myself have become an avowed Zoroastrian, entirely on faith, since I know nothing about that religion except that it directs a man to speak the truth and shoot the arrow straight.

But these are futile gestures. The truth is, we have lost Xanadu irretrievably, lost Cicero, lost Zoroaster. And what else have we lost? What great battles were fought, cities built, jungles conquered? What songs were sung, what dreams were dreamed? We see it now, too late, that our intelligence is a plant which must be rooted in the rich fields of the past.

In brief, our collective memories, the richest part of us, have been taken away, and we are poor indeed. In return for castles of the mind, our rulers have given us mud hovels palpable to the touch; a bad exchange for us.

The Mnemone, by official proclamation, never existed. By fiat he is ranked as an inexplicable dream or delusion—like Cicero.

And I who write these lines, I too will soon cease to exist. Like Cicero and the Mnemone, my reality will also be proscribed.

Nothing will help me: the truth is too fragile, it shatters too easily in the iron hands of our rulers. I shall not be revenged. I shall not even be remembered. For if the great Zoroaster himself could be reduced to a single rememberer, and that one killed, then what hope is there for me?

Generation of cows! Sheep! Pigs! We have not even the spirit of a goat! If Epaminondas was a man, if Achilles was a man, if Socrates was a man, then are we also men?

WARM

Anders lay on his bed, fully dressed except for his shoes and black bow tie, contemplating, with a certain uneasiness, the evening before him. In twenty minutes he would pick up Judy at her apartment, and that was the uneasy part of it.

He had realized, only seconds ago, that he was in love with her.

Well, he’d tell her. The evening would be memorable. He would propose, there would be kisses, and the seal of acceptance would, figuratively speaking, be stamped across his forehead.

Not too pleasant an outlook, he decided. It really would be much more comfortable not to be in love. What had done it? A look, a touch, a thought? It didn’t take much, he knew, and stretched his arms for a thorough yawn.

“Help me!” a voice said.

His muscles spasmed, cutting off the yawn in mid-moment. He sat upright on the bed, then grinned and lay back again.

“You must help me!” the voice insisted.

Anders sat up, reached for a polished shoe and fitted it on, giving his full attention to the tying of the laces.

“Can you hear me?” the voice asked. “You can, can’t you?”

That did it “Yes, I can hear you,” Anders said, still in a high good humor. “Don’t tell me you’re my guilty subconscious, attacking me for a childhood trauma I never bothered to resolve. I suppose you want me to join a monastery.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the voice said. “I’m no one’s subconscious. I’m
me.
Will you help me?”

Anders believed in voices as much as anyone; that is, he didn’t believe in them at all, until he heard them. Swiftly he cataloged the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Anders had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case—

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the voice answered.

Anders realized that the voice was speaking within his own mind. Very suspicious.

“You don’t know who you are,” Anders stated. “Very well.
Where
are you?”

“I don’t know that, either.” The voice paused, then went on. “Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I’m in some sort of limbo. I don’t know how I got here or who I am, but I want desperately to get out. Will you help me?”

Still fighting the idea of a voice speaking within his head, Anders knew that his next decision was vital. He had to accept—or reject—his own sanity.

“All right,” Anders said, lacing the other shoe. “I’ll grant that you’re a person in trouble, and that you’re in some sort of telepathic contact with me. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“I’m afraid not,” the voice said, with infinite sadness. “You’ll have to find out for yourself.”

“Can you contact anyone else?”

“No.”

“Then how can you talk with me?”

“I don’t know.”

Anders walked to his bureau mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, whistling softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him.

“I really don’t see how I can be of any help,” Anders said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. “You don’t know where you are, and there don’t seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you?” He turned and looked around the room to see if he had forgotten anything.