- 13 -
"Well maybe you don't have
much, but I have boxes of stuff in my hotel suite, which furthermore
is rigged up in a slap dash imitation of my office, kitchen, and bedroom
at home. I don't know how they did it, normally these things remain
as poignant& reminders of the absence of the former clumsy sentimental
owner, this paperweight, that inkstand--though it isn't an inkstand
these days of course at all, but a computer."
"They brought your computer?
Your own actual computer is in your hotel room here? That's very extraordinary.
When I arrived there was only a cot in the corner of an empty room and
a lightbulb swinging from the ceiling. Very existential!"
"But does this not support
my contention that I am not dead, but on a transplanetary adventure.
In fact I think I know what happened exactly; it starts out like this
. . ."
"Should we arrange our chairs
in a circle?"
"I see! You are the lone survivor,
who tells the tale."
"Sarcasm should be left on
earth, like . . . other clothing."
"I"I've felt like that right
along, you know, a lone survivor� , who survives to tell the tale---for
no other reason it occurs to him."
"And not because of any special
ability to tell tales?"
"No, but maybe because of a
moral fiber, a loyalty strain in him, which we can't trace because we
don't know where he was, or from when he came originally, to have invested
in him this sense of duty to the others lost--"
"He means to represent the
others. Argue their case. Argue that all their sins were most forgivable
when you realized that, really, in their hearts they were . . . and
so on."
"People! What I didn't like
was to watch people exuding personality, that
was very embarrassing to me.
There were some natural personalities, but most people were obviously
trying them on for size. Especially at picnics."
"What?"
"I said I hated to watch the
way people behaved at picnics."
"Walking around with plates
of food. Having fun."
"In Rochester all you had to
do was set up tents with food and call it a Festival, and thousands
of people would show up. It was frightening."
"I used to be relieved when
I woke up and it was raining. Then we didn't have to go trying to have
fun all day."
"How old were you?"
"In some areas one is always
the same age."
"Fourteen?"
"DeQuincey writes: 'You will
think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and communicative of my own
private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think
aloud, and follow my own humors, than much to inquire who is listening�z
to me; for, if once I stop to consider what is proper to be said, I
shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper."
"I thought I was invisible,
but I was vivid. That my thoughts being secret made me invisible, but
it was written all over me."
"What?"
"I think I was about thirty-five
before I realized that I was the major presence. People were spinning
around me. I had a gravitational force. Or maybe an electronic field
around me."
"And now?"
"I thought I was a receiver,
but I was a rebroadcaster as well. I knew what other people were thinking
better than they did. I myself had no thoughts."
"Oh, come on!"
"Edgar Allen wrote, as an apostrophe
for I forget what work: 'Surely now no man can say I have not done an
original thing!"
"Vanity supreme?"
"There is no vanity in a thought
if the thought is true."
"Could you repeat that?"
"There is no vanity in a thought
if the thought is true."
"That will stop the parade!"
"What does apostrophe mean?
I never learned that."
"Not the punctuation mark.
It's a salvo aimed at another quarter from the main address."
"It's a what?"
"What's a salvo?"
"Don't you know anything?"
"O�æh my God, what
if it all comes back?"
"So tell us again how they
do with the body doubles. How all the graves are filled with body doubles
and the people themselves literally transported."
