You Could Not Say, Saint Joseph having terminated the interview just there; but you Reported your Opinion that he was nowise “spaced out” (though the episode with the Senecas may well have occurred as he declared) and that, distressing as must have been his defeat by John Schott at Marshyhope, it had not unhinged him. Some sort of punishment — of yourself in the first instance for Disrupting His Marriage; perhaps of the Doctor for performing the fatal abortion — might well be among Morgan’s intentions, but you Did Not Quite Believe it to have brought him to the Farm. From Monsieur Casteene, in whose disinterestedness you Had No Great Confidence, you had Learned that a film director named Prinz was in fact at work on some sort of production involving scenes from the War of 1812 in Chesapeake Bay and on the Niagara Frontier: perhaps the blowing up of old Fort Erie, or the British capture of Fort Niagara, or the burning of Buffalo. Quite possibly Morgan was advising him on these scenes; Casteene himself hoped to be of use to the project when the company arrived, sometime during the summer, inasmuch as his forebears had played a certain role, so he asserted, in the original events.
“But that’s Casteene,” you Concluded. “Do you know who he really is?”
The Doctor twitched his nose. “No idle ontologies, Jacob Horner. ‘Casteene’ is sufficient for our purposes. So. Like yourself, I find our Saint Joseph to be altogether rational, certainly hostile, not so certainly threatening. He has paid in advance for the month of April, so we shall be seeing him for a while yet. If he does not murder us or have us arrested — either of which I regard him as quite capable of doing but not very likely to do — his presence here may have its benefits. Bibi and Pocahontas have certainly been easier to live with lately, though I foresee trouble if he shows a preference for one or the other. But you.”
You Waited.
“You Locked Up again, did you?”
“Not Locked Up,” you Corrected, “Petered Out. When Joe spoke of redreaming history, we were both looking out of the window. I was Waiting for him to explain and at the same time Thinking of all that water going by, that started out clean in Lake Superior and then flushed down through Huron and Erie. Heraclitus says you can’t step into the same stream twice: I’d be Content to Step Into It once. And Horace speaks of the man standing on the riverbank, shoes in hand, forever waiting to take the first step, till all the water’s run by. I’m that man.”
“Literature,” the Doctor said contemptuously. “That reminded me that the corps of engineers is supposed to turn off Niagara Falls this summer, the American side, to see whether it can be made as spectacular as the Canadian Falls: the most American project I Ever Heard Of. It’s expected to be a great tourist attraction, a sort of negative natural wonder. Then I Got To Thinking about negativism, how it would be positive in the antiworld, where entropy would be ectropy and we’d be running an Immobilization Farm—”
“Horner, Horner.”
“That was it, till Tombo X came by and laid his Straight-Razor Therapy on me.” It is that young man’s wont, with white male immobiles, to terrify them into motion by whipping out an old-fashioned straight razor, rolling his eyeballs and flashing his teeth blackamoor-style, and, seizing the patient by the scrotum, threatening in Deep Dixie dialect to relieve him of his honky nuts. “One day he’ll go too far with that.”
“One day,” the Doctor said, “you will Tell my son to get his pickaninny hands off you or you will Burn a cross on his lawn. That day the conversation can begin.”
“He cheats,” you Complained. “By squeezing. It wasn’t fear of castration that fetched me up. It was pain.”
“Never mind. You had Been Out for five hours. And you might Still Be There if he had not been dodging Pocahontas. It was exactly like old times?”
“Exactly. I was Aware of everything going on, but Weatherless. Couldn’t Bring myself to Move. Zen Buddhists speak of the air breathing you…”
“For pity’s sake, Horner, do not Add Zen Buddhism to your White Socks and Skinny Neckties. This is 1969. You are Forty-Six. Most men of your Age and Class have children in college who have gotten over their own adolescent mysticism by this time. We are right where we started.”
You Waited. The Doctor took his time. His own hair and mustache, now entirely white, he has let grow longer in the current fashion, and has added a small goatee: he looks like a bald black Colonel Sanders, or a dapper negative of Albert Einstein. Your Mind Began to Wander, then to Dissipate. Though you Would Not Join the Generation, seriously to yourself you Enounced the current test pattern of your Consciousness:
You’ve Got a lot to live,
And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.
Then it too trickled away into the void. Across a measureless distance the Doctor said: “I have no razor. But I will cheerfully crotch you if you do not Wake Up.”
Okay.
“Okay. Your Friend Saint Joseph has the right idea, whether he and the former Joe Morgan are the same or not.”
“They’re the same.”
The Doctor shrugged his eyebrows. “Heraclitus’s dictum cuts two ways: even if the river had not flowed, the You would have. I am remembering how Morgan sent his wife back to you when he could not assimilate her first infidelity. As if a replay might clarify it…”
The Doctor slid his chair away, stood, relit his long-dead cigar. The interview was apparently over.
“An impressive chap, your Friend. But this Wiederträumerei is a dangerous business. You set about to kill two birds with one stone, and sometimes you wipe out the whole flock. So. Forget what we decided earlier about you and Pocahontas, at least until Saint Joseph makes his choice. You and I must go back to weekly P-and-A’s, as in the old days.” He frowned. “Reenactment. But if there is no Freshman English requirement on the campuses nowadays, surely there is no Prescriptive Grammar. And you Ought to Stay Residential. How will you Teach?”
~ ~ ~
R: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of A. B. Cooke III: Pontiac’s conspiracy.
At Castines Hundred
Niagara, Upper Canada
2 April 1812
My Dearest Henrietta or Henry,
Read, dear child, when you shall have been born & begun to be educated, a great tiresome epical poem call’d Columbiad, by Joel Barlow of Connecticut & Paris, wherein the dying & despondent Columbus, in a dream or trance, is fetcht to the Mount of Vision by Hesper, Spirit of the Western World: thence like Aeneas in Hades he beholds panoramically the future history (up to 1807, the date of the poem’s appearance) of the empire for whose initiation he is responsible. This vision, stout Barlow assures us — of white Americans pushing ever westward, clearing the forests, draining the marshes, harvesting the fish & game, building canals & roads & cities from coast to coast — cheers Columbus & reconciles him to his obscure death.
The conceit is admirable. The poem itself is a bore because, unlike the Aeneid, its concerns do not range much beyond sentimental patriotism, and because, unlike Virgil, its author is a merely educated, sensible fellow with an amateur’s gift for making verses. Joel Barlow was one of the self-styled “Hartford Wits”; another was your grandfather, Henry Burlingame IV, who befriended Barlow at Yale College just before the American Revolution and suggested both The Vision of Columbus (the poet’s 1st & briefer version of Columbiad) & a passable satire of Daniel Shays’ rebellion call’d The Anarchiad, of which more anon. The Cooke-Burlingame line is given neither to longueurs nor to longevity: my father is said to have died in 1785 at the age of 39, before either of the poems that covertly memorialize him was publisht.