Karter SHolc - The Menagerie of Babel

I was living then in a cottage behind a ramshackle house in the Berkeley hills. Most of my ready cash had gone for three months' rent in advance. I could have had the basement for less, but when I saw it I balked. Half the floor was dirt, the other half worm-eaten boards. Through one filthy window fell the glaucous light of a Manhattan airshaft at dawn. It was a tomb. I knew that my asceticism was not equal to it. And I wanted at most three months. So I took the cottage. It was one room fifteen feet on a side, without electricity or plumbing.

My landlord lived in the main house. He was a law-school dropout with an overbearing manner that collapsed the moment I resisted it. Then he was almost unctuous. His name was Peter Fraser. He rented the house, and sublet rooms in it. I guessed that because of his manner he had trouble filling them. In a week, competition for housing among returning students would be desperate, and he could have named his price, but he chose to take my cash. We smoked a joint on it, and between lies I told him some harmless truths about myself. My luck was running well then in areas I did not care about.

Berkeley was neutral ground for me. I had come to the far edge of the country for some peace. When asked, I would say that I meant to complete my master's degree here; after leaving Harvard I spent part of the summer cleaning lab glass at Woods Hole, so it was at least a plausible intention. But in fact I had not even applied for admission, and on the road I took every chance to prolong the trip. On my last ride south from Eugene, when I woke from the shallow dreams peculiar to travel to see with what woe the mud flats of the bay and San Francisco barely visible through a gunmetal haze, I knew that all my intentions had been stories. I had left the East because there were decisions I did not want to make.

So I have no right to judge Murphy. At every crux of choice stands an angel offering counsel, and only after you have chosen and passed do you see his other face, that of a demon, taunting, vilifying, forbidding return. Glimpse this face once, and you live thereafter on a rack of indecision. My choice now was to live out the folly I had started or to run the gauntlet of retreat.

Murphy had no such crises. He was an idiot, in the root sense of the word; I mean that his mind was entirely his own, private, unlike any I had known, unique almost to the point of insanity. I do not mean to judge, only to describe him.

The morning after I moved in I met him in the backyard. He sat at an easel, drawing, not looking up but jerking his head sporadically to one side. I had never seen anyone so thin. He was shirtless and pale, though his arms were sunburnt and freckled. In his left hand was a drafting pen which rattled as he shook it. I had stepped out of the cottage before I saw him, and by the excessive politeness I indulged to combat my diffidence I was obliged at least to say hello.

Wait, he replied.

Wait? For what? I made to walk on, but stalled. Perhaps it was the intensity of the sun on the white page and black ink that arrested me. It was a dense, precise nature study. I took it for a sea urchin until, past the easel, I spotted his subject, a withered sunflower. It might have been on the moon, the way he drew it. I could not look at it nor away from it for very long.

The same held true for Murphy, when he turned to me. Where his drawing was severe and remorseless, his features were as spare and pale as his body.

His face was almost without character, except for the eyes. In them was a look I had sometimes surprised in myself: a total faith in the sufficiency of love, a hunger for the touch of another soul so absolute and needful that when repulsed, it turned to reproach and hurtfulness. If eyes reflect the soul then his soul, like mine, was far too eager to believe in any sympathy and too ready to bruise when repulsed. Not to acknowledge what I saw there, again I hedged my territory with a few small lies, and one truth: I said I liked his drawing, sometime I'd have to see more of it. He immediately agreed, and I was caught.

His room was in the crowning cupola of the house. It was filled with potted plants, and with his drawings. They all had the same stark, disconcerting quality. One was of a horseshoe crab; some were of cacti; a few were of the city view through his windows. I glanced at them, away from them, back again, as if expecting some transformation, some unsuspected alternative to emerge from their schematic precision. Even his pencil sketches were without softness.

As I studied them, at once fascinated and impatient to be away, Murphy watered his plants. Here he was in control, his body less nervous, his eyes less vulnerable. He raised the lid of a terrarium, and behind a cactus a dun lizard's tail lashed the sand.

I love these, he said, reaching in to touch a cactus spine. Do you know why? Look at them. They know the secret. Life is a drug. We'll turn ourselves into anything to have it.

I looked again at the drawings, and all at once they were morbid. Around the edge of each object, tossed onto the white shore of paper by an unfathomable sea, was an intense, obliterating space. Every line in the drawing battled this void. The overdrawn precision was claustrophobic.

He lifted his finger from the spine and regarded serenely the red bead forming on its pad. Briefly he pressed it to his mouth.

Why so many? So many types? Who can explain it?

Like a good graduate student, I began to answer by Darwinian rote, but his faint smile forced me to my more authentic, less scientific belief: the world was a plenum. The wonder of this was my life. His innocent question, if it was that, was the one thing he could have said to draw me from my diffidence into a study of him.

On occasion Murphy took his drawings to Telegraph Avenue for sale. One afternoon I went with him, because his route crossed the campus and I wanted a look at the place. If it became real to me, I thought, I might be moved to act. And I needed to buy an oil lamp. Peter had halfheartedly offered to run an extension cord from the house to the cottage, but I sensed that I would be obligated to him for the favor. I also wondered how real Murphy's business connection was. I thought that parts of his life were fantasy. I had nothing against this, certainly my own life now was largely phantasmal and seemed at times a slow but definite form of ritual suicide, but if I were to know him I would feel more secure knowing the form of his delusions.

My doubts were not unfounded. The rhythms of the house were erratic. It was an odd holdover, or recapitulation, of the communes of the sixties, yet I had more privacy than if I had lived alone. Dinners were shared, so

I gained a quick introduction to the seven tenants, but a nearly pathological avoidance of questions kept me from learning much. One man played bass for a band perpetually about to get work. One woman studied midwifery. Another was a proofreader for a Buddhist press. One couple, specialists in "noetic research," seemed to do nothing but drift in and out at any time of the day or night. Once I came back from a walk to find them peering into my cottage through its one window; they did not return my greeting. Their eyes were like cold oil.

My landlord liked to complain to me about the other tenants, as if thereby forming an alliance. I suspect he tried it on all new tenants. He confided that he was owed thousands in back rents, a pitiable soft touch, yet he spent his time aimlessly and went out in his battered Honda only for tennis, movies, and political meetings. His way of life at least had an easy explanation: he had a trust fund, and sold drugs.

Murphy and I crossed campus. I did not like it. Architecturally it was a hodgepodge. Beaux Artes styles had been lifted and laid with the care of a parvenu moving a castle across the ocean stone by stone. The buildings boldly declared that culture could be bought, transported, and legitimated in a new context. To stare at them too long invited dislocation; the classical style was wrong in this raw clear air, under this luxuriant and primitive flora. Like the defensive edges of Murphy's drawings, the pale granite and red-tiled roofs barely held the corrosive blue sky at bay.