ROWAN-4
Having been warned of Dr. Mulgar’s approach by Romulus, I was sitting on the brown couch studying the Grail with eager diligence, or rather what I was eager to appear to be diligence, when the door swung inward and he proceeded forth.
Earlier that day, not long after waking up, in lieu of the complicated task that my uneasy spirit didn’t want to tackle, of determining the precise times that Dr. Mulgar, Dr. Bowusuvi and the Fatheads, respectively, would arrive, I had asked Mind a related question: “Mind, why did Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi not come yesterday, or the Fatheads either?”
I asked as I dressed myself—in brown trousers, today, as every day, and a loose shirt that buttoned in front and tucked neatly into my pants, red, like all of my shirts, this one more bright than dark.
“Perhaps they were busy with other duties, Rowan,” Mind observed, with his usual good-natured acuteness.
“But they come almost every day! All of them!” I lacked the vocabulary, and the understanding of statistics, to enumerate to him the high odds against three events (the separate visitations of Dr. Mulgar, Dr. Bowusuvi, and the Fatheads) that each had a strong probability of happening on any given day, all not happening on the same day; but I knew, or sensed, that such a confluence was very very unlikely—likely so unlikely that chance couldn’t explain it.
Mind didn’t respond. I waited, with a pre-verbalized expectancy, but still he didn’t respond. He seemed either not to be sensible of the extraordinary nature of my regular visitors’ coinciding absences, or to be unimpressed by it.
“That means,” I expostulated, losing patience, “that there must be a reason they didn’t come! None of them, the same day!” Realizing that something was wrong with the syntax of my explanation, I clarified, “All of them didn’t come, and on the same day!” Sensing that something was still off, I said, “Each one of them was gone the same day…you know what I mean, Mind!”
“Are you suggesting, Rowan, that they were spending time together?”
“That’s what I was asking you!” I had been about to head to the kitchen to make my breakfast gruel, but instead sat down on my bed. I often held conversations with Mind while going about my daily tasks, but I sensed that to find out what I wanted to know I was going to have to walk the bright road, which would require my full attention.
Ignoring my protestations, Mind asked me, “If Thront, Hojum, and the gentlemen you refer to as ‘Fatheads’ were all to do something together, Rowan, what do you think it would be?”
I thought about this. I found I couldn’t imagine any of them doing anything with any of the others. Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi visited together on occasion, and when they did they spoke to each other, about me for the most part, in what I termed Otherspeak, that is, using Leniman words but in such a way that I had trouble following their conversation. Their interaction seemed, well I didn’t know what it seemed, but I couldn’t imagine them ever speaking to one another in any other setting, or about any topic except me, let alone spending any leisure time together. And the Fatheads, I thought, were their underlings, their servants: the Fatheads might spend time with each other and with others of their Fathead ilk, but with Dr. Mulgar or Dr. Bowusuvi? No. The doctors wouldn’t deign.
“Show me Dr. Mulgar yesterday,” I requested, and then, to intercept his inevitable, “At what point of the day yesterday would you like to see him, Rowan?” I hastened to add, “the middle of the day. The exact middle of the day.”
I walked the bright road, then: I felt a pleasant breeze and smelled dry leaves (I didn’t know this odor was of dry leaves at the time, only that it was strange and yet somehow familiar, and pleasant), and I was strolling, partly as if in a dream in which I was aware of where I was and in complete, conscious control of my own actions; and partly as if remembering strolling so, but with much more vividness and detail than a memory usually supplies.
I was strolling in a comfort neither of warmth or coolness, under an archway of orange and red leaves which clung in clusters to the branches of trees that reached out to each other from both sides of a wide path. Orange and red leaves, along with a few yellows and browns, covered this path as I walked it, as overhead the leaves still on the trees whispered, whispered, and laughed, and whispered stories about me and a million million others walking this path of fire, this bright road.
I walked forward, and at some unperceived moment (no matter how hard I tried, I never succeeded in perceiving the transition from the bright road to my destination), I was no longer on the path, but inside an immense circular room.
Whiteness flooded into my eyes from all directions. I was in a house, no, I decided, it wasn’t a house. It was too big to be a house, way too big, and it was circular. It was an edifice of some sort, and the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, or more accurately, the dome, were all white—clean, sterile, white. An odor similar to that of the soaps with which I was supposed to clean my bowls, spoons, sinks, and waste pot permeated the air. Dr. Mulgar stood, bright and tan, in a crowd of men wearing black and orange uniforms, in the center of the edifice, or, more accurately, as I was about to learn, in the center of this central chamber of the edifice. He and the other men were gathered beside, or in the theoretical shadow of, a plant which reached such a height it could have been a tree except that it didn’t have a trunk or branches, or leaves, just blades, like those of grass, but prickly and as wide as a man’s armspan, several of these blades, which were twined together, reaching to the white top of the dome. It was a rare plant called a swords-of-danzili, as I would learn many years later.
Many other people, too many to count, most of them garbed in the same black and orange uniforms as the men with Dr. Mulgar, and which, he, too, I now noticed, wore, were milling around everywhere, some of them crossing back and forth in the space between Dr. Mulgar and me, thereby blocking him from my view for short bursts of time. A babble of intermingled voices ebbed and flowed in the expansive whiteness above the people’s heads.
After exchanging words with one of the uniformed men among the crowd of which he was a part, Dr. Mulgar disengaged himself from the group and commenced a brisk walk in a direction that would take him farther away from me. I followed him.
It looked as if he would walk right into the white wall on the far side of the room, and, puzzled by this I had in fact slowed the pace of my pursuit, when my eyes sorted out that there was a rounded rectangular opening in the wall, an egress that I hadn’t noticed before because it was as white as the wall. Well, the walls of the chamber into which the egress led were as white as the walls of the circular chamber, making the opening itself seem white; the opening itself, of course, had no color, as per the nature of openings.
Seeing that Dr. Mulgar meant to gain this opening, I ran after him, dodging people as I went. I knew they couldn’t see me, and I knew I would run right through them if I happened to collide with them, and that neither they nor I would feel a thing, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to run into them. I might have saved myself a few steps with a direct route, but even as it was I reached the aperture, which I found wasn’t a chamber after all, but a long corridor, in time to see Dr. Mulgar open a door—a non-white door, chestnut, to be exact—about halfway down the corridor, and disappear behind it.
This corridor was higher-ceilinged than the rooms I was used to, namely, my bedroom, the kitchen, the main room, and Romulus’ room, but seemed nevertheless dark and confining entering into it from the circular chamber’s chasmic whiteness. The walls, here, though white, weren’t so bright up close as those in the circular room; and, as well, a parade of black doors (and one chestnut) on both sides of the corridor broke up the whiteness which in the circular room was so overweening, making it, the whiteness, less big here, less endless.
At a dead run in an effort to reach the chestnut door before it closed, I was unable to come all the way to a stop when I saw I wasn’t going to make it, and I ran right into it—and through it, into another white room. Three men, attired in various outfits of black and orange, sat at a large black table on large, cushioned black chairs. Dr. Mulgar sat down at the table with the others, and the four of them began discussing something. They talked for some while, in a gibberish similar to Otherspeak, about nothing that I could keep in my mind so senseless was it, or beyond me, maybe. I waited for something to happen, but they just sat around the table jabbering. After awhile—a long while, it seemed to me—Dr. Mulgar left that room and went to a different room and talked to some different people.
“Okay, Mind, that’s good,” I said, and in the blink of a wink I was back in my room, seated on the smooth whites of my bed.
A bit disappointed, I said, “That didn’t do any good.”
“Are you sure, Rowan?”
“He does that stuff all the time!” The incomprehensible boringness of Dr. Mulgar’s life had always struck me. It made me fonder of him, in a way, because he was always so cold, formal, and hard when interacting with all of the other Orange-and-Blacks, as I called them, whereas with me he was friendly and encouraging, smiling and laughing often.
“And that reveals nothing about what you want to know?”
“No,” I said at once to forestall a meandering back-and-forth with Mind in which he led me on a circuitous route to an answer he could have given me when I asked the question, “Now show me Dr. Bowusuvi yesterday exactly half-way through the day, too.” I asked Mind to show me the Fatheads, as well, and neither they, nor Dr. Bowusuvi were doing anything that I hadn’t at some other time observed them doing at the end of the bright road.
By the time I had finished watching Dr. Bowusuvi and the Fatheads, I had wandered down the hall to the kitchen, and was now making breakfast. I found the appropriate bowls in the bowl cabinet, the white breakfast bowls (as opposed to the brown lunch and supper bowls), and then, opening the gruel cabinet, debated between cans of dry gruel: Should it be yellow today, or white, brown, yellow-white, or yellow-brown? Gruel was what we ate for every breakfast, lunch, and supper, except on the rare day Dr. Mulgar brought us some delicacy, such as roast chicken and nuts. Brought me some delicacy, anyway, which I shared with Romulus later. Roast chicken was probably my favorite treat, because it provided a second course of enjoyment: the bone war that Romulus and I would have after we were finished eating, which was not unlike the black-and-white tile wars we had but with the extra, rewarding, element of being different from the usual.
I decided, today, on brown gruel for me and white for Romulus, then emptied the dry gruel into the bowls, filled the bowls with water from the kitchen pump and watched the dry gruel become wet gruel while filling a glass of water for both Romulus and me. Then I went down to Romulus’ room to spend my nervous morning which culminated in the arrival of Dr. Bowusuvi and the Fatheads, and now, Dr. Mulgar.
Dr. Mulgar was, in appearance and behavior, almost the exact opposite of Dr. Bowusuvi. He was tall, his face was tan, bordering on sun-burnt, he had long dark hair, serious gray eyes, and a ready, exaggerated and yet somehow friendly and compassionate white smile that shined like a crown above the colorful red or blue or striped sweaters he often wore. He was vigorous, vibrant, youthful (if not in fact young), and garrulous, with a high degree of personal magnetism. One was drawn to him, and drawn to like him. He did everything with zeal, a bounce in his step, an infectious energy.
His defining characteristic, though, was his ferventness. He was an intense man, driven. Everything he said was said with ferventness, as if he were burning from the inside, or as if, perhaps, he’d been given a holy duty from some deity, and every moment of his life had to be dedicated to fulfilling this duty. He brimmed over with intensity, and seriousness. Even when he laughed or joked, he was serious. When he laughed you could see in his eyes that his mind was elsewhere, addressing some more important matter even as his mouth curved upward and his white teeth flashed his appreciation of the jocularity of the present.
When he communicated with you—with me, in particular, but also the few other people with whom I saw him interact—a grasping eagerness emanated from him, as if he needed you for something, as if you were a possible helper in the fulfillment of his duty to his god. He was never relaxed, but filled always with an anxiety that one felt kinetically. Factoring in his personal magnetism and the strength of his presence, I can well imagine that this anxiety must have spread to almost anybody with whom he interacted. It did for me: I liked him, I looked forward to his visits, but I was tired when he left, and anxious, and filled with a need to learn everything he had instructed me to learn from the Grail, and more importantly, to learn how to see the things he wanted me to see, and more than that, to do something, take up some flaming sword for him, perhaps, and march with him to glorious battle. Something like that.
And he came every day. He was my teacher; we rendezvoused, whenever he showed up, in the main room, usually on the brown couch, and there he showed me what he wanted me to study on the Grail, and quizzed me about what he’d asked me to study yesterday. When I provided correct answers to his questions, which I invariably did, he told me that I was doing well, that I was a good boy, that I was intelligent, precocious, or amazing, often giving me a proud pat on the head. I lived for those pats; I wanted to please him, and he was always pleased with my work on the Grail.
However, the Grail stuff was always just a preliminary to the real reason he had come. He wanted something else from me, something that would help him achieve whatever great thing he was trying to achieve; and though I wanted to help him, I didn’t know how, and I knew he was frustrated by my inability to supply him with what he needed; and this caused me great anxiety (which I suspect is in part why I was so flawless with the Grail stuff: I was trying to atone for my failure in what was more important to him).
After dispensing with the Grail, he’d grow intense—even more intense than he already was—earnest, serious, and while he wouldn’t actually say, “Okay, that other stuff was meaningless, this is all that’s important,” I would have known by his attitude that that was the gist of the situation had I been younger even than I was.
He would ask, “Did you have any dreams last night?” More often than not I’d had none that I could remember, so I’d say, “no,” or shake my head, to which he’d just nod or say, “That’s okay,” with restrained disappointment. I did remember a dream every now and then, and when I did, I would excitedly begin telling him about it (especially if it was one of the rare ones in which I did something, or saw something interesting), hoping that he’d be happy that I’d had one, but he would always stop me before I was finished, smile sadly, and say something like, “That was a nice dream, Romulus.” I’d know, then, that it wasn’t the dream he wanted me to have.
Then he would ask me whether I’d had any strange daydreams or unexplained thoughts, and finally after my responses to those questions proved fruitless (as they inevitably did), growing yet more intense, more eager, he would urge me to concentrate, and would say something like, “Okay Romulus, ask yourself what’s going to happen tomorrow. Just relax, blank your mind, empty your mind of everything except that one question, ‘What is going to happen tomorrow?’” And on and on, in similar exhortations. Relaxing was difficult under the powerful insistence of his non-relaxation, but I would try: I would blank my mind, or do whatever else he asked me to do (sometimes he’d say, “Imagine a whiteness, and into that whiteness let tomorrow come,” or “Imagine a fire, let it burn away today and yesterday and every day except tomorrow, and see what is in your mind,” or any number of other image-guided attempts to get me to “see tomorrow”), and nothing would happen. Random images would come into my head, and I would report these to him, but he recognized them as what they were immediately, and would re-exhort me to try again, to blank my mind, and to refuse to allow my own mind to send me any images, to allow only images that came from outside, from “somewhere else.”
I didn’t know what to do. Nothing but random images which I was pretty sure were coming from my own mind were all that I could summon no matter how hard I tried. And boy did I try hard, because he was so anxious for me to “see tomorrow” and so disappointed, and as the days progressed so frustrated with me, for not being able to do so. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that I didn’t make the connection between the images Mind showed me and the images he wanted me to see, but I didn’t. Despite having to situate each scene that I asked of Mind in time, I had very little concept of time, existing as I did in a sort of timelessness, separate and apart from the rest of the world. I didn’t think of the scenes Mind showed me as the future or the past, but as interesting and/or informative vignettes.
Dr. Mulgar would say, “Don’t worry about it, you’ll get it, you’re special, I know you’ll get it, don’t worry about it, okay, Romulus?” when I grew upset at my own failures, but I knew he was getting more and more impatient with me. During one of the rare occasions when he and Dr. Bowusuvi visited at the same time, I heard him say to Dr. Bowusuvi, “What’s the hold up? What’s taking him so long? You said he’d be exhibiting by now!” To which Dr. Bowusuvi responded in his usual emotionless manner, “I said that based on the average progress of overall brain development, he might be exhibiting by this age. The information we have to go by, however, is quite limited, and it could be inaccurate. Maybe he never will.”
Once, I tried to make him happy by making something up when he asked me for a vision, but just as he recognized the random images for what they were, he recognized that I was lying. Even then, he didn’t get angry with me, he just assured me, “No pressure, Romulus. There’s no need to lie to me. Just concentrate, don’t make things up, there’s no pressure, just keep trying, okay?” and gave me a reassuring pat on the head. But the more he said there was no pressure, the more pressure I felt.
Today, when he arrived, Romulus and I were sucking down long gulps of disinfectant-laden air. Well, I was; Romulus, freed from having to contort himself into positions in which the smallest possible amount of the surface area of his body was touching the waste-saturated floor of his cage, was lying flat on his back, as stretched out as he could get, which I understood to be the equivalent for him of me sucking in the air, an expression of relief to be out of the stench that had permeated the house for two days. We were celebrating, as it were, the freshness of existence, and getting ready to settle into our routine of studying the Grail, teaching each other our respective languages, talking or being silent in comfortable comradeship, and/or playing games (I had, with my fear of being caught in a punishable predicament allayed by the arrival and departure of Dr. Bowusuvi, even ventured to bring the black and white blocks down from my bedroom, the possibility of making up a new game knocking about in my mind), when he said, “The demon arrives,” and handed me the Grail, which I took, hurrying, to the Main room, where I sat down on the couch pretending to study. The first time Romulus had called Dr. Mulgar “the demon,” I thought he was referring to Dr. Bowusuvi, who the designation suited, but Dr. Bowusuvi he just called “the old man.”
Dr. Mulgar entered smiling as usual, and we started in with the usual mini-lesson; but this was a false start. Today, he hurried through the Grail stuff with undisguised disinterest, proceeding to questions about dreams and exhortations to see tomorrow without even giving me any Grail assignments for tomorrow. His eagerness was overwhelming, his need palpable, his impatience frightening. And I was frightened: I didn’t think, consciously, that if I was unable to do what he needed me to do, he would kill me, or mistreat me, or do the eye thing to me as Dr. Bowusuvi did when I didn’t meet his demands; but I think I had reasoned it out, unconsciously, that a) he needed something, and b) I was a possible valuable tool in satisfying this need, hence if I didn’t become a valuable tool in satisfying that need, then I wouldn’t be needed and could be disposed of. So, without knowing exactly why, I felt that I had to supply him with the sort of vision he was always asking me for. I felt cornered and desperate, knowing, or believing, that I must tell him something but knowing that he would know if I were making something up. Then, and only then, was when I turned to Mind. Like a wild animal fleeing, I looked about, seeking escape, and it occurred to me in an unfocused but heightened flash of awareness that Mind could supply me with a vision of sorts, and that if I described this vision to Dr. Mulgar, I wouldn’t be making it up.
“Mind?” I prompted, tentative, testing to see whether he was with me or not. I may well have mumbled aloud, too full of anxiety to control the movement of my mouth, but if I did, Dr. Mulgar didn’t observe it; at any rate, he didn’t tell me to “Enunciate, Romulus enunciate!” which is what he usually said when I spoke with less than complete clarity.
Mind was present immediately: “Yes, Rowan?”
Desperate, I said, “Show me something! Anything!” I didn’t think he would show me anything without at least moderate questioning. I thought he would probably begin with his usual, “What would you like to see, Rowan?” and then if or when I was able to come up with something or someone I wanted to see, he would ask his usual, “When would you like to see them, Rowan?” and then when I said, for example, “Tomorrow,” he would ask his usual, “What time tomorrow would you like to see them, Rowan?” at which point I would have either to say exactly what hour of the day I wanted to see them, or else mark the time with an event such as “right after lunch,” or “at the same time the Fatheads are going to be here.” This discussion would take several minutes, and throughout it I’d be mumbling right there in front of Dr. Mulgar, who would not only tell me to “Enunciate, Romulus, enunciate!” but would also be getting more and more impatient, and perhaps curious about what I was doing—but, Mind came through this time: I was walking along the bright road before I finished enunciating (to Mind), “anything!”
At the end of the bright road, I came to a cave, or what seemed a cave or underground chamber, spacious and circular, with glowing yellow-white lanterns throwing warm light upon smooth rock floors and uneven striated red and brown walls, the ceiling lost in darkness. In the middle of this chamber was a stack of jars and cans and wallets of food: bread, dried fruit, jellies and jams, I could see for sure, and there was other stuff in the shadows that I couldn’t identify. Several rough and yet comfortable-looking pallets lined the walls, and near one of these a man and a woman sat on the ground facing each other, cross-legged. I could see them clearly in the lantern light. The man, who was dressed in Jaji green (I didn’t know this was the green of the traditional Twoblossoms leaf Jaji winter cloak at the time, of course, Romulus having been clothes-less all the time I’d known him, but I would learn later that it was), was larger than Romulus, but not as large as Dr. Mulgar or Dr. Bowusuvi, not as tall at least—that much I could tell even though he was sitting. He appeared more tightly put-together, though, compact and strong. Scars crisscrossed his swarthy arms and face, contrasting with and yet somehow accentuating his wondering and sad but joyful green eyes. The woman, or girl, I couldn’t decide which one, dressed in a cloak of goldenrod and a long red skirt, was small and almost white, much paler than anyone I knew (which admittedly only included myself, Romulus, the Fatheads, Dr. Bowusuvi, and Dr. Mulgar), with freckles abounding on her face and arms.
The girl leaned forward, her face compassionate, sorrowful, and touched the man’s head with infinite tenderness. The man’s face took on an aspect of surprise, and he said, in joyous wonder, “Is that you?”