The Changed Man Page 16

  “My son is brilliant, Dr. Fryer, and I want him to succeed, but surely this mumbo jumbo can’t be more than luck.”

  Dr. Fryer only smiled and took a sip of wine. “Joe tells me that you have never submitted to the test yourself.”

  Alvin almost argued, but it was true. He never had submitted, even though he went through the motions. “I’ve seen it in action,” Alvin said.

  “Have you? Have you seen his results with someone you know well?”

  Alvin shook his head, then smiled. “I figured that since I didn’t believe in it, it wouldn’t work around me.”

  “It isn’t magic.”

  “It isn’t science, either,” said Alvin.

  “No, you’re right. Not science at all. But just because it isn’t science doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  “Either it’s science or it isn’t.”

  “What a clear world you live in,” said Dr. Fryer. “All the lines neatly drawn. We’ve run double-blind tests on his program, Dr. Bevis. Without knowing it, he has analyzed data taken from the same patient on different days, under different circumstances: the patient has even been given different instructions in some of the samples so that it wasn’t random. And you know what happened?”

  Alvin knew but did not say so.

  “Not only did his program read substantially the same for all the different random inputs for the same patient, but the program also spotted the ringers. Easily. And then it turned out that the ringers were a consistent result for the woman who wrote the test we happened to use for the non-random input. Even when it shouldn’t have worked, it worked.”

  “Very impressive,” said Alvin, sounding as unimpressed as he could.

  “It is impressive.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Alvin. “So the cards are consistent. How do we know that they mean anything, or that what they mean is true?”

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that your son is why it’s true?”

  Alvin tapped his spoon on the tablecloth, providing a muffled rhythm.

  “Your son’s computer program objectifies random input. But only your son can read it. To me that says that it’s his mind that makes his method work, not his program. If we could figure out what’s going on inside your son’s head, Dr. Bevis, then his method would be science. Until then it’s an art. But whether it is art or science, he tells the truth.”

  “Forgive me for what might seem a slight to your profession,” said Alvin, “but how in God’s name do you know whether what he says is true?”

  Dr. Fryer smiled and cocked his head. “Because I can’t conceive of it being wrong. We can’t test his interpretations the way we tested his program. I’ve tried to find objective tests. For instance, whether his findings agree with my notes. But my notes mean nothing, because until your son reads my patients, I really don’t understand them. And after he reads them, I can’t conceive of any other view of them. Before you dismiss me as hopelessly subjective, remember please, Dr. Bevis, that I have every reason to fear and fight against your son’s work. It undoes everything that I have believed in. It undermines my own life’s work. And Joe is just like you. He doesn’t think psychology is a science, either. Forgive me for what might seem a slight to your son, but he is troubled and cold and difficult to work with. I don’t like him much. So why do I believe him?”

  “That’s your problem, isn’t it?”

  “On the contrary, Dr. Bevis. Everyone who’s seen what Joe does, believes it. Except for you. I think that most definitely makes it your problem.”

  Dr. Fryer was wrong. Not everyone believed Joe.

  “No,” said Connie.

  “No what?” asked Alvin. It was breakfast. Joe hadn’t come downstairs yet. Alvin and Connie hadn’t said a word since “Here’s the eggs” and “Thanks.”

  Connie was drawing paths with her fork through the yolk stains on her plate. “Don’t do another reading with Joe.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Dr. Fryer told you to believe it, didn’t he?” She put her fork down.

  “But I didn’t believe Dr. Fryer.”

  Connie got up from the table and began washing the dishes. Alvin watched her as she rattled the plates to make as much noise as possible. Nothing was normal anymore. Connie was angry as she washed the dishes. There was a dishwasher, but she was scrubbing everything by hand. Nothing was as it should be. Alvin tried to figure out why he felt such dread.

  “You will do a reading with Joe,” said Connie, “because you don’t believe Dr. Fryer. You always insist on verifying everything for yourself. If you believe, you must question your belief. If you doubt, you doubt your own disbelief. Am I not right?”

  “No.” Yes.

  “And I’m telling you this once to have faith in your doubt. There is no truth whatever in his God-damned tarot.”

  In all these years of marriage, Alvin could not remember Connie using such coarse language. But then she hadn’t said god-damn; she had said God-damned, with all the theological overtones.

  “I mean,” she went on, filling the silence. “I mean how can anyone take this seriously? The card he calls Strength—a woman closing a lion’s mouth, yes, fine, but then he makes up a God-damned story about it, how the lion wanted her baby and she fed it to him.” She looked at Alvin with fear. “It’s sick, isn’t it?”

  “He said that?”

  “And the Devil, forcing the lovers to stay together. He’s supposed to be the firstborn child, chaining Adam and Eve together. That’s why Iocaste and Laios tried to kill Oedipus. Because they hated each other, and the baby would force them to stay together. But then they stayed together anyway because of shame at what they had done to an innocent child. And then they told everyone that asinine lie about the oracle and her prophecy.”

  “He’s read too many books.”

  Connie trembled. “If he does a reading of you, I’m afraid of what will happen.”

  “If he feeds me crap like that, Connie, I’ll just bite my lip. No fights, I promise.”

  She touched his chest. Not his shirt, his chest. It felt as if her finger burned right through the cloth. “I’m not worried that you’ll fight,” she said. “I’m afraid that you’ll believe him.”

  “Why would I believe him?”

  “We don’t live in the Tower, Alvin!”

  “Of course we don’t.”

  “I’m not Iocaste, Alvin!”

  “Of course you aren’t.”

  “Don’t believe him. Don’t believe anything he says.”

  “Connie, don’t get so upset.” Again: “Why would I believe him?”

  She shook her head and walked out of the room. The water was still running in the sink. She hadn’t said a word. But her answer rang in the room as if she had spoken: “Because it’s true.”

  Alvin tried to sort it out for hours. Oedipus and Iocaste. Adam, Eve, and the Devil. The mother feeding her baby to the lion. As Dr. Fryer had said, it isn’t the cards, it isn’t the program, it’s Joe. Joe and the stories in his head. Is there a story in the world that Joe hasn’t read? All the tales that man has told himself, all the visions of the world, and Joe knew them. Knew and believed them. Joe the repository of all the world’s lies, and now he was telling the lies back, and they believed him, every one of them believed him.

  No matter how hard Alvin tried to treat this nonsense with the contempt it deserved, one thing kept coming back to him. Joe’s program had known that Alvin was lying, that Alvin was playing games, not telling the truth. Joe’s program was valid at least that far. If his method can pass that negative test, how can I call myself a scientist if I disbelieve it before I’ve given it the positive test as well?

  That night while Joe was watching M*A*S*H reruns, Alvin came into the family room to talk to him. It always startled Alvin to see his son watching normal television shows, especially old ones from Alvin’s own youth. The same boy who had read Ulysses and made sense of it without reading a single commentary, and he was la
ughing out loud at the television.

  It was only after he had sat beside his son and watched for a while that Alvin realized that Joe was not laughing at the places where the laugh track did. He was not laughing at the jokes. He was laughing at Hawkeye himself.

  “What was so funny?” asked Alvin.

  “Hawkeye,” said Joe.

  “He was being serious.”

  “I know,” said Joe. “But he’s so sure he’s right, and everybody believes him. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

  As a matter of fact, no, I don’t. “I want to give it another try, Joe,” said Alvin.

  Even though it was an abrupt change of subject, Joe understood at once, as if he had long been waiting for his father to speak. They got into the car, and Alvin drove them to the university. The computer people immediately made one of the full-color terminals available. This time Alvin allowed himself to be truly random, not thinking at all about what he was choosing, avoiding any meaning as he typed. When he was sick of typing, he looked at Joe for permission to be through. Joe shrugged. Alvin entered one more set of letters and then said, “Done.”

  Joe entered a single command that told the computer to start analyzing the input, and father and son sat together to watch the story unfold.

  After a seemingly eternal wait, in which neither of them said a word, a picture of a card appeared on the screen.

  “This is you,” said Joe. It was the King of Swords.

  “What does it mean?” asked Alvin.

  “Very little by itself.”

  “Why is the sword coming out of his mouth?”

  “Because he kills by the words of his mouth.”

  Father nodded. “And why is he holding his crotch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you knew,” said Father.

  “I don’t know until I see the other cards.” Joe pressed the return key, and a new card almost completely covered the old one. A thin blue line appeared around it, and then it was blown up to fill the screen. It was Judgment, an angel blowing a trumpet, awakening the dead, who were gray with corruption, standing in their graves. “This covers you,” said Joe.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s how you spend your life. Judging the dead.”

  “Like God? You’re saying I think I’m God?”

  “It’s what you do, Father,” said Joe. “You judge everything. You’re a scientist. I can’t help what the cards say.”

  “I study life.”

  “You break life down into its pieces. Then you make your judgment. Only when it’s all in fragments like the flesh of the dead.”

  Alvin tried to hear anger or bitterness in Joe’s voice, but Joe was calm, matter-of-fact, for all the world like a doctor with a good bedside manner. Or like a historian telling the simple truth.

  Joe pressed the key, and on the small display another card appeared, again on top of the first two, but horizontally. “This crosses you,” said Joe. And the card was outlined in blue, and zoomed close. It was the Devil.

  “What does it mean, crossing me?”

  “Your enemy, your obstacle. The son of Laios and Iocaste.”

  Alvin remembered that Connie had mentioned Iocaste. “How similar is this to what you told Connie?” he asked.

  Joe looked at him impassively. “How can I know after only three cards?”

  Alvin waved him to go on.

  A card above. “This crowns you.” The Two of Wands, a man holding the world in his hands, staring off into the distance, with two small saplings growing out of the stone parapet beside him. “The crown is what you think you are, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Lifegiver, the God of Genesis, the Prince whose kiss awakens Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.”

  A card below. “This is beneath you, what you most fear to become.” A man lying on the ground, ten swords piercing him in a row. He did not bleed.

  “I’ve never lain awake at night afraid that someone would stab me to death.”

  Joe looked at him placidly. “But, Father, I told you, swords are words as often as not. What you fear is death at the hands of storytellers. According to the cards, you’re the sort of man who would have killed the messenger who brought bad news.”

  According to the cards, or according to you? But Alvin held his anger and said nothing.

  A card to the right. “This is behind you, the story of your past.” A man in a sword-studded boat, poling the craft upstream, a woman and child sitting bowed in front of him. “Hansel and Gretel sent into the sea in a leaky boat.”

  “It doesn’t look like a brother and sister,” said Alvin. “It looks like a mother and child.”

  “Ah,” said Joe. A card to the left. “This is before you, where you know your course will lead.” A sarcophagus with a knight sculpted in stone upon it, a bird resting on his head.

  Death, thought Alvin. Always a safe prediction. And yet not safe at all. The cards themselves seemed malevolent. They all depicted situations that cried out with agony or fear. That was the gimmick, Alvin decided. Potent enough pictures will seem to be important whether they really mean anything or not. Heavy with meaning like a pregnant woman, they can be made to bear anything.

  “It isn’t death,” said Joe.

  Alvin was startled to have his thoughts so appropriately interrupted.

  “It’s a monument after you’re dead. With your words engraved on it and above it. Blind Homer. Jesus. Mahomet. To have your words read like scripture.”

  And for the first time Alvin was genuinely frightened by what his son had found. Not that this future frightened him. Hadn’t he forbidden himself to hope for it, he wanted it so much? No, what he feared was the way he felt himself say, silently, Yes, yes, this is True. I will not be flattered into belief, he said to himself. But underneath every layer of doubt that he built between himself and the cards he believed. Whatever Joe told him, he would believe, and so he denied belief now, not because of disbelief but because he was afraid. Perhaps that was why he had doubted from the start.

  Next the computer placed a card in the lower right-hand corner. “This is your house.” It was the Tower, broken by lightning, a man and a woman falling from it, surrounded by tears of flame.

  A card directly above it. “This answers you.” A man under a tree, beside a stream, with a hand coming from a small cloud, giving him a cup. “Elijah by the brook, and the ravens feed him.”

  And above that a man walking away from a stack of eight cups, with a pole and traveling cloak. The pole is a wand, with leaves growing from it. The cups are arranged so that a space is left where a ninth cup had been. “This saves you.”

  And then, at the top of the vertical file of four cards, Death. “This ends it.” A bishop, a woman, and a child kneeling before Death on a horse. The horse is trampling the corpse of a man who had been a king. Beside the man lie his crown and a golden sword. In the distance a ship is foundering in a swift river. The sun is rising between pillars in the east. And Death holds a leafy wand in his hand, with a sheaf of wheat bound to it at the top. A banner of life over the corpse of the king. “This ends it,” said Joe definitively.

  Alvin waited, looking at the cards, waiting for Joe to explain it. But Joe did not explain. He just gazed at the monitor and then suddenly got to his feet. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “It’s all clear now.”

  “To you it’s clear,” Alvin said.

  “Yes,” said Joe. “Thank you very much for not lying this time.” Then Joe made as if to leave.

  “Hey, wait,” Alvin said. “Aren’t you going to explain it to me?”

  “No,” said Joe.

  “Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  Alvin was not about to admit to anyone, least of all himself, that he did believe. “I still want to know. I’m curious. Can’t I be curious?”

  Joe studied his father’s face. “I told Mother, and she hasn’t spoken a natural word to me since.”

  So it was not just
Alvin’s imagination. The tarot program had driven a wedge between Connie and Joe. He’d been right. “I’ll speak a natural word or two every day, I promise,” Alvin said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Joe said.

  “Son,” Alvin said. “Dr. Fryer told me that the stories you tell, the way you put things together, is the closest thing to truth about people that he’s ever heard. Even if I don’t believe it, don’t I have the right to hear the truth?”

  “I don’t know if it is the truth. Or if there is such a thing.”

  “There is. The way things are, that’s truth.”

  “But how are things, with people? What causes me to feel the way I do or act the way I do? Hormones? Parents? Social patterns? All the causes or purposes of all our acts are just stories we tell ourselves, stories we believe or disbelieve, changing all the time. But still we live, still we act, and all those acts have some kind of cause. The patterns all fit together into a web that connects everyone who’s ever lived with everyone else. And every new person changes the web, adds to it, changes the connections, makes it all different. That’s what I find with this program, how you believe you fit into the web.”

  “Not how I really fit?”

  Joe shrugged. “How can I know? How can I measure it? I discover the stories that you believe most secretly, the stories that control your acts. But the very telling of the story changes the way you believe. Moves some things into the open, changes who you are. I undo my work by doing it.”

  “Then undo your work with me, and tell me the truth.”