The Changed Man Read online

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m in your story.”

  Alvin spoke then more honestly than he ever meant to. “Then for God’s sake tell me the story, because I don’t know who the hell you are.”

  Joe walked back to his chair and sat down. “I am Goneril and Regan, because you made me act out the lie that you needed to hear. I am Oedipus, because you pinned my ankles together and left me exposed on the hillside to save your own future.”

  “I have loved you more than life.”

  “You were always afraid of me, Father. Like Lear, afraid that I wouldn’t care for you when I was still vigorous and you were enfeebled by age. Like Laios, terrified that my power would overshadow you. So you took control; you put me out of my place.”

  “I gave years to educating you—”

  “Educating me in order to make me forever your shadow, your student. When the only thing that I really loved was the one thing that would free me from you—all the stories.”

  “Damnable stupid fictions.”

  “No more stupid than the fiction you believe. Your story of little cells and DNA, your story that there is such a thing as reality that can be objectively perceived. God, what an idea, to see with inhuman eyes, without interpretation. That’s exactly how stones see, without interpretation, because without interpretation there isn’t any sight.”

  “I think I know that much at least,” Alvin said, trying to feel as contemptuous as he sounded. “I never said I was objective.”

  “Scientific was the word. What could be verified was scientific. That was all that you would ever let me study, what could be verified. The trouble is, Father, that nothing in the world that matters at all is verifiable. What makes us who we are is forever tenuous, fragile, the web of a spider eaten and remade every day. I can never see out of your eyes. Yet I can never see any other way than through the eyes of every storyteller who ever taught me how to see. That was what you did to me, Father. You forbade me to hear any storyteller but you. It was your reality I had to surrender to. Your fiction I had to believe.”

  Alvin felt his past slipping out from under him. “If I had known those games of make-believe were so important to you, I wouldn’t have—”

  “You knew they were that important to me,” Joe said coldly. “Why else would you have bothered to forbid me? But my mother dipped me into the water, all but my heel, and I got all the power you tried to keep from me. You see, Mother was not Griselde. She wouldn’t kill her children for her husband’s sake. When you exiled me, you exiled her. We lived the stories together as long as we were free.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Until you came home to teach me. We were free until then. We acted out all the stories that we could. Without you.”

  It conjured for Alvin the ridiculous image of Connie playing Goldilocks and the Three Bears day after day for years. He laughed in spite of himself, laughed sharply, for only a moment.

  Joe took the laugh all wrong. Or perhaps took it exactly right. He took his father by the wrist and gripped him so tightly that Alvin grew afraid. Joe was stronger than Alvin had thought. “Grendel feels the touch of Beowulf on his hand,” Joe whispered, “and he thinks, Perhaps I should have stayed at home tonight. Perhaps I am not hungry after all.”

  Alvin tried for a moment to pull his arm away but could not. What have I done to you, Joe? he shouted inside himself. Then he relaxed his arm and surrendered to the tale. “Tell me my story from the cards,” he said. “Please.”

  Without letting go of his father’s arm, Joe began. “You are Lear, and your kingdom is great. Your whole life is shaped so that you will live forever in stone, in memory. Your dream is to create life. You thought I would be such life, as malleable as the little worlds you make from DNA. But from the moment I was born you were afraid of me. I couldn’t be taken apart and recombined like all your little animals. And you were afraid that I would steal the swords from your sepulchre. You were afraid that you would live on as Joseph Bevis’s father, instead of me forever being Alvin Bevis’s son.”

  “I was jealous of my child,” said Alvin, trying to sound skeptical.

  “Like the father rat that devours his babies because he knows that someday they will challenge his supremacy, yes. It’s the oldest pattern in the world, a tale older than teeth.”

  “Go on, this is quite fascinating.” I refuse to care.

  “All the storytellers know how this tale ends. Every time a father tries to change the future by controlling his children, it ends the same. Either the children lie, like Goneril and Regan, and pretend to be what he made them, or the children tell the truth, like Cordelia, and the father casts them out. I tried to tell the truth, but then together Mother and I lied to you. It was so much easier, and it kept me alive. She was Grim the Fisher, and she saved me alive.”

  Iocaste and Laios and Oedipus. “I see where this is going,” Alvin said. “I thought you were bright enough not to believe in that Freudian nonsense about the Oedipus complex.”

  “Freud thought he was telling the story of all mankind when he was only telling his own. Just because the story of Oedipus isn’t true for everyone doesn’t mean that it isn’t true for me. But don’t worry, Father. I don’t have to kill you in the forest in order to take possession of your throne.”

  “I’m not worried.” It was a lie. It was a truthful understatement.

  “Laios died only because he would not let his son pass along the road.”

  “Pass along any road you please.”

  “And I am the Devil. You and Mother were in Eden until I came. Because of me you were cast out. And now you’re in hell.”

  “How neatly it all fits.”

  “For you to achieve your dream, you had to kill me with your story. When I lay there with your blades in my back, only then could you be sure that your sepulchre was safe. When you exiled me in a boat I could not live in, only then could you be safe, you thought. But I am the Horn Child, and the boat bore me quickly across the sea to my true kingdom.”

  “This isn’t anything coming from the computer,” said Alvin. “This is just you being a normal resentful teenager. Just a phase that everyone goes through.”

  Joe’s grip on Alvin’s arm only tightened. “I didn’t die, I didn’t wither, I have my power now, and you’re not safe. Your house is broken, and you and Mother are being thrown from it to your destruction, and you know it. Why did you come to me, except that you knew you were being destroyed?”

  Again Alvin tried to find a way to fend off Joe’s story with ridicule. This time he could not. Joe had pierced through shield and armor and cloven him, neck to heart. “In the name of God, Joe, how do we end it all?” He barely kept from shouting.

  Joe relaxed his grip on Alvin’s arm at last. The blood began to flow again, painfully; Alvin fancied he could measure it passing through his calibrated arteries.

  “Two ways,” said Joe. “There is one way you can save yourself.”

  Alvin looked at the cards on the screen. “Exile.”

  “Just leave. Just go away for a while. Let us alone for a while. Let me pass you by, stop trying to rule, stop trying to force your story on me, and then after a while we can see what’s changed.”

  “Oh, excellent. A son divorcing his father. Not too likely.”

  “Or death. As the deliverer. As the fulfillment of your dream. If you die now, you defeat me. As Laios destroyed Oedipus at last.”

  Alvin stood up to leave. “This is rank melodrama. Nobody’s going to die because of this.”

  “Then why can’t you stop trembling?” asked Joe.

  “Because I’m angry, that’s why,” Alvin said. “I’m angry at the way you choose to look at me. I love you more than any other father I know loves his son, and this is the way you choose to view it. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth—”

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. Away, away!”

  �
�Lear, isn’t it? You gave me the script, and now I’m saying the goddamn lines.”

  Joe smiled a strange, sphinxlike smile. “It’s a good exit line, though, isn’t it?”

  “Joe, I’m not going to leave, and I’m not going to drop dead, either. You’ve told me a lot. Like you said, not the truth, not reality, but the way you see things. That helps, to know how you see things.”

  Joe shook his head in despair. “Father, you don’t understand. It was you who put those cards up on the screen. Not I. My reading is completely different. Completely different, but no better.”

  “If I’m the King of Swords, who are you?”

  “The Hanged Man,” Joe said.

  Alvin shook his head. “What an ugly world you choose to live in.”

  “Not neat and pretty like yours, not bound about by rules the way yours is. Laws and principles, theories and hypotheses, may they cover your eyes and keep you happy.”

  “Joe, I think you need help,” said Alvin.

  “Don’t we all,” said Joe.

  “So do I. A family counselor maybe. I think we need outside help.”

  “I’ve told you what you can do.”

  “I’m not going to run away from this, Joe, no matter how much you want me to.”

  “You already have. You’ve been running away for months. These are your cards, Father, not mine.”

  “Joe, I want to help you out of this—unhappiness.”

  Joe frowned. “Father, don’t you understand? The Hanged Man is smiling. The Hanged Man has won.”

  Alvin did not go home. He couldn’t face Connie right now, did not want to try to explain what he felt about what Joe had told him. So he went to the laboratory and lost himself for a time in reading records of what was happening with the different subject organisms. Some good results. If it all held up, Alvin Bevis would have taken mankind a long way toward being able to read the DNA chain. There was a Nobel in it. More important still, there was real change. I will have changed the world, he thought. And then there came into his mind the picture of the man holding the world in his hands, looking off into the distance. The Two of Wands. His dream. Joe was right about that. Right about Alvin’s longing for a monument to last forever.

  And in a moment of unusual clarity Alvin saw that Joe was right about everything. Wasn’t Alvin even now doing just what the cards called for him to do to save himself, going into hiding with the Eight of Cups? His house was breaking down, all was being undone, and he was setting out on a long journey that would lead him to solitude. Greatness, but solitude.

  There was one card that Joe hadn’t worked into his story, however. The Four of Cups. “This answers you,” he had said. The hand of God coming from a cloud. Elijah by the brook. If God were to whisper to me, what would He say?

  He would say, Alvin thought, that there is something profoundly wrong, something circular in all that Joe has done. He has synthesized things that no other mind in the world could have brought together meaningfully. He is, as Dr. Fryer said, touching on the borders of Truth. But, by God, there is something wrong, something he has overlooked. Not a mistake, exactly. Simply a place where Joe has not put two true things together in his own life: Stories make us who we are: the tarot program identifies the stories we believe: by hearing the tale of the tarot, we have changed who we are: therefore—

  Therefore, no one knows how much of Joe’s tarot story is believed because it is true, and how much becomes true because it is believed. Joe is not a scientist. Joe is a tale-teller. But the gifted, powerful teller of tales soon lives in the world he has created, for as more and more people believe him, his tales become true.

  We do not have to be the family of Laios. I do not have to play at being Lear. I can say no to this story, and make it false. Not that Joe could tell any other story, because this is the one that he believes. But I can change what he believes by changing what the cards say, and I can change what the cards say by being someone else.

  King of Swords. Imposing my will on others, making them live in the world that my words created. And now my son, too, doing the same. But I can change, and so can he, and then perhaps his brilliance, his insights can shape a better world than the sick one he is making us live in.

  And as he grew more excited, Alvin felt himself fill with light, as if the cup had poured into him from the cloud. He believed, in fact, that he had already changed. That he was already something other than what Joe said he was.

  The telephone rang. Rang twice, three times, before Alvin reached out to answer it. It was Connie.

  “Alvin?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Connie,” he said.

  “Alvin, Joe called me.” She sounded, lost, distant.

  “Did he? Don’t worry, Connie, everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh, I know,” Connie said. “I finally figured it out. It’s the thing that Helen never figured out. It’s the thing that Iocaste never had the guts to do. Enid knew it, though, Enid could do it. I love you, Alvin.” She hung up.

  Alvin sat with his hand on the phone for thirty seconds. That’s how long it took him to realize that Connie sounded sleepy. That Connie was trying to change the cards, too. By killing herself.

  All the way home in the car, Alvin was afraid that he was going crazy. He kept warning himself to drive carefully, not to take chances. He wouldn’t be able to save Connie if he had an accident on the way. And then there would come a voice that sounded like Joe’s, whispering, That’s the story you tell yourself, but the truth is you’re driving slowly and carefully, hoping she will die so everything will be simple again. It’s the best solution. Connie has solved it all, and you’re being slow so she can succeed, but telling yourself you’re being careful so you can live with yourself after she’s dead.

  No, said Alvin again and again, pushing on the accelerator, weaving through the traffic, then forcing himself to slow down, not to kill himself to save two seconds. Sleeping pills weren’t that fast. And maybe he was wrong; maybe she hadn’t taken pills. Or maybe he was thinking that in order to slow himself down so that Connie would die and everything would be simple again—

  Shut up, he told himself. Just get there, he told himself.

  He got there, fumbled with the key, and burst inside. “Connie!” he shouted.

  Joe was standing in the archway between the kitchen and the family room.

  “It’s all right,” Joe said. “I got here when she was on the phone to you. I forced her to vomit, and most of the pills hadn’t even dissolved yet.”

  “She’s awake?”

  “More or less.”

  Joe stepped aside, and Alvin walked into the family room. Connie sat on a chair, looking catatonic. But as he came nearer, she turned away, which at once hurt him and relieved him. At least she was not hopelessly insane. So it was not too late for change.

  “Joe,” Alvin said, still looking at Connie. “I’ve been thinking. About the reading.”

  Joe stood behind him, saying nothing.

  “I believe it. You told the truth. The whole thing, just as you said.”

  Still Joe did not answer. Well, what can he say, anyway? Alvin asked himself. Nothing. At least he’s listening. “Joe, you told the truth. I really screwed up the family. I’ve had to have the whole thing my way, and it really screwed things up. Do you hear me, Connie? I’m telling both of you, I agree with Joe about the past. But not the future. There’s nothing magical about those cards. They don’t tell the future. They just tell the outcome of the pattern, the way things will end if the pattern isn’t changed. But we can change it, don’t you see? That’s what Connie was trying to do with the pills, change the way things turn out. Well, I’m the one who can really change, by changing me. Can you see that? I’m changed already. As if I drank from the cup that came to me out of the cloud, Joe. I don’t have to control things the way I did. It’s all going to be better now. We can build up from, up from—”

  The ashes, those were the next words. But they were the wrong wor
ds, Alvin could sense that. All his words were wrong. It had seemed true in the lab, when he thought of it; now it sounded dishonest. Desperate. Ashes in his mouth. He turned around to Joe. His son was not listening silently. Joe’s face was contorted with rage, his hands trembling, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  As soon as Alvin looked at him, Joe screamed at him. “You can’t just let it be, can you! You have to do it again and again and again, don’t you!”

  Oh, I see, Alvin thought. By wanting to change things, I was just making them more the same. Trying to control the world they live in. I didn’t think it through well enough. God played a dirty trick on me, giving me that cup from the cloud.

  “I’m sorry,” Alvin said.

  “No!” Joe shouted. “There’s nothing you can say!”

  “You’re right,” Alvin said, trying to calm Joe. “I should just have—”

  “Don’t say anything!” Joe screamed, his face red.

  “I won’t, I won’t,” said Alvin. “I won’t say another—”

  “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

  “I’m just agreeing with you, that’s—”

  Joe lunged forward and screamed it in his father’s face. “God damn you, don’t talk at all!”

  “I see,” said Alvin, suddenly realizing. “I see—as long as I try to put it in words, I’m forcing my view of things on the rest of you, and if I—”

  There were no words left for Joe to say. He had tried every word he knew that might silence his father, but none would. Where words fail, there remains the act. The only thing close at hand was a heavy glass dish on the side table. Joe did not mean to grab it, did not mean to strike his father across the head with it. He only meant his father to be still. But all his incantations had failed, and still his father spoke, still his father stood in the way, refusing to let him pass, and so he smashed him across the head with the glass dish.

  But it was the dish that broke, not his father’s head. And the fragment of glass in Joe’s hand kept right on going after the blow, followed through with the stroke, and the sharp edge of the glass cut neatly through the fleshy, bloody, windy part of Alvin’s throat. All the way through, severing the carotid artery, the veins, and above all the trachea, so that no more air flowed through Alvin’s larynx. Alvin was wordless as he fell backward, spraying blood from his throat, clutching at the pieces of glass imbedded in the side of his face.