THE UHURU

Peter Billig
THE UHURU

Albeit the Uhuru tribe has been known to the ethnographic society for ages, it has not been described otherwise than in useless allusions and generalities. The reason for this is that, before me, no man (or woman) of science could bring himself to settle among them: even though the Uhuru cover their bodies tightly with their tribal garb, they leave the genitalia uncovered and whoever wants to set up house with them or even come near them has to dance to their tune.
Especially, they shield the face from the others’ gaze considering it the most intimate part – to the degree that they put the complete ethnic attire on the newborn: to start with, a hood with slits for eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth, then a jacket provided at the breasts with two pockets open downwards, and long trousers with a “décolletage” spanning the underbelly and the privy parts, and at last soft skin shoes.
They recognise each other by their genitals, and even more: they comprehend each others mood, frame of mind and even character, if it is an unknown tribesperson they meet, as other peoples do from the face.
When two Uhuru meet, they take each other by the reproductive organs and fondle them the more intensively the more sympathy they feel for each other. If they don’t like each other, they settle for a token touch. While greeting the opposite sex, they follow the example but should they wish to express cordiality, they copulate and even put their palms down the aforementioned breast-pockets and rub each other’s breasts: these caresses are the equivalent of kisses and hugs in other cultures.
The children sired as result of such greetings remain in the mother’s custody and inherit her family name, because for the matriarchal Uhuru the identity of the father is immaterial. Nevertheless, this attitude is a kind of gentleman’s agreement since the fathers identify faultlessly their progeny: and not only the sons, which could be understandable, but also the daughters. Siblings of one and the same womb must not have sexual intercourse – it is a very strong taboo, and that is why brothers and sisters confine their greetings to stroking each other’s privy parts, and only in very elated moments, e.g. after a long separation, masturbate each other.
Marriage amongst the Uhuru is based on principles different than elsewhere. To a chosen single, whose gender, age and degree of kinship is of no consequence, they make a proposition to go together to a secluded spot and there, in complete darkness, they take off their hoods and fondle each other’s faces. They do it repeatedly in stronger and stronger light and at last, on the day they distinctly have seen each other’s facial traits, they consider themselves a married couple. Then they move together into one hut – sometimes even into the same room! – and if it is two females they take their children with them, on condition that every child dwells in a room of his/her own.
It is so because the Uhuru take off their clothes, and the hood in particular, exclusively in connection with hygienic procedures, and to be seen without the hood is the most nightmarish experience that can occur to an Uhuru, so they live separately, wash the children in the dark and you never ever enter anybody’s quarters without permission. The most dreadful curse you can put on a fellow Uhuru is: May your hood fall off! Even to see one’s own countenance is not considered decorous, so before they begin their toilet they ruffle the surface of the water. Mirrors are considered the most abominable objects in the world.
Yet, to uncover your face in front of the beloved – and this person only – constitutes the erotic substance of marriage. A revaluation of values takes place and the very thing, which otherwise would be unbearable, becomes rapture much stronger than orgasm. The couple relish it even several times a day – as their libidos take them – and they are unwaveringly faithful to the partner.
Of course, all these eccentric practices, unheard-of among other peoples, are dictated by religion. But whoever should think the Uhuru heathen, would be utterly wrong; on the contrary – they are fiercely monotheistic. According to their beliefs, the Only God, Yu-hu-vu, having created Heaven and Earth, plants and beasts created also a woman and a man: U-vu and U-du-mu. But as He had made them in His image and after His likeness, He commanded them, in order to prevent them from becoming too familiar with Him because of that superficial resemblance, to cover themselves from head to toe with the exception of what made them outwardly different from Him: the genitals – because He, as the Divine Being, is sexless. The insubordinate U-du-mu and U-vu, though, did not obey Yu-hu-vu. On the contrary, just to spite Him they covered their reproductive organs; in retaliation, He took their immortality from them and sentenced them and their progeny to a short life in the sweat of their brow, in diseases, wickedness, fear and insecurity.
Years flew past, centuries were passing and peoples have filled up the Earth; the Uhuru were living as godlessly as the others. All of a sudden, one of the members of the tribe – a man called Yu-su-su – had a revelation: Yu-hu-vu manifested Himself for him and enunciated that His anger has abated and He wishes to offer humanity another chance to repent – and the Uhuru have been chosen as the tool of this recovery. Therefore, let them clothe themselves in seemingly fashion and allow nobody to befoul His face – mirrored in the face of every human being – with gaping eyes. Only the countenance of one other person they are allowed to see – the one most beloved – because in that face they will be venerating – Him! In return, He will bestow upon them more and more favours and, at last, will return to them everything they had lost because of U-vu’s and U-du-mu’s stupidity.
At first, the Uhuru scoffed at Yu-su-su’s words and attire, but as he was sticking zealously to his purpose and since his speeches had an overwhelming effect, first a few then more and more numerous tribesmen and tribeswomen believed that he is the Apostle and followed his example.
And they have never regretted. First, the internecine warfare within the tribe, a scourge of many centuries, has stopped as if by magic. Epidemic diseases disappeared, then normal diseases – first the grave ones, then the not serious – never to return, and everybody lived into a ripe old age. The Uhuru’s hunting grounds were teeming with game as never before, the rivers were full of fish and the fields were yielding crops beyond compare while the neighbours, as I witnessed in person, were tormented by constant epidemics, wars, famine, poverty and squalor.

Consumed by my hunger for knowledge I spent three years amongst the Uhuru. When I deemed my data complete I went back to the civilisation in order to set it in order and publish.
I am sitting in a hotel room behind a locked door, surrounded with provisions, and I write these words, which were meant to be a scientific paper but became a request for forgiveness.
There is just one horrible moment yet to come – a visit at the post office to send this message – and then back to the Uhuru!
Goodbye, Dear Wife! Farewell, Beloved Kids! Be well, Friends! Please, bear no grudge against me!
And, for Yu-hu-vu’s sake, cover those mugs of yours!

© Peter Billig 2007

THE WATER BEARER

Peter Billig
THE WATER BEARER

In the credits of a motion picture I saw once: MUSIC: ARTHUR XXYYZZ, and I thought: What a weird name to have, but the music was simply wonderful. These credits repeated themselves in several more films – I’m a movie-fan – and the music was getting better and better, though I would never thought it possible. Then I read on a poster about Sinfonia Mormorando opus 69 by Arthur Xxyyzz, directed by the Composer, to be performed in the Philharmonic, I broke with a longstanding tradition of not going to concerts (all these nitwits sitting in rows with eyes closed), bought a ticket at an exorbitant price and enjoyed myself tremendously sitting in a row with the twits, but with my eyes wide open, listening and watching the conductor: a handsome young man with a thoroughbred artistic face and haircut. The standing ovation that followed made my hands sore for a week, and the critics, normally so critical, were stumbling over each other in universal praise of his great achievement, comparing him to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
I have hardly had time to come to my senses when HENRIETTA XXYYZZ made me enthusiastic and horny, as I, on TV, was watching her win the title of Miss World over a dozen of only slightly less well-endowed girls. I allowed myself to participate in the jubilation in the streets that followed: only men came out and wild drinking and the shouts Henrietta! Henrietta! soon degenerated into smashing of show windows by the inebriated crowds. I, who have always hated doing anything with the masses – never go to soccer games, demonstrations, festivals and such like – felt like liberated by her and I personally smashed seven shop windows – well, six, as the last one was personal, belonging to an Arab-run local convenience store: he is an insolent git and charges you through the ceiling. I had a deep satisfaction carrying his stock up to my flat before the cops managed to arrive! No, Mr. Copper, it’s not an admission, should you try to charge me, it’s artistic imagination: licentia poetica. The oversexed Henrietta, though, having heard of the riotous male reaction at home, embarked on a model and movie career in Hollywood, so the welcome prepared for her at the airport had to be cancelled.
I was disappointed and angry with her, as so many of my heterosexual male and female lesbian compatriots, but it was only until I espied, in one of the newly replaced shop windows – that of a bookshop, not my work – a novel by CHRISTOPHER XXYYZZ and spent a sleepless night reading, from cover to cover, with flushed cheeks. I did the same with his other four novels, released with three months’ intervals, and claimed him to be the best writer ever. I was jubilant when the news arrived that the Nobel Committee… The reception at the airport was raucous as there were people present who, until CHRISTOPHER XXYYZZ began to write, never touched any literature except the funny papers. How he has managed to write books fit to unite the tastes of all the readers and critics of the country (with a few exceptions), and make every new book more exciting than the previous one, and every third month at that, is an insoluble enigma, all the more so, as he is keeping up both the rate and the quality of his output.
Some time after Christopher’s Nobel Prize, his brother MARTIN XXYYZZ also received one – in physics, and his sister DEBORAH XXYYZZ, M.D. has found a cure for a dreadful and until now incurable disease. A member of the Nobel Committee, interviewed by our journalists, said, with his thick Swedish accent: Why deliberate? It is easier to extend this honour to the remaining members of this family in advance!
Well, he was right even if he was wrong: half a year after Deborah’s prize I spent a very exciting quarter of an hour watching, on TV, ANDREAS “THE BEAST” XXYYZZ, brother of all the afore cited XXYYZZES, punch the current Champion of the World shitless all over the ring – and finish the poor sod off with a spectacular KO. There’s no Nobel Prize for that, is there?
Neither for the sister, NAOMI XXYYZZ, who in six chess games has pulverized the current Grand Master and World Champion (male) and won a purse of a million quid.
Her brother, engineer OLAF XXYYZZ, has, in his backyard shed, constructed an engine so fuel efficient – 30 per cent off the most thrifty so far! – that he had the motor companies – GM, Ford, Citroen, Renault, Toyota, MG, VW, Volvo, Fiat, you name it – all lined up on his threshold to buy his patent.
His younger brother, DAVID XXYYZZ, has soon after founded a political party and in only one year won the general election and the absolute majority in the Legislature; David himself became the youngest Prime Minister ever. I voted for him and have no complaints so far; nor do the 76% of the electorate, according to the polls, as the reforms and initiatives he has commenced once in power are exactly what this country has been panting for!

Well into David’s first period as Prime Minister, a friend took me to a garden party in a hilly countryside – and what an unusual place it was! The huge mansion and vast garden were sitting at the foot of an enormous mountain – and what a garden it was: a lush orgy of plants in bloom, birds chirping, a fishpond with water lilies and even a waterfall zigzagging in picturesque cascades down an enormous rock. The drinks were exquisite, so was the food, and the catering service was first class. I felt at home at once and helped myself liberally.
Then I spotted a bald gnome of a man standing by the falls – and every tuxedoed guest who approached to shake hands did it with a degree of reverence I simply could not understand, while the women were less formal but even more admiring. He, for his part, seemed to assess their femininity, as if he was looking for women to procreate with. This observation may seem bizarre, but believe me: I am very seldom wrong when intoxicated.
“Who’s the hairless dwarf everybody’s so obsequious to?” I asked my friend.
“Don’t you know?” he was scandalized by my ignorance. “It’s our host, ARCHIBALD XXYYZZ, the father of ARTHUR, HENRIETTA, CHRISTOPHER, MARTIN, DEBORAH, THE BEAST, NAOMI, OLAF and, last but not least, your pin-up: DAVID, the PM!”
“This is their Pa?!” I was stunned.
“There is more to him than meets the eye,” and he left me to greet an acquaintance.

“What the heck?” I said to myself having digested the information. “Even if he were the father of Napoleon or Einstein, he would still be human!” I downed more of the midget’s excellent single malt and I felt less intimidated by his breeding prowess. I approached under the pretext of praising his hospitality but actually hoping to find out how such an unremarkable fellow has been able to sire so many remarkable children.
“Thank you, sir, for your exceptional…” I began but our eyes met: there was a good-humoured twinkle in his, so I stopped open-mouthed, fully aware that he was onto me.
“No, sirree,” he said, “you have come to find out how such an uncommonly commonplace bloke has been able to spawn so many top-notch children! A person who is so bad at hiding his true motives cannot be bad, so I’ll tell you, especially as I see that you are quite familiar with astrology…”
“How can you see that?” I managed to utter in spite of my general perplexity and muddleheadedness.
“I’m a good judge of men,” he replied. “But if you want me to tell you, you’ll have to drink from this source,” he pointed at the pond behind his back, raised a glass of clear liquid to his lips and drunk.
I had a vision of germs, larvae, frog-eggs and other filth in the water, but overcame my aversion and started looking around for a glass.
“You know, the founder of Cynicism, Diogenes “The Dog”, had vowed not to own anything superfluous, yet one day he saw a boy drinking water from the hollow of his hand. He was crestfallen and threw away the bowl he had been carrying. Well, it’s a silly story, as every modern and ancient child, Diogenes included, knows this way of drinking…”
“He should have thrown his palm away, as well!” I exclaimed, leaned over the pond and drank directly from the surface trying not to imagine what malignant microorganisms I was exposing my macroorganism to.

“It’s enough!” he said, gave me a moment to swallow the last mouthful and took me to a cosy nook of his fantastic garden where behind some blossoming shrubbery there was a picnic table. We sat down facing each other and he opened with:
“Well, Mr. Astrologer, I have one of the traditional planets in each of my natal horoscope’s watery signs. What other classic planet is necessary to keep them in check and good order?”
It was a real assignment as he did not say which of the planets – Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn – were involved. I wanted a drink – it normally helps me think – but there was nothing on the table. Then something peculiar happened: a surge of inspiration seized me and I knew the answer: Moon in Cancer, Mars in Scorpio and Jupiter in Pisces and in an exact aspect – respectively quincunx, square and semi-sextile – to the planet holding them in check: Sun in Aquarius in close conjunction with Uranus. Actually, I saw the whole of his birth chart, including the positions of the inner planets and of Neptune, Pluto cum Charon, Chiron, Ceres, Juno, Pallas, Vesta, Vulcan and Transpluto, the last two being entirely hypothetical, but I saw them all – hypothetical and real, miraculously – together with their internal aspects!
“Here you see what good energized water gives people!” he exclaimed nodding his head that I was right about his horoscope. “I was born in this house and have been drinking only the water of this spring until I was eight, when I went with my parents to the capital and got sick immediately upon arrival. They took me to the best doctors but I was only getting worse and none of the stars of the medical profession knew what the matter was with me. I was told later that one day I had started hallucinating and, in this state, I was repeating: Take me to the Old Gush – it’s this source,” he pointed at the water gushing down the cliff. “They did and, as soon as I drank from it, I recovered. A miracle! It must have changed something in me because from this day I got interested in water-science: I wanted to know what was it in the Old Gush that has beaten our luminaries of the art of healing, and I did even if it took me eight more years. Well, you see…”

He paused, composing a lecture in his mind, and I got scared he was going to hold forth, but something like the astrological illumination told me not to flee, and the tiny bald Aquarius, as if having read my fears, said:
“I could talk about my research for days but suffice it to say that we, the living things of the Earth, are totally dependent on WATER – we humans are over seventy percent WATER (and most of the rest is calcium: the skeleton designed to keep the jelly, which is our soft matter, in place) – and we know dick about it! I’ll bet you anything that your illumination did not come from some minerals in the Old Gush. No, it’s the way WATER is treated that makes the difference: WATER has a memory and a mind! It hates being made to flow through miles of pumps and metal pipes – only to flush shit in a lavatory, wash a car or dissolve chemicals in a plant. The Old Gush, on the other hand, takes his origin from the rain falling on the ridge above us. Clouds and filtering through soil purify WATER: it likes it and when it comes down the rock, it meets happy human minds and a happy garden full of pleased plants, insects, birds and beasts. The garden is watered by the Old Gush and I never use fertilizers, fungus killers or pesticides. Once, when swarms of aphids descended upon nearly every plant, it was enough with a mantra – luckily, I had done plenty of research by that time – to strengthen the WATER – and the bastards just died out! When WATER from the Old Gush reaches the pond – whence there is a direct non-pipe aqueduct to the house: to the kitchen, the bathrooms and other outlets – it is extremely happy: it’s fully energized, you would say. Imbibe it, and every watery part of you gets revived and it utilizes one hundred percent of its know-how and capacity: hence your sudden astrological genius! As you normally drink adulterated WATER from the waterworks’ pipes, the Old Gush must feel like champagne (WATER hates metal and 90 degrees turns!), LSD or another conscience expanding – psychedelic – drug. Everybody is at least 70 percent water, many eat only ecologic food and abstain from meat – but still they drink from the tap or bottles claiming to be source WATER – and it well may be so, but it is tapped, for the producer’s convenience, through pipes! Up yours with such WATER: never drink it, unless you energize it before!”

“How?” I inquired.
“Even the worst treated WATER can be reenergized by a sincere mantra, a prayer or good will. Take holy WATER: in the Orthodox faith the priest blesses gallons upon gallons and the faithful take it home by the bucket, drink it celebrating Easter and give it to their sick and wobbly – often with marvellous results: Lourdes can kiss its arse! I was there by Bernadette’s fount but the WATER was delivered through pipes and faucets. I got sick there and I lived only by energizing the rest of what I had tapped with my “mumbo jumbo”. What a pity – the source WATER is excellent, even better than the Old Gush’s, but why don’t they allow people to wet their snouts in the fountain? Otherwise with Asclepius’ fountainhead outside Bergamo (Pergamon) in what is now Turkey. By the way, there is a military base close by but the well is still undefiled and going strong, as is the one in Epidaurus, the god Asclepius’ birthplace. And the WATER in the Ganges is not as bad as you would expect in view of how many millions pollute it daily, but it’s certainly overrated, especially as you go downstream from Varanasi. The Jordan’s WATER, however, is excellent from the very springs to the Dead Sea. As you hear, thanks to my watery know-how I can now travel all over the world and improve on any WATER before I down it. I am not the first one to do so: there is a story from some centuries ago about an abbot jailed by the Inquisition. For a month, he was given only a slice of bread and a cup of filthy WATER a day – it should improve on his will to confess his heresies – but when he was finally standing before the inquisitors, he had gained a stone. Asked how it was possible, he said he had been purifying the WATER with a sincere prayer before drinking it!”
“And what happened?” I enquired. “Was he released?”
“On the contrary: the Board considered it evidence of sorcery and the poor devil was burned at the stake!”

“Well,” he said and made a round movement with his arm, encompassing the paradise of the garden and the enormity of the house. “I am a very well-endowed man and I assure you that I am that also in the other sense of the word. But first things first: I was the only child and my parents left me, apart from the whole lot here, a very large portfolio, which I was able to enrich, particularly lately. The general public does not know him, but I have another child, ALOYSIUS, who is a financial wizard and very prominent within the banking society: he is my adviser. Being so dependent upon the quality of this liquid,” he pointed at the cascade, “made a scientist out of me: I have a very advanced lab in the house and employ a handful of collaborators. We go on field trips, testing the WATERS, so to speak, all over the world, both in Nature and in man-made systems; my last was to an oasis in the Sahara. But the most interesting thing is experimenting: WATER under influence. If you, for example, play nice music to it – Mozart, Telemann or Bach – and then freeze it and look at it through a microscope, you can see beautiful regular crystals, but should you choose heavy metal, the crystals are all broken up and pitifully shapeless. A tip: if you want to purify and energize WATER and know no mantra, prayer or incantation, play Bach’s passacaglia from BWV 582; and if you listen along, all the WATER in your organism will be likewise greatly improved. WATER is very partial to organ music and also responds to our human feelings: it gets crushed and shattered if we display hatred, anger, malice or even indifference in its presence. When, in his old days, the great Russian geneticist Ivan Michurin began to talk gently to his plants, his disciples thought him a senile dotard. Assholes! He was improving the quality of the WATER in his plants! I, on the other hand, made an experiment, since replicated on different plants, where three begonias were watered from the same source, but with WATER, which respectively had been abused verbally, praised or left unattended. Guess, which begonia grew and blossomed, which wilted and which barely survived!”

“I can imagine and it doesn’t surprise me that you, Mr. WATER Bearer, with that horoscope of yours, are researching WATER in all its forms: liquid, solid and gas – Uranus plus Sun in Aquarius in control of Moon in Cancer (water), Mars in Scorpio (ice) and Jupiter in Pisces (steam), even though you have not been mentioning the last one. However, I don’t see what bearing it has on your astounding fatherhood.”
“You don’t?! Well, as to steam, evaporating is the way WATER gets rid of the substances it is joined to or contaminated with: it gets purified, forgets all about its previous impurity and changes into a new state – rain. As to paternity, I would remind you that WATER is the most important building block of all life and above all – of our DNA! What can stop a person with so considerable expertise in WATER as mine from devising a way of influencing my, begging your pardon, sperms, towards one result or another? I’m going to explain all this in great detail in my forthcoming book. To give you the gist of it: every time I was impregnating a woman I knew precisely what effect I wanted to achieve – and I always pulled it off. A great achievement, isn’t it? I never could be sure in what way the partner’s genetic code would throw a monkey wrench into my works – all my children are offspring of different mothers. The only thing I never was able to achieve is the sexing of the progeny: CHRISTOPHER was to be a girl in order to write deep sensitive books – but the boy did it anyway! DEBORAH was to be a boy, but thanks to Women Lib it did not impede her career. I was afraid that the same mix-up would happen with “THE BEAST” but I was lucky – not that it would have mattered much: nowadays, there is an international Women’s Boxing League! I got it wrong with NAOMI, but again the position of women has changed from the time of her conception.”

I bowed to him and said with an ironic smile:
“Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?”
“You might say so but remember that a pioneer has to cut corners and take risks. Another drawback was that having enriched some traits I have depleted some others: to name but a few, the gorgeous HENRIETTA has absolutely no ear for music and OLAF is dyslectic. With Chiron on the Ascendant in Virgo and Mercury in conjunction with Venus in Capricorn, it’s no wonder that I strive for perfection. Having fathered DAVID, I have decided to take a break and get my act together. And I did, twenty nine an a half years later! I’m happy to announce that my command of WATER is now so complete that I can sire a child of a chosen sex and with all the talents well above average. This child will be able to choose any career he or she fancies and, whatever is chosen, still accomplish the absolute best, which is there to attain.”

“And what woman would like you to cover her?” I thought, and a pleasant female voice exclaimed:
“So here you are, daddy-o!”
I turned and saw a pretty young woman in loose attire entering our cosy corner. She nodded to me, went over to Xxyyzz, patted his naked head and planted herself firmly on his lap.
“Speaking of the devil,” he pointed at her bulging belly, “behold the Masterpiece: REGINALD XXYYZZ, the universal baby!”

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE LINK A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE LINK
A Saul Vogel Mystery

We were enjoying another sunny day on the porch of our forest home, Vogel laid-back lazily in his rocking chair, while I was fidgeting and wriggling like an impatient child.
"What is the matter with you?" he protested at last, my squirmy mood disturbing his – that of deep pacific relaxation. "Got a pain in the rear?"
"As if you didn't care about the great news: Humanity is finally landing on Mars!"

Together with the rest of the world, we were awaiting the TV transmission from the simultaneous landing of four manned interplanetary craft, their mission to build a base on the Red Planet. The transmission was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. and I could hardly contain myself. I checked the watch: 20 minutes to go. Did not bother to see commercials, look-backs (establishing bases on Moon to be used as chute for further travels) or listen to the experts, having heard all their opinions and predictions before.
"You misunderstand," he protested. "I am interested, but I don’t share your view of things to come. You and your co-religionists view the future of Mankind as that of space expansion, while I feel that we yet are too much linked to Mother Earth to be able to leave her without restoring her to her previous glory."
"You think that since we killed a few whales and reduced the jungles to national parks, Mother Earth won't let us go? On the contrary, she'll kick us all the way to Alpha Centauri – if only to get rid of us!"
"I'm afraid she won't. Her nature is to detain those who don't respect her."
"Care to explain?"
"Mother Earth is of Space, too, but she won't be just used by us, no sirree!"
"She survived the giant meteorite, which killed off the dinos. Why should she mind losing some acres of forest? She’s indomitable! When we are gone, she'll recover in no time."
"I feel we are tied to her with an invisible cord. It is long, I admit; after all, we have landed on the Moon. Perhaps, we will land on Mars as well or even on Jupiter’s moons, but as we’ll be going to the outer planets, the cord will be spent and we will be stopped in mid-space,” he said quite seriously.
“Yeah. And these invisible cords are fastened to the dicks and the clits of us humans, I presume?”
“I’m throwing my pearls for swine!”
He rose, stepped inside and switched on the TV.

The transmission lacked any dramatic merit, as the touchdown was smooth and uncannily true to the timetable. The four craft landed precisely on the spot and began the prescribed procedures without a glitch. It would have been boring if not for the feeling that I was witnessing a momentous event, but Vogel was actually yawning.
Then, the female commander of the mission stepped down the ladder onto Martian soil. She kneeled down and symbolically kissed it through the helmet of her spacesuit. She got up, took a step forward and said: Yet another giant step for Mankind – and she emitted a frightful howl, fell down and rolled on the ground. Simultaneously, the other astronauts emitted a howl and fell – and so did Vogel and I. Writhing on the floor, I almost upset the set. Then the indescribable pain in the gut ceased.
When we crawled back into the easy chairs the screen was all snow. Then, a sorry-looking speaker appeared and explained that the station's technicians have upset, in their paroxysms, some vital gear. The transmission from Mars is postponed owing to equipment having been smashed by the astronauts in their paroxysms. NASA is, however, in radio contact with them. Confronted with the inexplicable phenomenon, occurring both on Mars and Earth, the space agency commanded them to stay inside their craft while Earth was investigating.
Then he began to read the news from all over the world and the nature of the anomaly became clear: it hit all Humankind – that on Earth and that on Mars – at the very same time. Already, one intellectual has managed to formulate a theory and get on the air with it: the Solar system is an organism and the spacecraft must have hit some crucial nerve within it. "NASA's making a big mistake: the astronauts should get out and inspect what their rockets are standing on," he said. There were reports of disasters: fires, botched surgeries, an acrobat killed – the paroxysm having surprised people in precarious situations. Seven airplanes crushed, innumerable traffic accidents, people drowned, many injured in the safety of their homes. A religious pundit proclaimed the phenomenon a warning from God: "We overstepped our authorization and we have been punished by the Lord."
"Well, Mr. Vogel, what is the learned opinion of Philosophy?" I asked.
"You are my assistant, you tell me!"
"You've been right. There is a link between the Earth and us humans. With her giant step, the mission commander must have stretched it too far and it jammed the system."
And a new paroxysm hit us, followed by seven others. There was a pause from sunset to sunrise, when new paroxysms began…

Three weeks were gone. As the paroxysms during this period – up to fifty-one on the third day, thirty-three on average – occurred only within day-hours of our time-zone, people of other longitudes had to adapt to night-time torment and change their life rhythm. And adapt we all did, working and sleeping at odd hours and finding out what functions could be maintained in the periods with paroxysms. After a week, the global system of air transport has been re-established – with long stopovers. Working hours and routines in most work places have been re-devised. Contrary to some fears, suicides decreased, as if the paroxysms actually mustered us into hanging on. The fact that humans were the only species to be affected gave us hope that the answer is in our physiology: curable, when we make it out. And that the length of paroxysm periods was in accord with the shortening of daytime in our geographic latitude suggested that the problem is of earthly rather, not interplanetary nature.

After a month, NASA has at last ordered the astronauts out – for a few hours, well inside the paroxysm-free period. Their movements, some many miles from the base, provoked no paroxysms either here or there. They checked the ground under their craft and found only solid rock, in no way unusual.
"It only proves that stretching of the invisible cord is not guilty of our misery: we have plenty of rope yet," Vogel commented with that peculiar facial expression we all had during the paroxysm-periods: that of bracing oneself for a sudden explosion of pain. And the convulsions were hitting and they often came in pairs.

People were coping somehow: took painkillers, wore amulets, spent the periods in support or prayer groups or drank themselves numb, but all these took only the top off the agony. For myself, I developed a meditation-like attitude, which was taking more than the top. Vogel, on the other hand, was drawing on his hobo experiences: he concocted a herbal pill, which took off much more. He was selling plenty of those (made a wad) and was working on a stronger version during the precious paroxysm-free hours not squandered on sleep.

On the 35th day, we stayed, as usual during the periods of torment (sleep was impossible in spite of pills, booze, anything), in front of the TV set waiting for a news that would give us hope. We had seen journalists stalk men and women of science and demanding explanations – to no avail. We just heard a guy had been acquitted of killing his wife (who was divorcing and suing him for a stash): he was loading his gun when a paroxysm hit – as if Humanity did not know that toting firearms and paroxysm-periods don't mix, but there was no law yet.

Agony (for the 24th time today)… Agony (the 25th time: they do come in pairs)… We were not rolling off the chairs only because of the makeshift safety belts we had installed. After two paroxysms, there was a strong probability of a calm period, so Vogel took The Daily Rag, a paper edited by his old hobo-buddy Feigenblatt, just back in business. He skimmed a few lines, hammered his fist on his forehead and began to read aloud:

Dear Reader, we've been knocked out as much as anybody, but here we are again! In order to disperse the shadow of calamity hanging over the lot of us, a good news: our Mother is still alive! On the now infamous day of the Mars touchdown, a vivacious development has been taking place here on Earth – and within the borders of our own country! A tremor deeply under the seabed, several miles south of our fishing town of T., was registered that morning, but because of the later developments, the authorities were not up to the task of investigating. The first report came when our fishermen went back to fishing two days ago. They discovered a brand-new islet jutting from the sea [here an exact position according to GPS]. As our armed forces are rebuilding their efficacy, we remind the Government of its sacred duty to assure our national sovereignty over this possibly valuable piece of land, positioned so close to the territorial waters of our neighbor…

"Yeah, let's go!" I cried and we ran to the garage. I grabbed the flag in passing (we fly it on Vogel's birthday, National Day and other law-prescribed occasions) and we were off. Twice, we nearly got killed (driving and paroxysms don't mix) even though Vogel had swallowed a handful of his pills, and we survived other five paroxysms before the sun went down.
The roads were crowded during the nights, so we arrived at T. first shortly before sunrise and we couldn't find anyone willing to sail us over or to rent a boat (sailing and paroxysms don't mix). We were resigned to waiting till the evening when a motorboat appeared with a middle-aged guy at the helm, his military camouflage jacket and beret in national colors identifying him as a member of a certain nationalist group. I took the flag from the car and commanded him to take us to the new island. "Just think that some foreign jingoist claims it for his country!" I told him.
Who said that nationalism socks? The patriot took us over in no time, planted the flag, sang the national anthem and proceeded to drink beer and sing chauvinistic songs, leaving us free to roam the rocky island.
The day was breaking when we finally found our prize: a thick reddish rope protruding from the ground and forming a twisted sculpture. It must have issued from a fissure in the ground, much like toothpaste from a tube. As we were looking, a gull landed on one of its numerous folds, looked around, as if thinking what to do next.
"No, you bastard!" we shouted in unison, but it was too late: the bird pecked and as its beak hit the rope, we were hit by a paroxysm. It sent us writhing onto the hard stone.
There was no second one. As we got up, the bird was gone, scared by our contortions and moans. We approached the rope: it was like a thick cable braided of innumerable strands of enormously thin threads. It could have been mistaken for a piece of hi-tech wiring if not for its being alive and pulsating. It exuded a smell of flesh, which must have been prompting seabirds to peck – twice, before finding out it was too hard to penetrate.
It felt very hard when we – cautiously – laid our hands on its surface. We took off our clothes, wrapped it and with utmost care covered it with stones and camouflaged with seaweed.
When we joined the patriot he declared that he had named the island after himself and was going to claim it as his possession and to build a home here. Then he saw we were naked, called us perverts and wouldn't have us in the boat. It took some effort to persuade him that his title to the island depended on signatures of two witnesses, before he agreed do take us and to give us clothes from the boat's cupboard.
When we arrived back in T., the streets were crowded with happy people, united in an impromptu merry-making. Somehow they knew: the ordeal was over! We joined in.

"So there are invisible links binding people to the Earth,” I began, as we were speeding home in the afternoon. “But what was the thing we secured? It must have some connection with the links, obviously.”
“A fragment of the nerves of the Earth containing a part of the cords, which normally is hidden inside the Earth and has invisible extensions connecting us with Her. She’s a living organism and we are parts of Her. Volcanoes and earthquakes are Her diseases. The tremor must have forced the nerve up together with the island. In one of his stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle depicts Earth as a living organism and us humans as its parasites. Personally, I think we are Her organs – eyes, ears, noses and brains – and therefore have to be attached to Her. As no other living organisms were hit by paroxysms, it stands to reason that they don’t have that function. The purpose of the evolution must have been to generate new organs for Her, and when we humans appeared She set the apes free – as She did with other animals while developing improved organs. It seems that we also suffice as Her space-organs, at least for a time being, but who knows how long the link is? She might evolve another race whenever She feels like going into Deep Space. After all, we can only serve Her with our five senses! Imagine that a complete picture of the material world can only be achieved through not five but, say, ten senses, the extra five being unimaginable to us?”
“Master, the inconceivable thing is that our links are so material inside the Earth and totally invisible outside!”
“Must be one of Her early inventions: imagine Her organs: the fish, the dinosaurs, the monkeys, the apes and us pulling long meaty ropes from our asses? She made our part of the link of something so invisible, so pliable, so obvious and so supple as to be detectable only with one of the senses yet unknown. Should She make you grow them, you would be “seeing” the “cords”, don’t you worry!”
“You think She will give us enough “rope” to go for the stars, Master?”
“Let’s hope so! Otherwise, a new breed will appear and take over – if we don’t kill Her before. Just imagine: organs killing the host off!”

The paroxysms never came back, but Vogel’s pills have proven to be effective against migraine.
A month later there was another tremor and the island disappeared into the sea, back whence it came.
Let's hope that now, when the wiring is on the bottom, sharks won't get to it.

Copyright Peter Billig 2007

OCKHAM'S RAZOR A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
OCKHAM'S RAZOR
A Saul Vogel Mystery

“Don’t you feel sorry for your characters?” Vogel asked, as I finished reading some of my short stories to him. “You make them feel so much, think so much and suffer so much.”
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of 8. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape allegedly had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints – leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life: never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”

“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date! Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.

The Reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the surrounding woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.

In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy paths, which Vogel called donkey trails. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky nor sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.

As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. The threshold of Hell, I thought but Master sped forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.
People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another – mendicants’ rags, yet another – frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch, and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.

In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all. Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense: D’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falls out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”

“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The old, immobile and dead d’Artagnan changed suddenly into the youngster he had been before setting off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their part in the plot.
“He’s been dead as a doornail. What made him alive again, Master?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure. The writer creates these individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text, making them perform once more. And think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”

He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors, and he made the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”).
I refrain from quoting his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Dumas, Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek, Hrabal and Hašek.
As we saw mine, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “mine” moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.

“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we rushed back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“You are talented, yes, but can you fill Rostand’s shoes? My advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.




















Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE FOURTH DIMENSION A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Vogel had a sudden fit of scientific interest, this time for ancient Roman religion. I kept fetching volumes in numerous languages. I would have protested sooner, the library being miles away, but the librarian was so attractive that I did not protest till two months were gone and I still heard only her firm “no!”.
“Master, drop it!” I appealed to him. “I beseech you in the name of the Capitoline Triad! It’s all Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad now. Nobody venerates Jupiter or Juno anymore, and the career of a Vestal or any other virgin is not that popular nowadays. Perhaps only old Priapus…”
“You have become impertinent, my young apprentice! You do whatever your employer tells you to, that’s what you do! I want to refresh in situ on my Minerva, Saturn, Pomona, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Lares, Penates, Janus and other deities. Pack up! We’re going Rome!”

We stayed in a hotel. My hopes that Vogel, confronted with the Eternal City, will soften up, enjoy campari on the rocks and tick off the obligatory sights were gone. Sure, he liked campari but he refused to visit churches or the Vatican (“it’s modern Roman religion”). He spent day after day wandering in the worst heat on the Roman Forum: a site at the foot of the Palatine Hill, all covered with stumps of ancient temples. He would stop before a ruin, read in the thick books he carried in a case, and ponder.
At first I felt obliged to accompany my boss and carry the case but as he would not share his thoughts and the heat was unbearable, I thanked off, bought a second-hand bike and made excursions into the landscapes around Rome. We dined together in the evenings and broke our fast in the mornings, but we hardly spoke, as he was completely engrossed in the studies.
“Have you ever heard of the canicula, a vacation any Roman with self-respect would take from Rome’s burning heat when the constellation of Canis Minor came up?” I asked.
“I’m an old vagabond, I can take the heat.” And he counseled me to drive up to the colder North and see Florence, Venice, Ravenna, Turin and Milan on the way.

Heat indescribable. I couldn’t pull myself together to drive anywhere and stayed naked in the room, frequent showers and camparis on the rocks. I remember lifting the glass up to my lips, and suddenly Vogel is shaking me and I am spilling the drink.
Why was he in my room? How could I have fallen asleep like this, with a glass to my lips? Am I drunk? Is it a dream?
“Wake up, man, let’s go! No time to waste!”
“A moment, Master, I’m naked!”
“Not important!”

He dragged me out into the street and I was taken aback. A green double-decker was standing at the bus stop in front of the hotel but the alighting passenger was not landing on the sidewalk – he was hanging in the air! Cars, in Italy honking and speeding, stood motionless and soundless, and so did pedestrians, normally garrulous and gesticulating, now like a sculpture exhibition.
“What is this shit, Master?”
“Time’s stopped.”
“What?”
“Time is standing still. Time doesn’t fly,” he added in Latin[1]. “Let’s move it! Every second is precious!”
“How come? If it’s still, what’s the hurry?”
“It hasn’t stopped for us, can’t you see? And I don’t know when the next attack comes.”
“What attack?”
He sent me one of those glances, so I said: “Lead on, Master!” and followed him.
We ran like hell, slaloming among the frozen pedestrians and cars, all the way to the Roman Forum. There he led us zigzagging between the petrified tourists to a particular ruin.
There a young couple stood frozen in the middle of a kiss, a priest immobilized while taking a picture, two nuns eternized in mid-conversation, a sculptured woman reading in a guidebook and a guy immortalized with a string of urine between his dick and the wall of the ruin.
Vogel paid no attention. He stopped, raised both arms and cried out in Latin: “Father Janus, Father Janus, come to me![2]”
This I echoed and we kept on in more and more lamenting voice until a tall bearded man in a white toga emerged out of thin air.
“What do you want?[3]” he asked Vogel in Latin.
“Mercy![4] Don’t make us perish![5]” and Vogel made a movement with his arm encompassing the tourists but meaning all mankind.
The newcomer looked around with satisfaction, like a craftsman proud of his work. As he turned, I saw another face on the back of his head – and this one was angry.
“Seventeen hundred years”, he thundered out of this mouth, “and no respect, no sacrifice, no nothing! And now you even piss on my temple! You’ve been worshipping foreign gods here in my city and they have kept us down. I’ve got enough! I’ve stopped Time. Let your new deities save you!”
“I’m not so sure they can,” my Master answered with a bow. “For you, Father Janus, who were the god always named first in the prayers of the Quirites, to be ignored like this must be intolerable. But I vow and pledge that if you stop scourging us with your wrath I shall enliven you once a week with a prayer and incense burnt for you and you alone on an altar!”
“So you have sworn, mortal. Be careful not to breach your oath!” one mouth said. “Gee, you must be somebody special to resist my power so easily,” said the other mouth. “Or have I wanted you to succeed?” asked the first teasingly and the old god smiled with both pair of lips. “How nice, you brought yet another worshipper. Prayer and incense, remember, prayer and incense! Jove will be furious that the mortals worship again – not him but me!”
He disappeared into thin air and the tourists came alive. The pisser finished, hid his tool and zipped his fly. The reading woman turned a page. The priest took the picture and started looking for a new opportunity. The couple finished the kiss. Nobody had noticed anything. For them, nothing has happened.

Then they spotted the stark naked man: me. The priest dropped his camera. The young couple laughed. The nuns stared with open mouths. And the pisser sent me an angry look, as if I had outperformed him, the nuns having overlooked his performance.
Still stunned by the meeting with the double-faced one, I had completely forgotten my nudity. The pisser’s rage brought me back to the fact that the old rules apply again. I had an impulse to cover my dick with my hand and run for cover but I overcame it.
“See you later, micturator!” I said to the pisser, smiled to each of the other viewers and walked tall to the exit, head high and meeting the gapes of the revived visitors with intrepid eyes and a friendly smile. Master walked behind explaining in the numerous tongues he speaks that I was a fugitive from a loony bin.

At long last, we were out and took a taxi. As we were driving through the revived streets, again full of speeding cars and lively people, Master nodded philosophically and said:
“No person in the world save the two of us know that anything’s been amiss. If you ever wrote it down they would call it fantasy. Should anybody bother to check, the only clue to follow is an out-of-thin-air materialization and following parade of a well-endowed naked man in the Roman Forum.”
“You did it to me on purpose,” it dawned on me.
“And you surpassed yourself,” he answered, and the cabby asked me in bad English whether this was the newest outfit for flashers.
“Va’fa’n’culo!” I answered in a better Italian.

In the evening we were seated in a plane bound for our country, imbibing tax-free malt and talking.
“No, Master, no lecture. I may not have studied Roman religion as heatedly as you but still know my Janus, the double-faced god of beginnings and endings, the deity of Time. January is called after him and so should December, only it isn’t. The gate of his temple, that’s our ruin, was closed or opened only when there was peace all over the Roman Empire…”
“Closed!”
“Wasn’t it the ardor of your studies, which brought him back from the oblivion inside old books?”
“The ardor of my studies made me know what was going on, where to go and what to do. Actually, it’s the Catholic Church who’s been negligent or weak. After all, the Christians dislodged the ancient gods and it’s been their job to keep them down ever since. The Greek Orthodox Church does a much better job, as no Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hades, Ares, Aphrodite or such like re-appear over there.”
“How did you resist Janus, Master?”
“I was about to go out and roam the Forum again when I suddenly felt I was dying. Didn’t want to, so I fought it and it gave up. A moment later, it tried again and I gave it a shove and felt it was loosing interest for the time being. Then I looked out of the window and the sculptures down there made me understand: Time has been halted. With ancient Roman religion on my mind, I thought of the Roman god of time and, as you have seen, the hunch paid off.”
“But how is it possible to keep Time going for two persons only? Isn’t Time one and same for all?”
“So we philosophers thought but it can’t be. I figure Time is a bundle of individual channels. Makes sense if you think how differently time flies when you are in an uplifting conversation with your Master and when you sit in a dentist’s chair. And for the dentist, it’s a different time still.”
“Why use time on reviving me while a new attack was imminent?”
“If my intuition was correct and the attacker was a Roman god then he would appreciate another worshipper. I invested only little energy to activate your time channel; you kept it alive yourself after. And Janus was glad, which brings me to the oath we have taken…”
“You have taken,” I protested. “The constitution guarantees the freedom of religion.”
“You don’t have to feel any piety, just go through the motions. It’s a part of your job from now on,” he replied and we had a longer discussion about my job description, wages and such.
We built an altar in my garden and every Sunday we burn frankincense and say the following short Latin prayer:
Father Janus, I venerate You as the first and the last of the gods[6].
Any takers?

---

[1] Tempus non fugit. A paraphrase of one of those “golden thoughts”, which always have to be in Latin.

[2] Pater Iane, Pater Iane, veni ad me.

[3] Quid vobis vultis?

[4] Miserere!

[5] Noli nos omnes perdere.

[6] Pater Iane, Te primum ultimumque deorum veneror.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE HILL

Peter Billig
THE HILL

It was a clear summer evening. He was eight, standing on the top of a hill. To the right, the last red afterglow was going out, to the left, the stars were already shining. A black silhouette of a mountain range stood out on the horizon like a paper cutout. As the stars began to spread all over the heavenly ceiling, he had a sensation, frightening at first, then awesome, that he is not standing here and imbibing this view for the first time. Once, he was someone else and this someone – he, as it is he who is remembering this – made an important decision just here, on this very hilltop. What was it now…?
"Where are you, you brat!" called a harsh voice from below.
"I'm coming now, Mom!" he called back and ran downhill, the memory gone.
"You promised to come after sunset! Supper's getting cold!"
As he was eating, he strove to recall the consciousness of having been someone else, but the thought seemed absurd under the low ceiling of the hut.

He had a strong dream that night. He was in a town in some distant century. As he was walking the narrow streets, he recognized houses on both sides and remembered their names and purpose: a city hall, a blacksmith's, a mercer's, a grocer's, a gunsmith's, a bell-founder's, an inn and so on. He came to a broad river, and crossing it on a bridge with fancy towers he remembered that a famous person had been thrown down from here. He went uphill to a huge castle: the gate was open. With sure steps he strolled past a half-finished church to an alley glued to the ramparts. It was "his" and he knew which of the tiny houses was "his". He came to the door and spelt the name on the nameplate – his own. He awoke with a start.

One summer vacation twenty-five years later he was visiting Prague, a city he has never experienced before. First, he participated in an astrology seminar, astrology being his great hobby. Then there was time to play the tourist. And here he was with a guidebook in his hand, standing before the old city hall, a peculiar structure. Suddenly, he had an uncanny feeling of having seen this unique building before. Obviously, he had read illustrated material about Prague before going, but it did not explain the eerie quality of the experience. Then he remembered: it was the city hall from that long, long forgotten dream!
Being inside an evolving dream gave him goose flesh. He decided to follow through. He trod in the footsteps of the dream throughout the Old City, walking in the general direction of the river and recognizing the blacksmith's, the mercer's, the grocer's, the gunsmith's, the bell-founder's, the inn and so on through their now modern trappings.
He reached the river. The bridge was there. In the dream it had not been adorned with the statues of the saints (added by Counterreformation from 1685 on, the guidebook said), but the fancy towers gave it away.
He crossed the bridge (whence St John of Nepomuk had been thrown down, he read) and went up to the Castle. The unfinished church has grown into a consummate cathedral. He went to the alley from the dream, glued to the ramparts. It proved to be Golden Lane where Emperor Rudolph's alchemists lived: they were supposed to find a way of producing gold from base metals. At that time, Prague was the occult capital of Europe, full of astrologers, alchemists and magicians, the guidebook said.
He found "his" house: it was an innocent souvenir shop now, but it gave him a shudder, nevertheless.

Five years later, the first morning of his summer vacation. The exams are over, his students gone. He puts his Latin off his mind, ready to go holidaymaking, as he has been planning all the year. He has packed the car but now he feels like not going to the sea after all. What an unexpected change of heart! Where to, then? At once, the name of the destination enters his mind. He checks the road atlas: only one entry of that name: a village in the Foothills District, so he drives there instead.

Halfway, he stops at a roadside diner. He orders and sees a magazine, left by another customer, opened on a picture of the information plaque from the probe "Pioneer", sent by the U.S. at the end of the 1960's to meet Extraterrestrials. He looks closer. The messenger carried images of man and woman and a diagram of the Solar System. Aliens will be joyous finding it, now knowing that there is life in Space! And where Earth is and what manner of creature we humans are, should they feel like invading, ha, ha!

But what if we had sent the messenger not for the benefit of aliens but of ourselves?
"You all right?" inquires the waitress coming with his soup.
"Fine, I just had a very crazy thought."
She nods and leaves. This short exchange and the enticing smell of the food changes his priorities. He begins to eat, but the thought would not give up. It hits him again and he freezes with the spoon in midair.
If we, who now are Earthlings, are later reborn in another part of the Universe, a plaque from Earth could be, on Sirius or Aldebaran, a welcome reminder of a former incarnation.

He puts the spoon down and lets the thought think itself out: the sojourn on Earth is for gathering experience to carry out an assignment elsewhere. The sojourn elsewhere is for an assignment here. On Earth an exchange takes place: a part of one's soul is invested in Earth and it stays within Earth after one's death. One's body improves Earth by staying behind. It's of a better stuff, having been so close to the soul. Earth reciprocates by enriching the soul via the body, by making new parts of the soul grow. The new parts are the reason why a sojourn on another planet is now feasible. It all makes sense! So it can go on all over the galaxies, with repeated sojourns on the same planets, perhaps as member of a different species whenever on Earth? This traveling between distant worlds might be the meaning of one's existence as an entity…

"You don't like the soup?" the waitress arrives with his main course. "The cook believes himself to be the reincarnation of Brillat-Savarin. Puts his soul into the soup, we hear but praise and acclaim!"
"It's excellent. It's that crazy thought, I'm afraid. Could you explain to the cook…?"

She nods and leaves with the cold soup.

What did she say? The cook puts his dick in the soup?
He visualized the scene and burst out in laughter. The other guests began to stare. He shut up shaking with stifled laughter, tears pouring down his cheeks. Eating was impossible.

"So you left the main course, too. Been crying over it? It's not that bad, some people like it. The cook won't accept apologies this time. He'll go for you with the cleaver!"
He smiled and gave her a bill.
"Keep the change."
"No." She gave him change and pressed her own coins on him. "I'm tipping you for the entertainment."

The name of his destination appeared on a signboard by the road; a moment later he recognized the hut, and the summer vacation with his mother years, years ago came vividly back. It was here – that dream, which led to the curious experience in Prague! This great sensation, top of a hill!

And the hill appeared. He stopped the car and ran up.
To the right the last afterglow was going out and to the left the stars were already shining. Before him there was a black silhouette of a mountain range, like a paper cutout on the horizon. As the stars began to spread over the heavens, he had a sensation, at first frightening then awesome, that he is not standing here for the first time. Once, he was someone else and this someone – but actually he, as it is him who is remembering this – had made an important decision just here, on this very hilltop.
What was it now…? He sat down, closed his eyes, fell down the well of his inner space – and landed in Prague, crossing the bridge. Like in the old dream, the saint-figures were gone, as were the buildings built later than the early 1600's. Now he could fully appreciate it: the monstrous Wallenstein Palace, for example, wasn't there.
He went up to the Castle, entered Golden Lane and walked to his house. The door was locked. As he was searching for the key, he suddenly felt very cold – and found himself back on the hill, shivering.
It was 3 a.m. and dark, except for the stars. He fetched his sleeping bag from the car, found some level ground on the hilltop, crawled into the bag and was fast asleep:

Now he was by the door, turning the key. The room looked like a medieval laboratory: pipes and alembics arranged on long tables, shelves with varicolored jars, flasks and phials, containing chemicals, as he could tell by the smells. The fireplace was ablaze, even though it was summer.
A desk by the window was covered with writings and drawings. A man was scribbling laboriously with a quill. Immediately he knew: he and this man are one and the same person!

The man finished scrawling and fetched a little glass bottle from a shelf. He rolled the paper, he just had written, and placed it inside. He skillfully melted the neck down over the fire. There was no doubt: an important document has been placed in a time capsule.
A man with a whip knocked on the window:
"Your coach is ready, sir."
"I'm coming," the other replied, put the bottle in his breast pocket and reached for his cape and hat…

He awakes with a shudder. It is very cold; the sleeping bag is covered with dew. The sun is rising. The dream has been so vivid that to be back on the hill feels like being in a different universe.
He stands up, urinates, fetches a screwdriver from the car and begins to jab the soil off the level part where he just has been sleeping. The metal scratches against glass, and he digs on with his hands, extracts the little bottle. He rinses it in the dew. Yes, it is intact; the paper is still inside. He breaks the glass and unrolls the paper, actually a parchment.
There is a horoscope of one Adalbertus de Praga, drawn in the antiquated square-based style, and a text in Latin:

When I, Adalbertus of Prague, alchemist and astrologer, was on 15 August 1600 AD bivouacking on this hilltop, I was shaken to the deepest of my soul by an enormous view. As with wondering eyes I was watching the stars being born on the evening sky simultaneously with the black ridge of the mountains and a bloody sunset, a feeling in my heart and a thought in my head were born spontaneously: death is not the end of a human's life, but the beginning of a future life. There is no point in fearing death: when a human dies, the soul leaves the dead body, freed of carnal constraints. At the astrologically proper time, when the mistakes of the previous life best can be straightened by virtue of the favorable configuration of the planets, the very same soul enters a new body. That is why it is called metempsychosis in Greek and reincarnatio in Latin. To me, my doctrine seems to be a pernicious one because it is not in accord with the Scriptures and the Church, but more like a religion of heretics. Whom shall I believe: the heretics or the Fathers? Other people's authority or myself? Is it a deceptive daydream or a true hope? If it is not just a specter, let this be the token and testimony for you – or should I say "me"? Because if you should recall this had been written and find this container and read this report, what more should you require than this testimony, this token and this document? I stretch both my arms out to you (to me) through the chasm of eternity. Get born (let me get born), live (let me live) and stay fit (let me stay fit)![1]

"My private Pioneer has arrived," he thought and heaved a sigh of relief.

---

[1] The horoscope is private and will not be published, and the original Latin text reads as follows:

Ego, Adalbertus de Praga, alchemista & astrologus, die XV Aug. A.D. MDC hic in summo colle cum tempus tererem, visu enormi sum percussus usque ad imam animam. Nam cum stellas in caelo vesperino nascentia simul cum nigro derso montium & cruento Solis occasu oculis admirantibus animadverterem, sponte sua sensus in corde & cogitatio huius generis in animo nati: non esse mortem finem vitae humanae, sed initium vitae futurae. Non est timenda mors: moritur homo, dissolutis carnis catenis anima corpus mortuum relinquit, & cum tempus astrologice idoneum obventurum sit, quando peccata pristinae vitae ex constellatione planetarum facillime emendabuntur, ingreditur anima ipsissima in carnem novam; quare Graece metempsychosis, Latine reincarnatio appellatur. Quae doctrina ideo mi perniciosa videtur, quod contra Scripturas & Ecclesiam ad haereticorum paganorumque spectat religionem. Cui credam? haereticisne an Patribus? auctoritati aliorum aut mihimet ipsi? Est phantasma falsum aut spes vera? Si spectrum non est, en tibi – dicamne "mihi”? – signaculum testimoniumque: quod si scriptum recordatus fueris, repositorium inveneris, hunc nuntium legeris, quid hoc testimonio, hoc signo, hoc documento amplius requires? Bracchia ambo tibi (mihi) super abyssum aeternitatis protendo. Nascere (nascar), vive (vivam), vale (valeam)!

Copyright 2007 Peter Billig

TROJAN MULE

Peter Billig

TROJAN MULE

“Life’s a bitch and always because of the broads!” Werner said. “Bottoms up!”
He emptied the glass to his image in the mirror and thus spake to his double:
“Werner, a human blessed with awareness, got hurt again! Animals learn quicker! Where does this urge come from? I give my soul to a woman, I get abandoned and I undergo the same excruciating pain again and again. And when my heart has healed, I find yet another woman! This is a trap, a pitfall of existence! My manhood, erudition and free will mean dick because I can’t gainsay my psychological program, the preprogrammed robot I am! Cheers!”
They drank again.
“Let’s be fair. In my case, it’s always been a man ditched, as I’m a man. But women get discarded too. I’ve seen females hurt by men. Works for both genders; all humanity’s trapped! Cheerio!”
They took a long silent drink.

“Here we go again, full of heartache, getting stiff,” Werner said at last. “Time to do something. I’m referring to my secret project code-named “Sexless”, told you last time. Being the leader of this lab I can start at once, without questions from above. If I keep it secret the first three months, everybody – Rector, President, Primate and Pope – can kiss my ass. We have the anti-abortion law and the free press! Pro-lifers will stand by me and I will adopt, the sperm being mine! Let’s drink to the project!”
They did.

Nine months later all Institute was present to assist at the “delivery”. The moment the little one has been taken out of the mother-surrogate, the scientists avidly began their inspection: in the place where genitals occur, it had only an orifice to void urine. Werner called it Evadam, a hybrid of Eve and Adam, the first man and the first woman. Evadam was the first unsex. In its birth certificate, in the space gender stood neuter, and in mother and father both Werner’s name.
Werner’s flat became an open house for scientists and a strange thing happened: their initial scientific curiosity gradually changed into heartfelt care for Evadam’s well being. Soon, all scientific pretences were dropped and people kept coming for the pleasure of it.
Even though in its physical and intellectual growth Evadam did not stand out against his sexed peers, there was something irresistible to its beautiful features, gracious movements, and, later, harmonious voice making Evadam’s presence an enjoyment. Some said Evadam had a healing effect on body and psyche comparable to swimming with dolphins.
Three years old Evadam began in kindergarten and even the kids’ parents were enticed, staying to talk with it and to give it sweets. The kids, though, were not jealous because Evadam created peace and harmony around it. To be angry or envious with it was impossible.

Same story repeated itself in school: Evadam was a favorite with everyone, both its teachers and pals. In high school, in the age when sexuality means so much, Evadam’s peers respected it precisely because of its holding itself aloof of all this hanky-panky. And the teachers noticed that love and lust between the students, a normal state of affairs, was practically non-existent during the unsex’s stay, replaced by asexual friendships.
Only too late they linked this fact to Evadam’s person. As the unsex graduated from high school, it went on vacation. There, it celebrated its coming of age – eighteen – and, albeit unaware, its unsexual maturity. So when it entered university in the autumn, all the fellow students began to lose sexual interest for their partners. Once more nobody associated the fact with Evadam’s person. Three months after its enrollment a reporter from a local TV station visited the university to talk with the freshmen. He chanced upon Evadam.
The five minutes short interview was broadcast during the intermission in a prestigious soccer game. Only the people in the stadium watched the second half of the match. The TV viewers were phoning or e-mailing the station with demands to see Evadam again – such was the commendation of its charm! The interview was shown again immediately after the game. Other stations in the country heard of it and showed it. As the result, 99% of our populace saw Evadam and the same thing happened to them: they lost sexual interest for other people, exactly as Evadam’s fellow students. TV stations abroad bought and brought the interview. Every newspaper had at least one picture of Evadam. A soft drink company put its image on the bottles – and kept selling out! Other companies followed. Their products reached everywhere – into the jungles, the deserts and the icecaps.
And before anyone was aware of it was too late. We never thought that men and women attracted each other because their biological program offered no choice – a smart device by the monopolistic Nature, interested in keeping her farce of life going. As soon as an unsex appeared, engineered by human protest, the deeper strata of our psyche saw through the scheme and blew the whistle on Her.

Copyright 2007 Peter Billig

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH
A Saul Vogel Mystery

"What I most revere in you, Master, is your mental independence: that you never have adhered to any doctrines, even your own," I told Vogel. We’ve had a discussion about Philosophy the day before and once more I was amazed to see the ease, with which he abandoned yesterday’s opinions.
"I'm afraid your flattering opinion doesn't tally with the facts," he replied. "There was a time in my youth when a particular dogma was holding sway over me."
"Which dogma would that be?" I asked lightly, expecting a joke like "womanism", a neat formulation of my Master's particular partiality.
"Roman Catholicism," he said reluctantly, as if expecting me to be scandalized.
A sick joke – but something in his face told me it was no joke: he must have had a Catholic episode, never shared with me. My inner eye saw my Master kissing a priestly hand, and I felt sudden queasiness.
“Nauseating, isn’t it?” he said. “I met a padre in Italy, whose stance and faith impressed me so much that I converted…"
"You got baptized!" I exploded.
"But you wouldn't mind, had I become a Hassid?”
"It would have been more consistent with your national roots."
"Roots, shmoots, my ass! People are equal. A priest's cassock is no worse than a rabbi's gabardine or an imam’s whatever. What really was despicable here…"
"So you even wanted to be a sky pilot!"
"Why be a follower if you can be a leader? Father Giuseppe prevailed upon me, though, not to enter seminary but to spread the faith privately, the people of Italy having become increasingly Communist and godless under the Vatican's very nose. That's where my talent is, he told me, the fire of my heart much more effective in private contacts than anything I could say from the pulpit. What really was disgraceful here…" but I interrupted by getting up to fetch whisky and glasses.

As I was arranging the tray, it struck me that Vogel was being extremely frank, telling me things he was deeply ashamed of: a token of enormous confidence! I shouldn't have interrupted, I should have encouraged him or he might clam up on me.
"What a splendid idea!" his eyes shone up when he saw the tray.
"What really was shameful here…" I prompted, pouring.
"… was not the fact that I became a Catholic (it would have been the same had I become a Protestant, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Judaist) but that I ceased to use my own brains (or wait for my own illumination) and surrendered myself to another person's mental tutelage. It's not important whether this person is wise or stupid, godly or ungodly. It's to accept any doctrine as the truth: revealed, absolute and complete! Before meeting Father Giuseppe I used to call myself itinerant freethinker… Itinerant asshole!"
He drank up and I followed suit.
"You were young and wanted something to lean on," I said conciliatorily.
"Don’t patronize me! My youth was aggravating circumstances! I can understand an old man who's been searching for the truth all his life, and not having found it, he embraces an existing religion or philosophy in order to die in peace. This is all right. But young folks should search for new truths, establish own religions and philosophies and never let themselves be caught in a web of systems built on outdated illuminations, millennia old, which stay alive only through indoctrinating their customers from the cradle on."
"Imagine the mess if each and every person had his/her own religion. But tell me about your case: Saulo Voghelli vs. il Papa, " I said.
"I used to be a vagabond,” he smiled at last, “going from country to country, thinking whatever I pleased, taking odd jobs on my way, entrancing women and breaking their hearts (a bird free to perch on whatever branch it chose) when I met Padre Giuseppe in a coffee-bar in a Sicilian township. We talked over a cappuccino and I was struck by a lightning from God! Padre Giuseppe invited me to follow him to Palermo and join the group of his "laic friends"; he had a parish there and was a bigwig within the Jesuit order. I dropped the work I was doing for a local widow (Angela, and wasn't she an angel!) and drove with him in his Lancia. In Palermo he set me up with a job and a flat. I worked in a gunsmith's, selling legal rifles to hunters and illegal submachine guns to mafiosi. Twice a week, after evening services, we held meetings in his church, and the whole setup: the Master and the disciples, the topics discussed, the instructions issued, the atmosphere of sanctimonious subjugation provided all my spiritual nourishment. I lived within a protective Catholic circle, organized like a monastic order. We called each other fra Giovanni or suora Maria, even though most were married and had children. No wonder it did not take long before I was asking to be baptized. A cardinal performed it, the mayor of Palermo stood godfather. I wanted to become a priest but Padre Giuseppe convinced me my path should be worldly. He introduced me to a young woman from una famiglia borghese di Siracusa (Maddalena, a very nice girl) and suddenly I heard myself pronounce readiness to marry her, sire children and bring them up as Pope-fearing Catholics. So we got engaged."
"You were planning a pilgrimage on your honeymoon? Fátima, Compostela, Lourdes or just San Pietro?” I inquired. “Speaking of whom: did you inform your new friends about your origins?"
"I did. Padre Giuseppe was the more admired for having brought one of the "older stray brethren" back to the fold. Our flock told me the human part of Jesus was Jewish, his mother, too, and the Apostles. I wasn't actually turning my back or my coat on my roots. ‘The first Christians were Jewish,’ Padre Giuseppe told me, ‘and as you never believed in the now outdated truths of Judaism, there is no treachery.’ I was baptized as Paolo to remind me of my namesake Saul, who, at the gates of Damascus…"
"Oh, spare me! Tell me rather how you have got out of this holy mess!"
Vogel had another drink and began:

"I had a neighbor upstairs, a guy called Adriano. From his place, there always came noises of parties or sexual intercourses whenever I wanted to focus on contemplation or prayer. Sometimes, I had the impression, listening from my apartment, that he was doing it with more than one at a time. At last, I went up during an extremely wild party to appeal to his better self. He answered the doorbell together with three naked chicks. The fire in me went ablaze and I held a sermon on the doorstep, but he, instead of kicking me downstairs, invited me to step in. I'll never forget his grin when he poured a grappa for me, and the nudes began to touch me. I told them I was fidanzato and a teetotaler. Un astinente disgraziato, they teased and the horny chicks let me see all they had one at a time, having made bets as to which one will succeed in seducing me. My black half-priestly clothes actually piqued them on! I almost succumbed to the first, but overcame my old self through a moral effort and stayed chaste and sober throughout the ordeal.
"I must have impressed the host, because later Adriano visited me with a bottle and spent the whole evening emptying it and telling me the story of his life. A bastard son of a local landowning count, he was well provided for in his will. He was also an atheist and a fervent anticlerical, studying philosophy at the Università di Palermo. He aimed at a journalist career and certainly did his legwork and research. The things he told me about the clergy! All the sodomites, child-molesters, Satanists, thieves and weirdoes! Some stories were convincing but I managed to suppress them, especially as he couldn't say anything negative about my Padre Giuseppe.
"Then it was my turn. My religious glow made quite an impression on him, but he was able to suppress it as well. To cut the story short: a curious friendship developed. I tried to save his soul, and he – my head. We visited and discussed and philosophized and propagandized, and the temple of God stood firm in me, and so did that of Satan in him." Vogel sighed and had another drink.

"I remember our last conversation. He visited me in the gun-shop, and I assaulted the stronghold of Beelzebub in his soul:
"Just think, Adriano! Because of your way of life, you are squandering away the bliss of Paradise!" and I depicted for him the glory of the Trinity and the Cherubic Choirs, a view he will never be allowed to behold."
"Non dire cazzate, pio amico mio!" he replied. "I am as I am and this is not my fault: the Creator has made me so. If He doesn't like the way I live, He should have created me different. Is it reasonable that I should be made to pay because He botched His job? Is it fair that I, a product, should be made responsible for my Demiurges' foozle? If He wants a mule to carry ten tons, He should have made it a truck, not a mule! If I'm supposed to stay away from the girls, He should have created me a eunuch! I am not going to make a knot on Mr. Dick because You Know Who has been lazing it off in excelsis. The Creator has not created man until the 6th day: tired by then, hands trembling? I am a bungled, low-grade product, a lemon, and I act accordingly. Not that I believe in His existence, I believe in Matter having produced life, but should I be mistaken and the Creator exists, I'm sure He accepts my point!"
"Perhaps the Almighty purposely created man with all the faults and failures and is not so much interested in our avoiding all the sins and temptations but in our sincerely wanting to? And obeying the precepts of the Church is the surest policy, as She represents the Holy Trinity on earth. Why be an idiot and exchange eternal life in Paradise for eternal damnation in Hell? My friends tell me you propositioned a nun in the street! Have you no shame in life, Adriano?"
"Your people have a saying: One may proposition even a rabbi's wife. Suora Teresa could have changed her mind about staying a nun in response to my masculine charm, couldn't she? And a simple "no" would have sufficed, no need for the heavy stuff."
Suora Teresa called the carabinieri, Adriano was charged with blasphemy, but got off with a fine for streetwalking, the judge being quite witty.
"I don't believe in a life after death: there will be a black screen and no one to see it," Adriano went on. "But should there be a new TV show instead, a Catholic one, I won’t be languishing in Hell very long – if at all! There are worse criminals than me. Can’t imagine the Judge giving a lady-killer the same sentence as a real killer, a child-molester, a political leader or a religious one!"
"You will be boiling in tar longer than you think," I retorted, "because you think you are smarter than the Church and Her tradition, based on revelations of Jesus, the Apostles, the Fathers and the Saints up to the present day. Think of our own Father Pio, a Saint alive!”
"Va’ fa’n culo! The stigmata may be a special Catholic state of mind, but it is just one of many elated states, which devout Judaists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims or Hindus alike are able to generate. They experience whichever Lord is appropriate: Adonai, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Krishna… All these states are products of the material body, they are pure psychology, exactly as falling in love, getting angry or experiencing pleasure are," said Adriano. "For my part, I encounter Our Lady Venus whenever making love, but I don't believe in meeting Her when I'm dead, neither do you, Saolo."
"Call me Paolo. And what if you died tonight and, as the Holy Church teaches us, met your Maker? You think you will be able to convince Him to let you off the hook?"
"Don't worry, Saolo. If that be the case I'll drop you a line directly from Paradise!" Adriano replied. He said he had a date in Agrigento, sprang into his convertible and was off.
An hour later he was killed in a road accident.

“I was devastated. I never realized how much of a friend Adriano had become,” my Master continued, “but my grief was partly due to my not having been able to convert him in time. I received consolation from our flock. By now they called me “our little missionary”. Why “little”?
“Father Giuseppe asked us to pray for Adriano: ‘He really needs it more than anyone and let us hope that Paolo’s words managed to make an impression on his soul until, in his stupid rush through life, he took that fatal turning,’ he pronounced and promised to say a mass for his soul. Police investigation revealed that Adriano’s Ferrari had been negotiating the lethal curve with excessive speed.
“I went to the funeral, attended the banquet thrown by his friends, and when I got back home I found a letter on my desk, even though I had the only key to my flat.”
Master opened a drawer and handed me a piece of paper-like material. It was silky and did not rustle when handled. The letters on the white surface were handwritten in blue:

Dear Saolo, I promised to drop you a line from Paradise and here it comes!
I used to fear death as the moment of the inner screen going black but when the point in time actually came, instead of blackness I saw my limp body lying by the smashed car. An asshole should never drive a Ferrari, I thought, but I did not feel ashamed, actually I felt detached: I was outside, this corpse out there wasn’t me anymore. My eyes closed for the material world and opened for another dimension: a tunnel. I flew into it and moved quickly, headed for its bright end far away. With every passing second life was getting more distant, as if it only had been a dream.
Upon reaching the bright end, I found myself entering a lush park, which was sporting flowers, bushes and trees of all imaginable and unimaginable shapes. The feeling I was experiencing was that of indescribable happiness. I was in Paradise!
I wanted to plunge into this beautiful sensation but something kept nagging me, some unresolved bond to life, an unfinished business. Paradise is a Catholic idea and I realized that I was expecting the Judgment. You were right, there is a Paradise – but I should be in Hell instead! It was a very unpleasant feeling, making it impossible to sink into the bliss.
I spied some entities walking nearby and saw that in my present form I looked exactly like they: cartoon ghosts. ‘Excuse me, which way to the Judgment?’ One bothered to come out of bliss: ‘What Judgment?’. I explained, and the friendly ghost advised me to ask God: ‘He takes care of all questions here.’ The ghost gave me directions. ‘Can’t miss Him.’
I spare you the details of my walkabout but I assure you: no Trinity on my way, no Cherubic Choirs, no Abraham’s bosom, only human and animal ghosts perambulating amid the plants.
At last I saw God sitting under a particularly psychedelic-looking tree. There was no mistake: He was no ghost, He was a human being, very present and aware. He had a nondescript face and a little beauty-spot on the left cheek. He smiled when our eyes met, and He knew me at once:
“Adriano the nun-molester, professional lady-killer and amateurish driver! You want to ask about the Judgment, eh? There is no Judgment, no Hell, no Purgatory! There is only Paradise! Father Pio or Idi Amin, no difference, every single one of you comes directly here.”
“What is justice then if a Hitler and a Saint Francis get the same reward?” I asked.
“Justice is that whatever pain, misfortune and loss you have suffered or caused in life becomes irrelevant once you get in here. Life was a nightmare you have dreamt and now you are awake.”
“And what do I do now?” I asked.
“You bliss in, and when your time comes, you bliss out.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“There is some dissent among the inmates. Personally, I am pretty confident it is to the dimension whence I was made to appear here.”
This sounded all right and I couldn’t wait to bliss in, but something was vexing me, though: the awareness that you, my friend, live in the clutches of a stupid ideology, making confessions, doing penance, kissing a priestly hand and entering a loveless marriage.
“I want to tell a living friend about this Paradise, if I may?” I said.
“Who’s stopping you? You only have to will a letter with a specific content at a particular place over there, the way I had willed the world, life and so on.”
So here comes the letter and it’s up to you to take the cue as I’m about to bliss in.
Tanti saluti
Adriano.

“And this is how I got out of that holy mess.”
“It was a hoax! Someone from your pseudo-monastic order wanted to take the neophyte down a peg. Or was it a friend of Adriano’s? Far too ingenious for a Catholic!”
“Exactly my thoughts. Something told me, though, to have the letter analyzed, and the lab told me this material should not exist on earth at all as it is made of unknown elements. Actually, several labs did. A bit too elaborate for a practical joke, wouldn’t you think?”
“I would,” I said looking a bit sheepishly at the silky page.
“Suddenly, I saw the inner strings of my religious obsession, realized my mistake and my mind-set went tumbling down. I actually heard it crack and crumble in my head, a tower collapsing! I went to Padre Giuseppe, gave my reasons and said my goodbyes. I’ve never seen a man more shocked. He called me a Judas and so did the brothers and sisters I visited, as Padre Giuseppe forbade me to address them at a meeting. I drove my little Fiat to Siracusa and broke off the engagement. Poor Maddalena was flabbergasted and called me a Judas. Then I partied with Adriano’s crowd, made love to all the horny chicks and drove back to my Angelina, who called me a son of a bitch and set her vicious dog on me. So I sold my car, resumed my vagabondage, quit Italy and moved over to Greece, wisely knowing never to use other people’s minds instead of my own. But this is another story.”
“So you never got un-baptized?”
“Can a guy get un-circumcised?” he replied, looked at the clock, and I said goodnight and went downstairs to my apartment.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Billig

TWO DREAMS A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
TWO DREAMS
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Dream nr. 1
I was spending most of my free time with my friend, Albert Zweistein. The designation ‘friend’ is an exaggeration: Albert did not actually befriend me, he just accepted my company for walks and tolerated my presence in his study: I wasn’t disturbing him and sometimes I even paid my way as a live object on whose non-geometrical shape he could rest his sight and with whom he could share his thoughts – not that I understood anything of his infernally complex theories.
It does not mean, however, that I am particularly slow-witted: I do not believe that anybody comprehended them – except Albert himself, that is. Already his first book, written when he was seventeen, has been grasped only by a slim handful of initiated specialists, and the next one he was trying to bring out a year later has been turned down by the publisher: none of the reviewers were able to understand it.

It is characteristic, however, that they blamed this state of affairs not on the author, but on themselves: ‘Mr. Zweistein achieved heights none of the signatories can fly up to. Therefore, we are in agreement that publishing Mr. Zweistein’s opus at the present time would be a waste of paper and printing-ink; instead, we recommend that the manuscript be secured until the time when humanity attains a level of development, which would enable us to profit from it,’ was their joint opinion.
Albert accepted the negative-positive verdict of the experts with utter equanimity: for him, the book was past tense: already, he was working on something which would have been even less comprehensible or more incomprehensible. Therefore, he desisted from publicizing anything in print and restricted himself to sitting in his study and unraveling his theses.
It was purely intellectual work: he would make himself comfortable in his armchair, close the eyes and ruminate; once in a while he would dot something on a piece of paper. Before going to dinner, he would write down the date and put the paper on the heap of others. At 8:30 a.m. he would have his breakfast, and on the strike of nine he would begin his work, consulting first the sheet from the day before. Thus he could easily return to the interrupted train of thoughts: his ponderings formed an unbelievably long chain of ensuing conclusions; they were a logical expansion of an idea, which – as he once mentioned – he had had when fourteen.
He would work until five fifteen: that was the hour to sit down to his dinner. At eighteen hours I would appear and we would go together for a stroll of precisely one hour’s lenght. During the promenade I would keep him up to date as to the latest news, domestic and from abroad: he considered reading papers a waste of time. I would also entertain him telling jokes and anecdotes, spinning yarns or re-narrating films. Rarely, should he just happen to surmount a particularly crucial point in his inquiry, he would inform me briefly thereof. I would pretend that I understood – out of politeness.
Exactly at nine p.m. he was back at his desk, picking up his work. I would immerse myself in one of the books from his extensive library – he stopped using it a long time ago, since in his cogitations he had ventured into regions so lofty that knowledge gathered by others could be of no assistance – he was himself sailor, helm and ship for himself.
He thought with his eyes closed, though he opened them frequently in order to scribble hastily on the day’s leaf or to stare at one of the three objects facilitating his concentration: a crystal ball, an ugly figurine of Copenhagen mermaid or on my face. There would be absolute silence. Only exceptionally, if his deductions became unexpectedly intricate, he would read aloud from his slip. In my ears, it sounded like Chinese: he was operating on a level of abstraction so high that he was forced to forge terminology, vocabulary and nomenclature for himself.
At ten in the evening we would sup together, topping it off with a cigar. At eleven I would say my goodbyes and leave, and he would step over to the bathroom where he would first take a warm then a cold shower. He would have a glass of cognac on top of it and go to sleep.
Thus he did every single day – weekdays or Sundays, rain or shine – of all the twelve years of our acquaintance. He has filled exactly 3.183 sheets of paper, which were laying arranged in chronological order, and he emptied as many glasses of cognac. A substantial heritage from his parents assured his wealth and leisure; I have been taking care of his social life and entertainment; his other needs were taken care of by a serving girl.
Should I be asked what discipline of science Albert was engaged in, I would be in trouble. Just in case, I would say philosophy, but equally well it could have been mathematics, physics, theology or even, say, conchology. Matter of fact, the answer to the problem troubling him could be found in any of the mentioned or unmentioned domains; also in all of them or several together – or in one which has not yet been created by us humans. The only thing I can vouch for that I have understood from his rambling digressions is the subject of his research: the quest for the sense of the existence of the world; the very fact of the existence – both of the world and the sense – Albert has assumed a priori.

Exactly on the twelfth anniversary of our acquaintance, I came, as usual, at six p.m. and found him in a state of feverish excitement. I have never seen him like that and I was greatly worried. In spite of his young age (a few months ago he turned thirty) I could not exclude a serious illness, but he categorically refused to go to bed and let me fetch a doctor.
“I’m fine,” he said, but then quickly added in a despondent voice: “You know, today at noon I’ve arrived at my goal.”
I congratulated him, but he shrugged me off:
“It’s all very nice, but what am I to do with myself hence?”
I gave him a thousand and one advice how a well-off bachelor could boost his life, but none of the suggestions met with his approval. I left him in a state of sadness and disconsolation, I consoled myself, though, that he would be quick to make the best of the changed situation. I also promised myself solemnly to help him the best I could.

The day after I found him drunk: he was gazing with dull eyes at a half-emptied bottle of cognac and was shivering feverishly.
“I had a nightmare,” he explained seeing my worried expression.
I asked him to recount: there is no better medicine for that kind of affliction than to share it with another and see it once more – in daylight.
“I dreamt,” he began reluctantly, “that I was here in my study, having finished my labors of many years. Everything was exactly as yesterday at noon: the sun was shining, and through the open window and the chirping of birds was heard. Even the very same fly was buzzing, as it was circling the chandelier.
I was sitting and looking at the ultimate result on the last piece of paper when a white dove flew into the room: she flapped her wings and landed… here,” he pointed at the anglepoise lamp on the desk.
“I was looking at her and she was looking at me. She was not afraid at all, she even cooed a few times.
As I bent over her and stretched out my hand to stroke her, she pecked me – with unbelievable force – in the very middle of my forehead.
For a moment, there was utter darkness: I felt I was falling into a bottomless pit. Suddenly, it downed on me that I was flying up with uncanny speed. The white dove was flying before me, as if showing the way.
We stopped in front of a golden throne. A stern old man clad in majestic robes was sitting thereupon. The dove perched on his shoulder.
‘Ha!’ boomed the old-timer, stretching himself and clasping his hands on his neck. ‘Mr. Albert Zweistein in his own person! We are informed that you have found the meaning of the world’s existence, ehem?’
‘It’s true,” I replied. ‘I have.’
“Well?…’
‘How can it be!?’ I exploded not believing my own ears. ‘You – YOU – don’t know?!’
He spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness:
‘Shit happens.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied coldly, ‘but it’s my secret.’
I was hardly finished, as total darkness encompassed me again and I began to fall into the bottomless pit, and from somewhere above, from very, very far away, I heard the rumbling voice of the old man:
‘You shall regret this!’
And I woke up bathed in cold sweat – Albert finished his story and shuddered. – What a ghastly dream!

“It’s only a dream,” I said with a smile.
Albert looked at me and smiled too – at first somewhat grudgingly, then more frankly.
“Perhaps, you would like to share your secret with me?” I suggested giving him a skittish wink. “Please, look at me: I’m sitting on a chair, not a throne!”
He chuckled.
“Glad to oblige!” he replied, now positively cheerful, reached for his piece of paper and cleared his throat: “The meaning of the existence of the world is…”
There was flapping of wings and through the open window a white dove flew inside. She perched on the lamp.
Albert was petrified with the sheet in his hand; his eyes were becoming bigger and wider, and the smile was gradually disappearing from his lips.
The dove cooed and then, with an unimaginable force, she pecked him in the very middle of his forehead. For a while he was sitting stiffly in the armchair, then he leaned forward and fell noisily on the floor.
I took his wrist, but felt no pulse: he was dead.

To this day nobody has understood anything from his hapless papers.

Dream nr. 2

Vogel made Zweistein’s acquaintance (or rather that of his legacy) through me: it happened due to the good offices of an acquaintance of mine: Leonard, the orphaned “apprentice” of Zweistein’s.
I do not grace him with this title without the inverted commas mostly because he has learnt nothing: his “Master” stood – intellectually – two or three heads taller, so much that the “apprentice” has not been able to comprehend even the simplest of the sentences voiced by him. Besides, the bulk of his interaction with the “Master” looked pitiful: he dedicated all his leisure to him, he turned himself into his servant – and what has he got in return? The “privilege” to sup with his gruff idol and to look – with a dog’s devotion – into his eyes, while the other had the goodness to be thinking; anyway, this prize served Leonard right: they say that the worse you treat your dog, the more faithful it becomes.
He must lie on the bed he has made for himself! – I thought at first, but my heart does not consist of stone alone: the sight of the miserable Leonard, who after Zweistein’s demise went, if possible, even more to the dogs and hit the bottle, has woken my pity and compassion. I took care of him, I consoled him, but above all I provided a kind listener on whose shoulder he could weep out his grief.
At last, having poured the sack of all his sorrow and despondency on my poor head, he gave me a token of great trust by showing me – that’s how he titled this trash! – In Remembrance Of My Lamented Master: i.e. twenty-four full typed pages, covered with the most revolting literary puke I ever have encountered.
Everything there was muddled up and mixed together without any law or order: the serving girl’s assiduity was being lauded in the same breath as the Genius’ penetrating brainpower; the size of His shoes adjoined the deep mourning of his Bard, and the only teeny mention of the particular achievement of the Thinker – the discovery of the meaning to the World, no less – has been squeezed in, like a too large foot into a too tight shoe, between the description of the intensity of the greenness of his eyes and his praiseworthy custom of downing a sizable glass of cognac before hitting the hay.
Since I have some familiarity with biographical annotations about Great People (I have, concisely and, methinks, accurately, depicted my Master’s philosophical experiences), I recommended amendments and corrections, both factual, stylistic and orthographic. Those were so much to Leonard’s liking that he asked me to revise the whole thing. That, in turn, resulted in a piece – a mediocre one and much beneath my usual touchstone (all the more so as I strove to keep some of Leonard’s linguistic mannerisms), but having the advantage of filling only almost four typed pages.
Leonard was so pleased that he read it several times in a row and then gave me the token of his utmost trust: took me to a gloomy cubicle in a garret, which he proudly called his apartment, where an old-fashioned wrought-iron chest stood and, in its spacious innards, secreted the three thousand one hundred and eighty three slips of paper, covered with the priceless notes of Albert Zweistein: from the ones yet written in somewhat childish characters to the latest ones, mottled with glyphs so awful that my Master’s squiggles paled in comparison into a first prize in a calligraphy contest: the revered Mr. Albert Zweistein bequeathed all this waste paper to Leonard in his will, but the rest of his substantial estate he left to a distant and many times removed relative: a “lady” in dubious repute.

I mentioned Zweistein, Leonard and his precious chest to my Master exclusively as an oddity: he collects oddballs and eccentrics like others stamps or butterflies – and has amassed quite an assemblage. Unfortunately, he misunderstood: as if I were piquing him to decipher the secret of Zweistein’s papers, but perhaps I am exaggerating my influence: he could have been tempted simply by the perspective of a posthumous duel with another genius or by a chance of learning about the meaning to the world, which of course would be a treat for a philosopher.
Whatever his motives, he expressed a wish to pit himself against the contents of the chest. However, his wasn’t the first attempt: already a handful of scientists had not let the slips be covered with mildew: two gave up after a few days, one turned gray after three months, and the fourth, after half a year, has been secluded in an asylum: he was biting bystanders and wetting his pants.
Thus, besides the eventuality that Master would spend the rest of his days in a loony bin I was worried by the possibility that he would surrender halfway through the quest – which would make a dent in his self-esteem and, in turn, have adverse consequences for me, as I work for him and we live in the same house. The chance for this to happen was looming given that Zweistein presupposed the existence of the world and a meaning to it a priori, while Vogel’s system – gnoscoagnosticism (gnoskoagnosko among friends) – expresses a readiness to accept the existence of both exclusively a posteriori, in principle hoping genuinely that there is no meaning or world.

Beginning his campaign, he prevailed upon me to prompt Leonard into lending him the chest. After my diplomatic exertions, it landed finally in his study, but the lawful owner came every day to check.
Master began his work with a plan and a purpose. In order to approximate the conditions of the deciphering to those of the nascence, he changed his style of life to that preferred by Zweistein; I was cast in the role of Leonard. He worked from nine a.m. to five-fifteen p.m., at which time he dined: he went so far as to insist on Zweistein’s menu and I was obliged to play the servant girl as well. At six p.m. he would imitate Zweistein’s daily stroll and I would trot along. He made me relate him the news – domestic and from abroad – and he shamelessly insisted on my telling him jokes and anecdotes. Abusing his employer-status, he also bullied me into re-narrating films!
From seven to ten p.m. I would be sitting with him in the study and I was forbidden to breathe as much as a squeak. He was minding details to such a degree that he procured a crystal ball and a little mermaid of Copenhagen – these were to facilitate his concentration – but he did not focus on my face, as demanded by the scenario, since – quote – “your mug gets on my nerves” – unquote. Instead, he fixed a facsimile of Gorgon’s head on the wall over mine and lavished all his attention upon her.
He would sup with me and insist, when finished, that also I smoke a reeking cigar. As I was coughing, he would send me, with a malicious smile, to bed, while he would take first a hot then a cold shower – and I would listen with pleasure. When he was finished with his shouting and profanities, he would, covered with goose-flesh, run for his bedroom and down, instead of cognac, a glass of scotch – and go to bed.

Day was following day and week following week, until I began to fear that I was to suffer, like Leonard did, for a full twelve years (especially as my Master wasn’t showing any signs of becoming gray or even peeing himself) when exactly twelve weeks from the beginning of the experiment Vogel stood up from his armchair, impetuously threw the ball and the mermaid into the wastebasket and shouted:
“I’m finished!”
“Bravo!” I shouted. “What is the meaning to the world, then?”
“If you think that the sense or nonsense to the existence of the world is of any concern to me, then you are feebleminded!” he brushed me off.
“So why have you been poring over the dusty scraps?!”
“To join that old man sitting on the throne.”
"You think…?”
“I certainly do! I go to sleep at once and we shall see what the night brings. A white dove, I hope.”

Early the next morning, as I was snoring peacefully, I was awaken by tickling in the left ear:
“Rise and shine, you lazybones! I had a dream, a dream, a dream!”
I sat up in the bed, and he began:
“I dreamt that I am sleeping in my bed. Suddenly, a white dove appeared at my bedside and cooed. I woke up, i.e. I dreamt that I woke up, looked at her and felt that she was too much interested in my forehead for my liking.
‘There is no need,” I said.” I’ll go willingly.’
She nodded her little head and at once I flew up with extreme speed. The dove flew before me, as if showing the way. We stopped in front of a golden throne. A stern old man clad in majestic robes was sitting thereupon. The dove perched on his shoulder.
‘Ha!’ boomed the old-timer, stretching himself and clasping his hands on his neck. ‘Mr. Saul Vogel in his own person! So we meet again! You are so persistent as this Boušek from Libnia, portrayed so verily by Jaroslav Hašek: every time they would chuck him out of the pub, he would come back claiming that he had forgotten his pipe. But let it pass! We received intelligence that you have discovered the meaning to the world, yes?’
‘Yes, I have,’ I replied.
‘So…?’ he asked and added warningly. ‘You are cognizant of what happened to Mr. Zweistein when he refused to answer this very question?”
‘Yes, I am.’

Here Master stopped and complained about the cold in the room. I nodded consentingly and he went to the window and closed it. Then he sat back on the bed and began to beat his arms for warmth.
“For God’s sake, Master!” I protested. “What have you told him?”
“The truth: that Mr. Albert Zweistein made a mistake only once in his tireless reasoning, but as it happened already on the third they, all the rest of his work is totally worthless: because of Zweistein’s unswerving logic the one faulty link has caused the entire chain of thought, together with the final result, to be false.”
“Shit!” I exploded disenchanted. “So the meaning to the world has not been found!”
“You don’t say!” Master was genuinely hurt. “The fact that Albert Zweistein screwed up does not imply that Saul Vogel did the same!”
“So you did it!” I was enthusiastic. “And what? Have you told him?”
“Sure I did. It was the only way to make him steer us prudently and not, as hitherto, by trial and error. He promised to adapt himself, too.”

“I see,” I said after a while, nodding my head philosophically. “C. G. Jung was right, then: the Old Man gains consciousness of Himself through us, humans! But what about sharing also with the unassuming me? I’m your apprentice, after all.”
Master looked around and made a sign to lower my ear to his lips – and I obliged.
“Knock-knock” was heard from the window and we recoiled hastily, like conspirators taken red-handed. A white dove was outside the window and she was pecking the pane vigorously. Her eyes met Vogel’s – and she shook her little head reprovingly.
Master jumped to his feet, his ears blushing crimson, and he bowed – low and submissive. The dove gave him another look – an unmistakable “remember!”, beat her wings and was gone.
“Sorry, old chap,” said the Philosopher, “but you see for yourself: orders directly from the Boss!”

He has not breathed a word to this day.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

Zoosequence, the Tree of Life A Saul Vogel Mystery

Picture by Alicja Fenigsen, see my links

Peter Billig
MR. VOGEL & HIS ANIMALS
A Saul Vogel mystery

Vogel was reading his paper in the sitting- room. Suddenly, he emitted an exclamation of surprise:
"How can it be!? Or am I nuts?…” He turned to me: “I need to talk about animals."
I put whatever I was holding back on the table and took the armchair opposite his.
"Tell me whether my reasoning is correct," he continued. "If all the herbivores of the savannas – the antelopes, zebras, giraffes and so on – died out, the carnivores out there – the lions, hyenas, cheetahs and so on – would follow?"
"Inexorably. There is a nutritional connection between these groups."
“But would it affect the carnivores of North America – wolves, coyotes and pumas?”
“No way! There is no dietary or even physical connection between those groups.”
"A hypothetical demise of all tapirs would have no impact on the well-being of echidnas?"
"Correct again. No connection at all, they live on separate continents."
"Then how do you explain this?"
He showed me two articles:
DEMISE OF A SPECIES was about a genus of rodents to be found only on one tiny island off California shore. The animals perished because the owner developed it. The last pair has been moved to a zoo, but both died there without offspring on 15 August 2006, killed by a stray cat.
DEMISE OF YET ANOTHER SPECIES was about a genus of bats found only in a few caves in South Africa. They have been under scientific supervision and their numbers were mounting. Last seen alive on 15 August 2006, they were seemingly doing well. Next day the researchers found them dead: not a single specimen survived. A very scrupulous postmortem unearthed no cause of death. It was as if all the bats simultaneously got fed up with life and died.
"How did the demise of the herbivorous rodents in California influence the dire fate of the insectivorous bats down in South Africa?" Vogel asked.
"It didn't. It was a coincidence in time. Each day a species or two of animals die out in our modern world! Every child knows that. We are vandals."
"It wasn't us who did these bats in, though. There is more to it than meets the eye."
"A natural cause the scientists didn’t think of and, consequently, didn’t test for, perhaps?"
"Not all natural laws are known," he replied thoughtfully, "and I propose to discover this one."
"Good luck!" but I did not expect him to succeed. How does one go about finding a new law of Nature?

Vogel seemed to know how. He asked Voss to drive over for a consultation. Voss is a bright engineer specializing in electronics. They met during Voss's hobo period and stayed friends since. Voss loves Vogel's ideas and is eager to give him the technical assistance to make them work.
He arrived at Domicile, our house in a big forest owned by Vogel. It was spring and they went for a walk into the green freshness of the new leaves and the sweet chirpings of multifarious birds.
When they came back, Vogel's Porsche got evicted from the garage and Voss's van, full of parts and tools, moved in, a workshop on wheels. As the workaholic was toiling there, I brought him lunch daily, but "bio-recorder/ player" was all he would say about the contraption he was making. Portable, it looked like a cross between a laptop and a tape-recorder, with a smart dish-shaped foldable antenna.

Then it was ready, Vogel told me to hold the fort, put the machine in his car and was gone.

During his absence, Vogel kept sending me two postcards apiece from zoos the world over. The first would say: Greetings from [so and so zoo], making progress. The second: Ditto. Each was a photo of an animal, bought in the "zoovenir" shop, but the animals were oddly paired. From the Beijing Zoo he sent a panda on the first card and some kind of pig on the other, from the Nairobi Zoo – an aardvark and a penguin.
I received over a hundred of such pairs. Obviously, they were meant as clues to Vogel’s work. I could see no logic in the choice of the species, though, and did not care much, having sufficiently to do with my own projects. I contented myself with tracking his chaotic movements on a globe.

Finally, eight months after he left, he phoned from Brazil about workers to arrive at my end the next day. They did, built a hothouse and instructed me how to operate the heating system: it was winter outside and the temperature inside was to be kept at 30°C (100°F). Florists' vans brought tropical plants. They were put inside the glasshouse and I was instructed how to care for them. A landscaper arrived with rocks and soil and used the plants to create a mini-jungle. Vogel arrived and a cage was brought in the greenhouse and he took me inside: hummingbirds were hovering and sucking nourishment at feeding stations. They were beautiful: green bodies with red wings and yellow heads, all with metallic-like shine.
"It's a shame to jail them,” I said enchanted with their humming and breathtaking beauty.
"I don't want to jail them, I have to."
He instructed me how to prepare their liquid food and went to sleep off his jetlag.

Next morning I awoke with a shout, sprang out of bed and felt so much energy, so much life in me that I had to do something extreme – or I would burst! In my pajamas, I jumped through the window shattering the pane and landing in a snow-drive outside. I got up and, howling like a wolf, I ran into the woods. I ran and ran in deep snow – there was no limit to my energy; I felt I could accomplish any physical feat. I scared some deer, caught up with them, overtook them and turning my head back I stuck my tongue out to them! Flabbergasted, the kindly animals stopped in their tracks and so did I – because I collided with a tree.
Concussed and laying in the snow I saw before me a mini player: open, the cassette beside. There was adhesive tape with strands of my hair glued to the contrivance. Clearly, the tape had been used to fasten it to my head while I was asleep. The player must have caused my hyperactive behavior. Now the device was torn off by the impact and nonfunctional. I felt boundlessly nonfunctional, too – and went out.















Picture by Alicja Fenigsen, see my links

As I regained consciousness, I was lying on our toboggan, wrapped in blankets and tugged by our snowmobile. Vogel must have tracked me. I was aching all over but not enough to keep me awake.
When I awoke I was in my own bed and it was noon of the next day. There was plastic sheeting on the damaged window: it had happened, then. In my head, I reviewed the “reel” of the events of the day before and I understood: it was Vogel who had affixed the player in order to make me an unwitting part – a guinea pig, a lab-rat – to a dangerous experiment. I could have been killed! Damn him!
I felt an urge to punch him, but I only stood up with effort, every fiber in my body aching as after an enormous physical exertion. No punching was possible. Slowly, I put on my dressing gown and wobbled to the sitting-room; I could hear him there busying himself with crockery and cutlery.
Words like "two-faced bastard" were on my lips, as I hobbled in, but seeing guilt on his face and my favorite foods on the table I ended up calling him a "serious asshole".
"That I am," he said, "but you are in need of serious nourishment."
That I was. The gourmet food Vogel is so good at was delicious. When we finished I was sufficiently restored to content myself with a demand for an explanation.
“Recall the dead rodents and bats?” he obliged. “My first thought was that the rodents kept the bats alive by their sheer existence: when they died, the bats died. But how exactly do they do that?"
"Sending postcards, one species to another?"
"Bio-waves," he smiled, "capable of reaching far-off continents and non-disturbing for transmissions like radio, TV and radar; otherwise they would have been discovered long ago. I discussed the matter with Voss and, being a genius, he constructed a device capable of recording and playing back such hypothetical waves. I visited zoos innumerable to record waves emitted by one species and playing them while I walked about looking for a change of behavior in other species. Animals on my postcards are the emitters and the receivers, the former enabling the latter to live. I discovered such pairs in every zoo and was soon running out of rare species. Zoos repeat themselves: there is always a complete set of PR-beasts like the elephant, the hippo, the bear or the chimp. I was forced to do much of my research in Nature, bitten and sucked by mosquitoes, freezing, thirsting, drenched to the skin or hanging off a mountain!” He looked me in the eyes.

I’ve been living a quiet life while he’s been taking mortal risks – and he exposed me to only a minor one.
“You are pardoned,” I said and he poured me a large malt from his very private and expensive hoard.
I drank up with gusto. He poured another for us both and went on:
“There is a difference between the waves emitted by animals and those played by the machine. The first are long-range and sustain normal level of activity in the receiver-species, the second are short-range and cause hyperactivity, easy to detect. In this simple manner I was able to discern what species guarantees life to which, this in turn assuring life to yet another. It must have been like that all through the Evolution: some species simply couldn't pop up until an entirely different species evolved into a new species and produced a new pattern of waves enabling it to appear, perhaps on another continent."

He raised his glass: "I drink to the Zoosequence, my newly discovered Law of Nature!"
I drank up but stayed skeptical: "A sequence of millions of species: one at the bottom, guaranteeing life to the next and so on, all the way to the top: one long chain. If you destroy the species at the root, you’ve killed them all. If you exterminate a species in the upper parts of the chain, you take life of all those above. And were it a ring, animal life would be dead long ago, with dinosaurs, mammoths, dodos gone and now a species or two exterminated each and every day..."
"Not a ring – a tree, observably! The Tree of Life! There is the Trunk, a short affair consisting of some 10 000 species and having the qualities you mentioned, and there are Branches, as most of those in the Trunk assure existence of more than one species. These secure life for short side sequences of species, as was the case with the rodents guaranteeing the bats guaranteeing, say, a species of beetles in French Guyana, which nobody is missing, as it has not been discovered yet? And this Branch ends there. So far, we have been lucky that all of the lost species were in the Branches, not in the Trunk. Thanks to your participation, my guess has been validated: it is the hummingbirds who are our emitters. Sorry I used you, but I was afraid to awake the Hulk in some strangers.”

He poured another for us and suddenly I understood:
"More afraid of what kind of a Hulk would be aroused in yourself – as you would have to be close at hand. This is why you used me!" I said accusingly.
"Guilty as charged but, as I was the one with the knowledge, I had to remain outside. The attachable very short-range player was made by Voss on my request. I phoned him from Brazil."

Suddenly, I am aware that my employer is looking at me in a queer way, so I asked for a mirror. As I was viewing the maltreated face of but a casual resemblance to me, Vogel sighed and gave me a sizable raise.
“Now that we have their emissions recorded,” I said feeling elated by this token of appreciation, “we don’t need the birds. It’s only a technical problem to get the right quality of the waves and then we could use the satellite net to beam them to all over the world and even take them on Mars…”
“I like your modern global approach but I still prefer the genuine article.”
“You had the recording, so you didn’t need to bring the hummingbirds to have your experiment. Why all these costs to make an artificial jungle? Weren’t they happy in their natural environment?”
"Brazilians are about to make timber out of their habitat in the Amazonas," he replied. “And what if the technicians can’t get the waves right? Can mankind survive if we all become Tarzans, like you had?”

I pondered these – and other – questions for some time.
"And what’s the species at the root of the Trunk, ensuring all animal and human life?" I asked finally.
"I haven't found out yet."
"But, at any rate, we are at the top of the Trunk, aren't we?"
"Human vanity! We are high up the Trunk, I’ll give you that. We occupy the level just before the very top, and the top is split into two Branches. Thus, we have the honor and the privilege of guaranteeing the existence of the two topmost species in Nature."
"Which are …?" I held my breath.
"The house-fly (Musca domestica) and the skunk (Mephitis mephitis)." Vogel raised his glass: "To Mankind: let’s keep on accomplishing that historic mission of ours!"

Copyright Peter Billig 2007
















Picture by Alicja Fenigsen, see my links

THE SIDE EFFECT

Peter Billig

THE SIDE EFFECT

Unlike other creeds, we Plaudists have not been persecuted: people never took us seriously and we, for our part, have not been making a nuisance of ourselves: our only public appearances – the attempts of setting off and protracting applause whenever and wherever the opportunity offers – are – anyone would concede – of an innocuous character; they even earn us some goodwill, mainly in Thespian circles.

As the public know only that our entire rite consists of clapping hands, and we, for our part, pursue no information or missionary activities (new coreligionists are enrolled only if vouched for by three sponsoring members), there is a proliferation of contrary opinions: that it is applause for the perfection of the Creator and His Creation; that we do it in order to attract His attention; that the cadenced salvos of handclapping imbue us with a feeling of safety and power.
The truth is, however, that belief or unbelief in God is a private matter of each of us.
By what right, then, do we profess ourselves as a faith?
Because in the period when Plaudism was established it was safer to be deemed a heretic than an atheist.
Who do we clap for, then?
For nobody. We clap in order to achieve the Side Effect.
What Side Effect?
To explain, we must go back to the very genesis of the movement.

Count Wolfgang von Bodenheim, a welcome guest at Maria Theresia’s court, as he was promenading, on August the 12^th 1770, in a Viennese park, picked up and returned a batiste handkerchief to a pretty young lady who had dropped it. She thanked him, but the accompanying cavalier slapped his face.
The gallant Count went home ruminating upon the unpredictability of human reactions. Having eaten a meal and spoken to a friend, whom he burdened with a matter of greatest urgency, he returned to his meditations, supporting his thoughts with laconic notes.
The fruit of these musings was the unexpected conclusion – the cornerstone of Plaudism to this day – that to every action, resulting every time in the same proven and evident outcome, corresponds, at some umpteenth, albeit unforeseeable, repetition, a specific side effect. Thus, handing over lost handkerchiefs to ladies invariably causes their gratitude; only at some instance, which is fixed in advance, though unknown to us, it causes a slap on the face from an escorting cavalier.
Against all appearances, this theory contains nothing mystical: if because of God’s will or, say, the laws of Nature a splash is heard whenever a stone is thrown into water, why should it be strange if, on the strength of some divine or natural law, an umpteenth splash be linked with, say, development of spots on the Sun?

But why did the prosaic and unadventurously thinking Count thrust himself upon this highly speculative theory, savoring of a bad joke, without any comparative material except the episode of the handkerchief?
Because it dawned on him that although shortly before he had celebrated his 31^st birthday, he achieved nothing worthy of remembrance by the future generations and that he had only a fifty-fifty chance – considering the gravity of his present situation – of achieving anything like that in the future. And that is why, ignoring the scarcity of material, he went on with his undertaking, now and then getting (as his chaotic notes testify) off the road, chasing his tail or falling asleep.

Illumination reached him in the early hours; the manuscript does not state whether he was asleep or alert at that time. It states, however, in a categorical form – as if it were a fact unconditionally true and proven – that there are merely three things one can do to bring about side effects salutary for Mankind: clapping hands, smacking lips and snapping fingers: clapping – the greatest, smacking – a lesser one, snapping – the least.
What effects exactly? There is no doubt that he knew, but he’s never written it down, as he was interrupted by the arrival of his second with a box of pistols. An hour later he fell with a bullet in his heart.

Count Hubert von Bodenheim, while sorting out the papers of his deceased brother, had the spiritual upheaval of his life. Having recognized the notes as the late brother’s last will and testament, he presented them for the company of mutual friends and acquaintances where they were received as a revelation.
And that’s how Plaudism came into being: initially, it bore the hallmark of an elite aristocratic club; later, its roster and numbers were decided by the resultant of the spirit of the following epochs. At present, there are 537 of us from every nation and walk of life.

As years passed, divergences within our community became visible: some members would maintain that the illumination of Count Wolfgang had been the result of divine intervention; others – that it had been a tangle of natural causes; some – that we owe it to the Count alone. These we call “humanists”, those we call “naturalists”, and the first – “theists”, but it is a delimitation purely formal, of no practical value.
A more important issue is that we differ as to what exactly would be most salutary for Mankind. Here the views span, to cite the most uncompromising, from “immediate and painless extinction of our species” through “unbridled sexual license” to “immortality”.
The most important issue is that – because of one of the Count’s blurred turns of phrase – some of us tend to avow that the most salutary side effect can be attained only after achieving the two smaller ones; and since others (the so-called “medialists” or, in common parlance: “smackers”) persist that the least salutary has already been achieved as the illumination of the Count (tradition confirms that he was habitually snapping his fingers whenever upset), and yet others (the so-called “minimalists”, conversationally: “snappers”) uphold that even the least salutary has not been achieved, the first concentrate on smacking their lips, the latter – on snapping their fingers – and both groups clap only in congregation – with no conviction or enthusiasm – only to maintain esprit de corps, while the overwhelming majority (the so-called “maximalists”, colloquially “claquers”) profess the healthy tenet that there is no point in pursuing petty aims – and they go directly for the ultimate prize. However, duly appreciating the minimalists’ and the medialists’ good will, we maximalists have introduced the custom of devoting a substantial portion of our general assemblies to joint snapping and smacking: we do not lack tolerance!

Some outsiders with an above average insight into our affairs spurn us that we profess such an unstable doctrine: without any assurance the it all is not a hoax by Count Wolfgang.
Well, we have testimony of reliable witnesses to the effect that the Count has been utterly devoid of any sense of humor, but we got to hand it to the critics that in order to become a Plaudist you really have to possess a great dose of optimism. Moreover, we are people so highly cultured, educated and open-minded that wobbly articulations of a pesky count have no credence among us.

Why then do we fritter away our precious years and energy?
Well… in case he was right. For how many millennia have you been offering up prayers, exploring Nature, building industries, changing political systems – and to what avail?
And we?
Well, we might insinuate ourselves into something by snapping, smacking or clapping.
And if not – who’s worse off?

Vos plaudite![1]

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

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[1] You applaud! That’s how the Roman playwright, Plautus, speaks from the scene to his audience at the end of every of his comedies.

THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig

THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE

A Saul Vogel Mystery

“Should I give you this red herring not even knowing whether you really exist?” Master protested.

It was late evening. We had had supper, but we stayed at the table in order to gratify his gastronomic endeavors. His refusal to share was dictated by the sad reality that out of a dozen of the tasty fish only one was left. Moreover, today of all days, he had taken stock of all his philosophical achievements and was therefore in indecently high spirits – which always makes him poke fun at me.
“You don’t know if I exist? I’ve been your assistant from time immemorial!”
“It’s not so obvious,” he replied. “The only unquestionable thing is that it is I, Saul Vogel, who exist. How can I know whether you and everybody and everything else are not figments of my own imagination? That you are not phantoms, delusions, allurements – entities fictitious, abstract, false and mendacious? How can I be sure that while talking to you I am not addressing my own specters – hallucinations and phantasms dwelling not outside but solely and exclusively within myself? Can you prove your existence?”
“Cogito ergo sum!” I said proudly.
“Yes, yes,” Master was positively mirthful. “The old mantra by Helvetius, which does not prove anything but the existence of thought – my thought, that is. Helvetius himself is also a fabrication of my own mind.”
“It was not Helvetius, but Cartesius, a.k.a. Descartes.” It was my turn to be mirthful. “And why should I be an invention of your imagination and not the other way round? What, pray, makes you more significant than me? Don’t we both urinate, defecate, ruminate and copulate?”
“You?” he giggled contemptuously. “There is no such thing as a ‘thou’, a ‘he’, a ‘she’, an ‘it’, a ‘we’, a ‘ye’ or a ‘they’! There is only an ‘I’: there exists just ME, Saul Vogel, ME/I, the first and only person singular!”
“In that case,” I chuckled contemptuously, “the only option left is to punch your smug face: you will acknowledge that also EYE do exist!”
“Not in the least!” he retorted. “I shall only acknowledge the existence of my own pain. What are your feelings, your thoughts, your sufferings, moans and perplexities as you yourselves are but empty deceptions and mirages inside my brain, products of my uncontrolled and involuntary fantasy: phantasmagorias! Fata Morganas! I don’t sense with your skins when you burn yourselves nor with your stomachs when you starve nor with your heads when you think. And that’s why you’ll never be able to prove that you are a being material and independent, as whatever you do, whatever you say, in whatever manner you behave, I would still have to put you down as yet another intellectual manifestation of myself.”
“No way!” I retorted. “That’s exactly why you should recognize us as materially in existence: since one cannot feel with the matter of a stranger, you would have – should you be the only one in existence – the closest of contacts with your own illusions: they would be an integral part of you!”
“On the contrary,” he was adamant. “Do I feel the pain of the personages appearing and disappearing in one’s dreams? Never, unless I have a stomachache!”
“Not so long ago you took a tumble down the stairs and broke your leg,” I was adamant. “You could at least concede that the stairs were real.”
“No way!” he was being stubborn. “That is also a fruit of my fruitful brains. The only thing I know about the leg and the stairs has reached me through the so-called ‘senses’, which is exactly the same way as you and other fictions of your brand show themselves. But it has been stated: you are ghosts, ergo neither my leg nor those stairs exist!”
“You are not trying to tell me,” I was being stubborn, “that neither you exist? You are not going to be so brazen as to assert that also your bodily encasement is a creation of your intellect?! That you are an intellect alone: a mind liberated from the shackles of the body!”
“I am!” Master bellowed. “I’m the Hub of the Universe: the Omphalos! the Logos! the Universal Being! the Ouroboros! the Mother and the Father of Totality! I’m the Absolute! I’m the Pure Self! I’m Demiurges and Gaia! I’m the Mind Liberated! I’m the Place To Stand On! I’m Alpha and Omega!”
“Liar!” I bellowed in turn. “I am Noûs, the Axis of Everything, the Center of the World and the Mother of All! I am the Deity and the Cosmos! I am the Essence and the Quintessence! I am the Beginning, the Middle and the End! I am the Ball and the Goal and the Game! I am Uranus, Cronos and Zeus! I am Aleph and Beit! Gimel and Dalet! And you, Master, are Zayin!”

“Shut up your face!” Master thundered[1]. “How dare you?!”
“How come?” I laughed into his face. “Have you descended from your pedestal to talk to me – your own delirium tremens? You – the Apeiron? You – the Arche? You – the Spiritus Movens?!
There was a moment of silence while Vogel’s face became purple and from purple – dark blue. I must have overdone it, so I hurried to smooth it out and said amicably:
“Why don’t you exert your will and try whether you can, by its power, destroy the phantasms and the banshees of your mind, such as me? This way you could stake your claim empirically!”
He nodded, closed his eyes, and his face began slowly to display the signs of utmost concentration.
The clock on the mantelpiece began to chime midnight.

When I regained consciousness, my head was resting upon Master’s knees who was trying to pour some whisky between my clenched jaws. As the Scottish ambrosia was exactly what I needed at the moment, I made it easy for him – and bliss began to spread all over my Being.
“Get up, you cheat!” Master roared discovering the fraud.
I got up and looked at the clock: ten minutes past midnight.
“Whassa matta, Bwana?” I asked seeing his sorry face. “Why are you so sullen? Haven’t you nearly taken my measly life? Haven’t you established that you are what you claimed to be?”
“Yes, I have,” he replied dismally, “only that when my will was cutting your illusory body and fictitious soul like a hot knife cuts through cold butter, suddenly, it began to cut in vacuum.”
“I don’t get it, Master.”
“Is it so hard to figure out? I was the Mind Liberated only for one day – steering the world at will and whim – and exactly at twelve o’clock the honor was transferred – by some mysterious design – to someone else! I had some very deep and disturbing – ominous! – dreams last night, but as soon as I woke up it was to pee, to shit, to have breakfast and so on – the daily treadmill! First in the evening, after I had made the list of my accomplishments, the realization of my power got through – in a childish manner: playing games with you! Just imagine, what I could have brought about if I were fully cognizant of the situation from the moment I woke up. In these eighteen hours I could have changed the course of the world, repaired the hothouse effect, replenished the jungles and the seas, removed wrongdoers, redressed conflicts, stopped misuse of children, women, men…”

“No use crying over spilt milk, Master!” I cut him short. “Judging by results, the only really terrific Mind Liberated was the one of January 17, 1966, when the woman of my dreams allowed me to make love…”
“Don’t you understand?!” he cut me short. “The transfer of the Power means that from midnight also I – ME, SAUL VOGEL! – became – again! – a manifestation of some stranger’s – an asshole’s! – mind!”
“Well, Master, judging by you, me and the state of the world the Minds Liberated chosen nowadays are not that bad.” Actually, I was grateful to the new Mind for upholding me. “During the World Wars: these were really assholes! And perhaps the power will return to you one day and you will recognize it at once, wake up, perform – and planet Earth will become Paradise! No more Ahmadinejads, Mugabes or Bashirs!” I tried to comfort him, but he shook his head, got up and shuffled dejectedly upstairs to his bedroom.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007.

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[1] Zayin, the name of a Hebrew letter, is also the Hebrew name for “dick”, “prick”, “cock”, “pecker” or whatever you prefer calling the useful organ.

THE EXCURSION A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE EXCURSION
A Saul Vogel Mystery

The day after he had patented his super-accumulator, Vogel was radiant with joy: he sold the rights thus securing his finances. I was radiant, too: no Plato in a foreseeable future. Vogel had made me deliver, in order to invent his accumulator, two detailed lectures about the great thinker. I was enjoying my meal and feeling secure when Vogel said in a conversational tone:
“You were saying that Plato considered the body a grave: soma sema, right?”
I snarled at him, and he snapped:
“When I say Plato I mean Plato! You work here!”
“At breakfast? I also live here!” but something in his stare made me add: “Then Plato it is. The body is the grave for the soul. So what?”
“So life is a sojourn in a coffin, right?”
“Life is death for the soul, and death is a new life for the soul – a resurrection.”
“And is it known whatever happens to the soul when it is thus resurrected?”
“As I told you, it stays in the World of Ideas before being reborn into our World of Phenomena. Want another lecture? Personally I deem Plato overrated: he was a Pythagorean and divulged only what the Order deemed useful for public consumption. His initiate’s oath did not allow him to reveal the Pythagoreans’ true inner philosophy. It must have been pretty advanced!”
“The great Plato – a propagandist and not an original thinker?” Vogel sounded shocked.
“That is my conviction.”
“Do you know what happens to the soul after what we call death?” he asked.
“Would I be working here for peanuts instead of running a cult and getting rich?”
“Let’s find out empirically, then!” My employer stood up, ready for action.
“About Plato’s Pythagoreanism?” I asked hopefully.
“About what really happens after death.”
“But how, pray?”
“Are you forgetting the Cosmoscope?” and he rushed out to the UFO-shaped outhouse where the Cosmoscope is installed. As narrated in The Cosmoscope, this contraption is a philosopher’s dream come true: it enables transcendental soul-voyage.

I followed dutifully but I was dragging my feet. Whatever religions may say about the magnificence of the afterlife (I never hurt a fly, so I did not expect the unpleasant options) I would rather not jest with Death like Vogel was about to do.
“Wherever Employer goes…” he quoted from my contract and took the "driver's" seat.
“…there Employee shall follow within reason,” I quoted back, yet took the other seat, muttering a prayer for a good reincarnation.
Vogel programmed the machine and hit “enter”. The lights went out, there was the characteristic humming sound and I felt that I no more had to exert myself in order to pilot the vehicle of my life. The Cosmoscope made me accept anything that would come. I dropped thinking, feeling, even the woman of my heart and let myself be carried by this energy, leaving everything behind. The relief was indescribable.
Then suddenly I panic: all energy is leaving my body, I’m dying! I want to get off my seat but there is no reaction from the body. With my soul’s eyes, I can see it stripped to the seat, inert like a dummy. Then I see a tornado coming down on me, the “me” without the body, and it sucks me up into a tunnel. I am flying at an enormous speed and a review of my whole life begins: my friendships, love-affairs, parents and collaboration with Vogel. How I have been acquiring knowledge: what I accepted, what I rejected and the consequences thereof. The shaping of my thoughts, feelings, creed and system of values. My “deeds” in the world (not impressive) and my influence on History (extremely exiguous)… This, however, is a chronicle of Saul Vogel’s adventures, and suffice that these eye-openers were of great service to me later.

I reached the end of the tunnel, was thrown into a brightness and then I stopped. Vogel stopped by my side a moment later.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he “said”. I could “hear” him mentally.
“Looking” around we saw ourselves hovering in space. Before us were thousands of space-holes, some shaped like wide gates, others like doors. From the “mouth” of the tornado, many radiant ameba-like beings were issuing; they floated in unending lines up to the gate-shaped holes in space and disappeared inside.
“The souls of fellow Earthlings recently deceased,” I “heard” Vogel “say” (from now on I drop the quotation marks). He focused on one of the gates, I followed and saw a stupa by the gate and prayer-mills, which the amoebae turned, as they were passing in.
“This is the door to the Buddhist afterlife, Master!” it dawned on me.
“I take the Buddhists, you take those,” he pointed out a much frequented gate and moved over to the Buddhists. I saw him barge into the line, turn the prayer-mills and vanish inside.

Something happened in my mind and I saw myself stopping before Lord Buddha.
“Welcome, Mr. Vogel, we don’t discourage tourism. Take any door you please,” Lord Buddha spoke and I realized that I was seeing through Vogel’s eyes.
Vogel thanked the Lord and moved on into a space with six doors, where he stopped, while the Buddhist souls, instructed by the Lord, were entering appropriate doors without hesitation.
“You still there?” Vogel nudged me into action, suddenly aware of my witnessing his embarras de richesse. I moved over to the indicated gate, adorned with the symbol of the Cross, and slipped into the line.

“Welcome, young man, we don’t discourage tourism. Take any door you please,“ Lord Jesus greeted me. I thanked Him and proceeded into a space with three doors. I hesitated a moment while the Christian souls, informed by the Lord, unhesitatingly choose appropriate doors.
I checked with Vogel: he was in the World of Hungry Ghosts, one of the six Karmic Worlds, and I stepped inside a door. It was Hell: screaming amoebae being boiled in bobbling cauldrons or tortured on racks, the devils filling up tar or poking the tormented with pitchforks. One saw me and approached, and I remembered what Lord Jesus told me.
“Just a tourist, sir.”
“Dante, Bosch, now him! Tourists be damned!”
He went away, pitchfork, hooves and all. I retreated to the doors, opened another one and found myself in Purgatory. The devils seemed nicer, the tar less hot and the racks less excruciating. Now and then an angel would appear, free a suffering ameba and take it… where indeed? I went out and took the last door.

What a bliss! I saw God Almighty on His throne surrounded by the Holy Family, the Holy Ghost and the nine Cherubic Choirs. I was so entranced that I would have stayed there for ever in contemplation of this vision were it not for an angel who came to fetch me to Paradise: a magnificent park where the amoebae were in a permanent state of ecstasy. They praised God, discussed the holy scene they had beheld at the entrance and waited for the Last Judgment.
I joined a group, which was exalting and glorifying the Lord, and was enjoying myself tremendously when Vogel switched on from the World of Gods, yet another of the Buddhist Karmic Worlds:
“Get your butt out of there!”
I forced myself to obey, returned to the gate, moved over to our point in space and met Vogel.

“I skipped Hell and the World of Animals,” he was referring to yet other Karmic Worlds. “Entry to the World of Man was denied, even though amoebae were getting in. Of this I conclude that we are still alive: obviously, you can’t be twofold in one and the same World. But look, there are the gates of Islam and Judaism,” he exclaimed with philosophical zeal. “I visit them both, you take these,” he indicated less frequented gates where the amoebae were trickling in only now and then.
The first gate led to the Inuit afterlife, the second to the hereafter of a group of South American rain-forest tribes, the third to the aftertime of the Dogons, in whose religion there is a link between the Earth and the star Sirius. Some Papuan, Siberian, Aborigine and Pacific eschatologies. This is not a treatise on religions, however, this is a report of one of Saul Vogel’s philosophical explorations.

I tried some gates, which were receiving no amoebae, and I found them closed. Symbols revealed them as belonging to forsaken religions: Inca, Aztec, Maya or that of Zeus, Mithras, Svantevit, Ammon, Odin, Marduk or Baal. Some bore nameplates of individuals who conformed to no mass faith and contrived personal creeds instead. Some belonged to philosophers. I tried Nietzsche, Aristotle and Spinoza but the doors were closed. I did look for a door with ΠΛΑΤΩΝ on the nameplate, but found only the gate of the Pythagorean Order. It did not budge, either.

I was getting mentally tired, so I moved back to our point in space. Vogel appeared soon and began to dole out new tasks. He wanted Anthroposophy for himself, and for me he chose two New Age cults. Having read about them, I knew what was in store. In one case, I would have to travel to the constellations of Pleiades and Orion and there to incarnate into some strange creatures. The second was an astrological sect, whose amoebae would take lessons on all the planets of our Solar System before reincarnating on Earth. I did not feel up to it, so I made a jocular counterproposition:
“What about yours and mine? Shall we find our little gates?”
“Right! Let’s see what afterlives we are preparing for ourselves and improve on them!”
He actually liked my suggestion, so I reminded him of our accord on overtime.
“This excursion qualifies as a unique event and not as the routine work described in the contract!” he protested, and a sound of a gong was heard.
“Saved by the bell, you lazy dog! The Cosmoscope is about to reverse the process.”

A moment later I was speeding back through the tornado. The wonderful feeling of being back in the body, as we stretch ourselves in the seats.
We eat supper and take a scotch on the porch, sipping and watching the sun go down.
“People think that the afterworld is given. Now a reasonable assumption can be made that we create it ourselves,” Vogel says, as the last rays disappear behind the trees.
“Only according to your machine, Master!”
“Machine or not, I advise against making this excursion public. Many people feel and believe that solely their particular religion is the true one. The author of Satanic Verses got on the black list of the Muslims. You might get on those of all creeds.”
“As the chronicler of your exploits I can’t keep a philosophical feat of that magnitude confidential.”
So here you are.

© Copyright by Peter Billig 2007.

THE VISIT

Peter Billig
THE VISIT

Summer afternoon, the sky is blue and without a cloud. The sprinkler is spattering in the garden; bees are humming and bumblebees buzzing, as they land on the hollyhocks by the window of my study. I am sitting at my desk with a drink close at hand, the fragrance of the freshly mown grass pleasantly mixing with the scent of rum. The computer is on but I have only contrived to write a few sentences, preferring to enjoy my satisfaction with a job at home, a little house of my own and no humans within miles and miles. I feel like writing an ode to the beauty of life.
Suddenly there is a noisy droning sound from above. I stick my head out of the window: a vehicle is hovering over my property! It is saucer-shaped and has four spidery legs. Now it is going down vertically and I see that it will be landing in the garden. And it does, one leg squashing the apple tree, another the arbor. On the fuselage, there is an inscription: DELTA ALPHA CENTAURI. “Planet Delta of the star Alpha in the constellation of Centaur,” I translate to myself.
A hatch is opened, a ladder lowered and two individuals step down – humanoid, four feet high. One is carrying an attaché-case; the other has a chocolate box size box on the chest. They are walking on the lawn towards the door!
I have an urge to jump out of the window and run as far as my legs would take me but I feel ashamed of myself and as I hear a knock I go to the door and open: two smiling countenances, red teeth in the dark blue mouths. Facial complexion: willow green.
They rock from side to side as a greeting. I bow and bid them in with my arm. They cross the threshold and wait for the second invitation. I usher them into the living room. They stop in the middle and the one with the box generates a series of squeaks:
“Hello, sir,” the box translates. “We’re from Delta with a request to you. My name’s Zyg and my colleague’s Xyg.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” I say and the box translates into squeaks. “Make yourselves comfortable. Coffee? Brandy?”
They take the armchairs and both squeak simultaneously:
Zyg said: Ask the ill,” the box translates and adds “From me: “It is a jocular Deltan saying, sir, a healthy Deltan takes drinks for granted. Coffee’s no good, but do you have Coca-Cola? Xyg said: Don’t call us gentlemen, call us gentlethirds. We belong to the third gender, unknown to you, Earthling. From me: Gentlethirds are fiercely proud of being gentlethirds, sir.”
There are colas in the fridge and Xyg would rather have whisky while Zyg is for vodka. “It’s a great day for Zyg and Xyg,” the box explains. “Finally, they’ve tasted cola and stuff they know only from your TV.”
“You receive our TV on your planet?”
“We’ve had relay stations on your Moon and on Pluto for some millennia, and now we are working on accessing your Internet. But I’m getting garrulous. Back to the purpose of our visit,” and the box utters a purposeful cough.
Zyg and Xyg, engrossed in depleting my bottles, channel their attention towards me:
“As we said,” Xyg says through the box, “we have a request. Our lately extra active sun Alpha has been blurring all transmissions from the relays for some months now. Can you tell us the results of the Bundesliga in week 18?” – the date is three months ago.
“Are we talking soccer?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, gentlethirds, but I’m no sucker for soccer.”
A squeaking discussion – Zyg, Xyg and the box – ensues.
“Can you access this info on the Internet?” the box asks.
“I guess I could but, frankly, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
More squeaks ensue
“Zyg and Xyg say: This is highly unfortunate!”
“But what’s so significant about the Bundesliga? And for you Deltians, three light-years away?”
The guests look at each other in willow-green disbelief. Then more squeaks. Then the box:
“Xyg and Zyg say: you crazy? The bets are on and we have no results! From me: Delta is 4.3 light-years away from here.”
“You bet on our soccer?”
“Of course, sir, it’s the only way to ensure fairness. No Deltan can fix a sporting event on your planet, sir.” And the Deltans looked beseechingly at me.
“I’ve got it!” I explode tapping my forehead with my fist. “How could I forget? The paper!” and I go to the cellar where I retire my daily rag.
“Here it is,” I pass it to the box, having found the right paper and section. It scans it and says well for it.
“You mind we keep it as souvenir?”
I do not. The two Deltans get up, a bit shaky, and rock from side to side. I bow back and escort them to the entry where they stop and turn again to me.
“Gentlethirds,” I say, “how come you come three months after the games?”
“No use waiting longer: your sports event is an event of the moment. After a week or two nobody mentions it on TV. We understand it’s only accessible on the Web or on newspapers – a nostalgic way of accessing info, sir, for the Deltans.”
“No: how come you come in three months if your planet is 4.3 light-years away?”
“Oh, we use warp speed, of course. The TV signal from here is wrapped and warped over to Delta. Takes less time, sir.” And seeing my long face the box adds: “You know Star Trek, sir? It’s a source of many inventions on Delta. But now we are concerned with getting away before your armed forces descend on this place. We’ve alerted the radar, sir, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps you stay and make your visit official?” I suggest.
Zyg and Xyg exchange squeaks.
“Zyg says: Not until you Earthlings stop killing each other. Xyg says: But keep on making entertaining TV shows for us!”
“I see.” I extend both arms to Xyg. The gentlethird extends his and I squeeze his eight-fingered hands. This I repeat with Zyg and I pat the box goodbye.
I open the door for them and Zyg remembers:
“Here is compensation for the damages in the garden.”
He dives in his attaché case and hands me a fistful of money. The notes are purple.
“It’s paper, sir, but it’s valid and it’s plenty,” the box explains and they leave.
I go to the study window to witness their departure. They climb the ladder and wave to me before disappearing inside the hatch. I wave back.
There is a loud droning noise, the vehicle takes off vertically and disappears in the blue sky.
Three minutes later the first Army helicopters arrive.
Only after midnight, when I finally am alone again, I have the leisure to examine the money.
There are ten notes. On one side, there are symbols and marks unknown to me, on the other there is an inscription in English: “The Deltan Central Credit Register certifies hereby that the bearer of this note owns 277 mental credits to be effectuated on Delta.”

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE SEMINAR A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE SEMINAR
A Saul Vogel Mystery

I began to read a very well written handbook of astrology – and I was stunned. The idea that the forces of my psyche correspond to the locations of the planets in my horoscope, a planet-chart cast exactly for the time and place of my birth, appealed to me. At last, I felt connected to the Greater Whole, a feat neither religion nor philosophy had been able to achieve. And I had considered astrology a superstition!
In the final chapters, the authors used Frederic Chopin to illustrate what astrology can provide. Historical sources have two different dates of the composer’s birth. By comparing the two charts of Chopin to that of George Sand, his feminist writer-mistress, whose date of birth is certain, the authors concluded that should the composer be born on date A, he would not have attracted her – or the other way round. The chart for date B, however, shows that Sand and Chopin could give much to each other, as they did. Chopin must have been born on date B.
Ascertaining whether Chopin was born a fortnight later or earlier did not matter to me, but that you can compare charts of two living persons and warn them – before they commit themselves to marriage, partnership or whatnot – did. And what information can be elicited from comparing your chart to that of your mother, father or child! A spouse or lover! A business associate! A skillful astrologer can actually read people’s problems and complexes from their charts!
I was hooked. I paid cash for lessons in the use of astrological tables to calculate and draw horoscopes. I paid more to learn the techniques to interpret, correct and compare them. I bought and read dozens of books. I engrossed myself in charts of famous personalities. I studied history of astrology dating back to Babylonian times – and earlier. I bought my first computer because manual chart making is too cumbersome. I could hardly think and talk about anything else than astrology. I paid more cash to learn more about transits, progressions, midpoints, harmonics… But this is a record of Saul Vogel’s adventures, not mine.

Vogel was eyeing my astrological endeavors with interested though critical eyes. For some years now, I have been pestering my friends and acquaintances, demanding their birth data and interpreting charts for them quite successfully, so I finally asked for his.
“You feel wise enough to cast my chart? Are you telling me that the stars actually decide if and when I get married and when I die, not me or Fate?”
“No,” I said, “but if your birth data are correct I will be able to predict in what periods and in what way you will be most susceptible to dying – accident, sickness, boredom, other – or to marrying, say: for money, love or lust?”
It was a joke, as he is an inveterate bachelor.
He gave me his data and they were excellent, his father, a small-town physician, having meticulously noted down the exact time of birth during the delivery.
Vogel was quite impressed by some of my revelations (unless they were the fruit of our longstanding cooperation and cohabitation) and by some he was not. He remained, however, a much more sympathetic and participating witness than before.

For some years, I have been contacting a group of like-minded astrologers over the Internet. As we live in different parts of planet Earth, we were trying to meet in the flesh in one place, but the costs of transportation, accommodation and rental of suitable premises being so tantalizing…
One day (by this time Vogel was positively pumping me for astrological knowledge) I was explaining the tenets of a prediction technique called secondary progression:
“Imagine every of your first days on this new planet as long as a year because of the enormous bulk of impressions, thoughts, feelings and intuitions overwhelming the newborn. You the newborn make some unconscious decisions, important for the rest of your life. Let’s assume you are 20 years old now: the decisions you have taken on your 20th day of life have powerful influence on your 20th year of life. By comparing the chart for your 20th day of life with your birth-chart, you will be able to see what this influence was…”
“I’ve got it. Does it work?”
“I think I’ve seen it work all right for me. For example, I felt a great change in my life attitude and in my proclivity for action as soon as my progressive Mars had crossed over to the next Zodiac sign, a fiery one.”
“What do your colleagues say about these progressions?”
“Some swear by them, some call them bullshit.”
“What do you call them?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I replied and let him hear about the plan I have been incubating for the last couple of weeks: “Couldn’t I organize a seminar here in Domicile to find out?” And I volunteered half of my savings towards the costs.
He thought about it and said: “You must be joking: your own money? I’ll make sure the Members will sponsor our seminar!”

In my excitement, I forgot to ascertain the exact moment of the decision, so no chart could be erected, but the planets must have been in an extremely favorable alignment because many a honorable Member of Philosophers’ Circle (our club where homebred philosophers meet) have contributed to the project, even the miserly Chairman ($ 200) and the skeptic Federberg (“Astrology as a philosophical experiment, Mr. Vogel? I figured it was all humbug!”). The contributors have been invited to the opening banquet (some actually came) and to the seminar proper (none came).
The biggest donor, however, was the taxpayer. General Rubin, ashamed of his parsimonious and pusillanimous treatment of Vogel in connection with the wacky computer affair[1], has contributed with Army assistance. Naming it an exercise in preparation for an event of natural disaster, he sent tents, field kitchens, field rations, field hospital, chemical toilets, XXL-size staff-tents, beds, chairs, tables, a communications center and all the other materiel and personnel to run and coordinate it all. The clearing in front of Domicile became a sizable military encampment. And adequately so because as soon as I spread the word: “a seminar in a middle of a pristine forest, free accommodation, food and drink, just pay your way” to my Internet like-minded, I got well over 200 entries, instead of the 25-30 I had expected. People were spreading on to their masters and colleagues. One entered his wife (she became the star of the social evenings held in the bar tents; drinks for participants and staff were supplied by a Member, a liquor merchant) and another entered his 3 motherless children; they were to become a hit with the hospital’s nurses. There were cases of overdrinking and overeating for the medics to tackle but nothing more serious. And there is no shame in hospital staff’s promiscuity: the more encounters with death, the more need for life-confirming statements.
One master-astrologer has chosen to pass on from here, surrounded by his disciples, but it was a non-medical matter and no medic interfered.
I phoned Rubin when the participant list was ready, and he roared:
“274 instead of 30! You’re bothering me for that trifle? There are logistics there for 2.700!”
The Army has even provided hostess service for the participants arriving at Pegasino, the international airport, and at the Main Railway Station as well as transportation to Domicile.
Vogel’s share was to vacate Domicile. He moved over to Retreat, a log cabin surrounded by bog, and every morning he made the half-hour’s walk to eat and partake in the activities.
I moved over to the arbor in the garden behind Domicile, but as my garden is beautiful, people wanted to use it all the time – also at night for amorous purposes – so I budged to the boathouse by the lake deeper in the woods.
In every available room in Domicile we installed one of the aged masters, conveniently near bathrooms, the Army having provided additional beds, lockers and so on; a nurse was permanently stationed on the porch, just in case. The other participants and the staff lived in the pool of living-tents before Domicile. The tents and the numerous showers and toilets provided were all in camouflage patterns.

I was to be the mastermind-organizer-administrator of the seminar itself and I was relieved to find a willing substitute in Lt. Jacobsen, the Army having descended on us full two weeks before the event. In command of the Army effort, this young officer, a knowledgeable astrology-fan, overtook my Internet contacts and did a splendid job of fitting last-minute entrants and entries into the program. His efficiency enabled me to work on my own entry, and when, after the event, I was thanking Rubin I spoke highly of him. Jacobsen made Captain shortly after.
There was only one general assembly – at the welcome supper (wines and liquors courtesy of a Member, a distiller) – held on the evening of the third and last day of arrivals and billeting. The guests were assigned to one of the twelve “Zodiac-groups” (Lt. Jacobsen’s idea). The spontaneously forming subgroups – within the main groups or between them – just took one of the vacant meeting-tents and used its field-phone to call for refreshments. There was a communications center manned by military experts, a constantly updated website, and every tent and every room in Domicile had access to the Web as well as transformers for outlandish sockets and voltage. Practically all the astrologers brought laptops and communicated by e-mail and cellular phones. Seven bars and cafés took care of non-electronic communications, and the military cooks who toiled for our three square meals a day received a standing ovation at the farewell lunch. It is only fair to mention, though, that they were greatly abetted through lavish donations from a Member, the managing director of a delicatessen chain, and from another Member, the representative for a company importing foods. Every willing member of the military staff had his/her chart cast and interpreted free by up to three astrologers.

It’s been a great seminar, astrologically. In my main group and subgroups I heard a lot of interesting stuff:

• About the houses i.e. ways of dividing the horoscope and problems arising from the differences between the variety of house systems used by astrologers.
• A tribute to the British astrologer Liz Greene who had predicted the fact and the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse many years before it actually took place.
• An explanation of the heliocentric astrology system devised by Willi Sucher.
• About the great Johannes Kepler’s astrological prowess.
• A tirade against the astronomers who think themselves qualified to denounce astrology as pseudo-science although they know dick about its tenets.
• About Tycho Brahe’s astrological proficiency.
• About the importance of the last planet in the chart (my own entry) and the Nodes.
• About a great many things, which were debated officially or privately over a drink.
• Made new friends, strengthened bonds with old ones, cast and discussed charts.

Vogel participated in the agenda and took his meals with the rest of us. During the fortnight, I met him twice or thrice in subgroups and he was asking advanced questions of the type a student would ask. It dawned on me: he is taking a two-week astrology class; how practical! And everyone was so respectful and patient knowing him to be the host: not only this was his woods and place, but he also got the Army to help. He was present at the passing on of the old master. I met him many more times in the bars; very sociable. He even contrived to invite a nurse and a lady-astrologer over to Retreat.
The farewell lunch was sponsored by Member Wilcox, a multimillionaire, prepared by his fabulous French Chef-in-Chief and served by his waiters: thus the Army cooks and orderlies could take time off and enjoy a meal without having first to make or serve it. Everybody was invited: the military, the guests, the hosts and the sponsoring Members.
General Rubin put up an appearance and looked proud while the orators were heaping praise on the Army. Then the other sponsors got praised.
An old master stood up with a nurse and they announced their engagement. We drank to them and someone proposed a toast to the host.
All got up and drank (other tents were visually connected with the VIP tent by CC TV), and as the guests sat down, Vogel rose to his feet:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure to receive you all here. And I am very grateful to those of my guests, who are astrologers, for their patience with my amateurish inquiries. I’ve learnt a lot from you. I have not yet learnt, though, whether secondary progressions are bull or not. Perhaps we should repeat this one day?”
He bowed to Rubin and the sponsors at the high table; they looked unresponsive, though.
“I have learnt, however,” he went on, “that regardless of whether an astrologer uses progressions – secondary or tertiary – or whichever house system he or she employs, it is always the planets which decide, irrespective of whether she or he believes them to dictate our fates or only to influence them. Why is it so? The fundamental tenet of astrology, I was led to understand, is “as above so below”. Why is it always us – below – who are determined or influenced by the planets – above – and not the other way round? Why not “as below so above”?”
He took a sip of champagne, letting his words sink into the spellbound audience.
“Whether you believe that the planets influence us or that their positions are synchronic to what happens down here or you don’t believe in any of it, please do me a favor and participate in a philosophical experiment consistent with the tenets and aims of Philosophers’ Circle, the club of the Sponsors.” A bow to the high table again. “I’m asking for two minutes of your time. Whether you are military, astrologer, sponsor or a member of Mr. Wilcox’ staff, please halt whatever you are doing, close your eyes and concentrate on the planet Jupiter. Focus on Jupiter’s picture, glyph, house (the 9th), sign (Sagittarius the Archer) or name, whichever you prefer. Mentally, send the planet the following message on my signal: 'Jupiter, give us a sign that we humans can influence you,' until I tell you to stop. We’re a strong constellation of humans here. Why shouldn’t we be heard? All right, ladies and gentlemen, are you ready? Close your eyes… now!”
How typically Vogel, I thought, to choose the biggest of all the planets!
I glanced at the TV-screens from the other tents and saw people following his instructions. Even the waiters stood motionless, trays in their hands, eyes closed.
I closed mine.
“Thank you, much obliged,” Vogel opened his more than five minutes later, sat down and we went back to whatever had been interrupted.

Those who had an expectation of something Jovian happening at once were disappointed: the lunch ended without any incident, the guests departed, only the military, Vogel and me were left.
One more day and the military were gone, too, leaving some of the installations behind: they were proclaimed obsolete. Obsolete, my ass: I can access Cyberspace even from my arbor's chemical lavatory to this day!

Some months later I read in the press that astronomers had discovered an anomaly in Jupiter’s orbit. It was a slight one, but it rendered Jupiter’s expected positions – as recorded in the ephemeris – a minute of a grade or so inaccurate.

Astronomers blame it on the recent bombardment of the planet by the nine Shoemaker-Levy comets, but the participants of the seminar all share quite a different view.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Billig

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[1] See: The Case of the Wacky Mainframe.

THE FIRST COUPLE A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE FIRST COUPLE
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Daily between 6 and 7 p.m., Vogel is in the world of The Daily Rag and out of this one. It is my guaranteed Vogel-free period, and I call it Ragtime.
Imagine therefore my surprise when one autumn day at 6:23 p.m. I heard him talking. As I entered the parlor to investigate, Vogel was on the phone to his old pal Feigenblatt, the editor of The Rag:
“David, I know your Rag always has the latest news and pictures. But can you give me your word that this particular snapshot was taken only a week ago?”
He listened, thanked, hung up and told me to prepare provisions for an all-night ride.

“What made you sacrifice Ragtime – and bedtime, too?” I asked; we were driving through the night in his Porsche.
In reply, he handed me the day's Rag opened on the headline LINEAR “A” UNRAVELED BY PROVINCIAL GENIUS. There was a picture of a man in his thirties: Mr. Adam Gotteswerk, an amateur from Belleville, deciphers Cretan Linear “A”, which the best linguistic minds were breaking their teeth on.
I recognized Feigenblatt's penmanship.
“This ‘amateur’ has deciphered other extinct languages and wrote books on ancient history where he referred to facts and persons unknown to other historians,” Vogel commented. “Some of the facts and persons, however, have since been confirmed by sources found by later excavations on ancient sites. How does he do it?”
“He must have access to historical and linguistic material unknown to other researchers,” I replied. “He’s eating his way through a secret stash and becoming a celebrity from time to time. Must be talented: he isn't even forty! He is Champollion, Hrozný and Ventris all rolled into one!”
“Yeah, a shocking amount of knowledge in a sinner so young, wouldn't you say? The most interesting thing about the mysterious Mr. Gotteswerk, though, is that this particular picture of him, taken a week ago, is in no detail different from my neighbor Mr. Gotteswerk, as I remember him when I was eight in Belleville 40 years ago! Hasn’t grown a day older!”
“Comte Saint-Germain? Merlin? Nicholas Flamel? Freak of Nature?” I suggested.
Vogel did not replay, lost in thought. I fell asleep, as he is an excellent night-driver.

It was morning as we drove into Belleville, a sleepy hamlet of some 3.000 souls where Vogel had been born; his first visit since he left his parents and town at the age of eight. In passing, he pointed his childhood home out, not seemingly moved. He must have said good-by back then and had no extant concerns to come back to.
We stopped in front of a cozy house further on, overgrown with vine, now yellow-red, and surrounded by a garden of apple-trees, which were proudly displaying their yellow-red bounty.
We pressed the bell and the door opened revealing the man from the photo. Vogel looked at him intensely, as if confirming suspicions, and the linguistic genius exclaimed:
“You are old Doc Vogel's lost son! Young… Simon? You were seven or eight, but I recognize you!”
“And I you, Mr. Gotteswerk.” It was an accusation.
Gotteswerk’s face displayed the feeling we have when something we had been dreading happens at last and we are relieved not to have to wait for it anymore.

“Hello, Saul,” said a female voice of melodious timbre, and a fabulous woman appeared by the host. “Good to see you again, Porsche and all. But how come? We heard you became a drifter?”
“Hello,” said Vogel. “My vagabond chapter is ancient history now. You haven't changed at all, though, gorgeous as ever!” This was sheer and true appreciation. “Last time I saw you, I was eight and you gave me some cookies, Mrs. Gotteswerk.” She wasn’t a day over twenty-five.
“It's Eve. Would you introduce your friend?” Her voice was like music of angelic harps.
Vogel introduced me. As I shook her hand, a current ran between us and we made no effort to withdraw hands until we saw the others' astonishment and felt ill at ease. See you later, my hand said letting go of hers. See you later, said hers letting go of mine.
“I'm preparing breakfast,” she said aloud. “Care to join?”
“By all means,” Gotteswerk motioned us in eagerly enough, but he was not enjoying it at all. I felt that he has taken a dislike to me, and he was worried about Vogel. He escorted us to the parlor, told us to sit and asked Vogel why he had left the parents and chosen to become a tramp. I know all about this, so I stood up and left the room in order to find Eve.

I entered the kitchen and she handed me a cup of coffee, actually expecting me. She got it absolutely right: strong instant with milk and sweetener. I drank and joined in her chores and soon we were performing a dance, each taking care of her/his business, without ever colliding, just touching caressingly whenever we met. Pas de deux d’amour! We might have been rehearsing for years!
Dancingly, the table was set, we kissed and called the others. Vogel and Gotteswerk took the short sides, Eve and I sat together on one long and held hands under the table.

I ate with my left while Vogel was telling Eve the reason for his leaving back then: his parents were so infatuated with each other that he did not want to intrude. That’s manners for you!
Gotteswerk was silent, waiting for the meal to end. He seemed eager to cut short Eve's idyll with me; he made no attempt to separate us, though, but turned to my employer instead:
“Let's talk business, Master Vogel! I recognize that accusing look. You are not the first to notice our agelessness, you know. I bet you don't have a clue as to who we really are!”
“My assistant thought you Merlin the sorcerer, which makes Eve Morgana the witch.”
So that you think of me (said her hand jokingly). You bewitched me, haven’t you? (mine replied) and they laughed together.
“Who do you think us to be, Saul? Ahasverus with missus?” Eve asked.
“I consider you the First Couple: the original Adam and Eve.” Vogel was perfectly serious.
I felt the tension in Eve’s hand. She exchanged glances with her husband:
“I’ve been telling you: we are too conspicuous, Adam! Too long in one place, even if it’s Belleville. And you just have to show off your ancient knowledge and have your face plastered all over newspapers!”
“Sorry,” he replied, “but modern science can finally assure that those peoples, their history and their languages won’t be forgotten. And we are ready, Eve, we can move even today. I found an ideal spot in Costa Rica and have been preparing it for you, darling…”
He was looking intently at her, begging for a sign of appreciation, but she just nodded, not visibly impressed, and re-established our underground activities – on a deeper level.
Gotteswerk was saddened and turned to Vogel:
“The hobo really is a philosopher.” He sounded impressed with Vogel’s marksmanship.
“Thank you, Mr. Gotteswerk, and what is your story?”
“As soon as the turtledoves have cleaned the table.”
The turtledoves got up and did their kitchen-ballet again, served fresh coffee, sat down and resumed their handiwork.

“In your Bible”, Gotteswerk began, “you are told that God created a man, took a rib out of him and shaped a woman around it. Touch here…” he began to unbutton his shirt.
“No proof required,” said Vogel. “I stipulate readily that you lack one rib.”
“And no wonder, young sir,” Gotteswerk spoke to me, buttoning up, “that you can't let go of that lovely knee: Eve’s not a woman, she’s the Woman – a masterpiece by God Himself!”
He was wrong about the knee: I was advanced much further. I removed my hand, though, feeling suddenly like a thief taken red-handed, but she grabbed it and returned it firmly to its proper place.
You’re doing fine (her hand said) and she addressed her husband in an angry voice:
“Lose the crap, Adam, we struck a deal!”
“Just kidding, darling.” He turned to us, a stupid grin on his face. “There is no mention in the Good Book, though, that having created us God quickly figured out that man needs company of another man, and woman – that of another woman: we are a social breed. Consequently, He created a second couple, Adam 2 and Eve 2. Tired or unwilling to create competition for us, His firstborn, He fashioned the second couple, rough and crude… Sorry, but they were your forebears…”
“We have improved on it since,” said Vogel, and I received an affirmation of my worth under the table. I was not able to keep a straight face this time, and Gotteswerk’s grin was gone.
“The Creator forbade us to eat from two trees,” he resumed sternly, “but Eve 2 ate from the Tree of Knowledge and gave to her Adam 2 and to me… and I ate… At that, Eve came…”
“And found you banging Eve 2!” There was pain in her voice and she withdrew her hand, to my chagrin.
“I couldn't resist the urge! It was the apple, I told you a million times, Eve!”
“So you keep saying,” and she returned her hand to its previous assignment.
“Eve took me quickly to the Tree of Life,” Gotteswerk resumed. “She ate and made me eat, too. When expelled from Paradise, the other two died after some time, having sired your line, but we stay alive, deathless, dwelling amid you, trying not to be conspicuous, staying out of the way…”
“Not out of the way of the women,” said Eve, “even though someone had sworn never again.”
“You have been taking your revenge,” he said sadly, and I felt she was using me to get at him.
Of course I am using you, but it is you, her hand declared and I believed it.
“What are your intentions, Saul?” she asked my employer.
“Intentions?” Vogel sounded hurt. “I wanted confirmation of my guess, that’s all, Eve.” “Never heard of you, sir, madam,” I declared, as the host’s inquiring gaze shifted to me.
“One thing, though,” Vogel said. “Did you happen to take anything out of Paradise when you were getting expelled?”

Wasn’t he getting attention now! The hosts exchanged glances and together looked at the window; there was nothing to see except the apple-trees in the garden.
Then Gotteswerk sprang up, and Eve squeezed my hand in an urgent manner: a message will be forthcoming. She stood up and they escorted us to the door. She was humming Underneath the mango tree, a melody from a James Bond movie: I am awaiting you under the apple-trees. Got it, my eyes told her, thus making the separation of hands tolerable.
“I envy you, Mr. Gotteswerk,” I said. “To have met Plato in person! And Jesus! And Napoleon, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan! And to speak all those extinct languages…”
“Never met Plato, met Socrates and Aristotle, and as long as I and Eve can speak, no language is extinct. I expect to be speaking many more you won’t be speaking and to meet people you won’t be meeting,” he snapped, but Eva’s gentle pat on my back told me that she wants me, even though I do not speak Babylonian, Hittite, Minoan “A” or “B” - or even Sumerian.
They walked us to the Porsche.
“I did meet Plato,” she said and kissed me goodbye.
Gotteswerk shook Vogel’s hand who said:
“Take my advice: next time you pick a name, try a humbler one, like… Gottesschmerz?”

We drove away, turned into a side street and Vogel stopped the car even before I asked him to.
“Who does he take me for – an idiot?!” he roared. “Piece of cake to smuggle a pip or two out of Paradise, between the teeth or inside the intestines. Both glanced at the window, only apple-trees there. When stealing apples from the neighbors I always avoided the Gotteswerks', theirs were sour and tart. Now I understand.” I saw a boyish flicker in his eyes: “Let's go a-harvesting!”
“I’d rather harvest alone, Master…”
“I understand: a woman in heat!”
I got out of the car and he handed me a bag through the window:
“Fill herup, Romeo, fill herup.”

I approached the house, climbed the fence and moved under the trees. She was nowhere to be seen, so I stopped and saw red-yellow apples on a branch near my hand. I opened the bag, picked one – and heard her voice from behind:
“It's a wrong tree, silly!”
We embraced and kissed, and then she led me to another tree and plucked an apple.
“For your mouth only,” she said.
I put it in my pocket, and she led me to a corner of the garden where a shed was hidden in the bushes. Inside was a sizable bed.
“Adam never comes here,” she said. “It’s part of the deal. Eat the apple you plucked: it makes a tiger out of a philosopher!”
I am not the kind to kiss and tell, so I break off here. One thing, however: ever made love to a navel-less woman?

It was evening when I came back to the car. Vogel was fast asleep behind the wheel, but he awoke when I began to sing from the bottom of my happy heart:

La donna è mobile
Qual pium' al vento,
Muta d'accento
E di pensiero.
Sempre un' amabile
Leggiadro viso,
In piant' e riso
è menzognera.

La donna è mobil’
Qual pium' al vento,
Muta d'accento
E di pensier’,
E di pensier’,
E di pensier’…

“Where are my apples?” he asked.
“She gave one only: for Romeo, but I saved a bite, even though it took enormous effort to stop,” I replied displaying the miserable remnants: the core and thereabouts was all that was left.
Vogel was devouring it with his eyes. I mentioned the raise I had been pestering him about for the last six months. He agreed and, cautiously, I handed it to him.
“A philosopher has to be humble,” he said and ate it up.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

















Peter Billig
OCKHAM’S RAZOR
A Saul Vogel Mystery

“Don’t you feel sorry for your own heroes?” Vogel asked, as I finished reading a few of my short stories to him. “You make them feel so much, think so much and suffer so much.”
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of eight. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a freelance philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints, leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life, never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”

“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date. Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.

The reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.

In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy tracts, which Vogel called donkey paths. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky or sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.
As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. “The threshold of Hell,” I thought but my Master went forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.

People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another had mendicants’ rags, yet another frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.
In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all.

Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense to me: d’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falling out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”
“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The immobile dead d’Artagnan changed into the youngster he had been before taking off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their role in the plot.
“He was just dead. What made him alive again?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure,” Vogel replied. “The writer creates the individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text again, making them perform once more. In addition, think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”

I did not know what to say. He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors and he was making the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”). I refrain from his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek and Hašek.
As we were approaching mine, however, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “my” people moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.

“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we sped back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“Can you fill Rostand’s shoes? You are talented, but my advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.

© Copyright by Peter Billig 2007.


















Peter Billig
SHIT HAPPENS

A Saul Vogel Mystery

Vogel is always on time unless he has been invited with me. I’m always late. A brainy philosopher, he ought to have accepted that my being late cannot be helped, since it is immanent in my nature.
That afternoon, though, the tuxedoed Vogel stationed himself at my bathroom-door and pleaded for the last half-hour, while I was giving my face a thorough shave:
“Make haste, you moron! Perfection achieved! Federberg won’t even open for us!”
"I'm about finished!" I replied at last into the mirror and felt the razor penetrate my cheek.
I never cut myself so I had to search for the shaving-block to stop the bleeding, and iodine and plaster to dress the cut. As I was rummaging around and uttering profanities, Vogel was always in the way, uttering advice and instructions meant to be helpful, but actually causing me to drop a bottle of iodine on the snow-white front of his shirt.
Now I was haunting his closet-door and pleading with a moron to make haste, while he was changing completely, iodine having penetrated down to his underwear.
At last he was fully clad, but I had to send him dressing again: his shirt was inside out.

The host, Mr. Sylvester Federberg, did open for us, but he was very cross, as he considers even slight slights weighty. A fortnight ago, the old-timer sent me his second (at the beginning of 21st century!) with a box of dueling-pistols! I had not taken my hat off to him in the street. He is a fellow member of Philosophers' Circle, a club for homespun philosophers.
I explained that preoccupied with other matters I must have not recognized Mr. Federberg, for whose person and philosophic wit I have but profound respect. And a friend of my employer's, too! Should this clarification not satisfy Mr. Federberg, I shall oblige him, even though I had no intention of insulting him, but not before a year's time, as I am bound by a contract and, at present, my time and life belongs to Mr. Vogel.
Vogel and Federberg belong to the same faction in the club, and at the discussions there they wage philosophical warfare, together with the less gifted part of their fraction, against the Chairman's faction. Socially, they exchange visits. Federberg shares Vogel's taste for red herring and serves indescribably tasty ones from a source he won’t reveal. Vogel never forgets to ask, but the old fox keeps his secret jealously.
Having heard my explanation, the second bowed and was gone, and a week later Federberg called me on the phone, very apologetic: the morning in question he had shaved off his beard and never thought it could matter. I was just the first not to recognize him…
"So barba facit philosophum[1]," I interrupted, and he laughed and asked me to join Vogel on his visit – a courtesy never extended to me before.

So here we were in the lobby, the host taking our coats. He did not invite us inside where, perfectly visible through an open door, an enormous table was displaying a cozy array of dishes and bottles. Bound on revenge, he kept us hungry and thirsty in the lobby, teasing with the aromas of his renowned cold buffet. I was eager to taste his famous fare for the first time.
“Two hours late, gentlemen! Congratulations!" he said, tapping his watch. "Yes, you phoned and explained, you've been cutting yourselves, bleeding and pouring antiseptics on each other. This I approve of, but you ought to apologize for making me watch television!”
"I apologize sincerely: it was me both cutting himself, bleeding and pouring antiseptics," I said.
"I apologize no less sincerely for not having impounded his razor," said Vogel and sent a greedy glance at the table where the wonderful red herrings were waiting among Federberg's celebrated pâtés, salads and sausages.
"Everything was so slow in that movie that I was falling asleep, only couldn't, the music being so jittery,” the host went on, mercilessly. "This must be an inaction movie: guy kept on shaving for full ten minutes, by the clock," he tapped his watch again, "and wasn't even half-finished."
“Some shave longer,” said Vogel and sent me a meaningful look.
"To get rid of my beard I had to shave for a whole hour, but who wants to watch? Films are for people, not vice versa. Ten minutes of foam, razor and mug. ‘I hope you cut yourself, you asshole!’ I thought and turned the box off. What a waste of time!”
"One can also change the channel,” I said and gazed at the buffet as yearningly as my employer.
"Right you are, change of subject: let's grab some grub!" cried Vogel.

Federberg ushered us in and we all went straight to the table, served ourselves, sat down and began to munch; he must have been fasting too, as a good host should.
"This herring in curry à la Danois is exquisite, Mr. Federberg!" I exclaimed in awe.
"You really like it? I like yours better!" and he showed me the dishes he was truly proud of. A sampling tour ensued, the drinks complementing the foods, and a culinary exchange of tips and advice. Federberg's buffet was as good as the club lore claims, and I was surprised that he thought me a great cook, having tasted my cuisine while visiting Vogel; my contract stipulates that I cook for my employer, his girlfriends and guests, but the host himself does the serving. "You were never there to receive the compliments."
‘You could have praised me later in the club’, I thought, but he disarmed me that he never would have dared to invite me if not for the beard episode: so much he fears what I might think of his cooking.
"In case you don't know, young man, there go myths and tales in the Circle about your fabulous cuisine, and I concur!" he flattered me.
Seeing my obvious satisfaction and forgiveness as to the silly beard episode, he poured champagne for us to his kolbász puszta, a perfect choice – and finally asked me the question he was dying to ask all evening. "Last general discussion in the Circle: how did you manage to provide so devastating an argument for our faction, young man, even though by choice you belong to the Chairman's?"
My contract specifies that I am to provide philosophical assistance to the employer also in the Circle; he pays half my membership fee. But I am a member on my own accord as well, with different opinions and loyalties. Consequently, I contribute arguments to both sides, and whenever I stand up in the aula, I signal on whose behalf I shall be speaking, Vogel's or my own. But when not in general discussion, I hang out in the Circle's bar, together with the Chairman and the rest of my faction, not in the café where Vogel, Federberg and the rest of them reside.
"My duplex situation does not diminish me into two dwarfish philosophers, but increases me into two full-blown ones,” I explain. “I expect to find a counterargument to the one I gave your faction and to give it to mine this time," and I realize that Vogel has not uttered a single word ever since we came in from the lobby.

He has been eating and drinking, but in a mechanical way, his mind elsewhere. Federberg noticed it, too, and looked intensely, and Vogel looked back without seeing him, his soul not wholly inside.
"Don’t take it personally. Unconsciously, he enjoys your food,” I console him. "He gets into this mood when the outside world gives him a philosophical idea. Something we said in the lobby must have set it off."
"But all said in the lobby was a boring story about boredom in order to get you punished for being late." Federberg is looking curiously at his absent buddy. “A very special kind of man! Will he really remember what he ate and drank?”
"That he will when his soul comes back, but he will forget to ask about your red herrings. If I’m right – will you tell me instead?"
"That he will never forget! I’ll tell you, if he forgets, but you will have to give me the recipe for your à la Danois in exchange."
"You're on."
At this moment Vogel reached for the red herring and we followed suit. It was truly magnificent, a whole class better than the one I buy. I feel ashamed for ever having served mine to Federberg and I say so.
The host is happy to hear it. Vogel finishes his herring with a shot of Polish vodka, rises to his feet, blinks and his mental presence is miraculously restored. He notices us and smiles:
"A feast incomparable, Sly, and the herring beggaring description! How about the purveyor's identity this time?" Federberg firmly shakes his head. "No? Keep your little secret, Sly! But tell me: you got time tomorrow? Something you said made me wonder. I'd like you to help me with a little philosophical experiment."
"I'll be delighted, Saul, little experiment or big. Come at ten and stay for lunch."
They shook hands, then it was my turn.
"I'll mail the recipe in a day or two, Mr. Federberg."
"That will be fine. You lost the wager, but I still owe you for the beard episode."
And he told me the fishmonger's address.

Vogel woke me up at nine starting his Porsche and I remembered: a little philosophical experiment. What did Federberg say in the lobby? I reviewed yesterday’s "reel" but it was a boring story about some shaving guy – and then the wonderful abundance of foods and drinks, so perfectly matched and so smoothly consumed! Too smoothly, perhaps, as I had a touch of hangover.
An experiment, that’s interesting. I felt snubbed, as it is my job assisting in experiments, according to our contract. Yet, it is nice to stay in bed a little longer, and he will tell me all about it tonight: the contract spells out that no philosophic gains by either party may be hidden from the other.
I drank my coffee, felt I was yet too choppy to do any sensible work with my head and decided to clean the house instead, a tedious chore and somewhat overdue. Had a drink to pep me up, checked the time – 10:37 a.m. – began to water plants downstairs, in my apartment, and, at once, I upset a favorite euphorbia. Stepped back in horror and knocked a favorite stephanotis and an araucaria over. Had a drink to steady myself, replanted the victims, took out the Hoover to clean the mess, and it went dead. Had a glass, began to fix it and the 230 volts hit me: I had forgotten to unplug. Shaken, I steadied myself with a drink and resolved to go upstairs to spruce up my employer's apartment instead. Began to do his study and a porcelain statuette of shepherdess kissing chimneysweep fell with a spatter. It was Meissen and ugly, but Vogel kept it on the shelf for some sentimental reasons.
I took a tipple and thought the situation over. Obviously, it was one of these days when everything goes wrong. On such days, I drop everything and watch TV. Some force majeure, though, made me challenge this proven wisdom. I went down to the kitchen, fortified myself with a drink and began to prepare supper – and cut my finger to the bone with a carving knife. Dressed the wound, reinforced myself again and burned the other hand while lighting the gas-stove. Reinvigorated myself again, and a massive pot separated from the hook on the wall and landed on my foot.
Enough is enough. I hobbled to Vogel’s favorite armchair in the shared drawing/dining room, sat down – and this solid piece of furniture disintegrated under me!

I was on the sofa, drunk and moaning, when Vogel found me. Have a vague recollection of being helped to bed… I wake up, have one hell of a hangover, my head aches, the finger and the foot hurt, and the rest of my body is covered with bruises and scratches. I drag myself from the bed and shuffle to the drawing room where coffee and breakfast are waiting for me – and Vogel as well.
This is a standard procedure, we do it for one another, both being fond of fine spirits, but there is a touch of guilt in Vogel's face as well as curiosity and inquisitiveness. He hardly waits for me to finish my first cup before beginning to interrogate me as to what had happened. I would rather forget all about it but he makes me spill it all. As I am telling the story of yesterday's woes, he listens intently, inquires about the approximate time of every misadventure and compares the information with some notes. He is getting more and more pleased, so I tell him about the loss of the Meissen figurine, but he laughs it off:
“It was hideous, anyway, and I said goodbye to Clara years ago. You have days like this often?”
“They happen from time to time but never as mean as yesterday.”
“When was the last of such ill-starred days?”
“Your birthday. I smashed crockery, upset things and dropped a bottle of champagne.”

Vogel went to the phone and dialed, while I fortified myself with a large Scotch and a coffee.
“Greetings, Sly," Vogel said into the receiver. "It's about our experiment yesterday. I’d like to know about your frame of mind on this date,” he mentioned his birthday.
He listened, thanked and hung up.
“In the lobby, Sly said something about a guy on TV shaving so long that he wished him to cut himself," he said. "This I associated to your cutting yourself at the same time. Sly confirmed it yesterday: both he and me had been checking watches and getting madder and madder. To cut oneself is, grammatically speaking, a reflexive accident: you do it to yourself against your own will! Psychologically, it may be an unconscious wish to punish or kill oneself, but it might be something else…”
"I see," I butted in, experiencing a lucid interval (scotch is quite effective), "you thought Federberg had sent some mental waves causing me to cut myself?"
"Exactly. Yesterday I asked him to have the same feelings as when he said to the guy on the screen ‘Cut yourself!’, but the moment was gone. I reminded him of what the Chairman had said to him in the last general discussion, and he got furious and vindictive."
The Chairman had aptly labeled one of Federberg's arguments "moronic". Anyone can have a moronic thought, so he kept within our rules, which forbid argumenta ad hominem, but a touchy person like Federberg would feel as being called a retard and take offense.
I told my employer about the duel.
“So that’s why Sly never sent the second to the Chairman: he had made a mess of it with you!” Vogel exclaimed. "He is full of hate for the guy and I made him aim that malevolence mentally at his foe, while I jotted down the time and contents of each broadcast…”
“So why did shit happen to me and not the Chairman?” I protested.
“Of the same reason wherefore Sly’s cut yourself, asshole!’ hit you and not some innocent actor: you are in faze with Sly. Yesterday, Sly started with fairly benevolent malice, wishing the Chairman to break his leg and to fall down a stairs…"
"But I didn't break my leg or fall!" I protested again.
"But the timing and the number of your adventures correspond to his ill wills!"
"This is worthless crap! I should have tumbled down the stairs and fractured my shinbones!"
"How the heck could you fall down the stairs if you were, say, in the john?! If an ill wish can’t be fulfilled, some achievable shit happens: you pee up your pants, get your tool in the zipper, your denture plunges down the sewer…"
"I wear no denture!" I remonstrate again.
"These are waves of bad luck, nothing else. Sly just told me that on my birthday he had lost heavily on the stock market and wished every smiling person he met to drop dead. He felt they were mocking him. By now, you should resemble Jolly Roger! The worst thing to happen to you happened actually to me: you smashed my birthday bottle of Dom Perignon. Yesterday, his last ill wish was that the Chairman break his neck, but the only thing that happened to you at that moment was destroying my favorite armchair!"
"Some employer! Exposing me to mortal danger, even though the contract specifically…"

"Give me a break! I knew that no deep shit would happen to you. You've been under Sly's evil influence from the day you've been born, perhaps even nine months before, but still you walk among the living! He's been irritable all his life! These waves must be responsible for small accidents only, of the cutting, upsetting, bruising and dropping kind. No encounters of the third kind. On the other hand, the contract specifically specifies that you are to assist me in my philosophical endeavors…"
"Give me a break, Master! Where is the philosophy? So far you have proven that a certain old-timer has been trying to kill me in a duel, and not having succeeded used voodoo…"
"Oh, shuttupa your face! You know as well as I do he doesn't realize he's got that power! Imagine instead that somebody is a malefactor to him, and you – his victim – are a malefactor to someone else and so on: a chain involving perhaps the entire mankind. Here is your philosophy!”
“My philosophy from now on will be to keep Federberg happy. I’ll send him the recipe today and offer any recipe he cares to have. I will also…”
“You miss the point, philosopher!” Vogel cries. “I want to find out about this, so I want to start with finding your victim. As I suspect that the waves are not long-range, your victim will probably be found in the city…"
"Of several million inhabitants!" I protest.
"Seventy per cent of whom use the Underground. Position yourself at the main stairs of the Central Station. One has to begin somewhere."
"The contract specifies that I am not to be compelled to morally repulsive acts! You want me to harm an innocent individual. Why don't you do it yourself? You must have a victim, too!"
"C'mon, our fraction is to work on the presentation of Heidegger on Friday. I just don't have the time! We know who your malefactor is, it gives us a head start. And what is a bump on one's forehead or a broken limb compared with Philosophy? It could be interesting to learn what makes a person malefactor for someone and victim for somebody else. Comparing horoscopes of the involved might just give the answer."
Astrology is my dearly beloved hobby and my eyes must have given me away because Vogel goes on, now sure that the fish took his bait.
"Ultimately, you might reveal the malefactor for Mr. S, with whom you have accounts to settle. How would you like to make his life a hell on earth?"
"I'll do it!"

I drove to the city and began at exactly 3 p.m. by sending a strong wish to see Mr. S tumble down the stairs and break his neck. And even though I kept repeating it every fifth minute or so, nothing happened on the crowded stairs. I went on and on, the hours of malevolence dragged on and the rush-hour throng became a trickle. I decided to call it a day and went home.
Vogel was out. I prepared supper knowing that his stomach will make him forget Heidegger.
The phone rang. It was the hospital: Vogel has been hospitalized there and wants to see me.
He was lying in a bed, right leg in plaster, head bandaged.
“I fell down the stairs in the Circle, broke the leg and had a concussion.”
“What time was it?”
He gave me his watch, now smashed. It showed 3 p.m.
“I think I’ve found my victim,” I said. “Any hard feelings?”
“I had, as no one has ever brought me to my knees before. Now I know I was asking for it. I don’t think I’m up to wrestling this mystery out of Nature. Let someone else do it, someone with more guts.”
“Then you should let me publish an account of this adventure. Both the readers and me are sick and tired of your unending successes.”
“Anything to keep you good-humored,” he said.
To keep me amiable, he gave me a raise and asked me to put the sentence ‘Have only nice thoughts’ at the end of this account.
Have only nice thoughts!

Copyright © by Peter Billig, 2007.

[1] The beard does define a philosopher.

BWV

Peter Billig
B W V

I befriended Compenius, an outstanding computer specialist, because of shared love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. We spent evenings together listening to Bach’s compositions. Compenius had them all on CD and we came to learn them by heart. We would vie with each other, humming a tune and asking the other to name its number according to the catalogue Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis: BWV.
One evening, as we, satiated with the music, began to talk – about Bach, of course – the conversation touched the topic of so much of his work having been lost by his contemporaries, unappreciative of his genius. We were both concerned that perhaps the best compositions have been squandered forever.
“Just think of it: nowadays they publish the scribbles of any pipsqueak not fit to hold a candle to Bach!” Compenius complained.
“When I listen in the chronological order,” I said, “I have a feeling that some compositions sound out of the context, as if fallen from the Moon, while others seem to flow from each other even though they patently qualify as divergent genres. I’ll bet the fallen from the Moon are those whose predecessors, so to speak, have been lost.”
Compenius was listening with a growing interest.
“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “I feel the very same way!”
He was silent and there was a light of revelation in his eyes.
“Does it imply that…?” he murmured after a while and there was deep concentration in his face. Immersed in thought he did not even notice me leaving the flat.
Some days later, just before my going out to join Compenius for the next Bach-session, the phone rang:
“Be so kind as to refrain from further visits,” I heard the familiar voice and he hung up.
I was so hurt and offended that I did not even bother to phone him and ask for an explanation. I deleted this acquaintance from my address book and memory; I even quitted Bach.
A year and a half later, as I was beginning my evening yawns, the phone rang:
“Please, come at once!” an excited voice said and hang up.
It took a while to connect who was summoning me. I hesitated but curiosity got the better of me. I forgot my resentment, got hold of the coat and ran out.
Compenius opened quivering with excitement. He showed me the armchair without a word.
“Owing to your remark,” he began as if nothing had ever happened,” an idea crossed my mind: that only humanistic tommyrot about free will and unpredictability of human endeavors stands in the way of a mathematical conception of man. Accordingly, as Bach sat down to compose his first piece of music, he was beginning, unbeknownst to himself, to execute the artistic task assigned to him by Nature. Therefore, the subsequent compositions were consecutive phases on the way to the final result. Lacunae in a series of ensuing equations can be filled up. The challenge lies only in transcribing music into mathematics – and this I wanted to puzzle out. Unwilling to miss concentration, I allowed myself to sever ties with my ambience, and when I was finished with the theoretical part of the job, I have contrived an apparatus reconstructing the missing equations and converting them into music. The device is also capable of computing what Johann Sebastian would have composed had he not died earlier, and of bringing his artistic task to fruition; at this moment, Bach, should he live that long, would have perceived he has nothing more to say as composer. As I owe this idea to your words, I have invited you to the inauguration. To begin with let’s find out what Johann Sebastian has composed between BWV 333 and BWV 334!
Compenius went over to the contraption on his desk and pressed a button: some unfamiliar tones issued, though somehow expected and anticipated.

Copyright © Peter Billig, 2007.

THE INITIATE A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE INITIATE
A Saul Vogel Mystery

I invited Vogel to sample this year’s hemp harvest. We sat on the porch, smoked in silence and waited for the stuff to take effect. It was great. My mind made me a squirrel, jumping from bough to bough into the forest, further and further from the house.
“Good shit!” My employer’s voice came from afar. “I did pot in my hobo period, Floyd liked to share ganja with me. Remarkable man: when high he could become someone else. When he meditated on being an insect bugs from miles around would gather around him. When he was a bird, all the feathered friends would arrive. Earthworms surfaced to listen.”
“A veritable Saint Francis,” I said opening my eyes.
“Were you a squirrel?”
“Did it show? Was I cracking my nuts?”
“Just look.” At the steps of the porch, some three of four dozen of red squirrels were gathered gazing expectantly, as if waiting for me to reveal something important they could not think up themselves, us humans purportedly being the consciousness for all earthly life. I was sorry, but I could not think of anything to say.
“You have the knack, too,” Vogel went on and I felt that it was an important discovery for him. “Floyd told me, as we shared marihuana and local booze in a meadow, that during one meditation – being a turtle, to be exact – he had chanced upon a specific level of consciousness and found some two hundred human minds there communicating by thought transference. It is they who control the consciousness of the human race. From this level, they can read the lesser mortals’ minds and insert chosen thoughts and feelings into them. Floyd liked to mix good things, as I do,” Vogel pointed at his Bushmills bottle by my joints. “The mixture must function as a cloaking device since they did not discover his presence.”
Vogel drank some whisky, even though the weed was blowing his mind fine enough.
Somehow, I knew that he was working on a similar device.
“By mixing cannabis and alcohol, visiting regularly and eavesdropping, Floyd learnt that they belonged to a group calling themselves the Org, out to control mankind. It has been going on for thousands of years. There have been so many disparate creeds and philosophies from the first light of humanity – on one tiny planet! You think that conflicting political outlooks, revolutions, incompatibilities among peoples and individuals, jingoisms, wars, ego-trips and such like are a natural product of the human nature, the human psyche, right? Wrong! It’s the work of the Org, controlling the minds of religious, political, intellectual and scientific coryphées to keep mankind at odds, never at ease, always stressed and fighting, unable to reach their level of awareness. You think USA is the superpower now? The acronym’s ORG! Has always been! Whenever a person, who could smoothen things up, cannot be controlled, they have him/her assassinated, crucified or locked up. The chief reason I wanted you as my assistant is that you, like me, can’t be mentally controlled. They can read your mind but cannot implant their garbage into it.”
He lighted another joint and emptied another glass while I was taking all this in, including my unfamiliar imperviousness to Org’s scheming.
“It’s hard to believe,” I said at last. “Had I the aptitude to control human minds I would have made them do sensible things instead of warfare. That would give me a real kick!”
“So would I. We are both idiots: no taste for power.”
He poured a glass for me. I was fine with my smoke, but I accepted, feeling there was a reason for it.
As the liquor reached my brain, I had a message for the squirrels. I don’t know what I said or in what tongue; they seemed uplifted, though: they nodded and disbanded.
Vogel poured me another, I drank and realized that he had been kidding.
“Org, shmorg, my ass!” I looked him straight in the eyes. They met mine intrepidly:
“Exactly what I had told Floyd. He gave us another roach, another drink and told me to meditate on being a turtle. Soon, we two met on the Org level. The minds of the Orgs present there at that time were transparent spheres, everything inside visible. Our cloaking contrivance was functioning perfectly: we were undetectable. By concentrating on the mental processes of the spheres, I found all Floyd told me to be true. The Orgs also keep people’s minds on nonessentials like sport, TV, movies, books, sex, recreation, games, cyberspace and such like. I also ascertained the identities of the minds at hand. You would be surprised! Gentle, modest and inconspicuous people: who would ever suspect them of any fiendish supremacy? I was astounded, forgot myself and made a comment to Floyd. That blew our cover: the Orgs in attendance got wise to us and wanted us to declare we were joining the Org and accepting the group’s aims. Tasks are meted out to prove the loyalty of new members – a standard procedure for admittance of the eligible few who make it to this level. New members are required to spend more time here, scanning the ordinary minds to detect early signs of human harmony in the bud and to inspire action against that and the small number of people, who cannot be mentally bent. It’s imperative. Humans have a natural proclivity to harmonious coexistence and mutual respect and they would develop in this direction if left unimpeded.”
“It stands on the head everything we know about ourselves… And you accepted...?” I was overtaken by a sudden fright, as it happens when I am high.
“Relax! We refused, even though we were aware that the Orgs had our identities and geographic bearings by then, as we had theirs. We told them to shove it and got out back to the meadow (in Communist Bulgaria), turtles crowding on us. Floyd told them something and they dispersed, and we were alone with our bravery, now dissipating fast. As we got up to move on, a peasant appeared and shot Floyd dead. He took a potshot at me, too, but I ducked behind a rock and crept into a forest. Next day, as I was crossing a road, I was nearly hit by a bus and a day later Bulgarian militia organized a manhunt: to the populace, I was described as armed and dangerous lunatic, better killed than caught alive.”
Vogel was shaken by the memory, but there was defiance in his face.
“Obviously, since you are alive and kicking, Master, you had it fixed with the Org somehow... or you fixed the Org?” I suggested with sudden optimism, also typical when I am stoned.
“Would the world look like it does had I fixed the scum? No, as the police dragnet passed me by (I hid in a lake, breathing through a reed) I relaxed the best I could. Devoid of pot and liquor, I meditated intensely on being a turtle and made it to the Org level. What a pity types like that were first to arrive there, not the likes of you and me! They were all present, plotting the next attempt on my life, my lucky escapes having sounded all alarms. They were bewildered and impressed by my sudden appearance, though, and accepted my promise never to visit the level again nor to reveal the existence of the Org to anyone…”
“You just broke your word by telling me!”
“I gave the word under duress and besides we are well cloaked. I have been waiting for the right moment to strike. Somebody has to take them on! Let’s go! Perhaps you, with your fresh mind, will find their weak spot? Relax, imagine you’re a turtle, safely covered by your shield… and keep your mind shut!”
His abrupt style was too fast for me. I began to ask questions but got stopped in mid-sentence by an attack helicopter materializing out of nowhere: it was hovering above the ground, its armory of guns and missiles aimed at the porch. Through the cockpit’s bobble, I could see madness in the eyes of the pilot.
I made in my pants. Vogel raised hands to indicate surrender, and the helicopter hovered, as if waiting for instructions. Then the pilot regained his senses. His crazy eyes became aware. Bewildered what he was doing here, he flew away.
“We have been pinpointed!” I cried. “You idiot, you drank only after telling me about the Org! We’re lucky they just wanted to send a warning!”
“Your weed’s so good,” he said crestfallen. “Never realized they were keeping an eye on me after all these years. Scary, eh? So few of them and so much to do: six billion minds to scan!” He thought it over and added: “Don’t worry. We’ll get the bastards one day or my name is Mayer!” and to console ourselves, we kept improving our cloaking device, especially on the liquor side, until late hours.

A year later I read that the red squirrels of our country, whose very existence has been under threat because of the encroachment on their habitat by the gray imported variety, better suited to the environment, had regained the upper hand and were fighting back, recovering lost ground.
This I deem a fitting conclusion to this account.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE COSMOSCOPE A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE COSMOSCOPE
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Vogel invited me to share a bottle of a very exceptional alcoholic beverage:
“I drank this wonderful drink years ago, at my initiation into the Totoraq tribe, and I had breathtaking visions. Expect a unique experience,” and he poured liberally. The bottle had been sent via a vacationing anthropologist stationed with a tribe of Amazonian Indians, the Totoraq.
The stuff was good, we got drunk, but nothing happened whisky would not have provided.
Vogel was disappointed and puzzled. He booked an air ticket to Brazil, took his cellular phone, his WDR (wave-detector-recorder) and was gone. There was no doubt that in his Totoraq period he must have made an important assumption, now proven wrong.
A month later Voss arrived, a wizard engineer, who builds customized gear for Vogel against liberal invoices. His van, a workshop on wheels, took over the garage.
He constructed a UFO-shaped outhouse and furnished it with high-tech equipment. True to his unforthcoming nature, he would tell me nothing. Even though he would let me step inside with the lunch tray, whatever he was building – especially the electronics – was covered, and he would ask me to leave immediately. When finished, he simply disappeared without a word.
“It’s the Cosmoscope,” Vogel told me arriving the day after. “Let’s launch it!”
He unlocked the door. The interior was air-conditioned, the domed ceiling was covered with wiring and electronics. There was a control panel and two adjustable armchairs.
“At my initiation as Totoraq”, he said, as we sat down, ”I had been given that drink and taken to a cave where I had powerful visions. The initial ones concerned the well-being of my tribe, the final one was different. In it, I was sent into a new dimension and stopped by a wall. I tried to jump over, but it was too high. I tried to crash through – to no avail. Recently, when the Totoraq sent me the bottle and nothing happened, I understood the visions had not been in the drink. I realized, too, why they sent it: they wanted me back. I found them deeply in trouble with the neighbors and the authorities. We Totoraq are an independent-minded breed. I was initiated again, into the council of elders this time, given no drink, but taken to the cave. New visions ensued, which gave the tribe fresh ideas as to how to solve the problems, I’m proud to report. My private vision of old was repeated, and again I was stopped by the wall. I’ve got a feeling that surmounting the wall is of capital importance,” and he run his fingers over the control panel’s keyboard.
“The visions were not in the drink, but in the cave!” it dawned on me at last. “You recorded the waves inside the cave and sent to Voss ordering an electronic copy!”
“Let’s play test pilots. Voss was too scared to try it out on himself,” and he punched “Enter”.
The lights went out, a purr was heard and my consciousness sped out of the body into a new dimension. I wanted to scream, but my vocal cords were left behind. I braced myself for an encounter with a danger, but all I did was to stop suddenly in front of a towering wall, stretching into the horizon in both directions. Vogel stopped beside me, attacked the wall head-on and bounced off like a rubber ball. He jumped, stopped just short of the top and set down.
“Didn’t I tell you?” He sounded angry and impatient.
“I associate wall with gate. Have you considered looking for one, Master?”
“We Totoraq are too independent-minded indeed! Which way would you recommend?”
“Left, it works in my dreams.”
Being Totoraq, he went to the right, though, and after some speeding along the never-ending brick-mass we found a defined space dotted with letter-slits by the thousand. Most were open, allowing a flow of white and black balls to pass within. Some were closed and the unaccepted balls, coming out of space in thousands of unending lines, formed heaps at the foot of the wall.
Vogel converted himself into a black ball and leaped head-on into a slit, only to get spat out and land on a heap: “Shit!”
“Easy, Master! The lines of balls make me think of information bits coming as if by cable from different places. You might get in through the slit for information from our place.”
“Good thinking!” and we gave the slits another look. They all had inscriptions in different characters, symbols, pictograms and scrawls. All were outlandish, and we got bored before I saw something familiar: ץראה רודכ – and I showed it to Vogel.
“Kadur ha-aretz, “Earth” in Hebrew,” he said and jumped into the slit. I changed into a ball, too, and followed in. It was a narrow corridor and the balls were moving through in the orderly fashion they had entered. In front, I saw a solitary black one jump others over and I followed the example, not to stay behind. At last, we landed side by side on a spacious, slowly revolving disk, packed with balls. A tube would come from above and suck blocks of balls up and the empty spaces would be filled up with newcomers. Vogel-ball jumped forward into the section to be sucked up and I-ball followed. With countless thousands of others we were lifted from the disk and thrown in the same pattern onto a lattice where we were stopped by the small-sized meshes. Vogel-ball contracted and fell through to the other side, and I followed suit.
We landed by a computer screen. There was a person in white clothes by the desk, his fingers busy with the keyboard. He had a pair of white wings on his back. The desk stood under the boughs of a fantastic plant in a park bursting with fanciful vegetation, pleasant sounds and delightful scents.
We sprang to the ground and assumed our prior forms.
“Who the heck are you and why?!” the winged one exclaimed with a stern look.
“Humans from planet Earth,” Vogel replied with a bow, “and we come in peace.”
“Earth’s my desk. We call it Y-12/ZBB-22, and humans – ZZ-12Hs. How did you get in?”
“Via your computer, posing as bits,” I said and bowed too.
“Impressive. And you choose to arrive exactly now… What a coincidence!” He was thinking fast. “Come with me, there is someone I want you to meet.”
He led us through the park. We were awed by the abundance of plant, insect, bird and animal species, the likes of which I had never seen before. I wanted to stop and have a closer look, also into the ponds by the path, which were teeming with indescribable life forms, but the host walked too briskly for that, hating to come late to an important meeting.
“We call it his laboratory,” he commented. “He calls it his playground.”
Before I could ask who “he” or “we” were, Vogel, I and the host arrived at a table where an old man with a white beard sat modeling a clay figurine. It had three heads and six arms. The twinkle in his eyes expressed childlike joy of creation. Biting the tip of his tongue, he was giving the final touches to his handiwork. Two others of the kind were on the table, apparently finished.
Two of the winged kind stood by the table, watching the progress of the artist’s work and talking together in low voices. They gave Vogel and me a once-over, nodded to our guide and made a military-like row before the artist. Our host joined in, Vogel and me flanking him.
Somebody coughed, the artist sighed and raised his head.
“Yes, the evaluation,” he said looking right through Vogel and me. “Begin, please!”
“Good news from planet N-73, constellation GNM-88: model ZZ-73B is finally doing fine after third intervention,” one of the winged ones said.
“Splendid!” The artist was animated, but this disappeared, as the other winged one said:
“Nothing good about ZY-31D from planet G-73, constellation SKK-11. The model is still making wars after our fourth intervention.”
“Design a fifth intervener and we’ll evaluate,” the artist decided.
“ZZ-12H, planet Y-12, constellation ZBB-22,” our winged one said. “Fifth intervention has failed. The model is still allowing divisions into nationalities, which is leading to bloody wars. The model is still using violence in politics, causing more deaths. According to the Rules, it means irrevocable exclusion… unless, of course, the Rules be changed…?
“Yes!” the two others exclaimed. “The Rules be changed!”
The artist closed his eyes, deeply in thought, and said in a sad voice:
“I’m sorry, exclusion it shall be! Stop our business with ZZ-12H, close the slit and come back to get your new assignment. You’ll be thrilled: it’s a three-sexed brand-new TRS-99 to be launched on M-99, constellation LTT-27,” the artist indicated the figurines. “You recall: the recycled planet vacated by the excluded model GR-99F, which didn’t make it without our help, even though it bragged it would. TRS-99 will never fail you the way ZZ-12H did, I’m sure.”
It sounded like a tempting bargain, but our host turned to us and said:
“It will be exclusion, gentlemen. Your ass, not mine.”
He did not have to repeat it. We stepped out, bowed and Vogel spoke:
“Sir, as a specimen of the ZZ-12H model I beseech you to reconsider. What we have heard here was all about our imperfections, but nothing was said about our achievements. For example, quite a sizable portion of us have understood, from the perspective of our bloody history, that all ZZ-12Hs are equal, being products of the Master’s hands.” Vogel bowed again. “In this spirit, we have created human rights, international law and global organizations working for peace. We are abandoning the concept of imperial state of one nation enslaving another. In Europe, we’re building a multinational union – and some of the members have been waging war upon each other only recently! We male ZZ-12Hs have begun to give the rights back to the females of our model,” and he looked the artist straight in the eyes.
The artist was visibly attentive now. He returned the look and said to our winged one:
“What interventions have you employed, Gabriel?”
“As instructed, Sire,” was the reply. “The first three, the Buddha-Jesus-Mohammad triangle, were to create unity among the ZZ-12Hs through a common religion. The scientists were to establish unity by (Darwin) enlightening people as to their common ancestry and the floating boundaries between all the species on Y-12, and (Einstein) by proving the relativity of time and matter and giving thereby another point of view. In my opinion, Sire, there is nothing wrong with the ZZ-12Hs, just too few interventions,” and Gabriel laid a wing on my shoulder.
The artist seemed shaken, and I said, sympathetic of his predicament, with a sudden boldness, and feeling protected and prompted by the wing:
“The prophets are only dividing us, Sire, each religion claiming the sole ownership of the ultimate truth and fighting the others. And some of us ZZ-12Hs do not believe in Darwin’s theory, and most do not understand Einstein. Way over our heads, Sire, pardon the censure. We could use another intervention, something workable. Should the Rules be in the way, how about a change… please, Sire?” …” I stopped, feeling too bold, and bowed very low.
“New Rules, Sire! New Rules, Sire!” the winged ones demanded in unison and I felt the entire public opinion behind me.
The artist was lost in thought again then he nodded.
“Right,” he said, “the Rules be damned! You fellows tell the others and design some better Rules. Let’s have a General Assembly in, say, a month’s time?”
They nodded, and He looked at me in a dismissing way. I bowed and stepped back.
“Gabriel, design a smart new intervention for the ZZ-12Hs and come to talk about it in a week’s time. ZZ-12Hs can’t be that bungled if two of them made it all the way here,” the artist said, and the angels were enthusiastically clapping their hands now and beating their wings.
“Dismissed,” he said and returned to the TRS-99 on the table.
The others left, not without an appreciative pat on Vogel’s shoulder and mine. Gabriel led us through the park, asking additional questions about the failures of the previous interveners.
We came to an open gate (where we would have arrived, had we followed my recommendation to go left) and said goodbyes, Gabriel working in his head already.
We stood in the open gate and I was wondering how to get home when a sound of a gong was heard: the Cosmoscope was about to reverse the process. In my mind, I thanked Voss.
The wonderful feeling of being back in the body and stretching in my seat, Vogel in his.
“Let’s hope Gabriel will design a good intervener,” he said. “Another scientist, perhaps?”
“I think it will be many concurrent interveners, Master. You know: the Age of Aquarius. The challenge and rescue for us ZZ-12Hs will be to reconcile their teachings simultaneously.”
“Qui vivra verra,” he replied.
“Phone Voss, Master. By now he must think we have died in that contraption of his.”
“You phone him. He complained you never offered him a conversation, you boorish man!”
“What?!”
Vogel laughed, happy to be back, mission accomplished.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Billig

THE LOST BOOKS A Saul Vogel mystery

Peter Billig
THE LOST BOOKS
A Saul Vogel Mystery

When a re-run of I Claudius was announced on TV, my Master’s reaction was adverse. Only my solemn assurance that I know Robert Graves’ books the show is based on and that they are excellent made him watch the first episode – and he was captivated! Every Sunday he would wait impatiently for the Roman emperors to appear: the fatherly Augustus, the sex maniac Tiberius, the madman Caligula and the phony idiot Claudius. Also the wives: Livia the poisoner, Julia the drunk, Drusilla the victim and Messalina the whore. The plot was so stimulating that when the show was over, my Master, until now obstinately illiterate (to avoid cluttering up his mind with other thinkers’ philosophies), decided to learn to write and read.
I taught him our alphabet and orthography and he learnt the other orthographies himself: he is fluent in thirty languages and copes with many more: knowing, say, Danish, you grasp Norwegian and Swedish.
He spent his childhood and youth roaming the world as a vagabond with pals of all nationalities.

To get acquainted with all the necessary alphabets and orthographies he was buying dictionaries and grammars by the dozen. Previously virginal, his study now saw three enormous shelves fill up. The breakneck speed of this learning shows to this day: sometimes, he applies Turkish orthography to English.

After six months, Vogel considered himself literate. Never forgetting his objective, he now swallowed up Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God and wanted to know where the author had drawn the historical stuff. I suggested Suetonius’ biographies of Roman emperors and Tacitus’ volumes of Roman history. He had experienced some Latin (wandering with a dipsomaniac classical scholar who actually spoke it) and now he systematized it by reading several progressively more difficult constructed Latin texts. Then he jumped into the lives of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius via Suetonius’ biographies, supported by Lewis’ and Short’s A Latin Dictionary. Next, he took on Tacitus´ Histories, read for several weeks and suddenly came to me in tears: after a few chapters in the Fifth Book of Histories the text abruptly ends, never to reappear. A consultation of the newly bought Oxford Classical Dictionary showed this fact as known to science and much regretted. Tacitus’ Annals Vogel was planning to read next is even more lacerated. All of Caligula period is gone and there are other lacunae comprising whole chapters and even books.
“Also books have their fates.[1] The ones you desire aren’t just misplaced but lost forever,” I elucidated and proceeded to explain a Roman text’s arduous way through history. “Whatever we have has been copied onto parchment by monks in the Middle Ages. Perhaps one monk did not like Caligula? Or monastic mice did like him? Is it Fate that mice like Tacitus more than Cicero? Perhaps it’s much better for posterity not to know about some of Caligula’s hideous crimes and Tiberius’ disgusting sexual deviations?”
“Are you trying to tell an illiterate that there is no way of retrieving these texts?”
“I guess I am, unless a hitherto unknown copy is discovered in a murky corner of some library. Or the Norwegians succeed in unrolling the Herculanum scrolls: you know, from the library buried by lava during the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD,” and I proceeded to explain the Norwegian method, which unrolls an inch or so of a scroll a year.
“Many years to wait and only if, incidentally, the Norwegians have taken Tacitus first,” he says.
“They can’t,” I blush. “The volcano erupted in 79 AD and Tacitus began to write after this date, according to your Oxford Classical Dictionary. Sorry, my mistake.”

All next week, Vogel was disconsolate. He was reading everything he could get his eyes on concerning Tacitus: man, oeuvre and times. In order to understand the world of books, he aked me to take him to a library, his first ever, and he talked about Tacitus with me, visualizing the historian. Tacitus the scholar: researching in one of many private and public libraries in Rome and chatting with owners and librarians. Tacitus the politician: he became Governor of a province, a job for high-ranking administrators only – accessing some forgotten corner of Emperors’ Archive where Caligula’s infamous Black Book was once kept. Talking with an old-timer about days long gone. Receiving a secret diary of some long-executed conspirator kept by a sentimental niece. Writing or dictating to his scribe. Talking with the publisher. The manuscript being dictated to 50 “printing presses”: slave-copyists. Two Roman gentlemen meeting shortly after at a party:
“You know the booklet about the Germans by this guy Cornelius Tacitus?[2] You know, one of the praetors three or four years ago?”
“No, but they keep telling me it’s interesting.”
“It’s very informative, old chap. What low-life they are! Our boys do a good job keeping the brutes out up there on the Rhine.”

“Unless you are the incarnation of Tacitus himself and have a sudden flashback, Master, you’ll never know what was in the lost books. Why not face it, accept it as an adult and go back to the business of Philosophy – now as a man of letters?” I said after some more imaginative exercises of that kind.
“I just can’t! I’m not finished with Tacitus, whatever the reason.”
Raising his arms into the Cosmos like antennae, he intoned in a desperate tone:
“Corneli Tacite, libros tuos perditos desidero!”[3]
He went upstairs, presumably to sleep, but a loud vocalization from his study woke me in the middle of the night. I investigated: he was by the desk, reciting Latin into a tape-recorder, and his face was that of an obsessed. He was sentient, though: he saw me and motioned me away.
In the morning, he asked me to put the recording into the computer. I had tried to talk him into upgrading the machine to include voice recognition, but he found the cost prohibitive. I had to type, unceasingly stopping and restarting the tape-recorder. Bored, I was making many mistakes, having forgotten my high-school Latin, so – a hallmark of literacy! – he relieved me at the keyboard. It took weeks.
When finished, he appeared with malt and glasses.
“I heard a voice inside telling me to listen and write down. I did not feel up to writing yet, so I choose to repeat and record. The voice dictated all the lost books, chapters and lines in Tacitus. I am happy to inform you that Robert Graves has been real good at reconstructing missing events. A pity I can’t share the erstwhile lacunae with him!”
It took some booze to accommodate the news.
“Are you telling me that an angel from the celestial Post Office brought these puzzle-pieces to you because you were so sorry they were missing?” I replied finally.
“I think there is a Spiritual Layer where all thoughts are stored.” His face shone with that Special Light he exudes whenever he is speaking Words With Capital First Letters. “In some houses ghosts come into view and enact the same scene every time. I’ve seen it once with my own eyes! If an extremely emotional moment can be recorded in brick or stone and replay itself, why shouldn’t thought-energy get recorded in spirit? A person interested enough gets connected to this Layer on an appropriate level: Rudolf Steiner wanted all events and got the Akashic Records; Graves wanted scenes from imperial characters’ lives and got them as a clairvoyant film, which he called imagination; I needed texts and I got them, the clairaudient way! There are people who in trance speak languages they could not have known!”
“If everybody developed such faculties we would be an entirely different species, Master.”
“I’ll drink to that.”

Some years later, I read that a palimpsest had been discovered with a fragment of a lost Tacitus text. I found the text on the Internet. Not a single word was different from that on Vogel’s old diskette.

Copyright © by Peter Billig, 2007.
[1] Habent sua fata libelli: a popular quotation from Terentius Maurus’ Poetics, where the last book is lost, too.
[2] De origine et situ Germanorum.
[3] Cornelius Tacitus, I desire your lost books!

FROM ANOTHER SIDE A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
FROM ANOTHER SIDE
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Domicile is well hidden in the woods, poor times, though, found their way here: Vogel was moaning in his sleep and was down in the dumps during the waking hours. Every time a new invoice came, he would swear aloud. At last, he muttered something about shaving my wages off, as (quote) one can’t make something out of nothing (unquote). I let it pass but he began to talk about selling his beloved Porsche – and suddenly he was ashamed of his defeatism:
“You’re right,” he said, although I had not uttered a word. “A wise man should not grumble but make the nothing become a something!”
He got excited and I knew that even though he won’t find a new source of income at once, he will be pointing his resourceful mind in that direction.
His newfound optimism stayed overnight (no moaning) and throughout the morning, even though the mail brought a sizable bill for the maintenance of his much-loved vehicle. He did not utter a single profanity but knit his brow and addressed me at breakfast:
“All through the night dreams were repeating one scene only: a guy is telling me something important through a glass door but I can’t hear him. I try to open – it is locked. I punch codes in but can’t get the right sequence, no matter how hard I try.”
“You are too intellectual. Smash the glass!”
He liked my advice.
The next morning, he was exalted but ignored my questions. Instead, he ordered me to lecture him on Plato’s thought. He kept on nodding during the lecture, albeit not as one philosopher trying to comprehend another but as a schoolboy cramming a subject.
“What invention would be the most appreciated by humanity?” he asked then.
“A remedy for cancer or AIDS?”
He nodded and kept checking the time all evening, impatient to go to sleep.
In the morning he was sour.
“Could you suggest some non-pharmaceutical invention?” he asked.
“An accumulator capable of storing maximum of electricity inside a minimum of bulk. It would enable efficient non-polluting cars and help avert the greenhouse effect.”
He nodded and ordered a repetition about Plato; I obliged but hated every minute of it. He waited excitedly for the night to come and was radiant in the morning he but locked himself in his study whence he reappeared at noon with a wad of handwritten notes.
“Let’s go to the Capital!”
In the well-maintained Porsche we speed to the City as if there were no speed-limits, police or people on the roads. With the brakes whining, we stop in front of the Patent Office. The waiting inventors go berserk hearing what we brought – a super-accumulator! They let us jump the line and the experts take to their heads repeatedly, as they read and take in his notes.
It was evening when they finally let us go home, the patent firmly clasped in Vogel’s hand. The answering machine had already recorded some offers. Vogel disconnected the phone and as soon as we finished supper I bombed him with questions.
“So you smashed the glass? Who was the guy? What was Plato for? Where does your technical expertise come from?”
“The guy is from the other side of the glass door – also in his dream. He didn’t have as good an advisor as I,” he bowed, “so he was happy when I smashed the pane. His world is technically more advanced and he is an engineer.”
“What about Plato?”
“Barter. Compared to us, they are underdeveloped philosophically over there.”
“Why not remedy for cancer or AIDS?”
“Cancer and AIDS are unknown to them.”
I took it in and said:
“In a far-off galaxy a guy has patented Plato’s philosophy as his own, and here you make a buck on something invented in some freak dream-related reality…”
“I am expecting more than a buck! And I deserve it: in-dream memorizing of formulas one doesn’t understand is a pain in the neck. The guy’s job was easier: you are also a talented educator and I just repeated your words.”
“Where would you be without me? Shall we say fifty-fifty? And why the breakneck speed? You had it written down on paper.”
“Bell patented his telephone just an hour before his competitor arrived to patent his.”
“Such a crucial invention should perhaps belong to all humanity?” I suggested.
“Will humanity pay your salary every month? Will humanity service my car?”
“You’re right,” I replied, and he went over to reconnect the famous invention of Bell’s.

Copyright © 2004 Peter Billig