A Brief History of Howard
A Novel
Robert Levin
Mouzza Publications | Atlanta
A Brief History of Howard, Copyright © 2008 by Robert M. Levin. All Rights Reserved. Created in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Mouzza Publications via email: info at Mouzza dot com.
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual personas, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Book Design by Reva Horowitz
Cover Art by Catherine O’Keeffe
ISBN (eBook): 978-0-9823670-1-8
To the memory of my late parents, Bernard and Charlotte Levin.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Don’t Skip This Forward by the Author
Prelude
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Two Brief Interludes
Chapter 13
Part III
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part IV
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part V
Chapter 20
Part VI
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part VII
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part VIII
Chapter 25
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
There was a game I had as a child called the Shifty Gear Game. It was just gears, you could fill the whole board with interactive gears—the point seemed to be that each gear was vital to the whole. And so it is with this book. There is a long list of people all of whose names I will try to recall at five in the morning, having finished one of the last proofreads and edits of this manuscript. And if this sounds like I’m setting up an excuse for forgetting some names, you’re damn right that I am. So, in no particular order I’d like to thank:
Rosie Vogelti, Don Sheppard, Howard Schwartz, Jarvis Thurston, Stanley Elkin, Dr. Richard Laitman, Evelyn Perlstein, The Heitholts (Jim, Kent and their wives), The Davids, Jennifer Elin Cole, Deborah Schneider, Mitchell Moskowitz, Ronni Moskowitz, Michelle Moskowitz, Melissa Moskowitz, Frank Mormino, Larry Friedman, Bill Mamer, Lew Prince, Phil Birsh, Daryl Darden, Stanley Hale, Larry Wilson, Mark Deutsche, Jim Nicholas, Ed Seelig, Vernon Nashville, Charlie Payne, Joe Charles and Alan, his trumpet player, Steve Kirby, B.B.’s Jazz Blues and Soups, John Alberty, The Broadway Oyster Bar, Gary Ludewig, Bob Edwards, Blueberry Hill (but I’ve never met Joe Edwards), Vintage Vinyl, Dan Levin, Paul Piccone and the St. Louis Telos Group, Ben and Miriam Shatzman, Chana Shapiro, Aaron Shatzman, Howard Mirowitz, Sheldon Mirowitz, Lisa Mirowitz, Nancy and Paul Steinhardt, Leo and Shirley Mirowitz, Carl Mirowitz, Fran and Marvin Yavitz, Joel and Nancy Levin, Diane Gish, Elayne Gish, Barbara Perle, Norman Perle, Joan and Dick Smith, Ruth and Herb Shieber, Bernard and Charlotte Levin, and my children, Amy and Jacob Levin.
And although there is no top of the list, there really is—and Iris, my wife, goes there.
Here’s the disclaimer of sorts, the part where lawyers tell you to say any characters resembling persons living or dead is purely a coincidence. Well, this is the lawyer’s way of explaining fiction—which isn’t all that connected to the reality of fiction. The reality of writing is that you find the large intestine of the real world, so to speak, and fill it with fireworks. Then you light the fuse. In moments there is the explosion, the snap, crackle, and pop, the rocket’s red glare, and all that Jackson Pollack-y stuff. And that’s when you start writing what you see, leaving only a gossamer strand connecting the fiction to the reality we all know, love, and hate. So, don’t play no match game between the names above and the characters in the book, cause there just isn’t any point.
Don’t Skip
This Forward by the Author.
Although I Myself
Have Skipped More Of These
Than There Are
Blades of Grass On
A Baseball Diamond,
And Even Though I Understand
And Even Empathize
With Your Desire to Skip This
Forward,
I Strongly Urge That You Not
And
I Thank You For Continuing
To Read Directly
Below.
I’ve got to apologize, really. I’ve always considered such Authorial Forwards to be a tremendous waste of time when others have written them, and so I’ve skipped them without feelings of guilt or feelings that I’ve missed something, always turning right to the beginning of the book to commence reading. My personal history is littered with such skippings, mixing right in with all of those furniture and mattress tags I’ve torn away. So I wouldn’t have dreamed of writing this unless it was absolutely important. I have to tell you a little bit about the process of writing, the publishing business, and this book in particular.
Process first. If you want to write a novel, a serious novel, it’s important to have a good reader, someone knowledgeable about writing, someone who is well-read, someone who is honest with their criticism and praise. It’s like having a navigator on a ship or an airplane, you, author, have to know where you are because blank pages don’t come with a compass. So you give sections, maybe 40 to 50 pages at a time to your reader, checking to see if you are where you want to be—is the writing compelling, are the characters worthy of your caring, how’s that verisimilitude going, and do you feel driven to turn the page? I was very fortunate to have just such a reader. She has her own publishing company for children’s books and has written a book or two her own self. When she sold 20,000 copies she decided to shop the book to the publishers in New York who told her that her book wouldn’t sell and turned her away. She’s now up to 150,000 in sales. That tells quite a bit about those making the decisions in the Literary District.
But not everything and this leads us into the bit about the “Bidness” of publishing. I could easily go in the direction of the Keepers of the Bidness not knowing what’s good and what’s not. I’m not going in that direction simply because that’s not what’s going on. The Keepers of the Bidness think a little bit about what’s good, but mostly they have to think—given the thousands of titles at a normal book store, the tens of thousands of titles at a big chain, and not to mention Amazon—about the answers to two questions: On what shelf the book will be sitting, and how will they get you to notice it? So while I’m writing this novel knowing exactly what shelf it goes on—the one in your home that is not organized by any headings at all—the Keepers of the Bidness are thinking about how not to get ripped off by Barnes and Noble. See, Barnes and Noble gets to keep books for up to ninety days without paying for them, at which point they get to send them back to the Publisher free of charge (at least this is my present understanding). The Keepers of the Bidness think in terms of Suspense, Detective, Romance, Fiction, Best-Sellers, Non-Fiction, and the Dreaded Literature. I’ve written the Dreaded Literature. They publish the Dreaded Literature because they feel it’s their duty, and if they don’t publish it they’ll end up in some type of Dante Bidness Hell, the ring of those who have turned their back on Faulkner and Hemingway. They can distinguish the good Dreaded Literature from the bad because the good is impossible to read, nearly impossible to understand, and usually ends in some type of Existential Depression or Suicide. And the people who usually read Literature have come to expect such misery.
Which brings us to this particular book, and why I feel I need to lead you a little bit of the way, like a Sherpa, because I wrote this book to try to break that Literary paradigm, and not only that paradigm, but just about every paradigm my protagonist comes across. And so, there is suspense, but it’s not a Thriller. There is mystery, but it’s not a Detective novel, there is love but it’s not a Romance. And last, it is literary, but not depressing. (In fact, I’ve written it in many layers, so that every time you think about it you might discover something new. In other words, I’ve tried to make it a certain kind of fun. I find discovering things to be quite enjoyable.) There isn’t a category named Paradigm Shift but, beginning right now, let’s say that there is, and this is the first one written in the 21st century.
So now I will do my Sherpa duties and talk for a short while about paradigm shifts.
As soon as we talk about paradigm shifts, as soon as you begin to experience such a shift, you find yourself in perceptual and logical quicksand. That’s because everything looks the same. Here’s a small example: A couple I know recently had their first baby. We ran into each other at the grocery store and I asked how’re things? “Everything is the same,” she said, “but at the same time everything is completely different.” “Totally different,” he said. “Yeah,” she said, “same house, same floors, same furniture, same everything, except it’s totally different.”
So, when we talk paradigm shift, we talk stasis. And yet everything is different.
One of most famous paradigm shifts—I mean if you had to think of ten this would probably be on the list, is the shift from the Ptolemaic Universe to the Copernican Universe—from the world being flat with the sun revolving around it, to the world being round and revolving around the sun. Conceptually, no pun intended, night and day. And yet, the ancient Greek and the Modern American, if they could be defying time and standing next to each other, would still see the same thing, especially if they were standing in the middle of Kansas. Lots of flatness regarding the earth, and the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, and if they were standing still, it would feel just like they were standing still, as opposed to the truth, that they are twirling through space at approximately 1,000 mph. Everything looks the same—but inside of their minds, behind the eyes of our two observers, everything is completely different. They see the same data and interpret it in ways that are pretty much exactly opposite. In other words, their common sense isn’t common. It, common sense, has to be learned—kind of. Common sense sort of seeps into the mind when you’re not aware, the way rainwater gets into the basement or crawlspace. And it happens in such a way that it feels completely natural, so natural that it becomes inconceivable that anyone at any point in the history of the world could think differently. Common sense is one stubborn belief system—that is usually false.
Does that mean that the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun? Well, no. In this case the falseness comes from the fact that there is just so much more. It’s not so much wrong as it is an increasingly smaller piece of an increasingly bigger picture. That 1,000 mph is actually the speed along one pathway, day by day. It turns out that there is another pathway, on which we are moving at 67,000 mph, yearly, and there are probably several more pathways that we don’t even know about yet and forget about the exact speed because we are accelerating. But it sure feels like I’m sitting here, sitting still, save for my fingers.
It is that way with this novel. If you read this novel as you were taught in English class or if you read it the same way you read the newspaper, then you will be looking at a flat earth with the sun revolving around it. Put another way, in school they will teach you to read with a 19th century mindset and we are already in the 21st century.
But this isn’t a 19th century novel, nor is it an 18th century novel, both of which lead to 20th century literary art, and as I said before, this isn’t any of those things. This is the first 21st century novel you’ve read, and that’s why there’s a forward into which we are about halfway through.
Let’s step into the book for a moment. Not quite to the first word. Right here. You can see the first word across the flat plain.
Standing here and looking behind us we see some rules for writing novels, 19 rules to be exact, enumerated by Mark Twain, and I’m not the kind of writer who would disagree with or insult Mark Twain—although William Faulkner did exactly that. But I’m not the kind of writer who would question William Faulkner either. (Yep, I’m fully aware of the paradox.) But I followed those rules quite scrupulously, my comparatively little tiny feet springing jumps from Twain’s giant footprint to giant footprint.
Okay, let’s turn back around. This novel is about good versus evil, hence the reference to the 18th century Victorian novel, which is a riff on the even older story of David versus Goliath. Now it so happens that such novels are only as good as the villain, novels about good versus evil. And I’ve also had it up to here with novels that resolve due to 19th century technology—that is, steel and gunpowder. You know how such novels have to end—the bad guy shoots first and misses, the good guy shoots and hits the villain and he dies. wow. I mean that in an e.e. cummings sort of way. wow. Underwhelming at best. Even using James Bond advancements in technology, his small and more sophisticated tech is better than the evil dudes’ big sophisticated tech—and yeah, we only watch James Bond for the science. Really, we do. It’s the science. The point here is that the villain is starting out at a disadvantage, so Bond (Spy Thriller), isn’t exactly Hitchcock.
No, I needed a villain with just about every strategic advantage compared to the good guy, my protagonist. Not just in size but in every conceivable way. I mean that if my villain takes the first shot, he won’t miss and it will be a shot right through my good guy’s heart. And he isn’t going to get conveniently stupid, using some Rube Goldberg death machine when a knife would work quite well and the murder would take about a second as opposed to the long, lingering, sweat-filled torture. And my villain isn’t going to be outwitted by some scientist he hasn’t met who packs the power of the 3rd Armored Division in something the size of a shirt button.
I had to get my villain from a world, or I should more accurately say ‘paradigm,’ where the human potential is greater than the technological potential. In other words, in the western paradigm, if we think of the paradigm as a building, the room with human potential has a low ceiling, whereas the room with technological potential has a high ceiling, much higher than the human room. This is the 19th century paradigm, the 19th century building. Of course there is the contradiction that humans invent the technology, but I’m saying that the Western soul prefers to channel its gifts towards generating energy, for instance, by inventing the dynamo rather than learning to generate more and more life force, or ch’i, which the Western world hasn’t even discovered yet.
I needed the opposite, a paradigm where the room of human potential has a much, much higher ceiling than the technological room. That paradigm is sitting around on this earth, it’s a culture we see every day, we can order books about this culture because there are aplenty, and there are plenty of web pages to download. I didn’t have to invent another planet with another culture, nor did I have to invent some secret society living in the alleys and passages of underground New York or Yale University. The paradigm is on my bookshelf and it has been there since my days in college. That paradigm is Chinese, where there is emphasis on acquiring wisdom instead of memorizing knowledge. Put another way, Lao Tzu would kick Alex Trebek’s ass. Wisdom is more powerful than knowledge. We in the West like to say that knowledge is power. Wisdom is knowledge on steroids. In Lao Tzu’s world, folks think in poetry, in our world, we think in nouns.
In this way, the father of my villain, in his own quest for power, using his own ‘scientific method’ for generating inspiration, kills several people in search of what he calls their “seashells” (metaphor, poetry), what we call our cochleas (our use of nouns). The language of poetry leads to wisdom, the use of nouns leads to knowledge. Both cultures share the need for inspiration, that moment of knowing. The difference of course, is that my villain has a clear method for being inspired, my good guy, a product of the west, stumbles around in the dark until inspiration hits him in the head. But is it luck, or soul, or something else entirely? That’s why so many folks who consider themselves ‘spiritual’ as opposed to ‘religious’ know quite a bit about Asian philosophy.
So my villain is Chinese, and he is just about touching the ceiling, that is, he is approaching the point of becoming the most powerful man he can become. And he does bad things, in accordance with Mark Twain rule number 10.
With the deftness of Fred Astaire doing a move called the ‘Ball Change,’ with just the use of this villain, we move out of the Western 19th century paradigm. And good riddance.
Unfortunately, if we move sideways just a bit, we find ourselves stuck (and it is muddy, isn’t it?) in the 20th century artistic/philosophical paradigm. Did it start with Picasso, maybe Hemmingway? Fitzgerald revved it up to full speed, at least I thought, until I got to Sartre. Do you want to know how bad this paradigm is? Because it is just a god-awful piece of thought. If it was software, and you downloaded it, your computer would crash. Not only that, but your house would lose power for a week. But it’s art.
Here’s a story about my daughter’s first encounter with this paradigm. But first, some background about her. She has experienced only success and acceptance in her young life—the measurement being a school year. That is, she has overcome any adversity that has crossed her path the way a good umbrella overcomes a steady rain. She has won awards, received honors—and not that self-esteem building crap, but real stuff. She smiles a lot, laughs, and then the teenage years hit, which is a paradigm all by itself, but that’s another story. She was assigned Death of a Salesman followed by A Streetcar Named Desire. When she was done reading she came to me and told me that life is meaningless, that there is only darkness and hopelessness, and that at the end of all things there is only a twisted depravity. And this is from just two plays.
“Okay,” I said. “You’d better have a seat.”
“Why?” she asked with her shoulders slumping.
“Because we have to talk about this.”
“What’s the point?” she asked. “What’s the point about anything?”
“Sit.”
She sat.
“They lied,” I said.
“Who lied?”
“They all lied. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, all of them. Fitzgerald, Hemmingway. They lied.”
“Have you read these plays?” she asked.
“Do you know anything about their lives?” I asked. “Their own lives show that their stories aren’t true. There is meaning, there is happiness. At the essence of things, there is an essence, not emptiness. Every day they sat down, did their work, got published, had their plays performed... heck, do you know how much money Miller made from just one year’s work, or however long it took him to write that play? He could have spent the rest of his life searching for love and happiness—which was all around him but he chose not to notice. I mean, Picasso had a blue period—did Miller have a Happy period? Did any of them have a Happy period? Did they even look? Here’s the general rule. The more suicides or suicide attempts there are in a book or play, the more descents into insanity you find, the less the author has to say, the less the author actually knows about life.
“How do you feel when you practice your music and get somewhere, you know, when actual music comes out of the instrument? How would you feel if you were the best at what you did?”
“Good,” she smiled, a real beamer. The lights were back on.
“How did you feel when you rescued the cat, or when the cat came back after it was gone for two days?”
“Really happy, really good,” she smiled.
“When you cry for happiness are those real tears?”
“Okay, I get it,” she smiled, laughed a little.
“How about in fifth grade...”
“I said I get it,” and then she teenaged back to her room.
But I’ve been reading that kind of literature for a long time, and when I started it was already a cliché. I suspect that the writers and artists who achieve status, at least in college, sort of ghettoize themselves and stay away from the scientists, who, if I recall, were much happier since they were asking questions and trying to solve problems that would benefit others. And then there’s the whole scientific method thing, where you have to prove your assertions as opposed to making the assertion while smoking a cigarette and saying it in French—which counts as science in the liberal arts part of the university.
So I think that life does have meaning, and although we can feel emptiness and horrible sadness, underneath it, there is something wonderful.
And this brings us to, just step forward a little, the last bit of this Forward. Because this story has a rather unique ending, which it has because I think that there is meaning to life. We are taught in literature class that the ending is the key to the story’s meaning. That is, the ending tells us what we can generalize—the moral of the story, to use a term referring back to an 18th century paradigm. Not here. We can generalize the journey, the ending is specific to my protagonist. The ending of episodes in you own life will be different than his ending, but if you were to meet my protagonist, you could talk for days about the journey.
Well, well, well, I think that about does it. You just finished the Forward. I’d say it’s time for an ice cream.
Prelude
Beijing
The Forbidden Palace
1795
Closest to the Emperor were the Sages in half circles, the pattern repeating, like the filigreed grooves of a seashell. Bent bows, the architect conceived of the daily convening, intellects sharp and true as an archer conceives his arrows, three spans of thirty sages, with the Emperor as the ninety-first, just in case the Emperor developed a curious thirst for democracy. But the Emperor never did, and there was always only one vote to be tallied.
The Sage Wang, therefore, to learn the highest art of persuasion, devoted considerable time to thought itself and discovered Linguistic Ch’i, as complex and simple as one blade of grass. A man without wisdom, thought The Sage, goes to a field, bends down and picks such a blade, holds it in his hand, and may turn it over once, twice—then this man lets it go without thought, at most to test the direction of the wind, for he is not a wise man. He is not aware that in this blade there is Sunfire. Nor is he aware that it contains the paradoxical Earth—a cooler ch’i, not at all a burning, but a churning, the steady power of a great ox that never ceases its plowing, a ch’i that creates the constant pulling down of all objects, massives like the moon and lights like raindrops, webs like the roots of plants and trees, pulling them into the earth itself. And yet this ch’i allows for flight as the same plants and trees defy this pulling by reaching as far into the sky as the earth itself wills it down, into itself. The Sage Wang, therefore, understood the considerable power in this blade—and that if one possessed knowledge of the Hidden Ways, to convert sunfire to earth and earth to sunfire, mountains would either move or mountains would melt. When the Sage Wang looked at his reflection in clear pools he thought himself to be a man aware of the power in one blade of grass.
And so it is with words, he thought, written language, logic, and grammar—so much power in what most consider to be of negligible weight. He had seen this power often, beginning in childhood, remembering it as he sat in the back of the large room along with the young apprentices and older judges, watching and listening to the arguments of The Sages, his father among them, and noticing with some question that the most logical man did not always find the Emperor’s favor. His own father was always the most logical, his father always argued better than the others, and yet the Emperor and the other Sages could not see the correctness of his father’s position.
But now the fleeting question of his youth assumed a great urgency and he needed, passionately, to answer this question. As he felt the extreme heat of this need the answer descended as if from heaven, and he knew with certainty the existence of Linguistic Ch’i.
He could have written a small tractate of its existence and received a small measure of fame, but he chose to keep it as a secret in order to achieve a large measure of power. The problem, he found, was that the inquiry quickly took him outside of the ancient paradigm, the Tao, its variation, the interaction of the Five Elements, and its method—the aphorism attributed to no one, meaning that it achieved the status of a part of nature, like the sun, moon, and stars—that it is possible to learn everything there is to know about the universe without ever leaving your own backyard. That is, careful, methodical observation of what is around you is both—in European terms, both the finest telescope and the finest microscope.
If he could have avoided it he certainly would have—he had little respect for those who treated the traditions in a cavalier fashion. One type lived life as if there were no traditions, and yet followed them as one obeys the changes in seasons, for even though there is no tradition for this person, there is also no other way. The second type is not so benign, a person who does differently for difference’s own sake, not considering the care and wisdom accumulated by the repetitions of the rituals for over thousands of years. And yet here he was, faced with no other option than to break tradition, to place himself closer to the hated second type than the tepid first type.
He needed to see the ear and see the brain, literally, not metaphorically, not meditatively—he would need to use cadavers. This was not presently done, and in his knowledge, it had never been done. There was no need. Disease and death resulted from an imbalance or lack of ch’i, and since death is the moment when the ch’i departs the body, the disease also leaves. Cadavers? No need, until now.
In the evenings he would go outside the walls of the city to graveyards, only to find that decomposition and its accompanying fragility made his dissections more of a disgusting mess than anything scientifically precise. And so he went to a cooper and commissioned four large boxes, about six feet by four feet, absolutely water tight. Then he went to the alchemist and commissioned him to prepare a brine that would preserve flesh, six large barrels. Next he went to a groundskeeper and a mason and commissioned them to build a secret tunnel out of and into the Forbidden City. When his merchandise was complete he went out that evening with his quiet wagon and his sharpest knife and killed the cooper, the alchemist, the landscaper, and the mason. He brought them in through the tunnel, into his Most Private Room, and stored them in the large boxes and filled the boxes with the brine. Now he could work.
Using the tools of fisherman, of carpenters, of sculptors, finally the tools of those who filigree jewelry of jade and gold he was able to harvest from within the ears of victims—the seashells, the beautiful, molded tubes that absorb sound and inflection, that generate meaning and emotion. If he were another kind of man, he thought, this would be the excitement felt upon the discovery of a hidden treasury of gold and gems. Or perhaps, even if he were another kind of man, the excitement would be of great scientific discovery, a vanity hiding the true desire for immortality, he thought.
He stared at the specimen. Perhaps he was the kind of man who likes gems after all, he smiled his very slight smile. There it was, sitting there, just a seashell, but—he knew it immediately, it contained the worth of a large rare pearl, just one, gleaming through the muck on this filed left side—this was the center, this was the T’an Tien, the source, the sun, of Linguistic Ch’i.
There was a soft, sharp knock, a low knock, on the very thick wooden door—which meant that his ten-year-old son was pounding his small knuckles against the thick beams fastened together.
“May I come in, father?” said the muffled high voice.
Sage Wang walked over to the door and spoke through the tight cracks. “No you may not. I am working. It is important that I stay by myself to concentrate.” He heard his son’s small shoes crack crack on the stones of the garden, the dimming noise telling of the long journey back to the main house. Wang continued his work. There were three other corpses, and the question was whether the knowledge and wisdom would come to him more quickly if he meditated on two or on eight. The answer would have to be six, as it turned out, since he became tired and slipped when attempting to harvest the final two.
In the next week, traveling at night, he was able to dispose of the corpses, the coffins, and the barrels. He dried and lacquered the shells and then he was able to begin the long process of meditation, of allowing nature to whisper its secrets to him as if he were a trusted friend or a favorite lover.
In his mind he always thought, pictured to the smallest details the possibilities, what might happen on The Most Important Day, never sure when this day would arrive but knowing he must be prepared. As he walked along the stones leading from his house to the Hall of Wisdom, holding the hand of his apprentice, his son, ten, then over time, eleven, then twelve, he was always in a state of incubation, allowing the knowledge gained from the previous evening to seep into his cells, the way sunlight is folded into green leaves. The power of the Linguistic Ch’i built. He noticed that he was gaining favor with the Emperor; that the Emperor would turn to him first, at first occasionally, then with more and more frequency.
When he became the most trusted advisor, during the evening’s meditation, a small group of six ancestors became visible to offer congratulations. They looked at the six shells, sitting on a small table, glistening in the low candlelight, and nodded in approval. He waited for them to speak, to teach him, but they said nothing more and disappeared. But he deduced one thing. Tomorrow will be the Day.
He walked with his son, now fourteen, whose voice was beginning to deepen, whose height was nearly his own, they walked to the Hall of Wisdom.
“Father.”
“Yes, Sung.”
“Today is the Day of the Princes, isn’t it?”
“I believe that it is,” said Sage Wang.
“Will you be teaching them?”
“If the Emperor wishes it so.”
“I believe I have noticed that the other Sages dislike you,” said Sung. “ever since the Emperor turns to you first.”
They stopped walking. Sage Wang turned to his son and looked down out of old habit and found himself looking at his son’s waist instead of his eyes. He raised his head and met his eyes, straight across.
“How do you know this?” said Sage Wang.
“When you speak they begin to watch you from the corners of their eyes.”
“Then you may be correct.”
“I also believe that the Emperor is afraid of you,” said Sung.
They began walking again.
“And how do you know this?” asked Sage Wang.
“When he turns to another sage he is higher than that person.”
“He is sitting higher than we sit.”
“But for you,” said Sung, “he sinks his chest before he turns. He relinquishes his height.”
Sage Wang listened. “You may be right once more.”
“Father, are we in danger?”
“No, my son, we are not.”
Sung could feel himself grow a bit, his chest expanded with pride. “Then it is they who are in danger,” he said.
“Yes, my son, that is correct again.”
On the higher platform, higher than the sages, but in chairs not the throne, sat the fifteen princes. There were always more princes since the task of the Emperor is to make decisions in the morning and make princes in the afternoons and evenings. And it is the task of the greater population to make farmers and concubines. The princes, to this point, have learned the teachings of past Sages and the history of their dynasty. They have learned to begin to master their ch’i; they have learned to begin to meditate. They have learned that they are always beginning. Today the Sages and the Emperor will learn if any of the princes have an aptitude for governing.
A servant brought out the watches, fine English and German pocket watches, one made of silver and tortoise shell, engraved with pastoral scenes on the facing, the others made of gold, delicately engraved, and if turned sideways, showing the gears, hundreds of moving parts, delicate as the bones in the ear, the mainspring, the verge and fuzee, the hands on the face pointing to stick shapes the young princes had never before seen, although they all recognized the phases of the moon, which was also displayed on some of the faces. They touched them all gently, they put them to their ears. Eventually one looked, then they all looked at the Emperor with wonder. The Emperor nodded to Sage Wang.
“Tell me about the people who made this,” Sage Wang said.
“What is this?” asked one prince.
“Tell me about these people,” Sage Wang said once more.
It felt, to these young princes, that a veil of mourning fell upon them, the strands of silk sharp as fine blades. They became self-conscious of their motions, aware that, for many the first time, that they were not in surroundings at their beck and call, they were being scrutinized and judged, for many, as coldly as they had judged others. They became vaguely aware, the double blade of the razor silk, of political intrigue—that perhaps the premature deaths of their older siblings were not solely the doings of cruel fate, and that indeed some of them right here may not see their twentieth year.
“You are princes, but I am your elder,” said Sage Wang. “Someone tell me about the people who make such tools.”
“They are very brilliant,” said one.
“They are very beautiful,” said another.
“They are more skilled than we are when working with metals,” said another, not finishing his sentence completely, as if the final sounds were sliced off by the sharpness of the European metalsmiths. “I mean to say that their skills with metals are very impressive.”
“You were correct the first time,” said Sage Wang. “They are better than we are.”
There was a silence, a very long silence. If Sage Wang were a composer of music this silence would be exactly what he would want. He knew what was next; such is the lot of the master of Linguistic Ch’i.
“Does that mean that their weapons are superior to ours?” asked a prince.
“It does indeed,” said Sage Wang. “And their ship building skills are second to none.”
The boys began to feel their Emperor Oats. “What kind of warriors are they?”
“A small band of them, wearing their metal, wielding the swords made of their metal, destroyed an entire civilization across the sea. One hundred killed one million,” said Sage Wang.
Another sage stood up and spoke loudly. “This must stop!”
“Sage Hu,” said the Emperor, “there is something you wish to say?”
“I wish this man to stop his teaching. He is preparing the princes for war with the English,” said Sage Hu. The Emperor looked at Sage Wang, giving him opportunity to respond.
“Is it war itself that Sage Hu opposes, or war that he believes we will lose?” asked Sage Wang.
The point was simple, that one could not sit with the Sages and be opposed to war itself. Sage Hu must mean, therefore, that the time for war is not propitious, or that China could not defeat the English, or that the English would slaughter the Chinese. And these are words that Sage Hu would not wish to say publicly, thought Sage Wang.
Sage Hu sat down, for his point was much more complex—that Sage Wang was evil, and that only evil and more evil will come upon China by following anything Sage Wang desires. But Sage Wang was eloquent and learned and possessed great beauty—who would believe such a man as evil since he embodies the ideals and appearance of goodness? Indeed, the time for the war that truly needs to be fought, to defeat and destroy Sage Wang, it is not propitious, thought Sage Hu. That is why Sage Hu sat down.
“Weapons,” Sage Wang continued, “are only as effective as the man who holds them,” he said to the princes. “The effective man is the effective warrior, and indeed the truly good man needs no weapons at all.”
Could Sage Wang have caught me like a fish, thought Sage Hu. The aroma of my defeat has made the words of Sage Wang more delectable to the princes—and even to the Emperor, thought Sage Hu. He was shocked as he looked around the great semicircle of wise men—for they, too, are excited by the words of Sage Wang.
“Who are the men who hold such remarkable weapons, these Englishmen? These Europeans?” asked Sage Wang. “They have great intelligence, yes, and they have the strength of domesticated animals. They have endless perseverance.” He paused. “And they have set themselves the task of possessing China.” He paused once more. If someone challenges this assertion then he must argue again, he must argue him to his seat as he had done to Sage Hu. But if no one challenges this, they are accepting his words completely, he can, as a sailor would say, open up the sails, let them stretch, and be carried by the wind. He waited. There was most beautiful silence.
“And yet, whatever they do,” he continued. “Whether they work, or invent, or think, even whenever they see and hear, they do not use their souls, their Elevated Ch’i.” More than a few heads tilted to one side. This concept of action without the foundation of the Elevated Ch’i, this was impossible, as if an apple detached from the tree branch and did not fall down. How can there be any action without its first cause coming from the Elevated Ch’i?
“It is like this,” said Sage Wang. “You have a wagon to be drawn by a team of four horses. For the wagon to move forward you must give the order to each horse. ‘Onwards Horse Number One. Onwards Horse Number Two.’ The two horses will move, but the two others will not move. The first two horses have to pull the wagon and drag the other horses along in addition. That is what it is like, to not use one’s Elevated Ch’i.”
“Then they are in turmoil,” said one prince.
“And they bring turmoil wherever they go, and they wish to bring it here,” said Sage Wang. He looked around the room, he felt the silence as if he were stroking the skin of a beautiful woman. The ears of the sages, the princes, the emperor, were open, their eyes were clear. Sage Wang felt a frisson from the silent sound of his own thoughts.
“And what is left of their mind, they divide and divide again, like a maze with many paths that end, and there is no path to the end.” Again there were confused looks from the princes—for such a person, such a culture could not live with itself, it was just not possible. “I will explain again,” said Sage Wang. “Their metalsmiths speak a language known only to each other, their architects speak a language known only to other architects, the makers of their fabrics speak a language only other makers of fabric can speak, and they cannot speak to each other.
“We,” continued Sage Wang, “all speak with poetry, the same poetry, we all speak of the beauty of harmony and balance. A sage can speak to a fine cook, who can speak to the gardener, who can speak to the calligrapher—all of us can, and indeed wish, to learn from each other.”
A prince laughed quietly. But not so quietly. He stood. “That wagon that is dragging two horses—it also has square wheels,” said prince, immediately unsure, had he lengthened or shortened his life? There was laughter, but Sage Wang waited.
Once more there was silence, but this time Sage Wang noted the aroma of fear—a fear of the English metal, a fear of the English misery. Sage Wang allowed it to grow until it pushed against the great wooden wall of the room.
“What can be done?” the Emperor asked.
“Across the oceans,” said Sage Wang, “they have begun to grow sugar, and because of this sugar, they wish to trade for our tea. They will offer us many different kinds of goods in return for our tea. But we should not take them. We should only take their silver, for their silver is like their blood. Tea for silver, they will bleed to death. And they will do this gladly—for in place of their Elevated Ch’i, there is craving. They wake up craving, they walk the earth craving, they go to sleep craving, and they dream of their cravings. Paradoxically, they believe themselves to be free men, yet they are truly enslaved by their cravings.”
“Remarkable,” said the Emperor. “I will set this task before the ministers.”
As Sage Wang predicted, the English agreed to trade silver for tea, thus beginning the slow bleed of the English economy. Months later, the morning after a particularly rainy night, the bodies of Sage Hu and his wife were found strangled in their bed, strangled with a particularly heavy rope. There was no sign of struggle save for the severe rope burns around the couples’ necks, as if they just laid quietly while they were being murdered. Their children were too young and frail to do such a thing, and most puzzling, there were no footprints in the mud outside of their house. The murders remained unsolved. Sage Wang found that the strange circumstances surrounding the deaths added a significant measure of fear to the respect he already commanded, which pleased him beyond measure.
Years passed. Mighty England wobbled and came close to ruin—until the English found that the Chinese farmers, illegally of course, were more than happy to bypass the government and trade their tea for the opium the English could grow in India. The farmers would then take their wagons into the city and sell their opium. This became known in the West as the Opium Wars—history is written by the victors. It did not take much of this present for Sage Wang to see the future. He would be beaten, China would be beaten. He aged quickly, and in his Most Private Room the six ancestors appeared to him one final time, shortly before he himself would be joining the six.
They told him that his son, Sung, must practice his routine diligently, regularly, daily. He must do so with great intensity and purpose. They told him of the development of ch’i that in the womb as Yin unites with Yang, the ch’i forms along with the body, parallel with the body, developing its own organs and skills, its own capabilities. As the body deteriorates with age, the ch’i does not have to deteriorate, it can still grow, develop more skills, develop its own power and wisdom. The six ancestors told of ch’i’s stages and transformations, ending with this: When son Sung reaches an age near 250 years old, he will achieve the power to avenge these terrible events. He must avenge them. Go. Tell him. He must begin immediately and waste no time.
“But how, father,” asked Sung, now forty years old, “how will I live to two hundred fifty?”
“I don’t know,” his father said softly, “only I know that it is indeed the way.”
His ancestors knew, although his father did not know, what a powerful man Sung had become, learning the intricacies of even practice and change. And he learned that heaven assists all who are serious. As he aged, as he approached fifty, after his father died and he was in despair—despite the regularity and evenness of his practice, tired now—it happened.
And as he hoped, expected, the heavens did not allow him to decline, to allow his vengence unfulfilled. The answer came like a clap of thunder. On the Hill of Accumulated Elegance, in midst of shrubbery, he saw a gardener, a young man, manicuring the grasses. At that moment the second transformation occurred, Sung leaned against a nearby tree, nearly passing out, keeping his eye on the young gardener. Another energetic cell division took place, investing himself with wisdom and power few have known—and now he also knew, as simple as riding a bicycle, all 540 organs, as simple as picking an apple from a tree, he walked over to the young gardener, greeted him heartily, shook his hand with both hands, and took every bit of ch’i this man possessed. Wang Sung watched as the color drained from the young man’s eyes, his pupils turning white as marble, his skin graying like an elephant’s, his mouth opening, his tongue cracking like drought stricken earth, this young man, dropping dead within a minute. He had learned to be immortal.
Oh the rush of life force through his body, the heat of the high of it. His meridians tingled, then his arteries, his organs rushed with joy, his muscles popped with strength, the feeling of new youth, youth he can use wisely, his T’an Tiens crackled with lightning. His feet rose from the ground millimeters, for seconds he was flying, millimeters off of the ground, but flying nevertheless. But the next day, his skills had considerably diminished—the new ch’i needed to be molded and honed. It was clumsy and unresponsive to his will. It took him slightly over one year to regain his skill, and another year after that to build his new powers into precision.
He went into exile as China deteriorated into a vast dilapidated opium den. He went to Europe, learned the subtle way in which ch’i can be exchanged, or in his case, taken in small bits, during sex, as his young wives aged quickly and died. As his new ch’i grew older, as it approached fifty and began to wane, he approached a young man in France who helped him retrieve his dropped umbrella, reached out to give this Frenchman a firm handshake—and voila! as they would say, he was rejuventated once more.
Early in what the Westerners called the 20th century, Wang Sung noticed something quite subtle at first, but careful observation showed it to be quite clear. That ch’i itself, the life force of the earth was thinning. The ch’i he would take from young men would not be as strong, it would not last as long, and he found himself in the paradoxical position of having to help and heal the life force of these young men before he could ensnare it. He followed the currents of the earth, a mixture of politics and geology, and found himself after World War II migrating to the earth’s political center, the United States, and within the United States, to its energetic center, the crossroads of the Mississippi River and the Missouri River. This is where he would be as he hovered near 250 years of age, where he would take the ch’i of one more young man, ch’i he would nurture and then take, the keystone ch’i, ch’i that would allow him his own final transformation, becoming one with the world itself, that even the earth and trees, the clouds and rain would express his rage and revenge on those who ravaged China.
Part I
1
The Village
When Howard Stein was thrown out of Western Civilization he found the most frightening thing in the world. Howard wasn’t, strictly speaking, thrown out in a conventional manner. He never received a pink slip or a telegram telling him that his services were no longer required, that Western Civilization was downsizing and his position in the world was being integrated into another division. Yet there are events that throw a person so far off the beaten path that one needs an observatory telescope to see where everyone else is walking. One of these events is when you nearly die. And that is exactly what happened to him. It changed every little thing. The morning look into the bathroom mirror became a small adventure. He would see the same thin face, but wonder if he wasn’t a bit gaunt. He would see the same light skin, but wonder if it wasn’t a bit pale. He would see the same green eyes and wonder if the whites weren’t a bit sallow. Did his tongue have the same pattern of cracks and grooves yesterday? And did it mean something if it didn’t? The doctors agreed something was wrong, his blood work showed this. But they couldn’t tell him how close he was to death, which as it turned out, was very close indeed.
It was 1984, and he was a young man at the time, 26 years old, and he really hadn’t prepared for this situation. In allegories, he thought, young men are always facing death. They are journeying into the woods and coming face to face with a monster or dragon. The young man is usually a prince or something, and he has skills, like being a great archer, or wrestler, or ice skater if it was written in Europe. There is something he can do to fight the monster. Not me, he thought. No training. No pedigree. No clue.
He was still in St. Louis then, it was the summer. Before there was a St. Louis, the native Americans briefly stopped on this land next to the Mississippi River and decided it was entirely too hot, and so they moved on to Cahokia, Illinois, and proceeded to create a pretty interesting civilization. Although the St. Louis summer is a normal three months long, the heat melts the boundaries lines that differentiate, for instance, Monday and Tuesday. All of the days and months melt into one, long, hot, humid day. The city is four hundred and something feet above sea level, but only because the sea won’t go there, and will not go there under any circumstances, complaining to God that it is too damn hot, and choosing to spend its summers at the beach. At night, a person doesn’t actually fall asleep in this city so much as pass out. In St. Louis, the expression “go to hell” is actually a wish of good fortune, as in “may the general conditions of your life improve.” The word ‘perspire’ also has a slightly different connotation, meaning ‘to squirt’ or ‘to have your insides wrung out like a used washcloth.’
Winters in St. Louis come quickly, with a bitter, intense, dry cold, coupled with every possible combination of frozen precipitation, all of which act to stop summer’s cooking process. It may occur to the causal reader that the milder times of year, spring and fall may be somewhat tolerable. It occurs to this narrator that the casual reader is probably not from St. Louis. These times of year are usually spent in the basement cowering in fear of tornadoes and the kind of severe thunderstorms that cause flash floods. One night, when Howard was in fourth grade, five tornadoes passed through an area easily visible from his house like nature’s version of the Green Bay Power Sweep. That year one of his teachers survived a more intimate encounter with a tornado and was not able to return to school for many weeks. When she returned she would freeze with terror every time she heard a plane pass over the school. Evidently, the young Howard thought, jet engines sound very similar to tornadoes.
As unpleasant as the present is, weather-wise, the future is even worse. In the only geology class he ever took, the professor explained how mountain ranges are formed. You start with a great river, such as the Mississippi. The river continually washes away land, which becomes sediment. The sediment sinks to the bottom, which is followed by more sediment. Mountain ranges, he said, are very similar to ice cubes floating on liquid. If you push an ice cube to the bottom of a glass and then let go, the cube will quickly float to the top, pushing quickly through the liquid. This is called isostacy, this floating balance. Well, the earth’s surface is actually liquid, and the falling sediment, after hundreds of thousands of years, forms a mountain range deep under the surface. At some point, like the ice cube, the mountain range just pops up to the surface. The Mississippi River, he said, will eventually be a mountain range. If you can picture this, it becomes clear that the English language doesn’t have a word or phrase to express the magnitude of this phenomenon.
The professor wasn’t finished, speaking of earthquakes. The earth is comprised of many different plates of land, like puzzle pieces. These plates do not correspond to any geographical boundaries. The United States, for instance, could be comprised of six or seven plates. These plates are always pushing and bumping each other, which creates a lot of tension. Eventually the tension is so great that the plates have to readjust. The readjustment is called an earthquake. The earthquake releases the tension. The San Andreas Fault along the West Coast of the United States frequently releases tension. This is good, because too much tension means that the eventual release will be a colossal quake. The really dangerous faults are the ones you never hear about, said the professor. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the New Madrid fault, he said. Guess where it runs.
2
A monster pounces on the young man
as the young man wanders in the woods.