Meanwhile, in the downtown blocks around Washington Square, Noah was sinking his teeth into the meaty pleasures of his newly independent life, his liberation from the claustrophobic confines of his mother’s apartment on West End Avenue and the peace-and-quarrel cycles of his father’s demented marriage to his neurasthenic stepmother. As he put it to Ferguson one day as he showed him around his dormitory, his small, two-by-four room was the next best thing to camping out in the Montana wilderness. I’m no longer hemmed in, Arch, he said, I feel like an emancipated slave who’s lit out for the territories, and although Ferguson worried that he was smoking too much pot and too many cigarettes (close to two packs a day), his eyes were clear and he generally seemed to be in good form, even as he coped with the loss of his girlfriend, Carole, who had dumped him before going off to live under her own big skies in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Two weeks into the first semester, Noah reported that NYU was much less demanding than Fieldston and that he could do his daily stint of work in about the same time it took to consume a five-course dinner. Ferguson wondered when Noah had last sat down to a five-course dinner, but he got the point, and he couldn’t help admiring his cousin for being so relaxed about the business of college, which in his own case had nearly provoked a nervous breakdown. So there was young Mr. Marx, a new man in his old surroundings, stomping around the cobbled lanes of his West Village turf, going to jazz clubs and movies at the Bleecker Street Cinema, writing down story ideas for films as he sat in the Caffè Reggio and drank his sixth cup of espresso that day, and there he was making friends with young poets and painters from the Lower East Side, and when Noah began introducing Ferguson to some of those people, Ferguson’s world expanded in ways that would ultimately reconfigure the landscape of his life, for those early encounters were the first steps toward discovering what kind of life would be possible for him in the future, and again, as always, Noah was the one to thank for steering him in the right direction. However opposed he might have been to the workshops at Princeton, Ferguson knew there was much to be gained by talking to other writers and artists, and because most of the downtown fledglings he met through Noah were three and four and five years older than he was, they were already publishing their work in little magazines and organizing group shows in tumbledown lofts and storefronts, which meant they were miles ahead of him at that point, and therefore Ferguson listened carefully to what they said. Most of them wound up teaching him something, even the ones he didn’t take to personally, but the smartest one in his opinion turned out to be the one he liked best, a poet named Ron Pearson, who had come to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma, four years earlier and had graduated from Columbia in June, and one evening at Ron’s cramped little railroad flat on Rivington Street, as Ferguson and Noah and two or three others sat on the floor with Ron and his wife, Peg (he was already married!), the conversation spun around from Dada to anarchism, from twelve-tone music to Nancy and Sluggo porn cartoons, from traditional forms in poetry and painting to the role of chance in art, and suddenly John Cage was mentioned, a name that was only dimly recognizable to Ferguson, and when Ron learned that their new friend from the Jersey swamps had never read a word of Cage’s writings, he jumped to his feet, walked over to the bookcase, and pulled out a hardcover copy of Silence. You have to read this, Archie, he said, or else you’ll never learn how to think about anything except what other people want you to think.
Ferguson thanked him and promised to return the book as soon as possible, but Ron waved him off and said, Keep it. I have two other copies, so this one belongs to you now.
Ferguson opened the book, flipped through it for a couple of moments, and then fell upon this sentence on page 96: “The world is teeming: anything can happen.”
It was Friday, October 15, 1965, and Ferguson had been a student at Princeton for one month, one of the most trying and exhausting months he could remember, but he was pulling out of it now, he felt, something was starting to shift in him again, and spending those hours with Noah and Ron and the others had helped push him away from the things that were weak and angry and arrested in him, and now he had the book, a hardcover copy of John Cage’s Silence, and when the little party broke up and everyone left, he told Noah that he was feeling tired and wanted to head back to his grandfather’s place uptown, which wasn’t in fact true, since he wasn’t the least bit tired and merely wanted to be alone.
Twice before, a book had turned him inside out and altered who he was, had blasted apart his assumptions about the world and thrust him onto a new ground where everything in the world suddenly looked different — and would remain different for the rest of time, for as long as he himself went on living in time and occupied space in the world. Dostoyevsky’s book was about the passions and contradictions of the human soul, Thoreau’s book was a manual on how to live, and now Ferguson had discovered a book that Ron had correctly called a book about how to think, and as he sat in his grandfather’s apartment reading “2 Pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance,” “Lecture on Nothing,” “Lecture on Something,” “45′ for a Speaker,” and “Indeterminancy,” he felt as if a fierce, purifying wind were blowing through his brain and cleaning out the junk that had accumulated there, that he was in the presence of a man who was unafraid to ask first questions, to start all over from the beginning and walk down a path no one had ever traveled before him, and when Ferguson finally put down the book at three-thirty in the morning, he felt so stirred up and ignited by what he had read that he knew sleep was out of the question, that he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes for the rest of the night.
The world is teeming: anything can happen.
He had made plans to get together with Noah at noon tomorrow and march down Fifth Avenue in what would be their first anti-war demonstration, New York’s first large-scale protest against the buildup of American troops in Vietnam, an event that was sure to attract tens of thousands of people if not one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand, and nothing was going to stop Ferguson from taking part in it, not even if he was dead on his feet and had to shuffle down Fifth Avenue like a drunken somnambulist, but noon was many hours away, and for the first time since he had first set foot in Brown Hall last month, he was ready to start writing again, and nothing was going to stop him from doing that either.
Mulligan’s first twelve voyages had taken him to countries that lived in a state of permanent war, countries of intense religious severity that punished their citizens for thinking impure thoughts, countries whose cultures were dedicated to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, countries whose people thought about little else but food, countries run by women in which the men served as low-paid lackeys, countries devoted to the making of art and music, countries governed by racist, Nazi-like laws and other countries in which the people could not distinguish between different colors of skin, countries in which merchants and businessmen cheated the public as a matter of civic duty, countries organized around perpetual sports competitions, countries besieged by earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and continual bad weather, tropical countries in which the people wore no clothes, frigid countries in which the people were obsessed with fur, primitive countries and technologically advanced countries, countries that seemed to belong to the past and others that seemed to belong to the present or the distant future. Ferguson had made a rough map of the twenty-four journeys before starting the project, but he had found that the best way to enter a new chapter was by writing blindly, to put down whatever seemed to be bubbling in his head as he barreled along from sentence to sentence, and then, when the wild first draft was finished, he would go back and slowly begin to tame it, usually going through five or six more drafts before it reached its proper and definitive shape, the mysterious combination of lightness and heaviness he was searching for, the seriocomic tone that was necessary to pull off such outlandish narratives, the plausible implausibility of what he called nonsense in motion. He looked upon his little book as an experiment, an exercise that would allow him to flex some new writerly muscles, and when he had finished writing the last chapter, he was planning to burn the manuscript or, if not burn it, bury the book in a place where no one would ever find it.