And next: “—confessed today that he knowingly tainted the entire hospital’s transfusion supply with AIDS infected bl—”
“—amid allegations of abducting over one hundred children for what FBI officials have called ‘the underground snuff-film circuit—’”
“—strangled slowly with a lampcord while her common-law husband and his friends took turns—”
Smith turned off the set, feeling as confused as he felt disgusted. The newspaper offered more of the same. CRACK MOM TURNS KIDS TO PROSTITUTES read one local headline. The Post seemed less blunt: EARTHQUAKE DEATH TOLL EXPECTED TO REACH 120,000. Here was a story. A Tucson, Arizona, woman locked her three children in her attic while she went shopping with a friend. All three children died as the temperature in the attic exceeded 150 degrees. Stray bullets in a drug-related shootout killed three six-year-olds in front of a Detroit apartment project. The body of a thirteen-year old was found by hunters in Davidsonville, Maryland; the police reported that she’d been raped en mass and tortured with power tools. A suitcase was discovered in a dumpster behind a Washington D.C. convenience store, containing a dead newborn baby complete with umbilical cord and placenta.
Smith’s contemplations wavered. What could be more real than all of this? But there must be something. The ghost was walking around, he could feel it. It seemed to be perusing the bookshelf full of his work. Then it hissed at him, and disappeared.
The sun felt like a blade against his face as his guest dragged him back out onto the street. He was shriveling. It occurred to him, as he ascended the stone steps, that this was the first time he’d entered a church since he’d become a writer.
An old priest limped across the chancel, his bald head like a shiny ball of dough. He began to change the frontals on the altar.
“Excuse me, sir…er, Father,” Smith interrupted.
“Yes?”
“What is real?”
The priest straightened, a frocked silhouette before stained glass. He did not question, or even pause upon, the obscurity of Smith’s query. He answered at once: “God, Christ, the kingdom of Heaven.”
“But how do you know?”
The priest’s bland face smiled. He held up his Bible.
Smith thanked him and walked out. He felt abandoned, not as much by God as by himself. Conviction wasn’t proof. Belief didn’t validate a reality. Next, he took a Yellow cab to the University, where the static sunlight made everything look brittle and fake. Inside, cool darkness and tile shine led him down the hall. PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT. Smith stepped unannounced into the first office. A man — who looked as old — glanced up from a cluttered industrial gray metal desk. “May I…help you?”
Smith considered how he must look — a haggard, emaciated vagabond. “Forgive my appearance… “but it’s hard to look good when you’re dying from a large-cell metastatic mass. He had no time for intricate explanations nor cordialities. “I have a question that only a philosopher can answer. The question is this: What is real?”
The professor lit a pipe with a face engraved in relief on the bowl. His eyes looked tiny below the great, bushy gray brows. “That’s quite a universal question, wouldn’t you say? You want my opinion?”
In the window, the campus stood empty in sunlight. “Yes,” Smith said after a pause. That’s when he noticed the ghost. It was standing just outside, looking at him, an ethereal chaperon. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’d appreciate your opinion very much.”
“Ah, what is real?” Pipe smoke smeared the professor’s aged face. “Consider, first, the initial tenets of conclusionary nihilism. Truth is reality, and there is no objective basis for truth. Take mathematics for example, which exists only because space and time are forms of intuition; all material qualities are only the outward appearances arising from monadistic nexi. See? What is real can only be found in the immaterial mind; hence, the solipsistic doctrine. The human self is the only thing, in other words, that can be known and therefore verified. Quite a contradiction, since life is clearly a material, or a physio-chemical, interaction. Being and reality are not found in objects of knowledge but in something accessible only to the free and total self. Man’s destiny is a struggle for power, or, in your case, for answers. What I mean is, the real can never be made manifest in our finite minds but in the genetic empiricism beyond the whole. To put it more plainly, and I think it should be obvious now, reality is a consistence of a judgement pursuant to other judgements, fitting in ultimately to a single absolute system.”
Smith resisted rolling his eyes. He thanked the professor for his time, and left, thinking, What a crock of shit.
So it wasn’t truth, and it wasn’t spirit. Smith lit a cigarette, pondering the smoke. Love? he wondered. Was love real? Did love make something real? He didn’t know. He’d been too busy writing to ever find out.
These were simply subjectivities trying to be concrete, which was impossible. Beauty, then? He leaned back. Hmmm. Did beauty — a true subjectivity — make something real? Suddenly Smith felt buoyant with excitement. His kidneys throbbed, and his lung felt like a bleeding clot. Yet the surmise gave him energy.
Beauty.
Wasn’t beauty what all writers were supposed to pursue?
He heard a sigh, or no — a hiss. Did it denote relief, or disappointment? “It’s beauty, isn’t it?” Smith asked aloud to the shadow which now lingered at the closet. Was it inspecting his clothes? The shape sharpened as dusk bled into the room, creeping. What had it said, just days ago, on the street? Revere me. Smith knew at once that he must appease the ghost, with aphorism, with comprehension. “I’ll show you,” he said.
He opened the Yellow Pages, to the E’s. ESCORTS UNLIMITED, BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, CONFIDENTIAL, 24 HOURS, VISA, MASTERCARD.
The sigh replayed in his head, and the wondrous scent rose as Smith reached for the phone, to call beauty.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
The girl’s smile twitched. “Uh, well…”
“Never mind,” Smith said. “I was allegorizing, I suppose. I used to be a novelist.” He sat behind his desk, behind his typewriter, which was turned off. He would never turn it on again, and this left him dryly depressed. He had nothing to write. But it seemed a suitable place from which to observe: the lap of his insufficiency. I’ve written over a hundred books, he felt inclined to brag. But so what? Why say that? His books had not been real.
“What, uh, what would you like me to do?” the girl inquired.
Smith squinted. “I want to see you. I realize how obscure that must sound, but I’m on a quest of sorts, and I’m afraid I’ve become subject to a considerable time constraint. I’ve been made aware of a possibility, though, quite recently, that reality only arrives through an acknowledgment, or a reckoning, of human beauty. Not an objective acknowledgment, but a temporal one. I’m looking for something, the underside perhaps, of what makes something real in our minds and, more critically, our hearts. Use a sentence in fiction as an example. Objectively, the sentence is nothing more than configurations of ink on a piece of paper. But the mechanism of the words, and the function of the mechanism, in conjunction with the manner by which we define the sequence of the words, affects a transposition of imagery. It makes the sentence real in the process. The process—do you understand?” Smith doubted that she did. “The words suddenly become real, in some other, ineffable way.” He must sound worse than the professor. You’re just a piece of physical meat, he could have put it more simply. But I need to see what you are beyond that, not as just a body but as an image transposed through the body. Would it offend her? Would she understand?