The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

Oppenheimer got a hundred hours in the jacket for it, and, when he was unlaced, spat in the Warden’s face and received a second hundred hours on end.  When he was unlaced this time, the Warden was careful not to be in solitary.  That he was shaken by Oppenheimer’s words there is no doubt.

But it was Doctor Jackson who was the arch-fiend.  To him I was a novelty, and he was ever eager to see how much more I could stand before I broke.

“He can stand twenty days off the bat,” he bragged to the Warden in my presence.

“You are conservative,” I broke in.  “I can stand forty days.  Pshaw!  I can stand a hundred when such as you administer it.”  And, remembering my sea-cuny’s patience of forty years’ waiting ere I got my hands on Chong Mong-ju’s gullet, I added: “You prison curs, you don’t know what a man is.  You think a man is made in your own cowardly images.  Behold, I am a man.  You are feeblings.  I am your master.  You can’t bring a squeal out of me.  You think it remarkable, for you know how easily you would squeal.”

Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hell’s scullions, slime of the pit.  For I was above them, beyond them.  They were slaves.  I was free spirit.  My flesh only lay pent there in solitary.  I was not pent.  I had mastered the flesh, and the spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor flesh, not even suffering, lay in the little death in the jacket.

Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades.  Morrell believed, for he had himself tasted the little death.  But Oppenheimer, enraptured with my tales, remained a sceptic to the end.  His regret was naпve, and at times really pathetic, in that I had devoted my life to the science of agriculture instead of to fiction writing.

“But, man,” I reasoned with him, “what do I know of myself about this Cho-Sen?  I am able to identify it with what is to-day called Korea, and that is about all.  That is as far as my reading goes.  For instance, how possibly, out of my present life’s experience, could I know anything about kimchi ?  Yet I know kimchi .  It is a sort of sauerkraut.  When it is spoiled it stinks to heaven.  I tell you, when I was Adam Strang, I ate kimchi thousands of times.  I know good kimchi , bad kimchi , rotten kimchi .  I know the best kimchi is made by the women of Wosan.  Now how do I know that?  It is not in the content of my mind, Darrell Standing’s mind.  It is in the content of Adam Strang’s mind, who, through various births and deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me, Darrell Standing, along with the rest of the experiences of those various other lives that intervened.  Don’t you see, Jake?  That is how men come to be, to grow, how spirit develops.”

“Aw, come off,” he rapped back with the quick imperative knuckles I knew so well.  “Listen to your uncle talk now.  I am Jake Oppenheimer.  I always have been Jake Oppenheimer.  No other guy is in my makings.  What I know I know as Jake Oppenheimer.  Now what do I know?  I’ll tell you one thing.  I know kimchi .  Kimchi is a sort of sauerkraut made in a country that used to be called Cho-Sen.  The women of Wosan make the best kimchi , and when kimchi is spoiled it stinks to heaven.  You keep out of this, Ed.  Wait till I tie the professor up.

“Now, professor, how do I know all this stuff about kimchi ?  It is not in the content of my mind.”

“But it is,” I exulted.  “I put it there.”

“All right, old boss.  Then who put it into your mind?”

“Adam Strang.”

“Not on your tintype.  Adam Strang is a pipe-dream.  You read it somewhere.”

“Never,” I averred.  “The little I read of Korea was the war correspondence at the time of the Japanese- Russian War.”

“Do you remember all you read?” Oppenheimer queried.

“No.”

“Some you forget?”

“Yes, but—”

“That’s all, thank you,” he interrupted, in the manner of a lawyer abruptly concluding a cross-examination after having extracted a fatal admission from a witness.

It was impossible to convince Oppenheimer of my sincerity.  He insisted that I was making it up as I went along, although he applauded what he called my “to-be-continued-in-our-next,” and, at the times they were resting me up from the jacket, was continually begging and urging me to run off a few more chapters.

“Now, professor, cut out that high-brow stuff,” he would interrupt Ed Morrell’s and my metaphysical discussions, “and tell us more about the ki-sang and the cunies.  And, say, while you’re about it, tell us what happened to the Lady Om when that rough-neck husband of hers choked the old geezer and croaked.”

How often have I said that form perishes.  Let me repeat.  Form perishes.  Matter has no memory.  Spirit only remembers, as here, in prison cells, after the centuries, knowledge of the Lady Om and Chong Mong-ju persisted in my mind, was conveyed by me into Jake Oppenheimer’s mind, and by him was reconveyed into my mind in the argot and jargon of the West.  And now I have conveyed it into your mind, my reader.  Try to eliminate it from your mind.  You cannot.  As long as you live what I have told will tenant your mind.  Mind?  There is nothing permanent but mind.  Matter fluxes, crystallizes, and fluxes again, and forms are never repeated.  Forms disintegrate into the eternal nothingness from which there is no return.  Form is apparitional and passes, as passed the physical forms of the Lady Om and Chong Mong-ju.  But the memory of them remains, shall always remain as long as spirit endures, and spirit is indestructible.

“One thing sticks out as big as a house,” was Oppenheimer’s final criticism of my Adam Strang adventure.  “And that is that you’ve done more hanging around Chinatown dumps and hop-joints than was good for a respectable college professor.  Evil communications, you know.  I guess that’s what brought you here.”

Before I return to my adventures I am compelled to tell one remarkable incident that occurred in solitary.  It is remarkable in two ways.  It shows the astounding mental power of that child of the gutters, Jake Oppenheimer; and it is in itself convincing proof of the verity of my experiences when in the jacket coma.

“Say, professor,” Oppenheimer tapped to me one day.  “When you was spieling that Adam Strang yarn, I remember you mentioned playing chess with that royal souse of an emperor’s brother.  Now is that chess like our kind of chess?”

Of course I had to reply that I did not know, that I did not remember the details after I returned to my normal state.  And of course he laughed good-naturedly at what he called my foolery.  Yet I could distinctly remember that in my Adam Strang adventure I had frequently played chess.  The trouble was that whenever I came back to consciousness in solitary, unessential and intricate details faded from my memory.

It must be remembered that for convenience I have assembled my intermittent and repetitional jacket experiences into coherent and consecutive narratives.  I never knew in advance where my journeys in time would take me.  For instance, I have a score of different times returned to Jesse Fancher in the wagon-circle at Mountain Meadows.  In a single ten-days’ bout in the jacket I have gone back and back, from life to life, and often skipping whole series of lives that at other times I have covered, back to prehistoric time, and back of that to days ere civilization began.

So I resolved, on my next return from Adam Strang’s experiences, whenever it might be, that I should, immediately, I on resuming consciousness, concentrate upon what visions and memories.  I had brought back of chess playing.  As luck would have it, I had to endure Oppenheimer’s chaffing for a full month ere it happened.  And then, no sooner out of jacket and circulation restored, than I started knuckle-rapping the information.

Further, I taught Oppenheimer the chess Adam Strang had played in Cho-Sen centuries agone.  It was different from Western chess, and yet could not but be fundamentally the same, tracing back to a common origin, probably India.  In place of our sixty-four squares there are eighty-one squares.  We have eight pawns on a side; they have nine; and though limited similarly, the principle of moving is different.

Also, in the Cho-Sen game, there are twenty pieces and pawns against our sixteen, and they are arrayed in three rows instead of two.  Thus, the nine pawns are in the front row; in the middle row are two pieces resembling our castles; and in the back row, midway, stands the king, flanked in order on either side by “gold money,” “silver money,” “knight,” and “spear.”  It will be observed that in the Cho-Sen game there is no queen.  A further radical variation is that a captured piece or pawn is not removed from the board.  It becomes the property of the captor and is thereafter played by him.