King Dork

The first thing we did at the library was to use a concordance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from Matthew 3:9.

The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.

Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic

“question authority” message. “Maybe they were trying to say that this Timothy J. Anderson was some kind of rebel.”

He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie Carrie. J. the B.

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was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”

I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the Seven Story Mountain guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe, which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who knows? The SSM guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats”

for all the difference it would make. You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.

But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.

“Look,” he said in a library whisper.

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I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, if I’m not mistaken, but who am I to criticize John the Baptist on stylistic grounds? I’m sure it sounded very convincing at the time. You probably had to be there. Anyway, Tit, remember, had written in the uncoded part of his note:

“The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire.”

That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the Seven Storey Mountain guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.

The Bible passage brought to mind my first response to the note, the Rosemary’s Baby/ Black Sabbath–influenced idea that it had something to do with burning witches. Was there something in that after all? I mean, maybe Tit was implying that Timothy J. Anderson had been some kind of heretic, through a (devil-head) oblique and maybe ironic reference to a biblical text about burning trees and vipers and questioning authority? I really wished I knew more about history, religion, the Bible, witches, the sixties, and so forth. My Academic Achievements were second to none, yet somehow I instinctively knew I wasn’t going to solve this particular problem by making a collage or appreciating ethnic food or putting on a 203

skit. In fact, I felt severely handicapped by my lack of knowledge in general, which is not something that comes up very often in my day-to-day life. Or more likely it comes up all the time without my realizing it.

We had discovered something potentially meaningful, yet I didn’t get much satisfaction from it. Part of that was because solving one puzzle had simply opened a new set of puzzles, and vaguer ones at that, and I was more confused than ever.

But mostly, it was because the whole thing gave me an uncomfortable, creepy feeling. Tit’s note was creepy. The Bible passage was creepy. It wasn’t what I had been going for with this cute little hobby of trying to investigate my dad’s teenage life through clues he had inadvertently left behind. I looked down at all of our research materials spread out on the table: Catcher, CEH 1960; the note from Tit; The Seven Storey Mountain; the Jerusalem Bible; the concordance; my French dictionary; my various notebooks—I could almost see and feel them morph from charming-exhilarating-profound to sordid-depressing- pointless. For some reason the phrase “brood of vipers” kept echoing unpleasantly in my head. I had this idi-otic notion that the materials spread out on the table formed a kind of picture of the world, and that it wasn’t a picture I particularly cared for. And my dad’s role in this picture was maddeningly dim and indistinct.

I had once again been distracted from the investigation by my own fantasies and emotions. Not Sam Hellerman, though. He was a bespectacled teenage research machine, the dork Woodward and the geek Bernstein rolled into one diminutive, socially inferior package, loading the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle into the microfilm viewing machine.

I tried to shake the vipers out of my head. It seemed to 204

me that the way to approach the Seven Storey Mountain/

Timothy J. Anderson problem was not so much through trying to understand the meaning of the text itself but