He has wondered ever since if it was this persistent, illogical conviction of unreality that allowed him—it was an alternative him, wasn’t it? a quasi-unreal him—to do something that he would like to believe the real him would not have done. But then again, if he hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have a daughter. Who is dear to him, even if he rarely sees her.
An uncomfortable subject.
Mark heads down the hall, in search of more of that peaceful euphoria. Here is his own old bedroom, overlooking the backyard. Bright and bare, his sleeping bag on the floor. When Mark was nine or ten he picked up from some book the phrase “bathed in moonlight,” and when the moon was in the right position relative to either of his two bedroom windows—one facing southeast, the other southwest—to cast its light across his blanket, he would say to himself, “I’m bathed in moonlight,” and a little bit of that feeling would come. Immanence. Epiphany. The oceanic feeling. What epileptics are said to feel right before a grand mal seizure. What schizophrenics experience in its nightmare form.
He still prefers to call it “the nameless feeling.” He suspects everyone means something different when they refer to it. My own private nameless feeling. Which is ironic, since a common element of it is a sense of expansion and connection. My own private self-serving confusion of my ego with the cosmos.
All his adult life he’s experienced the feeling when he sees a certain style of line drawings in young adult books. N. C. Wyeth and his imitators. Say, a sketch of a farmhouse under a tree. There’s the shapely abundant crown, with the two small rogue branches that poke out toward the bottom to keep it from looking too perfect; the house with its roof shaded in parallel lines, smoke undulating up from the stone chimney. There are the tufts here and there in the foreground representing the meadow-like turf, the one small squarish boulder half sunk in soil, flanked by a tall grass stalk, the fence of stripped saplings. Most stirring of all, there’s the trodden path that starts at the bottom of the picture and curves over the brow of the hill, dipping out of sight, reappearing smaller and farther away on a distant hill, and beyond that hill the mountains, and behind the mountains, towering cumulus clouds, suggesting that out there, far distant there, beyond those cloud-ramparts lies Aslan’s country, the Land of Faerie, Amber, Alpha Centauri—in other words, Heaven—and that the pebbly, homely footpath is the way to get there.
He wondered why that style of drawing meant so much to him. Then he cleared out the family attic five months ago and came across an edition of The Yearling, with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, and there they were: sapling fences, chimneys capped with sinuous smoke, paths curving off toward hills and clouds. And he remembered (he hadn’t thought about this for a long time) his ambitious, lively, slightly crazy seventh-grade English teacher, whom he came to adore, and her tag phrase to her students, these favored sons and daughters of professors and scientists, launched on a Titan rocket of public money in pursuit of Sputnik: “To whom much is given, much is expected.” And he remembered that dark rainy weekend, rather strangely dark, “penumbral,” when he’d lain in bed curled around The Yearling with his back to the door and had his conversion experience, the discovery of a more-real world beyond and behind this one. That idea could lead to dangerous falsehoods—e.g., Platonism, Christianity—but it was also, in a way, the root of science, particularly mathematics and physics. No accident that Plato was a mathematician; that Christianity was Neo-Platonism. An illusion powerful enough to break his heart. Dreaminess hardwired in the human brain. A necessary concomitant, perhaps, to creative intelligence.
He also found in the attic The World of Tomorrow. (He’s gone up there now, he’s staring at the patch of subflooring where the box used to be.) It must have been his father who packed it away, since his mother never saved anything. As an adult he could see, in the photographs of the City of Tomorrow, the obvious artificiality of the model: wayward grit looking like hazardous rocks on the superhighway; dried-moss “trees” that he recognized from his days constructing model railroad towns. Yet the old ghostly yearning possessed him all the same, the longing to live in the ordered City. And at last he thought he could see why the skyscrapers’ featureless glowing windows had called to him so powerfully. It was precisely because he couldn’t see through them. Radiant behind one of them (where is Carol Merrill standing?) was his future life, so wonderful no photograph could depict it. His longing wasn’t for the future per se, but for his unimaginable adulthood. Maybe he would have a theremin, but that wasn’t the point, the point was that his unimaginable wife would play theremin sonatas with him. Sure, he’d have a Rocket Academy yearbook, but the part he would read over Martian brandy in the evenings would be the love notes his wife had written to him in the margins when they were cadets. And his hovercar out on the telepad was merely the outward sign of something far more wonderful: the unimaginable job, at which he was an acknowledged whiz, awaiting him at the rainbow-end of his ballistic commute.
Mark was forty-three years old before he realized he had never quite stopped believing that one day he would take a spaceliner to visit the lunar colony, or to Mars to advise on some thorny problem of terraforming. He had sealed the dream in a suspended-animation pod in the back of his mind. He remembers exactly where he was when the pod popped
