Chapter Ten #4
But this also needed background, this new background having begun when he was in his senior year at Greensbury, majoring in mathematics, well on his way to graduating summa, already taking graduate-level courses one on one with a professor, with a rumor circulating that his senior thesis was at the level of a Ph.D.
Discussions were already under way about hiring him directly, something that should have been a source of pride for anyone, and would have been for Bentley, had he not for months been pervaded by a growing fear, a sense that something dreadful was amiss.
He was, Miles should know, the first in his family to go to college, and for a long time felt he didn’t deserve it.
Clearly, a trick was being played upon him, a belief that his school-appointed therapist, Sandra, whose affection for him seemed to blind her to the fact that she was in over her head, attributed to a run-of-the-mill impostor syndrome.
Snowflake, or Reggie then, tolerated this line of reasoning because he did not wish to disappoint her, though all along his fear was hardening into a conviction that something far more evil was at work.
Soon he began to pour his energy into this puzzle, abandoning his studies, which he had begun to worry lay at the source of his persecution.
For was he not on the cusp of great mathematical discoveries that forces of the world might wish to keep hidden?
In lucid moments, he had the sense to tell himself that such fears were overblown, and perhaps better explained by something psychiatric, a symptom or a syndrome.
But this was also hard to face; he had an uncle with schizophrenia in Georgia who had spent most of his life in and out of hospitals, and he didn’t want that for himself.
In any case, he said, he did not have a chance to share the true extent of his fears with Sandra, who one afternoon had failed to show up for his appointment, having suffered a disabling stroke, the kind of thing that could not be hidden in a small town.
A month later, he encountered her on Main Street, walking slowly alongside her husband, right arm curled up against her chest, mumbling an agonized greeting when he ran up to say hello.
This had sent him over the edge; not only had he lost one of the few people who could comfort him, but it was not hard to see that she was a casualty of the same forces that were circling closer, and that her monstrous punishment—a so-called Broca’s aphasia, he would learn, where comprehension is retained but expression shattered—had been chosen with his isolation as its intent.
His unraveling from there was rapid. He didn’t finish school.
The truth was, he did not really remember what happened next; even the simplest tasks became so complex that sometimes eating overwhelmed him.
He was renting off-campus, and didn’t go outside except when he ran out of the canned food that he’d begun to stockpile.
His mother, after trying to persuade him to return to Georgia, had instead offered to send money if he agreed to speak to a psychiatrist, a man who prescribed a medication that helped bring some order to his thoughts but made him sleep much of the day.
In sum, he said, he was very sick, a point he was willing to acknowledge if only to draw the distinction with what happened next: namely, the emergence, one winter evening, in the back right part of his brain, of a man identifying himself as the centuries-old photographer.
Until that moment, Bentley—still Reggie—had been harried for many months by inchoate voices, usually fragmentary, often mocking, racist, vulgar.
In contrast, the voice of Bentley the ibbur seemed to have emerged precisely to defend against the cruel menagerie.
Bentley calmed him down, taught him to ignore the others.
Soon he was spending hours—indeed, days—in conversation with this visitor, all the while trying to puzzle out his mystery, until the ibbur informed him that it was Sandra who had invited him.
Sandra, who, the second Bentley now recalled, decorated her office with photos from Bentley’s famous collection.
A gust came and whipped up the snow that lay across the road.
This story—which Miles had at first thought was rather silly—did not seem silly anymore.
“But you asked about the card catalogues,” said Bentley.
The catalogues were but a natural extension of the troubles in which the man had found himself.
Miles perhaps might have been aware of a line attributed by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria to the poet Nathaniel Lee, admitted to the Bedlam asylum.
“I [meaning Lee, said Bentley] asserted that the world was mad, and the world said that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me.”
It was, he said, not insignificant that this work by Coleridge was the same to introduce to the world the notion of the “suspension of disbelief,” a fact they might return to.
Bentley had not heard of Lee during this period of troubles.
Rather, it was only later that he realized the wisdom of the line: that he had been, essentially, outvoted.
He said he was possessed by Bentley, and the world said he was not possessed by Bentley, and they had outvoted him, would always outvote him, and he could not reasonably expect to persuade them otherwise.
Indeed, others would be mad to believe him, without themselves experiencing the incontrovertible reality of Bentley’s counsel.
By then he was so tired of people trying to convince him of his wrongheadedness that something had to be done.
And he realized that what was needed was not to convince the world that he was right but, rather, to convince the world that it was so often wrong that it had no authority upon which to hold its vote at all.
So Bentley set out to expose, systematically, all poppycock, all mummery, all mishigas, all malarky, every last bit of stultiloquence and stupidity, in the way that he knew best, which was to direct the full force and industry of his intellect, once devoted to problems of set theory, toward the hypocrisies of the supposed sane.
Of course, that mankind often erred was hardly a new claim, said Bentley; what most people did not realize was the sheer magnitude of their foolery.
Indeed, listen to any so-called educated person, take note of their words, and, in a moment of quiet, measure them against known facts, and you will realize swiftly that the vast majority of humankind have no idea what they are talking about.
And this fact he would prove by sheer volume, in what he had alternately titled an “Encyclopedia of Foolish Errors,” a “Registry of Unsubstantiated Nonsense,” an “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”
In other words: he would expose, by brute-force argument, the hypocrisy of those who called his snowy ibbur a delusion, by systematically cataloguing the falsehoods of everybody else.
“Like what?” asked Miles.
“Like what? Like FBI brain implants, targeted radio mind control, targeted radio mind reading, geocentrism, delusional parasitosis, alien sex abductions, the wisdom of introducing cane toads to Australia, the belief that you can live forever, cryogenics, vaccine skepticism, Ultra Slim-Fast, heroic bleeding as a medical treatment, mercury as a medical treatment, arsenic as a medical treatment. Like unicorns, like the Emperor Nero death hoax, the Mozart death hoax, the Tupac death hoax, animal magnetism, climate-change denialism, contrail poisoning, celery-juice cleanses, the Great Leap Forward, the fake moon landing, Satanic panic, the Jimmy Carter puppet replacement theory, tulips as a good investment, ‘Do I really need a doctor for this operation?,’ the Salem witch trials, evil-clown sightings, the Dancing Plague of 1518, Piltdown man, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the belief that talking about sports will make you more attractive to women, the belief that one can fix things that should be left to a professional, the belief that polls can predict presidential elections, the belief that one is funny when one isn’t, ethical carnivory, flat-earth theory, frequent-flier miles, denying one’s wife is having an affair when it is obvious to everyone else.
To give some examples as they come to mind. ”
“I see,” said Miles, who was a little taken aback to see some of his occasionally held notions on this wide-ranging list.
“Puts a little ol’ Kabbalistic ibbur in perspective, doesn’t it,” said Bentley triumphantly. He had been collecting them for years. From psychiatric case reports, conversations, history books, the newspaper. The supply, he said, was endless.
“And it all fits back there?” asked Miles, turning back to appreciate the furniture.
“I have small handwriting.”
“Ah,” said Miles. And, in fact, he was now reassured, not only by the presence of some kind of logic, but by the library’s steady advance over five or six of the most perilous mountain miles between the valley of the hospital and the valley of the house.
He had at that moment quite a number of thoughts, ranging from questions about the “Encyclopedia,” to concern that it had now been a very long time since they had seen any other cars, to fear over the upcoming descent, to the more practical matter of not forgetting to ask Bentley where he had bought the foot massager and whether it worked on a normal outlet.
But Bentley hadn’t finished. The real problem, he said, was how to organize it.
“I can only imagine,” said Miles.