ARCHETYPE

Whenever I think about H.G. Wells, I am possessed again by Gene, a friend of some years ago, who took his own life one afternoon and left behind a bewildered assortment of friends, co-workers, and family.  I had just arrived in town to begin graduate work at the university.  Since I was new to the place, I had no people to turn to for help unloading the big truck in which our household stuff was packed.  My two children were little, the boy just weaned and his sister only two years older.  My wife had all she could do to keep an eye on them and begin the arduous chores of unpacking and storing our things.  I made trip after trip up the ramp of the yellow Ryder rental in the driveway, hauling boxes and the lighter furniture, eyeing with consternation the mattresses and dressers, the couch, the washing machine, and other items that sat heavily in the furthest reaches of the dark interior.  I was reconciling myself to keeping the truck an extra few days—an expensive proposition—until I could get someone from the university, when I heard a car horn honk.  I stepped out of the truck and saw Gene get out of his car and come up the drive.  He introduced himself, told me he lived half-a-block down the road, and asked if I needed help. 

     Gene had a twin brother who lived at home with his mother.  Though they looked twinish, they couldn’t have been more different.  The one was a recluse, living still in the protective embrace of the mother; the other a gregarious, imaginative, yearning type, who, though not a scholar—Gene was a medical technologist who worked in a lab in the university hospital—was a lover of Wells and knew all the scholarship on the great man.  I was indebted to him right from the start.  However, I liked him, enjoyed his enthusiasm over Wells, and spent many a lunch and happy hour that first semester discussing his favorite topic.  He had published an article on Wells and was very proud of it, as indeed he should have been.

     Gene never discussed his work at the hospital, and though he came to my place many times, he never asked me to his own.  There was a side of him that remained blank to me.  About work, he said once that he earned a decent livelihood.  His place was a small tree shaded cedar-shingled rental in a neighborhood of rentals, pretty run down, as were all our places in that area—as a student, I lived where I could afford to.  He said he could own a home if he wanted to but wasn’t interested.  What he had served his purpose.  That attitude is current in university towns.  I thought there was nothing unusual about Gene. 

     Since Wells came up here and there in the courses I taught as a graduate student, we had ample opportunity to discuss what he most loved.  Around mid-morning one day towards the end of that first semester, Gene came to my cubicle in the English Department, and we chatted about nothing in particular.  He did mention that he had a dream of one day founding a journal to specialize in Wells’ idea of the World Brain and that he was saving for that end.  We talked about the notion of the World Brain, Wells’ conception of the organization of knowledge and teaching designed to create a “global village” as we would say today. 

     We talked about the implied autocracy and social repression Wells’ idea entailed, and Gene, before he left, commented on how Wells might have been blind to all that—considering how his earlier novels, like The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, were cautionary tales against those very things.  Then he went to the Sunset Motel, directly from his visit to me, rented a room, filled the tub with hot water, climbed in and opened the veins in his wrists. 

     Late in the afternoon, I received calls from both his mother and brother inquiring if I had heard from him.  They were both reassured by the fact he had been to see me earlier in the day but were concerned about him, since they had themselves received inquiries from the lab where he worked.  It wasn’t till morning of the next day that he was found by the motel maids, and later that afternoon I was visited by a policeman.  He asked me if Gene had seemed depressed, or angry, or gave any indication (now in retrospect) of what was on his mind, and of course I could only answer no, no, and no.  He asked why Gene had visited and what we talked about, but nothing I could tell him was a help.  He left none the wiser. 

And that’s where my relations with Gene came to an end.  I never could fathom it, though I knew him, or a part of him, only several months.  He did it Roman style, in the manner of Seneca, and I think he knew I would understand that, what it meant—that he had stoically endured what came in the end to be unendurable.  It was a strain of thought and feeling in him I didn’t perceive, though afterward I thought I could detect the threads of it here and there in the manner of his life and in his obsession with Wells and his deliberate distancing from twin and mother. 

     So H. G. Wells and Gene are inextricably linked in my mind, the linkage making for a Wells that exists in precisely this way for no other.  Gene’s face and voice have become so much a part of Wells’ texts for me, that I cannot read them without the darkening and brooding the association forces upon me, all of which give the novels and stories an added texture and depth.  A sentence here and a paragraph there suddenly resonate with the sound of Gene’s voice, and Time and the Abyss creep noticeably across the page.

    I think of the pattern such a linkage makes: unrepeatable, absolutely unique.  No other can share or ever even imagine the Wells I read.  And this thought leads to another, inevitably, and unremarkably: every living creature’s experience of the world is, ipso facto, unrepeatable and unique.  With memories of Gene hovering in the atmosphere of my present awareness, it occurs to me to question, What if every unique experience of the world—that is, all taken together—could be contained in the experience of one subjectivity?  What might Wells have thought of that?  A World Brain?  Indeed, but not as Wells imagined it.  Can it not be assumed that such a subjectivity exists?  One could deduce the necessity of it on the basis of our separateness—isn’t it implicit in my speaking to you?  For it, Gene’s suicide would not have been a surprise.  And in it, Gene’s despair would continue to resonate—one among many notes of a shrilly high pitch?

     Our speculations on Wells’ notion of the World Brain were the last things Gene and I spoke off before he—how should I speak of it?  And these speculations were Gene’s last overt connection to the world.  I shudder to think of it.  I will not say that Gene’s act was motiveless, for I do not believe it.  I do say that his act was unpremeditated.  I cannot believe, as we sat and talked, that he had already thought through his fate and had determined on the act.  Is it possible to be so deceptive?   

     I can recall, even after all this time, Gene sitting beside my desk, and I can recall his face, his mannerisms, everything, for I ran them through my head over and over in the days that followed, and they have become as fixed as anything.  Even now, as I recall, I am shot through and through, as I often had been in those days, with the odd, almost nauseating feelings of Time reversals, as though those moments had become multi-dimensional, fixed on translucent annulments, and shuffled every which way, so that I talked that morning with a man who was already dead, his visit a moment of transcendence, and that moment recurring, the slippage as real as the living thought of Wells on the page I read.  Out of the One Gene came to me that morning, and still does.  Yet, at the time, I saw nothing, was aware of nothing!

     In the dark recess of the truck, I stoop and lift another box.  A horn honks.  Gene comes walking up the drive.  Tremblingly, I set the box down and look out.  I foresee nothing.  Thus, the World Brain disposes of a great deal of guilt.  That whole semester wears parentheses.  It exists as a thing complete, as something separable from the rest of my life, as a title is separate from the story it sits above.