John Adams - Other Worlds Than These

Of course, it isn’t easy. The infiltrator doesn’t have the privilege of buying stability by acting dumb. You won’t be able to say, “How much does it cost to ride on the cable car?” You won’t be able to say, “I’m from somewhere else, and this is the kind of money I carry, dollars quarters pennies halves nickels, is any of it legal tender here?” You don’t dare identify yourself in any way as an outsider. If you don’t get the idioms or the accent right, you can tell them you grew up out of town, but that’s as much as you can reveal. The truth is your eternal secret, even when you’re in trouble, especially when you’re in trouble. When your back’s to the wall you won’t have time to say, “Look, I wasn’t born in this universe at all, you see, I came zipping in from some other place, so pardon me, forgive me, excuse me, pity me.” No, no, no, you can’t do that. They won’t believe you, and even if they do, they’ll make it all the worse for you once they know. If you want to infiltrate, Cameron, you’ve got to fake it all the way. Jaunty smile; steely, even gaze. And you have to infiltrate. You know that, don’t you? You don’t really have any choice.

Infiltrating has its dangers, too. The rough part comes when they find you out, and they always will find you out. Then they’ll react bitterly against your deception; they’ll lash out in blind rage. If you’re lucky, you’ll be gone before they learn your sweaty little secret. Before they discover the discarded phrasebook hidden in the boarding-house room, before they stumble on the torn-off pages of your private journal. They’ll find you out. They always do. But by then you’ll be somewhere else, you hope, beyond the reach of their anger and their sorrow, beyond their reach.

Suppose I show you, for Exhibit A, Cameron reacting to an extraordinary situation. You can test your own resilience by trying to picture yourself in his position. There has been a sensation in Cameron’s mind very much like that of the extinction of the cosmos: a thunderclap, everything going black, a blankness, a total absence. Followed by the return of light, flowing inward upon him like high tide on the celestial shore, a surging stream of brightness moving with inexorable certainty. He stands flatfooted, dumbfounded, high on a bare hillside in warm early-hour sunlight. The house—redwood timbers, picture window, driftwood sculptures, paintings, books, records, refrigerator, gallon jugs of red wine, carpets, tiles, avocado plants in wooden tubs, carport, car, driveway—is gone. The neighbouring houses are gone. The winding street is gone. The eucalyptus forest that ought to be behind him, rising toward the crest of the hill, is gone. Downslope there is no Oakland, there is no Berkeley, only a scattering of crude squatter’s shacks running raggedly along unpaved switchbacks toward the pure blue bay. Across the water there is no Bay Bridge; on the far shore there is no San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge does not span the gap between the city and the Marin headland—Cameron is astonished, not that he didn’t expect something like this, but that the transformation is so complete, so absolute. “If you don’t want your world any more,” the old man had said, “you can drop it, can’t you? Let go of it, let it drop. Can’t you? Of course you can.”

And so Cameron has let go of it. He’s in another place entirely, now. Wherever this place is, it isn’t home. The sprawling Bay Area cities and towns aren’t here, never were. Goodbye, San Leandro, San Mateo, El Cerrito, Walnut Creek. He sees a landscape of gentle bare hills, rolling meadows, the dry brown grass of summer; the scarring hand of man is evident only occasionally. He begins to adapt. This is what he must have wanted, after all; and though he has been jarred by the shock of transition, he is recovering quickly; he is settling in; he feels already that he could belong here. He will explore this unfamiliar world, and if he finds it good he will discover a niche for himself. The air is sweet. The sky is cloudless. Has he really gone to some new place, or is he still in the old place and has everything else that was there simply gone away? Easy. He has gone. Everything else has gone. The cosmos has entered into a transitional phase. Nothing’s stable any more. From this moment onward, Cameron’s existence is a conditional matter, subject to ready alteration. What did the old man say? Go wherever you like. Define your world as you would like it to be, and go there, and if you discover that you don’t care for this or don’t need that, why, go somewhere else. It’s all trips, this universe. What else is there? There isn’t anything but trips. Just trips. So here you are, friend. New frameworks! New patterns! New!

There is a sound to his left, the crackling of dry brush underfoot, and Cameron turns, looking straight into the morning sun, and sees a man on horseback approaching him. He is tall, slender, about Cameron’s own height and build, it seems, but perhaps a shade broader through the shoulders. His hair, like Cameron’s, is golden, but it is much longer, descending in a straight flow to his shoulders and tumbling onto his chest. He has a soft, full curling beard, untrimmed but tidy. He wears a wide-brimmed hat, buckskin chaps, and a light fringed jacket of tawny leather. Because of the sunlight Cameron has difficulty at first making out his features, but after a moment his eyes adjust and he sees that the other’s face is very much like his own: thin lips, jutting high-bridged nose, cleft chin, cool blue eyes below heavy brows. Of course. Your face is my face. You and I, I and you, drawn to the same place at the same time across the many worlds. Cameron had not expected this, but now that it has happened it seems to have been inevitable.

They look at each other. Neither speaks. During that silent moment Cameron invents a scene for them. He imagines the other dismounting, inspecting him in wonder, walking around him, peering into his face, studying it, frowning, shaking his head, finally grinning and saying:

—I’ll be damned. I never knew I had a twin brother. But here you are. It’s just like looking in the mirror.

—We aren’t twins.

—We’ve got the same face. Same everything. Trim away a little hair and nobody could tell me from you, you from me. If we aren’t twins, what are we?

—We’re closer than brothers.

—I don’t follow your meaning, friend.

—This is how it is: I’m you. You’re me. One soul, one identity. What’s your name?

—Cameron.

—Of course. First name?

—Kit.

—That’s short for Christopher, isn’t it? My name is Cameron too. Chris. Short for Christopher. I tell you, we’re one and the same person, out of two different worlds. Closer than brothers. Closer than anything.

None of this is said, however. Instead, the man in the leather clothing rides slowly toward Cameron, pauses, gives him a long incurious stare, and says simply, “Morning. Nice day.” And continues onward.

“Wait,” Cameron says.

The man halts. Looks back. “What?”

Never ask for help. Fake it all the way. Jaunty smile; steely, even gaze.

Yes. Cameron remembers all that. Somehow, though, infiltration seems easier to bring off in a city. You can blend into the background there. More difficult here, exposed as you are against the stark, unpeopled landscape.

Cameron says, as casually as he can, using what he hopes is a colourless neutral accent, “I’ve been travelling out from inland. Came a long way.”

“Umm. Didn’t think you were from around here. Your clothes.”

“Inland clothes.”

“The way you talk. Different. So?”

“New to these parts. Wondered if you could tell me a place I could hire a room till I got settled.”