Orbit 2

“I got clear down to the sparrow hawks,” said Homer the monster.

“Do you remark anything different about me this time?” Diogenes asked.

“You have little feathers on the backs of your hands where you used to have little hairs,” said Homer the man, “and on your toes. You’re barefoot now. But I wouldn’t have noticed any of it if I hadn’t been looking for something funny.”

“I’m a gestalt four now,” said Diogenes. “My conduct is likely to become a little extravagant.”

“It always was,” said Dr. Corte.

“But not so much as if I were a gestalt five,” said Diogenes. “As a five, I might take a Pan-like leap onto the shoulders of young Fregona here, or literally walk barefoot through the hair of the beautiful Regina as she stands there. Many normal gestalt twos become gestalt fours or fives in their dreams. It seems that Regina does.

“I found the shadow, but not the substance, of the whole situation in the psychology of Jung. Jung served me as the second element in this, for it was the errors of Phelan and Jung in widely different fields that set me on the trail of the truth. What Jung really says is that each of us is a number of persons in depth. This I consider silly. There is something about such far-out theories that repels me. The truth is that our counterparts enter into our unconsciousness and dreams only by accident, as being most of the time in the same space that we occupy. But we are all separate and independent persons. And we may, two or more of us, be present in the same frame at the same time, and then in a near, but not the same, place. Witness the gestalt two and the gestalt nine Homers here present.

“I’ve been experimenting to see how far I can go with it, and the gestalt nine is the furthest I have brought it so far. I do not number the gestalten in the order of their strangeness to our own norm, but in the order in which I discovered them. I’m convinced that the concentric and congravitic worlds and people complexes number near a hundred, however.”

“Well, there is a hole on the comer, isn’t there?” Dr. Corte asked.

“Yes, I set it up there by the bus stop as a convenient evening point of entry for the people of this block,” said Diogenes. “I’ve had lots of opportunity to study the results these last two days.”

“Well, just how do you set up a hole on the comer?” Dr. Corte persisted.

“Believe me, Corte, it took a lot of imagination,” Diogenes said. “I mean it literally. I drew so deeply on my own psychic store to construct the thing that it left me shaken, and I have the most manifold supply of psychic images of any person I know. I’ve also set up magnetic amplifiers on both sides of the street, but it is my original imagery that they amplify. I see a never-ending field of study in this.”

“Just what is the incantation stuff that takes you from one gestalt to another?” Homer the monster asked.

“It is only one of dozens of possible modes of entry, but I sometimes find it the easiest,” said Diogenes. “It is Immediacy Remembered, or the Verbal Ramble. It is the Evocation — an intuitive or charismatic entry. I often use it in the Bradmont Motif — named by me from two as-aff writers in the twentieth century.”

“You speak of it as if — well — isn’t this the twentieth century?” Regina asked.

“This the twentieth? Why, you’re right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes I get my times mixed. All of you, I believe, do sometimes have moments of peculiar immediacy and vividness. It seems then as if the world were somehow fresher in that moment, as though it were a new world. And the explanation is that, to you, it is a new world. You have moved, for a moment, into a different gestalt. There are many accidental holes or modes of entry, but mine is the only contrived one I know of.”

“There’s a discrepancy here,” said Dr. Corte. “If the persons are separate, how can you change from one to another?”

“I do not change from one person to another,” said Diogenes. “There have been three different Diogenes’ lecturing you here in series. Fortunately, my colleagues and I, being of like scientific mind, work together in close concert. We have made a successful experiment in substitution acceptance on you here this evening. Oh, the ramifications of this thing! The aspects to be studied. I will take you out of your narrow gestalt-two world and show you worlds upon worlds.”

“You talk about the gestalt-two complex that we normally belong to,” said wife Regina, “and about others up to gestalt nine, and maybe a hundred. Isn’t there a gestalt one? Lots of people start counting at one.”

“There is a number one, Regina,” said Diogenes. “I discovered it first and named it, before I realized that the common world of most of you was of a similar category. But I do not intend to visit gestalt one again. It is turgid and dreary beyond tolerating. One instance of its mediocrity will serve. The people of gestalt one refer to their world as the ‘everyday world.’ Retch quietly, please. May the lowest of us never fall so low! Persimmons After First Frost! Old Barbershop Chairs! Pink Dogwood Blossoms in the Third Week of November! Murad Cigarette Advertisements!!”

Diogenes cried out the last in mild panic, and he seemed disturbed. He changed into another fellow a little bit different, but the new Diogenes didn’t like what he saw either.

“Smell of Wet Sweet Clover!” he cried out. “St. Mary's Street in San Antonio! Model Airplane Glue! Moon Crabs in March! It won’t work! The rats have run out on me! Homer and Homer, grab that other Homer there! I believe he’s a gestalt six, and they sure are mean.”

Homer Hoose wasn’t particularly mean. He had just come home a few minutes late and had found two other fellows who looked like him jazzing his wife Regina. And those two mouth men, Dr. Corte and Diogenes Pontifex, didn’t have any business in his house when he was gone either.

He started to swing. You’d have done it too.

Those three Homers were all powerful and quick-moving fellows, and they had a lot of blood in them. It was soon flowing, amid the crashing and breaking-up of furniture and people — ocher-colored blood, pearl-gray blood, one of the Homers even had blood of a sort of red color. Those boys threw a real riot!

“Give me that package of coriander seed, Homer,” wife Regina said to the latest Homer as she took it from his pocket. “It won’t hurt to have three of them. Homer! Homer! Homer! All three of you! Stop bleeding on the rug!”

Homer was always a battler. So was Homer. And Homer.

“Stethoscopes and Moonlight and Memory— ah— in Late March,” Dr. Corte chanted. “Didn’t work, did it? I’ll get out of here a regular way. Homers, boys, come up to my place, one at a time, and get patched up when you’re finished. I have to do a little regular medicine on the side nowadays.”

Dr. Corte went out the door with the loopy run of a man not in very good condition.

“Old Hairbreadth Harry Comic Strips! Congress Street in Houston! Light Street in Baltimore! Elizabeth Street in Sydney! Varnish on Old Bar-Room Pianos! B-Girls Named Dotty! I believe it’s easier just to make a dash for my house next door,” Diogenes rattled off. And he did dash out with the easy run of a man who is in good condition.

“I’ve had it!” boomed one of the Homers — and we don’t know which one — as he was flung free from the donnybrook and smashed into a wall. “Peace and quiet is what a man wants when he comes home in the evening, not this. Folks, I’m going out and up to the comer again. Then I’m going to come home all over again. I’m going to wipe my mind clear of all this. When I turn back from the comer I’ll be whistling Dixie and I’ll be the most peaceful man in the world. But when I get home, I bet neither of you guys had better have happened at all.”