The Wisdom of Solomon

Solomon Perry was destined for failure. His father was disgusted with the boy from the day he was born and his mother insisted on calling him Solomon. "That's a stupid name," he argued. "Nonsense," she snorted. "Solomon was the smartest man in history." "It's a sissy name," he insisted, "and no son of mine is gonna be called it." Then she got mad, and since she could be a real bitch when she put her mind to it, he gave in. But he never expected much of the kid. And little Solomon, like most sons, didn't want to disappoint his daddy.

Solomon's mother, though she stood up for him against her husband, had become disenchanted with her new toy after she realized the diapers and the crying were not going to go away. Eventually she resigned herself to her new role, but she was careful to keep Solomon their only child.

His parents believed, if not in love, at least in discipline, and Solomon grew up in terror of pain. In time, this came to include a fear of sports, and he was soon the clumsiest kid in the neighborhood. Local bullies found him a perfect target for physical and mental torture. He learned quickly to avoid conflict, accepting loneliness as the price to be paid for safety.

With no refuge inside his home, and no reason to go outside, it was little wonder that Solomon turned to books for companionship and solace. Science fiction and fantasy were his earliest paths of escape, and his collection of comic books became legendary. But his tastes soon became cosmopolitan, and his shelves, a literary United Nations: Dickens rubbed shoulders with Dostoevsky; Milne and Milton and Melville were seen in each other's company; and Heinlein and Hesse and Haggard and Hawthorne sang happily discordant harmonies.

Given a choice, Solomon would have remained solitary and invisible. But this choice was taken from him in high school, when the girls who had scorned him before suddenly saw him differently. He was painfully shy, a fact of which he was all too aware. But he had also become quite handsome, a concept which had never dared to enter his mind. This proved a fatal combination. He suddenly found himself drawn into conversations with the girls in his classes, conversations which, for the most part, he didn't initiate. The girls, meanwhile, found him quite intelligent, which served only to further his mystique. More and more, his fellow students--of both genders now--turned to him for advice, for information, for a shoulder to cry on. He craved the attention, and encouraged it by listening eagerly.

It was inevitable that Solomon would begin dating. It was also inevitable that his first date would be a disaster. It was a school dance. He had the day right, and originally had the time right, too. She lived within walking distance of the school, so his father dropped him off at what Solomon thought was her apartment building. But after staring at the huge, old, ivy-covered structure for a few minutes, he decided it looked more like a grade school. He started walking around, looking for the right place. A cold and frantic hour later, he sought out a pay phone, only to find that he hadn't the proper change. He would probably have stood there all night if someone hadn't called the phone booth by mistake. With the help of that cooperative wrong number, he was soon talking to his erstwhile date, who informed him that the "grade school" really was their apartment building. After that, he was certain that the evening couldn't possibly get worse, even though the corsage he'd brought clashed with her dress and he didn't know how to dance.

The evening wasn't a total loss. She had a good sense of humor, and though he never took her out again, she remained his friend, introducing him to her own passion--drama. He'd read many plays, but he'd never considered acting. So he was pleasantly surprised when, on his first audition for a school play (at her urging), he was given a part. Granted, it was small--Officer Brophy in "Arsenic and Old Lace"--but it was the first time he'd ever been accepted for anything. He threw all his heart--and gratitude--into his performance, and was rewarded with the part of the gentleman caller in "The Glass Menagerie". He had found his niche.

During his next three years, Solomon's popularity grew. Of course, there were those who said that the only way to go from nothing is up, but Solomon had not yet learned to be cynical. He was still known primarily as a "brain", but acting was beginning to give him self-assurance. His dates were still nothing exciting, but at least they occurred a little more frequently now, and nothing truly disastrous happened during them.

Solomon had long been aware of romance novels, but had disdained them. However, now that he was beginning to dabble in that world himself, these books became his secret mistresses. Their clandestine rendezvous took place late at night in his room in the dim light of a single, small bedside lamp, soon becoming guilty pleasures. After a while, he turned to such novelists as Henry Miller and Irwin Shaw, and from them to soft-core pornography. He read these in fear and trembling, not only at what he was learning, but also at the possibility of parental discovery. He didn't know it, but he'd already been found out. His mother's reaction was predictable: hysterics, self-recriminations, and a vow to destroy every filthy book in his room. His father's reaction was totally unexpected. In a rare show of paternal pride, he defended his son. "Maybe," he said, "the kid's not gonna grow up queer after all." His refusal to back down put a new strain on their marriage, but by now he was used to that.

Solomon's senior year in high school was, he decided, the best time of his entire life. He had a steady girl friend, people to whom he could talk, and a triumph as Willy Loman in the spring play, "Death of a Salesman". And he'd been accepted at a major West Coast university with a nationally respected theatre program. But his feeling of greatest success came that May when he broke up with his girl friend. Until then, it had always been the other way around.

He arrived at college with his favourite books, his limited wardrobe, and a fresh supply of fearful uncertainty. He had just begun to feel accepted in high school, and this new environment was devastating. He spent his entire first week hiding in his dormitory room, wondering what a little twerp from the Midwest was doing in the Western Mecca of all would-be actors. However, his good sense (and a volume of Hemingway) soon convinced him that if he wanted to survive, he must seize control of his own life. And where better than here, where no one knew him and he could build the persona that he wanted?

So began Solomon's greatest acting challenge. He forced himself to lose his shyness and to imitate the popular people. He wore the right clothes, listened to the right music, and frequented the right hangouts. He went out when he wanted to stay in, sought the crowd when he wanted to be alone, and sat up half the night telling lies about his sexual conquests and drinking prowess when all he really wanted was to lie in bed and read a book. And, in time, his performance became so believable that he convinced even himself. He got properly drunk at parties and vomited with the best of them, graduated from soft-core pornography to the most explicit material he could find, and experimented with much of what he read. He gorged himself on pleasure and popularity and the approval of those he counted as his friends. And he hated every minute of it. His freshman year ended with a plummeting grade-point average, a manic interpretation of King Lear, and a deliberate overdose of amphetamines.

As with almost everything else, he botched his own suicide. However, during his recovery, he discovered philosophy, desperately devouring the works of the world's deepest thinkers. He journeyed with the likes of Plato and Socrates and Bertrand Russel and made side trips into the jungles of such less conventional minds as Carlos Castenadas and Robert M. Pirsig. He was utterly fascinated with them, and when he was released from the hospital in time to sign up for sophomore year, he changed his major to philosophy--much to the relief of the dean of the theatre department, who still had nightmares of King Lear reciting Hamlet's soliloquy to a very confused Cordelia.

When classes resumed, Solomon Perry changed more than his major. He changed his entire lifestyle, now living the life of a near ascetic. His private library of pornography--which had achieved a status once enjoyed by his comic book collection--was donated to a properly awestruck freshman. His floor mates' parties were made duller by the loss of his inebriated antics. And his relationships with the co-eds took an intellectual turn, with only an occasional digression to satisfy the appetites of the flesh. His grade-point average reversed its downward spiral virtually overnight. His parents, who had viewed his dissipation with disfavor (and at a distance, refusing to visit him even in his convalescence), were relieved with this sudden outburst of common sense. He coldly maintained that their opinions were entirely immaterial, but deep inside, something was pleased that he'd finally made mommy and daddy happy.

Another year passed. Spring once more approached, and with it, discontent. Solomon realized that, for all his knowledge and experimentations, his life was a shell in which his intellect rattled like a dried pea. The philosophers, he saw, were searching for an elusive something that would justify their own--and everybody else's--existence, and even those who claimed to have all the answers had, at best, only clues. Solomon was left with an acute sense of frustration, which crystallized into a firm resolve. If he couldn't find what he sought in the souls of others, he would have to find it in his own. But where to begin?

The answer eluded him for weeks. A year of philosophy told him that it would not be found in the intellect. And he'd been to the outskirts of the chemically induced Utopias advocated by some of the contemporary sages and found them to be little more than slums. But it wasn't until just before final exams that an unlikely door was opened. He was reading about one of his favourite science-fiction authors, L. Ron Hubbard, when he was reminded that Hubbard had founded his own religion. He had ignored that revelation before, but now he was curious. A quick study of the doctrines of Scientology convinced him that Hubbard had missed the answer, too, but the realm of the spiritual and mystical had become an attractive idea. So as soon as his exams were over, Solomon turned to religion.

Orthodox Christianity he rejected immediately. His parents had insisted on the traditional church training, and his observations of the workings of the church had left him unimpressed. He'd perceived it as all hypocrisies and empty words; wonderful in theory, but impossible in practice. He agreed with Nietzsche that "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross". Besides, something in him resented a religion that could inspire a woman to name her child "Solomon".

He glanced only briefly at Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and the like, for he was soon convinced that, like Christianity, their teachings were marvelous but impractical. This took him through the summer months, when he had to decide whether to continue in philosophy during his third year. He chose to quit school altogether. His parents were furious, his mother demanding why she deserved such treatment, his father making dark and dire predictions of future failures. Solomon had long ago learned to ignore them. He took a job in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore that specialized in little-known volumes on arcane subjects. It wasn't much, but it kept him fed on Hamburger Helper in his tiny efficiency apartment while giving him access to information on dozens of offbeat religions.

During the next months, Solomon spent every spare minute assimilating every bit of knowledge he could find. If he wasn't satisfied with what he read, he sought it personally. He attended Ba'hai firesides and Unification Church weekend retreats. He haunted services given by Mormons and Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses and Unitarians, carrying away all their literature. He participated in seminars on Transcendental Meditation and est and Spiritualism and The Way, and hitchhiked hundreds of miles to hear Moses David and the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and David Spangler. And, after more than a year of intensive research, he firmly concluded that none of them knew what the hell they were talking about.

This was dismaying and stimulating; dismaying because it meant that all that study had seemingly gone for nothing, yet stimulating because it meant that if he was to find an answer, he would have to do it on his own. He cast about for some way to begin, and, once again, his beloved science fiction provided the answer. As he re-read Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", Solomon was reminded of hybrid Martian Valentine Michael Smith's self-concocted religion, based on the premise, "Thou art God". Through earlier readings, Solomon had smiled indulgently. The idea of every living thing being God had seemed so naive, but now he lay aside the volume and gave it some thought. The same concept was the basis for pantheism, his favourite theology. And it really wasn't too far removed from that most exemplary of all Christians, Jesus of Nazareth, who had said (if he remembered correctly), "The kingdom of God is within you", and "God and I are one".

The more he thought about it, the more intrigued Solomon became. It was a crazy idea, to be sure, but no crazier than many of the others he'd studied. And it was rather appealing. He played with it for several days before he reluctantly abandoned it. After all, if he was God--or even a godling--he should have some control over his own existence, shouldn't he? At least, he should be able to work a miracle or two. And yet, the only real miracle in his miserable life was that he'd managed to stay alive and sane so far.

Now he plunged into a black mood that nothing--not his religious studies, not his philosophy, not even his science fiction--could shatter. He prowled the streets after dark, existing on an hour or two of tortured sleep. He conducted ever more bizarre sexual experiments in an effort to recapture a sense of excitement, relying on a bewildering variety of drugs to keep him going. And, finally, something snapped.

It was three o'clock on a wet, chill spring morning. Solomon stood swaying in the center of a murkily lit room, staring around him at the writhing bodies, feeling disgust rise like nausea. A naked, leering stranger was beginning to strip him of his own clothes. Without even thinking, Solomon planted his fist in the center of the guy's leer. He ignored the explosion of blood and teeth, the bodies he kicked at, the screams of pain, the angry shouts, the fingernails that clawed at him as he fought his way to the door and out to the street. He ran without caring where he went, ran until he could run no more, then collapsed, sobbing and retching.

He awoke at mid-afternoon in a refuse-choked alley. His head whirled and ached, the knuckles of his left hand were stiff and swollen, and the blood-caked scratches on his face and arms throbbed and stung. He tried to stand, but the effort made him sick again. So he lay in his own vomit, trying desperately to cling to something of hope.

As he stared at the harsh, blue-gray sky, a tiny voice began yammering in his ear. "I think, therefore, I am," it burbled. This is a hell of a time to think of Descartes, he told himself, but the voice ignored his rebuke. "I think, therefore, I am, " it tittered. "I think, therefore I am. I think therefore I am. IthinkthereforeIam. IthinkthereforeIamIthinkthereforeIamIthinkthereforeI--"

"Shut up!" he screamed, and "Shut up!" screamed the echoes. A cloud of pigeons roiled the air with startled wings. "I think," whispered the voice, "therefore, I am."

Battling the pain and sickness, he dragged himself to his feet and staggered out of the alley, supporting himself against the wall. The street was busy and the sidewalks filled with beautiful people who glared at his torn, befouled clothing and haggard, filthy visage, wrinkling their noses as they veered sharply around him. He saw none of them. He wanted to find a quiet place where he could die in peace, or at least where he could escape from that voice which giggled incessantly at his shoulder, "I think, therefore, I am."

Another wave of nausea surged through him. He fought it, leaning his head against a cool pane of glass. The illness receded, and he stared into the peaceful darkness before him. He ached to enter and lose himself in solitude, and it was nearly two full minutes before he even saw the window display. A pile of books was scattered in an artistically haphazard fashion; a Bible was there, and several doctrinal books of the Church of Christ, Scientist. He dimly remembered reading those books, not so long ago. One of them, "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures", lay open atop the pile, a passage highlighted in fluorescent yellow. He read a few words before he had to turn his tortured eyes away from the colour, but the rest of the passage crept into his memory: "There is no matter in Life, and no life in matter, no matter in good, and no good in matter. The verity of Mind shows conclusively how it is that matter seems to be, but is not. Matter has no life, hence it has no real existence." "I think, therefore, I am!" cried the voice in triumph, and in that instant Rene Descartes had met and wooed and wed with Mary Baker Eddy.

Solomon fell to his knees, gritting his teeth and clutching at his head. He had to get away, find somewhere to hide and think. He staggered away from the Christian Science Reading Room and back to the alley, where he collapsed in the rancid garbage behind an overflowing dumpster. Something had happened, something important. If he could only stop the pounding in his head for a moment, maybe--

"THOU ART GOD!!"

The voice reverberated from the looming walls, crashed against his skull, and battered his numbed brain.

"THOU ART GOD!!'

"Who are you?" he screamed, clutching his exploding head. "What do you want?"

"THOU ART GOD!!" the voice roared. It was his own voice, but he wasn't speaking. "THOU THINKEST, THEREFORE, THOU ART. MATTER IS EVIL. EVIL DOES NOT EXIST. MATTER DOES NOT EXIST. THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN THEE. THOU ART GOD. THOU ART INSANE. THOU RIDEST THE WINDS OF ETERNITY. THY MIND HATH CREATED ALL THAT THOU SEEST. THOU ART INSANE. THOU ART GOD!!"

The echoes died away. Solomon let out a weak, pitiful, kitten-cry of terror. Then he fainted.

When he woke, the sky was dark and his mind was clear. He was still very weak, but he was able to stand without the world reeling. He remembered something about an insane god, but it was all a jumble, until he heard his voice whisper in the dark, "Thou art God". Then he recalled the booming message. It had seemed foolish and confused, but that was because he, too, had been confused. Now his mind was sharper than ever, and the words had a crystalline clarity. He looked up, and they were written across the sky in huge, glittering letters. He quickly lowered his eyes, embarrassed, hoping no one else would notice. With great dignity ("Thou art God", the voice murmured), he straightened his fouled clothes and stepped, with only the slightest unsteadiness, out of the alley. He was aware that he stank, but he didn't care. He now had a purpose, and needed only a place to fulfill it.

He walked all night, leaving the city and climbing the rugged, wooded hills. The moon, no longer hidden by the smog, lit his path with a glorious light. Once he looked up at the stars that beckoned so temptingly ("That's where you belong," urged the whisper, "you must return there!"), but it made him so dizzy that he kept his eyes to the ground from then on.

Dawn found him seated in lotus position atop a high cliff, staring out over the ocean. He had spent the last hour or so piecing everything together. It had been almost childishly simple with his new clarity of mind. That he was alone in the universe was certain. Nothing else existed but him; not even his body. ("Mind is all," whispered the voice. "Matter doesn't exist.") He--his mind--had been extant for all eternity. But at some point he had become bored, and, for amusement, had created a world in his imagination. He had done his work too well; he had created too believable a world, and had become lost in it. He had gone mad, and in his madness had created things with which to torture himself--pain and embarrassment and people like his teachers and his schoolmates and his parents. Yet through it all, some part of his mind had remained sane, trying to regain control, leaving hints about the truth in the books he'd read, working toward this moment. All that remained was to complete the transition.

The sun peeped over the trees behind him, and Solomon fixed his eyes on the distant sea-horizon. He began to quietly drone the mantra he had been given during his flirtation with Transcendental Meditation, turning his thoughts inward. ("The kingdom of God is within you," assured the whisper. "Thou art God.") He felt a strange, new power, and closed his eyes. One by one, he felt the shackles of insanity slip from him. He opened his eyes and looked down at the sea, finally recognizing it as a bit of his imagination over which he had control. He smiled. "Cease," he murmured. "Be still."

And the waves froze.

Solomon scrambled to his feet, staring. It was working! He was regaining control! He laughed at the motionless gulls anchored against the sapphire water, then whirled and pointed at the sun and cried, "Go down!", and in an instant it was sinking behind the forest. "Halt!" he cried, and it stopped. "Now rise!" And it rose again as he shouted in triumphant exhilaration.

"Are you all right?" a voice beside him asked. Solomon slowly turned his head and found a young couple in hiking clothes, staring at him with concern. He smiled benignly at them.

"Listen," the young man continued solicitously, "you're not looking so hot. Come with us, we'll get you to a doctor."

Solomon laughed. "You can't fool me any more," he assured them. "I'm remembering. Oh, you look real enough, but I know better. You don't exist."

The girl tugged at her companion's sleeve. "Let's go," she whispered. "The guy's crazy."

Solomon laughed again. "That won't work! I know the truth now. You can't hold me by confusing me. Sure, I was crazy, but I'm not going to be soon."

The couple started backing away. "Listen," the young man said quickly, "you just wait here, we'll send help--"

Solomon cut him off. "Help?" he chortled. "I don't need help! Especially from my own phantoms! Here!" He pointed at them. "You don't exist, you know. So be gone! Now!"

The girl screamed as they dissolved into a million sparkling particles that floated away on the breeze.

Solomon laughed again. It was so easy, so wonderfully easy, now that he knew the truth. He spread his arms wide and stared up into the bright blue depths of the sky. "They weren't real," he chuckled. "They weren't real at all. Nothing is real--nothing but me!"

He felt suddenly light-headed, quickly lowered his eyes, and gasped in joyful surprise. He had left the ground and was rising straight up! The cliff-top, the forest, the frozen sea--all were rapidly dwindling beneath his toes. He cried out again and again in delight. There was the city, wrapped like a caterpillar in its cocoon of smog. There were the mountains to the east, and the desert beyond. There was the entire coast beneath him, from Mexico to Canada; and still he rose, until he could see the opposite ocean slip up over the edge of the world, beneath the clouds. He knew none of it was real, but for the moment he reveled in the brilliance of his own creation. All of North America was beneath him, getting ever smaller. South America joined it, and the poles, and now the whole world of his imagination. He flashed by the moon, giving it hardly a glance as it and the earth receded.

And then everything slowed and stopped and he hung in space, looking around. The stars were more intense than he had ever seen them. The nearer planets were tiny, softly mottled discs. And the sun--he squinted and shaded his eyes. It was so bright! He frowned at it, and it dimmed. He thought, If I'm going to regain control, I have to start somewhere, and he reached out with thumb and forefinger and snuffed out the sun like a candle. Then he waved his hand nonchalantly and the stars and planets winked out of existence.

He turned back to the Earth. It glowed sullenly, refusing to be banished. He contemplated it. It had been his most delicate and beloved creation, but it had gone so wrong. His every pain and humiliation had been suffered there. It was a special place that should be treated specially. He stared at it, and it brightened, glowing from within. The oceans began to boil, obscuring the continents with vast clouds of steam. The light increased, and the entire planet wavered and blurred. A hissing tendril reached out, wrapped itself lovingly around the moon, and drew the cold rock to its fiery breast. The light became another sun, and then began to fade; white melting to yellow and then gold and then orange and red and finally a filmy magenta that drifted apart and disappeared.

And now Solomon was left in complete darkness with only the beating of his heart and the rasping of his breath. He smiled. His body, too, was an illusion, to be disposed of with the others if he was to complete his self-cure. Slowly and carefully, he obliterated his toes, and then worked his way upward until nothing remained but his mind, floating serenely in the eternal void.

They found him where the two hikers said they'd left him. He was standing, motionless, arms dangling at his sides; head cocked slightly, lips curved in a gentle smile, eyes staring vacantly at the sky. He responded to nothing, and they finally carried him back to the city.

They eventually identified him and found his parents. Their reactions when notified were like the chorus of an old song. His mother wailed, "How could he do this to me?"; his father merely snorted, "I always knew he was nuts." The doctors couched their own diagnosis in obscure Latin and gave little hope for recovery. His parents had him transferred to a cheap, minimal care facility. They mailed their check regularly, but never visited. "Our son," they said, "died long ago."

Solomon was content. He hovered in blessed darkness as he had once hovered eons ago. He had been insane, but he was all right now. The tortures of that false world were behind him. Of course, he would eventually grow weary of nothing as he had before, and would once again create an imaginary world for himself. This time he would be more careful, and create a place without the terrors of the last one. But that was in the future yet; the far, far future. Now he was looking forward to a couple millennia of rest. If he'd had lungs, he would have sighed; if he'd had lips, he would have smiled.

Solomon Perry had, at last, found peace.

THE END


Copyright ?2001 by Stephen M. Larson

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