Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Sixteen

She said, “This may be difficult to explain. Nobody sat down with me and told me things. I was shown, I was given to understand. Do you know what cancer is, Guthrie?”

“More or less. Something starts growing in you, and if they don’t cut it out it keeps on growing until it kills you.”

“Yes.”

“Or unless you cure it yourself. The good cells run around eating up the bad cells, or however Sue Anne did it.”

She nodded. “Something starts growing in you,” she said. “The something that grows is part of you. Let me tell you what cancer is. Cancer is cellular ego.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Let me try to explain. Picture a cell in your body. It’s a part of one of your organs and it has a job to do and it does it. But one day something upsets that cell and causes it to change its behavior. Maybe it’s a cell in your lung, and you’ve been bombarding it with tobacco smoke for years until the cell’s engulfed in tar. And finally the cell says, ‘Hey, this isn’t working. I’m in real trouble here, and if I just keep on doing my usual job I’m not going to survive, and then where’ll we be?’ So the cell goes on a crash program for survival. It multiplies like crazy to guarantee it’ll be around for a while. It kills any other cells that get in its way. And it does such a good job of survival that it spreads wildly all through the system, and eventually it kills the body it’s been a part of, and, because in the long run it’s just a cell and not a complete organism and it can’t survive alone, finally it dies along with the rest of the body.”

“And that’s what cancer is?”

“What it is and how it works. Cancer’s a cell with a mind of its own. It may be an irritant, like tobacco smoke or asbestos fibers or food additives, that nudges it into a cycle of eccentric behavior. It may be emotional. Look at all the widows who manifest breast cancer. They stuff their grief and their anger at being left, and a cell feels threatened by all that psychic pain, and starts growing in self-defense. One way or another we choose our diseases and find a way to bully our cells into creating them. One way or another we activate the cell’s ego and the label we put on what follows is cancer.”

“Why cellular ego? How does ego enter into it?”

“Because your ego is the part of you that believes you’re separate from the rest of the universe, and that thinks you have to be separate in order to survive. When a cell behaves as if it had an ego, and allows that ego to dictate its behavior, the result is cancer.”

“Okay, but how does a planet get cancer? The earth’s not a living thing.”

“Of course it is. Did you think it was just a chunk of lifeless rock?”

“No, but it’s a setting for life rather than a living being. It’s a home for all of us, it’s a nurturing environment, but it’s not a creature itself, is it?”

“Isn’t it? Every last bit of the planet’s alive, you know. Every molecule, every atom, is buzzing with activity. Nothing stands still. Everything is changing, growing, evolving, going through cycles of birth and death. The rocks are alive. The water is alive.”

“And the hills,” he said. “With the sound of music.”

She leaned forward, touched his arm. “Guthrie,” she said, “I saw the earth the way the astronauts have seen it. It looks like a beautiful blue pearl, and it’s a living being. The rivers are its bloodstream, the atmosphere is its respiratory system. The rocks and mountains are its bones. Everything that lives, everything that is, is part of a tissue or organ or system of the planet it lives on.”

“And what are we?”

“As human beings? You can answer that by looking at what we have that distinguishes us from the other animals. That’s what we are to the planet.”

“What does that make us, the earth’s opposable thumb?”

She laughed. “Oh, that’s lovely. No, our wonderful thumbs are just tools we grew to make it easier to be what we are. It’s our brains that make us unique, and that’s what we are. The human race is the cognitive brain of the planet earth.”

“I think the earth must have a headache.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It does.”

“No, I was just joking, Sara.”

“I wasn’t. The earth has worse than a headache. It’s got brain fever. The human race is cancerous, it’s a planetary brain tumor.”

“‘The goddamned human race.’ That’s what Mark Twain called it.”

“More than that, surely. God damned perhaps, but God blessed as well. Awful and wonderful.”

“Those meant the same thing once, you know. Full of awe and full of wonder. Now one’s good and the other’s bad.”

“Yes,” she said. “Awful and wonderful. Could you get me some water, Guthrie? This is thirsty work.”

“Ego,” Sara said. “Cancer. Human beings behave like cancer cells. They think they can survive independently at the expense of the rest of the world. They spoil the planet. They kill the other animals and they kill each other. Every faith tells them that they’re all one flesh, that all men are brothers, but none of them act as though they believe it.”

“Hasn’t it always been that way? Isn’t that just part of the human condition?”

“Yes. And for thousands of years it didn’t matter. Man, exercising his cognitive brain, indulging his ego, could do whatever he wanted as he grew in mastery over his environment. We could kill his brothers and be killed by them in turn. There’s no danger in it. He kills, he’s killed, the earth abides and the mountains remain. Souls learn the lesson they came here to learn. Life goes on. The planet goes on.

“Oh, there are some events that look catastrophic. Genocide erases the last passenger pigeon and almost wipes out the bison and the Jew. It is indeed awful and wonderful, the history of mankind. On the bus ride west I would look out at a river or a mountain and see its progress through all of time, and every vista I looked upon that way was awful and wonderful, because that’s what man’s story has always been.

“And it didn’t matter. The earth could allow man to slip his leash and range at the effect of his ego. He wasn’t dangerous. The harm he did wasn’t lasting.” She took a breath. “But it’s different now.”

“How?”

“His tools and weapons are more powerful. Cain doesn’t just kill Abel now. He blows up the world. You can’t do the things you used to do when they have the power to do permanent damage on a global scale. Man is strong enough to destroy the planet now. And he’s been doing it.”

“You mean nuclear weapons?”

“Of course, if they’re used. And if enough countries have them and enough people take them for granted, sooner or later they’ll be used. Nuclear power could destroy the world without a war, if there’s an accidental meltdown on a large enough scale.

“But that’s just one area. A few hundred years ago the Indians in eastern North America used to burn the forest on purpose to flush game. It didn’t matter. There weren’t that many Indians, they didn’t set that many fires, and the forest always grew back. Then the white man came and cleared the land for farming and settlement, and the forest was gone forever.

“In Brazil the rain forest is disappearing. Every single day more acres of it are cleared and burned and more tropical rain forest is gone forever. And, as it goes, the planet’s ozone layer is eroding and starting to go, and the temperature of the planet is probably going to increase a degree or two, and there’ll be some melting of the polar caps, and the seas will rise and the whole climate of the earth will change. No one knows quite what will happen; predictions range from a new Ice Age to subtropical conditions in northern Europe. No one is certain, but everyone knows the rain forest is too valuable to be lost, and it goes on disappearing every single day. Because the people who are cutting it down think they have to do that to survive.”

She took another sip of water. “And that’s the problem,” she said. “Not what man does but how he thinks, because that’s what determines what he does. We don’t need more knowledge. We already know that global population has to stabilize, that irreplaceable resources can’t be squandered, that war and preparations for war are more than any nation can afford. We know that. Everybody knows it. But the population grows and the world’s stores are depleted and nations arm themselves and make war.

“Everybody knows better, but ego makes villains of us all. The Japanese think they have to go on slaughtering whales. The Arabs think God wants them to blow up airplanes. In Ireland the Catholics and Protestants are having a religious war. That may even have made a certain amount of sense in the seventeenth century, but it’s completely ridiculous now. And everybody knows that, everybody on both sides knows that, and nobody can stop it.”

“You said it’s always worked out in the past.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’ll work out now. Some people will be killed and some species will die out, but that’s been happening since the Flood. Maybe it’s still just part of the process, maybe—”

She was shaking her head. “No. We’re running out of time.”

“How do you know?”

“I was given to know it. But people have always known. So many of the religions talk about the Last Days, and many of them seem to agree on a date somewhere around the year 2000. The Mayan calendar runs out in the year 2011. The predictions of Nostradamus grind to a halt around the end of the century. According to a Brahman story, Brahma began breathing out the universe in a single breath — which, incidentally, fits remarkably well with the Big Bang theory of creation. Around the year 2000, Brahma runs out of breath.”

“And the world ends?”

“No — he begins inhaling what he breathed out. You can interpret that as you please. Maybe it’s the end of the world. Maybe it’s the beginning of something else.”

“Like what?”

“A new age. There’s a theory that says Nostradamus and the other prophetic systems end when they do because a new time is going to dawn, and history will cease to be predictable. Everything will be so utterly different that no one with his feet planted in the Old Age can guess what it will look like. Nostradamus can’t foresee it and the Mayans can’t count the years or predict the eclipses.” She held out her hands. “So those are the choices, my friend. Heaven on earth or the end of the world.”

“Either way, a whole new ballgame.”

“A new game or no game at all.”

He scratched his head. “This is hard to take in,” he said.

“I tried to explain as well as I could.”

“You did fine. The hard part isn’t understanding what you’re saying, it’s getting my mind to wrap itself around the idea of it. Either the world ends or Man behaves in a completely different fashion, is that what it adds up to?”

“Yes.”

“But knowing we have to act differently won’t cut it, because we’ve known that all along, and we can’t do anything about it.”

“Yes, because it’s not a logic problem. We know right now how to feed the world. Instead we have farm surpluses and banks foreclosing on farmers and grain rotting in warehouses and famine in Africa, all happening at once. Knowing doesn’t help.”

“Then what the hell do we do? If we’re the cancer, how do we cure the planet without destroying ourselves? What you’re talking about is a wholly revolutionary change in human behavior.”

“Yes.”

“It’s human ego that’s the planetary cancer, isn’t it? How do you cut the ego out of a human being? What kind of scalpel do you use?”

“That’s not it,” she said. “You can’t remove the ego surgically. You can’t kill it or crush it. Human destiny doesn’t call for us to wind up as ants in an ant colony, the selfless servants of a despotic planet. The way we have to deal with ego is by transcending it. We have to outgrow the illusion that the ego is right and that anything can be good for one of us if it’s not good for all of us. We have to remember who we really are.”

“‘Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.’ You know the Yeats poem?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what this is beginning to sound like. ‘The Second Coming.’”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

He looked at her. “Sara,” he said, “this isn’t some elaborate cosmic joke, is it? Jody wanted to know if we were heading for Washington. Should I have told him that our actual destination is a little north of there, where a Pennsylvania Dutch farmgirl will soon be preparing to give birth to a babe in a stone barn outside of Bethlehem?”

She laughed.

“Well? When we pass Harrisburg, do I start looking for a bright star?”

“No,” she said. “That’s not how it will happen this time around.”

“Then we really are talking about the second coming.”

She nodded. “The first time the Christ Consciousness came to earth it was in the form of a single man. It happened more than once, incidentally. There have been Christs besides Jesus. There was Krishna, there was Buddha, there were others. Different civilizations had their individual visitations. The second coming will be for the whole world, and it won’t be one man. The second coming will occur when the Christ Consciousness is instilled in the entire human race.”

He thought about this. “And that’s what this is all about,” he said. “What we’re walking for.”

“Yes.”

“High-stakes poker. Either the world comes to an end or it’s heaven on earth and two cars in every garage. Two smog-free cars, I suppose. Solar-powered, probably.”

“Could be.”

“All because an aimless bartender in Roseburg, Oregon, decided it was a nice day for a walk. Shouldn’t I have talked to a burning bush first, Sara?”

“I thought you heard a voice.”

“Yes, I did. I tend to forget that. Well, what did I do? I went for a walk and ran into a strange sort of St. Paul who fell out of his truck and joined the party. Then we met a lady who phased out her eyes so she could see better, and now we’re within a few miles of the spot where the Indians brought Custer an abrupt sense of his own mortality, and I’m having a wonderful time, Sara, I really am, but it’s hard to believe we’re saving the world.”

“What happens to people when they start walking with us, Guthrie?”

“They quit smoking, they hyperventilate, their tattoos fade, their arthritis dissolves, their acne clears up, their warts disappear, and now it looks as though they grow themselves new teeth. Suppose we pick up a guy with an arm missing. Will he grow a new one?”

“Why not? Crabs and lobsters do it all the time. What else happens to people, Guthrie? What happens on the inside?”

“We change.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t turn into clones. If anything, people become more completely themselves.”

“That’s right.”

“We walk out of our old lives. We let go, we open up. We forgive and forget, and one of the things we forget is who we thought we were.”

“And we remember who we really are.”

“Yes.”

“And love our neighbors as ourselves, and act out some of the other radical notions that fellow was talking about on the mountain.”

“Uh-huh. But—”

“What, Guthrie?”

“Well, does it amount to anything? It’s wonderful for us, I’m not asking for a better way to spend my summer, but I didn’t know I was doing this to save the planet. Are we reaching enough people? Shouldn’t we, well, find a way to get the word around faster?”

She smiled. “You think we need media attention? We could get one of the networks to send a film crew to follow us around. You could hold press conferences and announce all the latest miracles.”

“Jesus, don’t even say that.”

“You and I could go on Donahue and Oprah Winfrey and spread the word. We could answer provocative questions from the audience. Or maybe it would be better to buy some TV time. Should we start raising money?”

“Stop it, Sara.”

“We could get one of the shoe companies to sponsor us. ‘When you’re walking to Glory, only Reeboks will do.’ Or should we offer it to Nike first? After all, this whole thing started in Oregon, so maybe we ought to do business with a local firm.”

“I get the point, Sara. I really do.”

“Wanting to make it happen faster is just ego, Guthrie. It’s thinking, ‘Oh boy, God’s in deep shit without my help.’ It’s thinking we have to get people to do what we want them to do for their own good. But we haven’t been trying to make anybody do anything, and the only people who join us are people who want to, and that’s why it all feels right. We’re not going to make this happen by marching on Washington and telling the government what to do. But if we go on walking wherever your intuition happens to lead us, and if people join us because they’re led to join us, somebody in Washington’s going to get up from his desk one of these days and decide he feels like going for a walk.”

“And who runs the store when everybody goes for a walk?”

“It doesn’t matter. Who’s tending bar in Roseburg? It really doesn’t matter. You know that line, ‘It’s a lousy job but somebody has to do it’? If it’s really a lousy job, then nobody has to do it.”