Charlie is My Darling
by William K. CarlsonToday was strange. Strange? Today was downright weird!
It all started yesterday morning on the way to work, jerking and jiggling and hanging onto a subway strap while trying to read the Times. The article was on page nine - a minor miracle I ever saw it - and the headline was "CHARLES DICKENS FOUND ON BROADWAY?" I was scanning the first paragraph when some jerk in a black polo shirt tried to feel me up. I rammed my elbow into his ribs so hard he gasped, then I slammed my hard rubber heel down onto his training shoe as hard as I could. The guy's face turned white - greenish-white - something broken, I hope? - and he got as far away from me as he could in the crowded car. Feeling like a Valkyrie or Amazon or something, I continued reading:
"An unusual case of mental illness was reported today by Dr. Raul Hartmann, Director of the Brooklyn Halfway House in Bay Ridge. Dr. Hartmann said that a white male apparently in his mid-thirties was picked up by the NYPD yesterday morning on Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets after nearly being run over. Confused and disoriented, the nameless man claimed he did not understand that red meant stop and green meant go - which wasn't so much of a surprise when the man explained that he was Charles Dickens, and the year was 1843.
"The would-be Dickens, whose actual name is unknown at this time, did not reveal his name at first. He began by asking what had happened to all the horses and carriages, and to all the mud and pigs in the streets. He also expressed intense interest in automobiles, asking "Were they like locomotives running off the track?"
"Dr. Hartmann said that when the officers told him that tall buildings and cars and trucks and buses were quite normal for the year 2009, the man became faint and unresponsive. When he recovered, he announced that the last he knew, he was in London, England, 1843 - and that he was the renowned Charles Dickens.
"At this point the officers took the man, who carried no ID, into custody for his own protection. After consultation with city health officials, the officers brought him to the Brooklyn Halfway House where he is now under the care of Dr. Hartmann."
Well! For a gal who had listened to her book-publisher father read A Christmas Carol aloud every other December throughout her childhood and who was brought up on Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and who is at this very moment trying to get the money and talent together to produce a four-hour miniseries on the life of the great nineteenth century novelist and social reformer, this article had, shall we say, a certain resonance. Good God, that sentence is worthy of Dickens himself - in length, anyway.
Unfortunately - although I did stick that section of the Times into my shoulder bag - the usual studio Sturm und Drang pushed the story out of my mind. I'm working simultaneously on a made-for-TV movie, a miniseries on Jack London and a sitcom series - not including the Dickens miniseries - all of which does tend to keep my mind occupied. So it wasn't until I was riding the subway home last night that I thought about "Charles Dickens" again.
It was already seven-thirty when I got home, but once the story popped back into my head it wouldn't let go. I dug out the article, called the Halfway House, and mirabile dictu! - Dr. Hartmann was still there and was quite willing to talk to a TV producer. I think he was disappointed to learn that I wasn't the kind of producer who could get him twenty minutes on "Dateline" or whatever, but he hid his disappointment pretty well and I made an appointment to meet him and "Charlie," as Dr. Hartmann called him, today at one o'clock.
I frequently work all day Saturday - but hey, all work and no play makes Jack - or Jan - a you-know-what, and besides, I had a hunch about Charlie.
What if he wasn't a mental case at all but a clever imposter, maybe an amateur Dickens scholar, who was using this ploy to parlay himself into a little fame and fortune? Or a lot of fame and fortune? The whole business intrigued me - mental case, impostor, whatever, there had to be a story in there somewhere.
Got out to the Halfway House on Marine Avenue, near the Verrazano Narrows Bridge - hadn't been to Bay Ridge for years - found Dr. Hartmann pretty much what I'd expected, typical Jewish psychiatrist. Hey, I can say it, I'm one-quarter Jewish on my mother's side. But Charlie I found... Well, let's just say that Charlie is something else again.
To begin with, he doesn't look anything like Charles Dickens, except maybe for his eyes. Charles Dickens, according to Forster and Johnson and Kaplan and all his biographers, had extraordinary, speaking brown eyes, revealing a quicksilver stream of emotions and underneath, a will of steel. Even filled with confusion as they are now, Charlie's eyes are wonderfully bright and expressive. But he is over six feet tall, more Crowe than DiCaprio, rugged good looks and rather ponderous movements, while Dickens was a much smaller man with a dancer's physical grace. Also, Dickens had long curly chestnut hair while Charlie's is dark and cut short. Charlie doesn't sound like Charles Dickens either. Obviously we don't have any recordings of the great man's voice, but tens of thousands of Americans heard him on his reading tours. We know that the voice of Charles Dickens was rather high-pitched and dramatic in tone, with the upper-class English accent one would expect. Charlie's voice is very different, a husky baritone with a definite American Midwestern twang.
However, what Charlie actually says in that flat Kansas accent you have never heard on the streets of Topeka. As near as Hartmann and I can tell - except for the accent - Charlie sounds very much like an educated Londoner of the mid-nineteenth century. It's true that Dickens was mostly self-educated, but it was a rigorous and disciplined self-education. And having friends like Thomas Carlyle and Richard Owen and William Makepeace Thackeray would be an education in itself. Also, Charlie seems honestly and utterly flummoxed by twenty-first century New York. Either the man really has never seen stoplights and automobiles and skyscrapers or else he is the best actor I have ever encountered - and as a TV and film producer for thirteen years, I've encountered some pretty good ones. He talked a lot this afternoon about Kate and Charley and Mamey and Katey and Walter and a man named Forster. These references confused Dr. Hartmann - he isn't a Dickens scholar or even a fan - but I quickly sorted them out as Dickens's wife Catherine, the first four of his ten children, and his best and lifelong friend, John Forster. Charlie also mentioned the year 1843 and his need to finish something before Christmas, and he kept feeling the third finger of his right hand and muttering, "Where is it? Where is Mary's ring?"
Not being a full-time Dickens scholar myself, I couldn't immediately confirm all these details, but I've since checked the biographies and everything fits. In the winter of 1843 Charles Dickens got the idea for A Christmas Carol, and in a fine frenzy of creation - all-night walks through the streets of London, days spent at his writing desk - composed the Carol. The reference to Mary's ring refers to his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, who lived mostly with Charles and Catherine after their marriage, and whom Dickens idolized. She died in his arms at the age of seventeen and for the rest of his life he wore her ring.
I've just checked another half-dozen of Charlie's statements with my reference books - too tired to list them - and he's right on target with every one. If this guy is a phony, by God he has done his homework!
It's been a fascinating and exhausting day, and I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll pop over to the Fourteenth Street Monthly Meeting in Gramercy Park tomorrow morning - a little quiet Quaker contemplation might be just what I need after all this - and then it's out to Bay Ridge again in the afternoon. Hartmann is gathering books and papers on channeling and time-warps and various paranormal psychic states. We've decided to say nothing to the press until we get a better handle on this thing. If Charlie is an imposter - still the most likely explanation - he is the best I've ever seen and still a fascinating story, maybe even worth twenty minutes on "Prime Time" or "Dateline." On the other hand, if Charles Dickens - channeling through a lanky American Midwesterner - is somehow paying our twenty-first century a visit from 1843 - well, God knows what will come of that.
New York City Twenty-ninth October 2009
My Dear Forster,
I don't suppose you will ever see this letter - or the others I shall undoubtedly write in an attempt to preserve what remains of my sanity here in this brave new world - unless somehow I can take them with me back to our dear old dirty London. That is, if I ever get back.
But what am I saying? Of course I'll get back, I must get back, because on Jan's shelves (Jan is my mentor and guide to twenty-first century New York) is a whole row of novels by one Charles Dickens, nine and a half of which were published after the Carol comes out - came out - in 1843. What is the half, you ask? I answer, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, left unfinished at my death in 1870.
Well, old friend, I have been staring at that last sentence for ten minutes - surely one of the strangest ever penned! How I have come to read books which I have not yet written and inhabit this hulking six-foot body and speak with this grotesque American twang which I am just now - I have been here almost a fortnight - beginning to shed, I do not know. O Forster, if you could only - it is unbelievably wonderful and terrible, this future world. Jan is doing her best to catch me up on 165 years of history, but it just - it just isn't - let me put it this way. Do you remember our rambles in Cornwall with Maclise and Stanfield, after Longfellow visited Kate and me at Devonshire Terrace? Remember that cool, misty Saturday afternoon, after we had prowled though a coal mine and visited that ancient church in Camborne, how the four of us got into that strange conversation about what the world might be like in the year 1900 and then in the year 2000? Well, I can tell you now that our wildest flights of fancy did not even come close to this twenty-first century reality!
For reality it is, Forster. I do not believe for one second that I am dreaming or in the middle of some fantastical vision - it is all too real, the airplanes flying overhead, the automobiles and buses on the streets with nary a horse to pull them, these incredibly tall buildings, higher than any cliffs in England, and telephones and radios and televisions and these amazing machines called computers which Jan is teaching me how to use, and even this very pen I am using to write to you. Believe it or not, this pen - called a ball point pen - writes without a nib and even without ink! Or rather the ink is inside of it somehow, you never have to dip it into ink - there probably isn't a single ink well left in New York City - and apparently they last for months of writing. They even come in different colors - very handy for correcting manuscripts.
However, this little miracle is nothing, absolutely nothing in comparison to these computers I mentioned. They are everywhere, not only in every office and home in New York City but - so Jan tells me - all over the world. We have three in our rooms here, and Jan is trying to teach me how to write a story on one of them, then print it out, perfectly typeset, like pages in a book. I was afraid to touch the thing at first - it seemed like magic, black magic - but after a couple of days my fascination overcame my fear, and I sat down in front of the window-like device, called a monitor, and the group of buttons with letters on them called a keyboard. I picked out the letters CHARLES DICKENS and saw them come up on the monitor - quite a moment for the old Inimitable! Our computers also display the most amazing pictures and sounds and somehow all this information can be flashed to other computers around the world in seconds via something called the Internet. Jan even has one machine rigged up so that when she speaks to it, her words immediately appear on the monitor, from where they can be edited and proofread and then printed out into perfectly typeset pages. I know all this is hard to believe, but I swear on my sacred honor that it is true. However, I must admit that when it comes to writing my journal or these letters to you, I still use a pen. A ball point pen.
I know I am gabbling on about all these twenty-first century gewgaws while you must be famished to hear about the history of the last 165 years. I can only say that I had to learn about these gewgaws very quickly - I almost got crushed by an automobile in my first few minutes here because I didn't understand the devices called stoplights which they use to regulate traffic. 165 years is a long time and there are only nineteen learning hours in a day (I sleep five), and a great deal happened during the last half of our century, and even more happened in the twentieth, so I have barely dipped a toe into these dark historical waters myself. Just one stunning example: During a mid-twentieth-century war they call World War II, fifty million people were killed or died from disease or starvation. As you know, Forster, that is three times the entire population of England and Wales in our time. And there were other dreadful wars before that one, including World War I and a Civil War in nineteenth-century America which freed the slaves, and other, thankfully smaller ones, have followed World War II. And despite all this, do you know what one of the greatest worries of 2009 is? Overpopulation! Also, something they call "global warming" which for the life of me I cannot -
I must break off, Forster. Jan has just reminded me that we have an appointment - two appointments - for which we must leave immediately. One is with this brain doctor named Raul Hartmann who was my first host here. Although a Jew, he seems intelligent and sympathetic and well educated - nothing like Fagin! I've noticed that Jews blend in remarkably well here - one was even elected mayor of New York City. By the bye, they call these brain doctors psychiatrists now (the "p" is silent) and they practice in strange new ways. When I asked Doctor Hartmann why he wasn't examining the bumps on my head, he told me that phrenology has been discredited for a hundred years! Our other meeting is a secret one with Jan's boss, a TV executive. TV is - well, it's...ah, never mind, Jan is dragging me away.
But one quick word before I go, if you see Kate and the children, will you - ah, what am I saying! O what in the world is sadder and more poignant than a letter that cannot be mailed?
Faithfully yours,
Charles Dickens
Should be writing more often, but everything is just so - so frantic that I'm just - I don't know - am I losing it? I'm still functioning outwardly, of course, helping Charlie catch up on 165 years of history, trying to help him survive in this - to him - frightening new world. Actually, seeing it now partly through his soulful brown eyes, our crazy damn world and our crazy damn history is looking pretty damn scary to me as well. And although Charlie is a wonderful lover - in and out of bed - I'm wondering now if we - I'm sort of wishing we hadn't - but he was just so lost during those first few days, so bewildered, so homesick for his own time and place and family and friends and yet so utterly fascinated by our world and by me that I - we - well, it happened. And it's OK, it's fine, it's wonderful, but the result is that I've lost my objectivity on this thing, my professional distance, and I miss it, I need it, and I haven't got it.
All my professional instincts - what's left of them - tell me that this is the story of the century. Here we have one of the most intelligent and talented men of the nineteenth century somehow transported into the twenty-first, by whom or for what purpose nobody knows. All my lingering doubts have disappeared. We still don't know who inhabited this beautiful hard American body before October 16th but we do know - I know - who is in there now. Charles Dickens. No question. His encyclopedic knowledge of the life of Charles Dickens - his own life - and of mid-nineteenth century London and the British Isles and the rest of Europe and even America up to 1843 is as overwhelming as his ignorance of everything that has happened since.
I don't know, had I not brought him here to the apartment that day, had he not been so homesick and lost and confused, had he not cried so hard when he read in Ackroyd's biography how he left Catherine in 1858, it might not - we might not have - but he did and we did, and there was no going back to Bay Ridge then. He told me that his marriage to Kate was already troubled in 1843 - with six more children to go! There is no doubt that his true love was Kate's sister Mary who died in his arms in 1837. He told me that he was so devastated in 1841 when Mary's grandmother was buried next to her that he became physically ill and couldn't work for weeks. He wanted to be buried next to his own true love. At the time, although thanks to Pickwick and Oliver and Little Nell he was already the world's first literary superstar, he did not foresee that he would be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton and whoever - is Shakespeare buried there? Anyway, the bones of Charles Dickens are resting in very good - but I'm getting off the - now what was the - oh yeah, I remember.
Fact is, I need to get my head straight. Thought I'd take a shot at it here on my Thinkpad while Charlie is out. He loves prowling the streets, just as he did in London. New York is so clean, he says, no pigs and dogs running free as they did in 1842, no men chewing tobacco and spitting everywhere, even inside, even on carpets. My God, this place must have been a squalid pigsty back then. I'm always worried when he's out. But what can I do? He's not a prisoner. I insisted on accompanying him the first few times to alert him to the most obvious dangers. But the man is an incredibly quick study, and I think he'll be all right. Whether or not I'm going to be all right is another question!
I've got - we've got - two sets of problems, short-term and long-term. Short-term, aside from trying to keep Charlie safe and well, the main one is how to break the story. So far we've told the media nothing, and Charlie's true identity is still more or less a secret. The home videos I'm making of some of our conversations (just to be on the safe side) I'm keeping in a safe deposit box at Chase Manhattan. Hartmann knows, of course, and so does my boss Peter Rucelli. As my own studio work began to suffer, Peter wanted to know why, and I felt he had a right to know. So after a brief preparation and an oath of secrecy, I invited him over for a lasagna dinner and an evening with Charles Dickens. Pete Rucelli is a veritable Diogenes of skepticism, but that evening turned him into a believer - almost, anyway - and he relieved me of everything except the Jack London miniseries with no change in salary. He can afford it; we both know that when we break this story and cash in on the various media contracts and promotions, we'll all become millionaires - or billionaires. I've explained all this to Charlie as best I can so he himself is the main factor in this short-term problem of when and how to break his story.
Hartmann is adamant. Breaking the story means breaking Charlie. The publicity and the adulation, the skepticism and the media furor will probably either kill him or make such a psychological wreck out of him that he might as well be dead. Hartmann's craving for his fifteen minutes of fame seems to have melted away, and I kind of like him now. We've got some things in common; he's three-quarters Jewish, I'm one-quarter - one good Jew between us! He's been divorced for five years and I've been divorced for three, he likes ballet and Brahms and sunny Spain and so do I. His ancestry is Sephardic - which explains the Spanish connection while mine is Ashkenazi but what the heck, I like Spain and I like him. I like his protectiveness of Charlie, and Peter Rucelli and I listen very carefully when he explains the psychological dangers of massive media exposure and - given its inevitability - how those dangers may be lessened.
I've also told Julia and David, my two main New York buddies. Charlie needed some wider personal contacts, and we needed somebody to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with, and they were wild with curiosity about my new lover and either one would rather die than reveal the secret. Both are believers, though it took three long conversations to convince Dave. Charlie was - and is - so aghast and embarrassed by Dave's open homosexuality that he still cannot look directly at him. But even open homosexuality is not as traumatic to him as the power of women in our time. Charlie nearly fainted when he heard about our woman president. He can still scarcely believe that Margaret Thatcher was once the prime minister of Great Britain. And while it is difficult for him to accept female senators and scientists and entertainment superstars and industry leaders, nothing upset and shocked him as much as the news that women can now control their own reproduction. Truth to tell, he even has a bit of trouble with black and Jewish and Asian and Hispanic men in positions of power. What is so strange about these prejudicial attitudes is that Charles Dickens worked as a zealous reformer all his life to bring these very conditions about! I keep telling him, "Charlie, you won, no more slaves, no more children in coal mines, no more factory workers slaving sixty hours a week. In the developed world women lead great corporations and even countries, gays and blacks are accepted everywhere - you and your reforming friends won, Charlie, the world you worked so hard to bring about is here! So why does it bother you so much?"
Articulate though he is, Charlie has trouble with this question, and I think I know why. In his head he's happy - overjoyed even - with the gains in social justice and equality since 1843. But in his heart, when he comes face to face with an openly gay man or sees a black cabinet secretary or a woman CEO on TV, well, he - like all of us - is a child of his time. But Charlie's heart is large and warm and even as he shrinks from some of the (to him) frightening social realities of the twenty-first century, he struggles to understand and even embrace them. It is utterly fascinating to watch.
Anyway, the crux of our short-term problem is when and how to break this story. The secret simply cannot be kept forever - even Hartmann admits that. Charlie himself is something of a loose cannon. Although we have been over and over what will happen once it's out, I'm still not sure he fully understands. But he was a literary superstar in his own time, as well as a superb amateur actor and director. Charles Dickens is not afraid of our twenty-first century limelight!
So much for short-term. Long-term...
Long-term...God, I'm in love! And I can't - it's this time-travel thing that's freaking me out - I just can't lose him now, I'll die - and yet of course we both know that Charlie or Charlie's spirit or whatever goes back to London, completes the Carol and Copperfield and all the rest of his incredible oeuvre, leaves Catherine, takes up with Ellen Ternan, on and on...So he will go back - probably to the exact time and the exact London street from where and when he left - but with time so skewed and warped, why can't he be in both times and places simultaneously? Maybe we will grow old together! On the other hand, his spirit could be leaving his body right now, right this very moment on the streets out there, flying back to 1843, leaving that lean, hard body that holds me close every night.
We got to talking about it last night after making love, wondering if Charlie will remember Jan O'Neal when he gets back to London, if he'll have some faint memory of having read his own last ten novels before writing them. Charlie said he would not want any foreknowledge about three of his children dying so young, or about his bitter separation from Catherine, or about his taking up with a beautiful young actress. This kind of foreknowledge would be almost unbearable. We talked about the how of channeling - how can one discarnate consciousness so completely take over a living entity? Are "discarnate" and "take over" even the right words? Might these 1843 and 2009 worldlines - all worldlines? - be somehow simultaneous? We talked about the why of it. Why him? Why now? Does Charlie have some kind of mission here? Mission from where? To do what? Set by whom? There's a weird arbitrariness about this thing that is profoundly disturbing to both of us. We are not a pair of scatterbrains - more like control freaks, really - and although we are deeply grateful for every second we have together, we still want to understand, we want to know why.
Oh Lord, did I really think I could figure all this out by typing a few sentences on my Thinkpad? Dream on, Jan! Given that the secret is beginning to trickle out, I guess Pete and I are doing what needs to be done here in the short term - a dozen lawyers and agents and media money-people lined up - formal presentations next week - looks like a nonprofit corporation in the works. Hartmann is aghast, but I see no other way, Charlie's light is just too bright to hide under a bushel much longer - and by preparing for the media firestorm we'll be able to give him a degree of protection, and channel some of the money into the areas of his greatest concerns. He is ready to go - at least he thinks he is! - he wants to meet the experts and professors and skeptics and prove that he really is who he knows he is. And I have come to believe that Charles Dickens - and hence my beloved Charlie - is an actor at heart. Not only does he not fear the limelight; in some strange way I think he actually craves, even needs it.
As to the long-term... With time so twisted and weird, who knows from time anyway - as Grandma Leah might have said. Maybe Einstein was right; maybe for those who truly understand physics, the concepts of past and future are mere illusions. Maybe the situation is beyond us altogether. Ah, there's Charlie at the door - thank God, he's still with us! Long-term, short-term, it's still one day at a time - which we are living with every speck of zest and pleasure that we can!
New York City Twenty-eighth January 2010
My Dear Forster,
Tomorrow is the day, the Big Day as Jan calls it. She has been a wonderful friend - more than a friend - to me. I don't know how I could have survived the dangers and wonders of this new world without her. And now she and her colleagues have developed this "media debut" for me tomorrow morning at eleven. "Media" is a collective term for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the Internet, etc. You know what "debut" means - and I am nearly as nervous as a girl at her first ball!
In fact, my media debut will he held in a ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. You would be fascinated by the remarkable business arrangements that have preceded it. You and I were justifiably proud of some of the contracts you helped me draw up with Chapman and Hall, but believe me, Forster, our most sophisticated efforts were nothing, nothing, in comparison to what these American solicitors and clerks (lawyers and accountants here) are drawing up for me and having me sign. The scope is world-wide - international copyright is finally a fact! - and the sums involved are truly staggering, hundreds of millions of dollars. By the way, the U.S. dollar is now the world's preeminent currency - a pound is worth about two dollars. I was astonished to learn that the dollar's main competitor is not the pound but something called the Euro, the standard currency of a relatively new Union of many European countries - no more French Francs or German Marks! I have resisted all offers to fly to England to see this new Europe; too painful, and somehow the idea of flying five hundred miles per hour six miles above the earth does not enchant me.
But to return to our business arrangements: Jan has found not one but two venture capitalists (very rich men - and women) who are Charles Dickens fans (admirers). I met with each of them, convinced them, and they are providing the "seed money" for our new corporation called - at my insistence - Boz Enterprises, Ltd. What I still cannot quite fathom is that to gain this wealth of Croesus, all I have to do is write one book! Non-fiction, just the old Inimitable's impressions of this twenty-first century. One little book and a few "appearances," mostly just talking with interviewers, and a few "commercials" (selling products), and six lectures at Harvard University and ten readings from my works. That's it. That's all. Over a period of three years. The money I'm paid will go into a "non-profit corporation." There are still enormous profits but most of the money will be used - again at my insistence - for prison reform, and for helping children in what they now call "developing countries." Some of the profits will be used to provide Jan and me with country and city residences and offices, and we will also have most of our other expenses paid and more spending money than we could spend in five lifetimes.
So that is approximately what is in store. After tomorrow I suppose I'll be quite busy for a while - which is why I wanted to write you before our Big Day. You might be interested to know how we celebrated Thanksgiving (an American holiday having to do with the Pilgrims and big turkey dinners) and Christmas and New Year's. For some reason Boxing Day and Twelfth Night are not important here. We celebrated the holidays with David and Julia and Peter Rucelli and three lawyers, two of which - believe it or not - were female! During the Christmas week Jan and I watched three different movie versions of my Christmas Carol on television. Words cannot describe how strange it was to see these dramatic presentations of a work which I am still writing - in 1843 anyway. The best by far was one made back in 1951 starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. These "movies" are truly wonderful, Forster. If only we could have preserved Macready's sublime Hamlet or his Lear for this generation!
But wait a moment - did I say back in 1951? Is 1951 back or is it more than 100 years in the future? Or is it somehow both? Will I ever get home again? Have I ever really left? God knows!
In any event, it seems that Scrooge and Tiny Tim and my Christmas Ghosts have become - I don't quite know how to put this - but they seem to have become part of the mythology of Christmas. I have found nothing in this twenty-first century that has given me more pleasure and satisfaction, and yet . . I know you remember the splendid times we had at Christmas, old friend, the delectable negus I used to mix, the dinners from oysters to plum pudding, the forfeits and theatricals. O Forster, it is so different here! There are Santa Clauses (Father Christmases) everywhere, Christmas music and Christmas trees and Christmas lights and above all an endless stream of advertisements leading to a veritable orgy of gift-buying and gift-giving - so very different from what we know, and yet somehow it is still Christmas!
I meant to write to you around Christmastime but with so much to see and learn and do and the days and weeks flying by, I did not find the time. It is also true that these people do not write several letters a day as we did - as we do - but if anything, they communicate even more. It is quite usual to see a person talking on a portable telephone as he or she sits in a taxi or walks down the street. And Jan and her friends and colleagues are constantly exchanging what they call E-mail messages. These are typed out and sent somehow from computer to computer through wires or even through the air. One of the solicitors told me how many of these E-mail messages are exchanged every day throughout the world. I did not believe him and in any case I could not grasp the number. E-mail, telephones, faxes, radios - I don't know how any of these devices work - neither I suspect do most of the people who use them - nevertheless I can tell you for certain that twenty-first century people are prodigious communicators!
But enough about these gewgaws. Yes, they are fascinating, almost spellbinding! - but I no longer believe that they are the true measure of this civilization. As I learn more about the truly frightful history of the twentieth century and about the unimaginable weapons and the acts of terror that have persisted right into the twenty-first and the horrible conditions that still exist in the developing countries, especially in Africa, South America and parts of Asia, and the destruction of the environment that all creatures depend upon for life itself, I feel that I am finally beginning to uncover the dark underside of all this surface gleam and glitter.
As I jot down notes for my lectures - which will be the basis for my book - I realize of course that my world-wide audience will expect me to marvel at their twenty-first century gewgaws and perhaps I shall, a little, maybe even with a touch of humor, but over the past two or three fortnights my imagination seems to have been developing a deeper and darker theme. Let me begin by admitting what you already know, that our nineteenth century world was far from perfect. How many convivial evenings have you and I and Maclise and Carlyle and Thackeray and Lord Lytton and others spent discussing its many deficiencies! There were appalling conditions in our factories, in education (as I tried to point out in Nickleby) and in the poorer sections of our cities. In England and many other countries there was no education at all for many poor people, no medical care, and little or no hope of the poor wretches ever bettering themselves. There were frightful abuses throughout what they now call the period of colonization - indeed I see some of those wrongs more clearly now than I did then. All this I freely admit as any honest man must do.
However, if my audiences expect me to simply gape goggle-eyed at their airplanes and computers and skyscrapers and spaceships and tell them how much better things are now that they were in our time, they had better brace themselves for a shock. It is true that I have been here only a little while, but I am becoming more and more convinced that beneath the hard surface glitter of this technological giant there beats a heart that is putrid and rotten to the core, and perhaps ready to stop altogether.
I have kept this harsh judgment to myself thus far - except for some conversations with Jan - but let me give you two reasons why I make it. The first is that in the developed countries - especially in America - far too much technological creativity and ingenuity is used in the production of weapons, from deadly little repeating rifles to what they call nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of such destructive potential that my face blanched white when I learned about them and Jan had to give me a restorative drink of brandy. And Forster, many of these weapons have already been used! In these times - in fact ever since the American Civil War - armies make war on civilians as well as on each other. These terrible weapons combined with the aggression in the human heart and all the ethnic and religious and racial and national rivalries that still plague this planet make up a witches' brew that I fear will explode one day with frightful consequences. Throughout history there have been power-mad men who did not care how many they killed in their climb to the top. But primitive weapons somewhat limited the damage they could do (though they still did a great deal). Now, however, there are no limits, and barring some kind of universal moral regeneration throughout the world, I really do not see how Armageddon can be avoided. In a nutshell: Technology has changed; human nature hasn't.
My second reason - the environmental one - is not so clear in my mind. It is harder to understand and I have not had time to follow up all the complicated lines of evidence. But it seems that greed and selfishness have not left the human heart any more than aggression has. Certain individuals and companies and even whole countries appear to be overwhelming the natural world with such practices as over-fishing, over-cutting of trees, over-planting of marginal land and truly horrible air and water pollution. Now these were not things we worried much about in our time but here and now they appear to be causing global warming, massive extinction of species, and as incredible as it seems, the imbalance and perhaps even the ultimate destruction of the natural world upon which all life depends. Many brilliant men - and women - are studying these complex matters. I have talked with three of them, and have read two books and some articles. It's not much to go on, but I can assure you that a great many brilliant and creative scientists feel that this "environmental crisis" is even more dangerous than the combination of aggression and horrible weapons I mentioned earlier.
Well, old friend, I got more deeply into this material that I had intended - since I do not see how you can ever receive this letter, I suppose I'll keep it mostly as a reference for my lectures. All I know is that I had to write this to you, now, before our Big Day changes so many things. O for a ramble with you and Maclise in Broadstairs or anywhere. How I miss my friends! How I miss my family!
Your eternal friend,
Charles Dickens
It's over.
It's been a week now, a week of nonstop work winding up all our projects and plans, and although I'm managing to do what needs to be done, underneath it all I'm still shocked and distraught and lonely beyond words. But perhaps not truly surprised. Charlie came out of nowhere, and I guess, in some deep well of my being, I knew he would someday go back into nowhere.
Nevertheless, it was still the greatest shock of my life - by far! - to wake up naked on the morning after our Big Day next to Mr. George Petersen of Mason City, Iowa, who was trying not to stare at me - not succeeding - and was saying, "Mornin', Ma'am. Uh, kin I ask, however did I get t'be here?"
The body was the same, but the accent was back to pure American Midwest, and the eyes...Oh, the eyes! I saw immediately that the quick intelligence, the sympathy, the empathy, the fire, the spirit - everything that had made Charlie Charlie was gone. I went all to pieces, upsetting poor, bewildered George even more. He remembered nothing of the past few months.
After we'd made ourselves decent, I attempted to fill him in on what had been happening. I'm afraid most of it was beyond him, although he did at least know about Charles Dickens. He had seen A Christmas Carol on TV. Mostly, George just shook his head and said, "Well, I never!"
Then he told me something of his story - born and raised in Mason City, Iowa, never married, was a laid-off John Deere mechanic, had no siblings, few friends, last parent recently died and left him a little money, some of which he decided to spend on a trip to New York City. Arrived in Manhattan, was walking down Broadway and...Well, how the heck did it get to be January? Last he knew it was October.
George more or less accepted my crazy explanations - too stunned to do anything else, I guess. I started doing what had to be done. Hundreds of millions of dollars were riding on a man who had just disappeared into the ether. I knew with absolute certainty that Charlie would never return, and the media juggernaut had to be stopped. I called Raul and Pete and Julia and a couple of lawyers, and they all came over. One of our VCs was in New York and he came over, too. There was no doubt in anyone's mind: George Petersen of Mason City, Iowa was not Charles Dickens of London, England!
We put poor, bewildered George into a hotel for three days, gave him the necessary psychiatric and legal evaluations, had him sign the necessary papers, cut him a nice check and sent him home. It says something profoundly sad about George Petersen's life that apparently nobody missed him enough to file a missing person's report. I won't deny that I pulled a few strings to get him out of town as fast as possible. I felt nothing even remotely romantic or sexual for George Petersen, and it was becoming unbearably painful to witness Charlie's face and body deprived of Charlie's ardent spirit. It will take a while to wind up our absurdly elaborate business affairs, but our lawyers had wisely written a "Charlie escape clause" into every contract, so lawsuits will be held to a minimum. And thanks to all the media interest following Charlie's Big Day and the soon-to-be-signed contract for my own book, it looks like we will eventually be able to pay back most of our seed money. It may not be possible to avoid bankruptcy but I'm sure as hell going to try.
So - it's over. Some part of me is over, too. Nevertheless, life seems to go on. And the questions, of course, remain...
I believe - not quite sure why - that Charlie returned to the identical London street and midnight hour from which he left, which would mean that from the 1843 point of view, he never left at all. Raul agrees with me, but nobody knows. As to the why questions - why did he come, why now, was he sent or did it just happen, why did he leave - I've seen and heard a million theories, but the truth is that nobody knows.
One thing I do know: while I live, nobody except Raul will ever see a single frame of the thirteen private conversational tapes I now have stored in my safe deposit box. For my book I'll try to distill something of Charlie's inimitable essence out of them and my memories - he would want that - but that's as far as I'll go. Even though making the tapes public would solve all our money problems, it's not going to happen. The reason is simple. Of course I know that Charles Dickens - for reasons still unknown - came to visit the civilization of the twenty-first century. But somehow - against all logic - I also know that my darling Charlie came to visit me.
©William K. Carlson
Bill Carlson was born in the city of Chicago in 1937, when it was still "hog butcher of the world." But he was raised mostly on a farm in Nebraska and attended the University of Nebraska (B.A. in English) and Cornell University (M.A. in Creative Writing). After a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy as a destroyer Communications Officer, he settled down to a single life of writing and part-time work with the National Park Service. He has had two science fiction novels, Sunrise West and Elysium
, published by Doubleday, and he has also published short stories and articles in a variety of publications and websites.