Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

futility. From Heidegger to Kant . He knew who Kant was of course though he had never read anything by him, only about him in The Story of Philosophy . He might once have known who Heidegger was but he didn’t know now. He had not gone to college. In his day you did not have to go to college to become a druggist, you just had to serve an apprenticeship, as he had done with his uncle. But later on he had gone through a period of serious reading. Nothing like this, though. He knew enough to recognize the names, that was all. Meister Eckhart. Simon Weil. Teilhard de Chardin. Loren Eiseley. Respected names. Luminous names. And the thing was that Eugene had not just collected these books, planning to read through them all someday. No. He had read them. Eugene had read virtually everything there was to read on these most important, these most demanding subjects. Philosophy. Religion. Mysticism. Psychology. Science. Eugene was twenty-eight years old and it was safe to say that he had spent the last twenty years of his life reading. He had degrees. He had won scholarships and prizes. All of which he scorned, or at least dismissed, with a kind of apology. He had done little spates of teaching, but no other steady work, it seemed. At some point there had been a breakdown, a lengthy crisis from which he still, perhaps, believed himself to be recovering. Yes, he had the air of someone who gauges and guards his convalescence. He was deliberate, even in his supple movements, his light-heartedness. He wore his hair like a medieval page boy’s. His hair and his eyes shone, soft and foxy, reddish brown. He had a little mustache, which did not help him look his age.
    “I heard this business about the walking on water,” said Mr. Lougheed, attempting to take a jocular tone.
    “Honey?” said Eugene, and slid a large dollop of it into Mr. Lougheed’s tea.
    Mr. Lougheed, who liked his tea without sweetening, absently accepted a spoon.
    “I didn’t credit it.”
    “Oh, yes,” said Eugene.
    “I said you wouldn’t be that big a fool.”
    “You were wrong.”
    Both were smiling. Mr. Lougheed’s smile was thin but hopeful, tactical. Eugene’s was frank and kind. And yet—what was that frankness? It was not natural, it was achieved. Eugene, who knew about military history and mysticism and astronomy and biology, who could discuss Indian art (either Indians) or the art of poisoning, who could have made a fortune in the days of quiz shows as Mr. Lougheed had once said to him (Eugene laughing and saying thank God for the good of his soul such days were past)—Eugene in all the ordinary movements and exchanges of life was an achievement, in the face of something he did not mention. His breakdown? His bursting knowledge? His understanding?
    “Well I don’t know if I took this up wrong,” Mr. Lougheed said. “I understood the proposition was walking on water.”
    “That’s it.”
    “And what is the purpose of this?”
    “The purpose is walking on water. If that is possible. Do you think it is?”
    For that Mr. Lougheed could not find an answer.
    “It’s some kind of joke?”
    “It could be,” said Eugene, and still so brightly. “A serious kind of joke.”
    Mr. Lougheed’s eyes had strayed to a shelf of another kind of books Eugene read, which did not seem to him to tie in too readily with the first kind. These books were by and about people who made prophecies, they were about astral bodies and psychic experiences and supernatural powers and every kind of hoax or magic, if that was what you wanted to call it. Mr. Lougheed had even borrowed some of these books, as he did others, from Eugene, but he was not able to read them. Incredulity clogged his brain. Using a word out of his own youth, he told Eugene that all this had him stumped. He could not believe Eugene took it seriously, even when he heard Eugene say so.
    A little while after the incident in the downstairs hall Mr. Lougheed had come home one day and found a sign painted on his door. It was something like a flower, with thin red petals, inexpertly painted, and black petals in between, tapering the wrong way. A red circle in the middle and a black circle, black hole, inside that. He touched the paint and found that it was wet, but not very wet, they had paints nowadays that dried in no time. He called Eugene out to take a look at it.
    “That’s nothing,” Eugene said. “At least it’s nothing to worry about. I don’t recognize it. It’s just something