THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON
by
Stephen M. Larson
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 possiblility 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 aeons 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