communicating with the Martians.”

  “Are you crazy?” Scowling darkly, Melvin turned to-

  ward Rupert and jerked an accusing thumb in my direc-

  tion. “Dr. Onslo thinks my amplifier still works even

  though half the tubes are burned out.”

  “He’s a psychiatrist,” Rupert explained. “He knows

  nothing about engineering. How was your catatonic stu-

  por?”

  “Restful. You’ll have to come along some time.”

  “I haven’t got the courage,” said Rupert.

  Melvin was enchanted by the gift of the bananas, and

  even more enchanted to be reunited with his fellow para-

  noid. As the two middle-aged madmen headed east,

  swapping jokes and stories like old school chums, I could barely keep up with their frenetic pace. After passing

  Sixth Avenue they turned abruptly into Bryant Park,

  where they found an abandoned soccer ball on the grass.

  For twenty minutes they kicked it back and forth, then

  grew weary of the sport. They sat down on a bench. I

  joined them. Survivors streamed by holding handker-

  chiefs over their faces.

  2 7 4

  T H E WA R O F T H E WO R L DV I E W S

  “The city’s dying,” I told Melvin. “We need your help.”

  “Rupert, have you still got the touch?” Melvin asked

  his friend.

  “I believe I do,” said Rupert.

  “Rupert can fix burned-out vacuum tubes merely by

  laying his hands on them,” Melvin informed me. “I call

  him the Cathode Christ.”

  Even before Melvin finished his sentence, Rupert had

  begun fondling the amplifier. He rubbed each tube as if

  the warmth of his hand might bring it to life.

  “You’ve done it again!” cried Melvin, putting on his

  headphones. “I’m pulling in a signal from Ceres! I think it might be just the place for us to retire, Rupert! No capital gains tax!” He removed the phones and looked me in the

  eye. “Do you solicit me as head of the Epistemology Com-

  mittee or in my capacity as a paranoid schizophrenic?”

  “The former,” I said. “I’m hoping you’ve managed to

  define the Phobos-Deimos rift.”

  “You came to the right place.” Melvin ate a banana,

  depositing the peel in the dish antenna atop his head.

  “It’s the most basic of Weltanschauung dichotomies. Here on Earth many philosophers would trace the problem

  back to all that bad blood between the Platonists and the Aristotelians—you know, idealism versus realism—but it’s

  actually the sort of controversy you can have only after a full-blown curiosity about nature has come on the

  scene.”

  “Do you speak of the classic schism between scientific

  materialists and those who champion presumed numi-

  nous realities?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” said Melvin.

  “There—what did I tell you?” said Rupert merrily. “I

  knew old Melvin would set us straight.”

  2 7 5

  J A M E S M O R R O W

  “On the one hand, Deimos, moon of the logical posi-

  tivists,” said Melvin. “On the other hand, Phobos, bastion of revealed religion.”

  “Melvin, you’re a genius,” said Rupert, retrieving his

  telescope from my rucksack.

  “Should we infer that the Phobosians are loath to

  evoke Darwinian mechanisms in explaining why they

  look so different from the Deimosians?” I asked.

  “Quite so.” Melvin unstrapped the dish antenna,

  scratched his head, and nodded. “The Phobes believe that

  God created them in his own image.”

  “They think God looks like a pencil sharpener?”

  “That is one consequence of their religion, yes.”

  Melvin donned his antenna and retrieved a bottle of red

  capsules from his bathrobe pocket. He fished one out and

  ate it. “Want to hear the really nutty part? The Phobes

  and the Deems are genetically wired to abandon any

  given philosophical position the moment it encounters an

  honest and coherent refutation. The Martians won’t ac-

  cept no for an answer, and they won’t accept yes for an

  answer either—instead they want rational arguments.”

  “Rational arguments?” I said. “Then why the hell are

  they killing each other and bringing down New York with

  them?”

  “If you were a dog, a dead possum would look like the

  Mona Lisa,” said Rupert.

  Melvin explained, “No one has ever presented them

  with a persuasive discourse favoring either the Phobosian or the Deimosian worldview.”

  “You mean we could end this nightmare by supplying

  the Martians with some crackerjack reasons why theistic

  revelation is the case?” I said.

  “Either that, or some crackerjack reasons why scien-

  2 7 6

  T H E WA R O F T H E WO R L DV I E W S

  tific materialism is the case,” said Melvin. “I realize it’s fashionable these days to speak of an emergent compati-bility between the two idioms, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the concept of materialistic supernaturalism is oxymoronic if not plainly moronic,

  and nobody knows this better than the Martians.” He

  pulled the headphones over his ears.

  “Ha! Just as I suspected. The civilization on Ceres di-

  vides neatly into those who have exact change and those

  who don’t.”

  “The problem, as I see it, is twofold,” said Rupert, pointing his telescope south toward the Empire State Building.

  “We must construct the rational arguments in question,

  and we must communicate them to the Martians.”

  “They don’t speak English, do they?” I said.

  “Of course they don’t speak English,” said Rupert, ex-

  asperated. “They’re Martians. They don’t even have lan-

  guage as we commonly understand the term.” He poked

  Melvin on the shoulder. “This is clearly a job for Annie.”

  “What?” said Melvin, removing the headphones.

  “It’s a job for Annie,” said Rupert.

  “Agreed,” said Melvin.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Annie Porlock,” said Rupert. “She built her own

  harpsichord.”

  “Soul of an artist,” said Melvin.

  “Heart of an angel,” said Rupert.

  “For our immediate purpose, the most relevant fact

  about Annie is that she chairs our Interplanetary Com-

  munications Committee, in which capacity she cracked

  the Martian tweets and twitters, or so she claimed right

  before the medics took her away.”

  “How do we find her?” I asked.

  2 7 7

  J A M E S M O R R O W

  “For many years she was locked up in some wretched

  Long Island laughing academy, but then the family

  lawyer got into the act,” said Melvin. “I’m pretty sure

  they transferred her to a more humane facility here in

  New York.”

  “What facility?” I said. “Where?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Melvin.

  “You’ve got to remember.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Try.”

  Melvin picked up the soccer ball and set it in his lap.

  “Fresh from the guillotine, the head of Maximilien-

  Françoise-Marie-Isidore de Robespierre,” he said, as if

  perhaps I’d forgotten he was a paranoid schizophrenic.

  “Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inad-

  vertence over intention ever so total?”

  I brought both lunatics home with me. Valerie greeted

  us with the sad news that the Winter Garden, the Walter

  Kerr, the Eugene O’Neill, and half a dozen other White

  Way theaters had been lost in the Battle of Times Square.

  I told her there was hope for the Big Apple yet.

  “It all depends on our ability to devise a set of robust

  arguments favoring either scientific materialism or theistic revelation and then communicating the salient points

  to the Martians in their nonlinguistic language, which

  was apparently deciphered several years ago by a para-

  noid schizophrenic named Annie Porlock,” I told Valerie.

  “That’s not a sentence you hear every day,” she

  replied.

  It turns out that Melvin is even more devoted to board

  games than Rupert, so the evening went well. We played

  Scrabble, Clue, and Monopoly, after which Melvin intro-

  duced us to an amusement of his own invention, a varia-

  2 7 8

  T H E WA R O F T H E WO R L DV I E W S

  tion on Trivial Pursuit called Teleological Ambition.

  Whereas the average Trivial Pursuit conundrum is frivo-

  lous, the challenges underlying Teleological Ambition are profound. Melvin remembered at least half of the original questions, writing them out on three-by-five cards. If

  God is infinite and self-sufficient, why would he care

  whether his creatures worshiped him or not? Which

  thought is the more overwhelming: the possibility that

  the Milky Way is teeming with sentient life, or the possibility that Earthlings and Martians occupy an otherwise

  empty galaxy? That sort of thing. Bobby hated every

  minute, and I can’t say I blame him.

  AUGUST 12

  Shortly after breakfast this morning, while he was

  consuming what may have been the last fresh egg in

  SoHo, Melvin announced that he knew how to track

  down Annie Porlock.

  “I was thinking of how she’s a walking Rosetta Stone,

  our key to deciphering the Martian tongue,” he ex-

  plained, strapping on his dish antenna. “Rosetta made me

  think of Roosevelt, and then I remembered that she’s liv-

  ing in a houseboat moored by Roosevelt Island in the

  middle of the East River.”

  I went to the pantry and filled my rucksack with a loaf

  of stale bread, a jar of instant coffee, a Kellogg’s Variety Pack, and six cans of Campbell’s soup. The can opener

  was nowhere to be found, so I tossed in my Swiss army

  knife. I guided my lunatics out the door.

  There were probably only a handful of taxis still func-

  tioning in New York—most of them had run out of gas,

  2 7 9

  J A M E S M O R R O W

  and their owners couldn’t refuel because the pumps

  worked on electricity—but somehow we managed to nab

  one at the corner of Houston and Forsyth. The driver, a

  Russian immigrant, named Vladimir, was not surprised to

  learn we had no cash, all the ATMs being dormant, and

  he agreed to claim his fare in groceries. He piloted us

  north along First Avenue, running straight through fifty-

  seven defunct traffic signals, and left us off at the

  Queensboro Bridge. I gave him two cans of chicken noo-

  dle soup and a single-serving box of Frosted Flakes.

  The Martian force-field dome had divided Roosevelt

  Island right down the middle, but luckily Annie Porlock

  had moored her houseboat on the Manhattan side.

  “Houseboat” isn’t the right word, for the thing was nei-

  ther a house nor a boat but a decrepit two-room shack

  sitting atop a half-submerged barge called the Folly to Be Wise. Evidently the hull was leaking. If Annie’s residence sank any lower, I thought as we entered the shack, the

  East River would soon be lapping at her ankles.

  A ruddy, zaftig, silver-haired woman in her mid-fifties

  lay dozing in a wicker chair, her lap occupied by a book

  about Buddhism and a large calico cat. Her harpsichord

  rose against the far wall, beside a lamp table holding a

  large bottle of orange capsules the size of jelly beans. Our footfalls woke her. Recognizing Rupert, Annie let loose a whoop of delight. The cat bailed out. She stood up.

  “Melvin Haskin?” said Annie, sashaying across the

  room. “Is that really you? They let you out?”

  Annie extended her right hand. Melvin kissed it.

  “Taa-daa!” shouted Rupert, stepping out from behind

  Melvin’s bulky frame. His pressed his mouth against An-

  nie’s cheek.

  2 8 0

  T H E WA R O F T H E WO R L DV I E W S

  “Rupert Klieg—they sprang you, too!” said Annie. “If I

  knew you were coming, I’d have baked a fruitcake.”

  “The First Annual Reunion of the Asaph Hall Society

  will now come to order,” said Melvin, chuckling.

  “Have you heard about the Martians?” said Rupert.

  Annie’s eyes widened grotesquely, offering a brief in-

  timation of the derangement that lay behind. “They’ve

  landed? Really? You can’t be serious!”

  “Cross my heart,” said Rupert. “Even as we speak, the

  Phobes and the Deems are thrashing out their differences

  in Times Square.”

  “Just as we predicted,” said Annie. Turning from Ru-

  pert, she fixed her frowning gaze on me. “I guess that’ll show you doubting Thomases . . .”

  Rupert introduced me as “Dr. Onslo, the first in a long

  line of distinguished psychiatrists who tried to help me

  before hyperlithium came on the market,” and I didn’t

  bother to contradict him. Instead I explained the situation to Annie, emphasizing Melvin’s recent deductions concerning Martian dialectics. She was astonished to learn

  that the Deimosians and the Phobosians were occupying

  Manhattan in direct consequence of the old materialism-

  supernaturalism dispute, and equally astonished to learn

  that, in contrast to most human minds, the Martian psy-

  che was hardwired to favor rational discourse over pleas-

  urable opinion.

  “That must be the strangest evolutionary adaptation

  ever,” said Annie.

  “Certainly the strangest we know about,” said Melvin.

  “Can you help us?” I asked.

  Approaching her harpsichord, Annie sat on her

  swiveling stool and rested her hands on the keyboard.

  2 8 1

  J A M E S M O R R O W

  “This looks like a harpsichord, but it’s really an interplanetary communication device. I’ve spent the last three

  years recalibrating the jacks, upgrading the plectrums,

  and adjusting the strings.”

  Her fingers glided across the keys. A jumble of notes

  leaped forth, so weird and discordant they made Schoen-

  berg sound melodic.

  “There,” said Annie proudly, pivoting toward her audi-

  ence. “In the Martian language I just said, ‘Before en-

  lightenment, chop wood, carry water. After

  enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’ ”

  “Wow,” said Klieg.

  “Terrific,” said Melvin.

  Annie turned back to the keyboard and called forth

  another unruly refrain.

  “That meant, ‘There are two kinds of naïveté: the

  naïveté of optimism and the naïveté of pessimism,’ ” she

  explained.

  “Who would’ve guessed there could be so much mean-

  ing in cacophony?” I said.

  “To a polar bear, the Arctic Ocean feels like a Jacuzzi,”

  said Rupert.

  Annie called forth a third strain—another grotesque

  non-melody.

  “And the translation?” asked Rupert.

  “It’s an idiomatic expression,” she replied.

  “Can you give us a rough paraphrase?”

  “ ‘Hi there, baby. You have great tits. Would you like to fuck?’ ”

  Melvin said, “The problem, of course, is that the Mar-

  tians are likely to kill each other—along with the remaining population of New York—before we can decide

  2 8 2

  T H E WA R O F T H E WO R L DV I E W S

  conclusively which worldview enjoys the imprimatur of

  rationality.”

  “All is not lost,” said Rupert.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We might, just might, have enough time to formulate

  strong arguments supporting a side of the controversy

  chosen . . . arbitrarily,” said Rupert.

  “Arbitrarily?” echoed Annie, voice cracking.

  “Arbitrarily,” repeated Rupert. “It’s the only way.”

  The four of us traded glances of reluctant consensus. I

  removed a quarter from my pants pocket.

  “Heads: revelation, God, the Phobes,” said Melvin.

  “Tails: materialism, science, the Deems,” said Rupert.

  I flipped the quarter. It landed under Annie’s piano

  stool, frightening the cat.

  Tails.

  And so we went at it, a melee of discourse and dispu-

  tation that lasted through the long, hot afternoon and

  well into evening. We napped on the floor. We pissed in

  the river. We ate cold soup and dry raisin bran.

  By eight o’clock we’d put the Deimosian worldview on

  solid ground—or so we believed. The gist of our argument

  was that sentient species emerged in consequence of cer-

  tain discoverable properties embedded in nature. Whether

  Earthling or Martian, aquatic or terrestrial, feathered or furred, scaled or smooth, all life-forms were inextricably woven into a material biosphere, and it was this astonishing and demonstrable connection, not the agenda of

  some hypothetical supernatural agency, that made us one

  with the cosmos and the bearers of its meaning.