“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“You walked?” I was incredulous. That would be fifteen miles or so. In this weather, without a coat? I wasn’t thinking too clearly yet, but that would be feat par excellence for anyone—let alone lugging two bags along. From the attaché case Fred took the handwritten manuscript of The Rules of Love. “Please. I am Seth. Show this book to Jane and have her read it while I wait here, then you tell me, Robert, what she thinks of it....” This, after Fred comprehended that I had no intention of letting him in the house. Jane could not deal with him, I thought, although he showed no signs of violence. “Please, Fred is getting cold.... If you won’t take the whole manuscript, take just this one chapter—Fifteen—and show that to her. Let her read it. Then you come out and tell Fred what Jane thinks of it. I can help her. She’s going to die soon.”

“If you don’t let me in your house I’ll just die,” Fred said. By now he’d taken two hardcover books from a bag, and given them to me. One by Jerszy Kosinski and one by Somerset Maugham. The latter was an expensive anthology. In one he’d written a note on a blank page to Jane, and to me in the other. Check their phrasing for a close approximation of the way he talked. Fred also handed me a thick, neatly tied package of brown paper and yellow string—The Christ Book, he said, which was for Jane and me, and for Prentice-Hall. I didn’t open it, and still haven’t. When I asked him where he was really from, he said Denver, and that his address was inside the package. It wasn’t on the other manuscript. Nor was I quick-witted enough to ask if he had a family, if anyone knew where he was, or what he did for a living—if he worked, or could—or how he found our house in the first place. I wondered if he was schizophrenic. He appeared to be harmless enough.

I was just going back in after the hot drink when the dark-colored police car pulled up Holley Road and turned into the driveway. I waved to the officer driving. He was a youngish man with a mustache. He came inside the porch and I began to explain the situation to him as briefly as I could. “How did you get here?” he asked Fred. “I walked,” Fred answered. “Fred has read some of our books,” I said. “This is difficult to explain briefly, but he came here from Denver, he said, and he has no money, and nowhere to go when he leaves here. He’s given us those books and manuscripts” —I pointed to them, stacked up on the picnic table—“and he wants my wife to read them. I don’t have his address—”

We hope not. We’ll probably call the police to ask for news, eventually. I may ask them not to refer people here, if they’re not legally bound to. Upon scanning the one manuscript, I found several references to Fred writing on it in a series of restaurants in Pennsylvania—which means of course that he didn’t take a direct flight here from Denver. There may be no such connection. Maybe he landed in Pittsburgh. Maybe he’ comes from Pennsylvania. The manuscript of The Rule Book of Love: A Seth Book, is written on the back of heavy white stationery from Howard Johnson’s motor lodge in Coraopolis, PA, which may be near Philadelphia. I’m not sure. That is, Chapter 16 and a few other pages are. The rest is plain white paper, from who knows where? I definitely ended up feeling sorry for Fred, and I think Jane does too. Too bad she missed him, for as I told her, he’d make beautiful subject matter for a chapter, by inference. So would his manuscript (not a bad title, that), although we couldn’t quote it. It’s a very coherent production in its own way. I know it’s easy to feel bad about what appears to be someone else’s dilemma, but at the same time they live in the reality they’ve created and have their own kinds of protection. Their set of rules of the game are just as strict as ours are—at least that’s the way it seems to be in Fred’s case. All of his behavior was consistent with his beliefs, I’d say. At no time did I feel fear, but at the same time I didn’t want him in the house, where problems might develop getting him out....

(P.S. After I finished, found a reference in Fred’s manuscript to being in a restaurant in Pittsburgh and waiting for a flight—evidently to Elmira. Coraopolis must be a part of Pittsburgh, then.... was Fred’s suitcoat stolen—maybe in a restroom or on a plane? When I asked him where his coat was he only said, “I have none.”