ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes Frank’s story, “The path,” which is set in Berlin in 1932 with its apocalyptic future just over the horizon. Frank develops his theme of convergence. Hypnotic convergence of the minds of Ching Ling Foo (God) and Willy Herold cause Willy to see the future, and his own death.
Willy is a transvestite nightclub singer working with Foo, an elderly stage magician. Willy has a deeply sympathetic relationship with his father, a shell-shocked veteran whose mind was destroyed in the Battle of Verdun. Formerly an architect for Walter Gropius, after the war he is unable to work. Willy’s father dies in an apparent suicide. Willy is friends with Max Besessen and Daniel Distanziert, the crazy architect and Freudian psychoanalyst from Frank’s first chapter. In their final years at university, they attend Willy’s singing performances.
Willy has three experiences of hypnotic convergence with Foo causing him to experience visions of Berlin’s disastrous future. His final vision is of his own death. He awakes from this vision as he is walking home from the nightclub. Identified as homosexual, Willy is murdered by a group of brownshirts. He awakes from death and joyously joins his father on a large cruise ship.
