Some biography
Here's a basic resume for the record. I will put samples of unpublished work here as well as other non-fiction "exploratory" writing.
Richard Monaco
PO Box 2080
Cathedral Station
NYC 10025
E-mail: broaditch@earthlink.net
Education:
WORK EXPERIENCE
Senior vice-president and co-founder of The Adele Leone Literary Agency, Inc., Responsible for discovering and developing new writers; subsidiary rights, movie projects -1978-1998
Director, Wildstar Books - Co-created concepts, hired writers and editorially supervised a 22-book series for New American Library, a 12-book series for Harlequin Books and others, 1990-94
Co-creator and Book and Film Editor of the University Review, national student newspaper 1969-70
Editor-in-Chief of New York Poetry magazine – 1969-70
Assistant to the Directors of The Group for Contemporary Music at
Curator of Music for
Founding Editor of the Contemporary Music Newsletter (
Teaching
Faculty of The New School for Social Research, 1974-77
Faculty of
Lectured at
PUBLICATIONS
Novels
Parsival or a Knight’s Tale, Macmillan/Pocket Books 1977 – bestseller, main selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club (Book-of-the-Month Club) widely translated and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize – re-issued by
The Grail War, Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books 1978 – re-issued by
The Cult Candidate, Sphere Books (GB) 1979
The Final Quest, Putnam/Berkley Books 1980 – nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
Blood and Dreams, Putnam/Berkley 1981
Runes, Ace Books 1982
Broken Stone, Ace Books 1983
Journey to the Flame, Bantam/Spectra Books 1985
Unto the Beast, Bantam/Spectra Books 1987
Goodbye to
Lost Years: The War for Avalon (recent unpublished)
Dead Blossoms (recent unpublished)
Presently working on Bad Trip Beach book and screenplay
Novella, Blood and Dreams, Elsewhere Vol. 2, Ace Books, 1982
Parsival: or a Knight's Tale re-issued on eread.com fictionwise.com 2002
Poetry
Poems in various periodicals such as The Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, New York Poetry, The University Review of U. of Missouri, Dobbs Ferry, Prologue Magazine. Anthologized in International Poetry Society collection, 1976, New American Poetry, 1973.
Plays
“The Politics of Harmony,” libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s chamber opera, 1969
“Parsival,” performed by Michael Moriarity’s Potter Field Company, 1978
“Realities of the Business,” written and produced on a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1978 at the Whitney Museum and various theater spaces in NYC
“Goodbye to
Magazines
Contemporary Music Newsletter. University Review, Saturday Review, New York Poetry, The Grail War excerpted in Heavy Metal Magazine, 1980
Non-fiction
New American Poetry, McGraw-Hill, 1973
The Logic of Poetry, (textbook) McGraw-Hill, 1974 reprinted by
Rubouts, Ace Books, 1990
Bizarre
The Dracula Syndrome, Ace Books,1992
Media
Film 1970-74:
Wrote original screenplays for many studios including Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures and MGM
Radio:
Co-hosted “The Logic of Poetry” show on WNYC-FM, 1974-77
Co-hosted “Poetry PM” on WNYC-FM, 1975-77
Talk show spots on WBAI-FM, 1972-73
Fund-raising and public service, 1994-96
Treasurer of the Campaign to re-elect the Mayor of Yonkers, NY: fund-raising efforts include a NY Giant quarterback Phil Simms event (raised $70,000.00) and an Al Gore Luncheon, first visit of Vice-President to Westchester County in Clinton administration (raised $155.000.00)
Instrumental in creating the Northeast League, a successful AA minor league baseball group of 8 teams
Director and overall manager of the Yonkers Hoot Owls, first professional baseball team in Yonkers since 1946, coached by former Yankee Paul Blair
Helped rebuild Fleming Field and left it as a gift to the City of Yonkers
Volunteer,
Bibliography
The Return from Avalon: A Study of Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction, Thompson,
The Arthurian Encyclopedia,
Taliesin’s Successors: Interviews with Authors, Camelot Project, 1989
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, St.Martin's, 1999
An Annotated Guide to Sequels, Apple
The New Arthurian Encyclopedia,
The Arthurian Handbook,
The Literary Teachers Book of Lists, Strouf
Adam's Grace, Fall and Redemption in Medieval Literature, Murdoch
A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes and Characters in Medieval Tradition,
Gerritsen & Van Melle, Boydell & Brewer
The Holy Grail Mystery Solved
Perceval/Parsival a casebook, Gross & Lacy, Routledge
Medieval France – An Encyclopedia, Kibler
The Arthurian Bibliography, Pickford
Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Magil
Psychic Journal – Crossing the Bridge
The Mammoth Book of Art, Ashley, Carroll & Graf
The Literature of Fantasy, a Complete Annotated Bibliography of Modern…Schlobin
A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy, Searles & Meachum
Bulletin Bibliographique de la Societe Internationale Arthurenne
JSTOR, Medieval
Modeme Arturus, Rezeption, Gamerschlag
Mittelhochdeutche, Epenstoffein
Deutchsprach, Igen, Literature nach 1945, Siegrid Schmidt
Von Kommenden Zeiten…, Knoll
Parzival Reescritura, Universidad de Valencia
Chronica Medieval Association of the Pacific
Here's the opening of BAD TRIP BEACH.
MICHAEL D’ANGELI
Summer 1970
The old Volvo had a new rattle in the engine, somewhere between a gasp and a click. Summer heat, I decided. This was a northern machine and always ran hot. I front-parked partly in a fire zone where the curb was sawgrass and powdery earth with a concrete sidewalk bright white in the impacting sunlight. I had a police card on the visor in case some local officer happened not to be snoozing under a shade tree somewhere and actually on a call.
I sat a moment and thought about lighting a smoke. Killed the motor and knew it would be unbearable in there in 3 minutes. If it idled the temperature would red-line. Through the big gate and brass-colored high fence things looked lush, green and deceptively cool. A dusty-looking little bird looped by and quick-stopped on a long pine branch that poked through the bars, swaying it slightly in the almost windless air.
If you could communicate with the bird, I automatically thought, then you’d know when it would perch and take off again... if you could communicate with all the birds on campus none of their movements would seem random from your point of view….If you could talk to dust motes….
I always hated randomness. It’s not equivalent to probability which is just a by-product of our defects in seeing and measuring stuff. There were always arguments in school. It never made sense. If you knew everybody in
their noses randomness would be out. The real order would become visible. If we could talk to electrons…why care? I always cared. The less everyday and sensible something was, the more I went for it.
I was tall and thin in high school and except for a learner bike tire at the belt line nothing too different today. I was good at boxing and running. Wish I’d been better at running, in the end. Tall and thin with dark hair and dark eyes. I liked to think they gleamed with piercing intelligence. Well they gleamed, anyway.
I was back at school in a way I’d never have imagined, unfolding myself from the dull red coupe, which wasn’t quite old enough to be vintage or new enough to have decent air-conditioning. Perfect for long winters and crisp falls.
This was the most golden mellow August scene imaginable: lush, soft lawns with rows of old, dense trees where the late sunlight lay like melted honey among lucent flowers. Here and there summer school people reading, chatting, dozing off on the rich grass: bright clothes, bare feet, strains of music (thought I heard The Doors chanting one out, distant, blurred away by shifting air) and the hint of pot on the soft, scented, sluggish breezes.
Most anti-war radicals had gone to
The air smelled of life’s richness. It made me want to sit under a tree. Take off the square shoes and navy blue socks and dream, think about sex, the pliant sweetness and taste of a sleek young body under my hands and mouth…or smoke a joint and drift away thinking about how Pascal had it right, that the opposite of randomness wasn’t absolute cause and effect, just absolute order. I had no concept of how close I was to the opposite just then. I liked poetry: “A sweet
disorder in the dress/Kindles in clothes a wantonness….” Sweet disorder. I was just about to meet her.
I’d been married in grad school though the bonds were never too tight. We had what they starting calling “open marriage” rather than consensual adultery. The straw that collapsed our camel was when I came home one headache-bright dawn and found a guitar player we’d met at a club the day before sitting naked in my walk-in closet doing yoga. My nude wife was deep in non-REM sleep in the bedroom amidst signs of sweet violence. Eventually she went to the West Coast in a psychedelic bus with a band and I was drafted. It might have been Sly and the family Stone, I’m not sure.
Must have sighed, walking off the campus road onto the loamy earth, studying a bubble-bodied young beauty whose tanned treasures seemed to be finding loopholes in her casual sketch of a skirt and attenuated braless top. Her hair was tied in two loose, unbraided braids. Her legs looked long enough for two knees apiece. I definitely sighed and ogled. Some women have a paralyzing effect and leave you fumbling and desperate at first sight.
So I nearly went into a trance of lust and got lost in the timeless drowse of desire and discovery. Her rimless glasses flashed sun and green lawn. I blinked nervously. Started walking again. I hadn’t realized I’d actually stopped and stared. The almost thirty pervert in a dark suit and dull red tie. She flexed her toes (they looked soft and perfect) as I stared away towards the science building, looking (I hoped) serious, remote, lost in deep contemplations. I thought she smiled. I refused to look again.
I wasn’t here for meeting young babes. I was dressed for business and as serious as my slightly baggy and wrinkles outfit. Women would ask: “Why don’t you buy cool clothes?” I always thought I did. Let’s not bandy women at this point.
These things come out as you tell a story. Lies and truth and all in between. Nothing is random and I want things remembered.
I didn’t yet know I was Marlowe in the Heart of Darkness heading upstream to Mr. Kurtz. We met, up the
It was already too late to go back and sit near the girl. Oh, I couldn’t have escaped, couldn’t cause anything to come out differently. Edmund the bastard had no more chance than Lear or any Kennedy, King or other poor sucker. To see this as an abstraction or academic debate is nothing like having to live it. The Greeks had it right: fate points a finger.
Half-step back: I got a degree in philosophy here with a minor in astrophysics. Graduate school was in
I looked around and shook my head. It had only been a few years (some pretty dark) and suddenly the students here were all kids.
My senior thesis got favorable attention. Physicists as Philosophers is what it broke down into. Scholarships to grad school, publication, lots of pipes smoked at me in dark paneled offices, sherry with Old Boys who still wished Britain had won in 1776, touting me as a nearly white Italian who might be fine-tuned into a radical, less practical version of maybe Carl Sagan. Some shrewder ones became vaguely disenchanted when my second paper came out suggesting Pascal (who wasn’t much in) had the right idea on determinism and Einstein on God. There were cautious complaints that the paper suggested the ancient Vedic Yogis were physicists. Still,
lot of hearts by breaking up; students took off their clothes and took over schools and draft boards. Ali was a hated hero, Johnson a goat and Nixon finally was having his shot at screwing up the world. I loved Ali. I always lean towards the high ground even though that’s where they drag you to be hanged.
My mind had been elsewhere most school days, pondering replacing measurement with direct communication, the absurdity of normalizing probability plus wall-to-wall sex with a joint in every mouth that wasn’t otherwise occupied. Cocaine hadn’t yet become the Holy Grail of partying. I remember wondering while ticking towards orgasm beat by varying beat if our coital rhythms both measured and expressed time like an atomic clock being constantly recalibrated by acceleration. Time isn’t subjective, just measured from different points of views. Nothing is absolutely subjective anyway, that idea’s just another way to avoid tough facts. We love binary fragmentation: good/bad; male/female; Heaven/Hell on into seconds, minutes, hours; centimeters, kilometers, parsecs – measurement by bits and pieces while everything flows along smooth, unbroken, forever….
Between smoke, booze and a brain full of big ideas the Army took me when I deserted graduate school after meeting Hunter Thomson. There was a connection. One night he came into a biker bar that was walking distance from my off-campus housing in a neighborhood with old refrigerators on weathered porches and rusted-out cars up on blocks in front yards. Red-neck Meadows. I’d been a kid in a suburb one wobbly half-a-step up from that.
Thompson came in stripped to his pale, skinny waist with a long cigarette holder clamped in his aggressive jaw. I expected this deranged homosexual hippie (as I saw it) to be quickly flung back into the moist, warm, star-filled night by the bikers massed around the sagging, battered bar that reeked of sour mash and humid wood rot. The whole joint smelled like an armpit, anyway and you could find the toilet with your eyes closed. It took me back to teenage years of trying to be tough so I could get the bad girl. Real tough guys want the near-virgin while the fakes dream of the wild slut with the pure, untouchable spirit. You see, on one side there was this beauty, order and wonder of the universe and on the other was a strange anger and frustration, that brick wall in your face called death you crash into and are blanked-away forever. Now I almost wish it were true.
Some parts of my teenage years weren’t a blur. I’d spend days reading back issues of Scientific American and taking out physics books from the local library. My father owned a gas station; he liked to shake his head and say that Einstein had never been brought home by the police so maybe I was no Einstein. Fair enough.
To my surprise the stinky, tattooed, greasy, violent pack of motorcycle mental cases made room for this skinny, half-naked weirdo. He stood next to me where I was shifting my center of mass around a hard, seriously tilted barstool that kept threatening to dump me off to the left. He peered at me like a mad bird and I hoped he wasn’t going to put his hand on my leg or something. I must have showed it. I later learned he was about as gay as Humphrey Bogart. But he made me nervous. He clamped on the cigarette holder and said things I couldn’t understand because there seemed to be no actual words most of the time. Mutters and murmurs with significant pauses. I took a shine to him and we hung out.
He explained (I think) that he was there visiting a friend who had just gone to another dimension. I liked that. He told me he was writing something but the conversation was like talking in a hurricane where most of the words blew away before you could hear them.
After telling him I was trying to find ways to speak to electrons he decided we better drop acid. He wanted in on the conversation. I had never done that. I never did it again until…let that come in time.
Dropped Lysergic Acid, dropped out as in the stupid Timothy Leary chant: Tune in, turn on, drop out. The professors, the subjects, the history, the math, the limited theories all melted away as I got inside time and space in some unmeasured way walking around the bar parking lot with Hunter T. (though I can’t swear how long he was actually there) and expressing things without words or math or anything else…I shook hands with a few sub-atomic particles that night. It was the real unmaking of me.
A changed man after seeing infinite variations and structures all around me in a supernal light that had no photons exciting my eyes (footnote to come, professor) like a dream where everything was clear, perfect, absolute but not a dream, not a shrink’s shrinkable dream, at least. And something more…and that something more is why I never intentionally did mind-expanders again or anything like it. And that’s coming up soon, that something more which turned out to be waiting just across campus (or up the Congo) as the sun interfaced the massive oak treetops while I hesitantly walked through broken shade and shatters of softly melting gold, wanting to look back, wanting to go over to the girl I’d never met reading with eyeglasses full of light and legs without end. I needn’t have worried because she was waiting on ahead, too. All ordered. Terrible and wonderful.
The war was as pleasant as rectal cancer. I insisted on combat. They wanted me to use my education but I was stubborn. I knew survival out there depended on knowing something useful. I refused (being so young and so right) to put any buffer between me and senseless, organized violence. Look, armies want to produce selective sociopaths: kill who we tell you to without hesitation or pity but be nice at home. Songs and stories go with it.
Lying in a hooch in a burned out village, looking out the open door as an exhaled lungful of pot smoke slowly dispersed in the wet, heavy air, watching the full moon set and stain the massed, dark jungle trees with soft silver, sweating in the thick, rich, sour air that smelled like charred wood and meat while evil bugs danced around my ears, it occurred to me that God was on everybody’s side. Conscience was equivalent for everyone everywhere and always. Morality was political. Conscience was absolute and eternal; true intelligence. Creation’s mind arranging yours. It shook me up as ruthless truth will. It blew my high.
Crossing the quiet campus I half-consciously lit a cigarette and remembered nice things. Like meeting my second wife and making love around midnight over there in the dense, misty, underbrush under the ancient, massive trees that should have had Druids under them, the thick soft grass crushed under us, the September summer sunheat pulsing back from the rich earth. The campus clock had tolled and I remember timing the beats of our bodies to that deep, haunting, measured sound….
The campus clock now tolled five as I went up the old, stone steps worn smooth by generations. It was The Doors I’d heard, the song was clearer here, finishing: “…when you’re strange, faces come out of the rain when you’re strange, when you’re straaaangge….”
The sun was unobstructed and glancingly left me with a blast of purple afterglow as I went through the dim entranceway. In the blurred mix of cool shadow and stunned optics I saw someone standing to my left, coming at me fast. He was strange. My impression was of a small, almost impossibly thin young boy with a big head and huge dark eyes, naked, bug-like.
Reflexes took over and I half-crouched and put up my hands, sensing a savage, cold anger and hair-trigger violence about to rip at me. The shock set my heart pounding.
“Stop!” I barked.
“Why?” asked a papery, thin voice.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes and saw a small, round, balding man with a wildly asymmetrical dark moustache (left spiking up, right down) walking past from my right, heavy briefcase tilting him as if he had one short leg. There was an elevator directly across and a wide staircase to the right.
“Sorry,” I murmured, shaking my head and taking a deep breath. Shut my
eyes. When I opened them the big, cool marble foyer was empty. I peered around, blinking. Where was the rotund son-of-a-bitch? “Hey!” I called out. “Where are you?”
Nothing. Cocked my ears. Nothing.
Human senses, I thought. What a joke….
But I wasn’t laughing. For no apparent reason I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to leave. Thought about the girl under the tree and thon (peripherally) about
I groaned and snarled. Conscience.
“Shit,” I said, “what the fuck?”
The hall was still, cool and dim. My eyes were free of the afterhaze. I went to the stairs a little too quickly. One flight up and I should have turned around and run except you can’t escape. You just keep thinking you can.
LISA
The guy was dressed like an undertaker. He looked over and I knew he dug me. That was cool. He had a long, sensitive face. I gave him an up from under look hoping he’d come over. I didn’t want to beckon. Why bother? Karma controls this shit. If it was going to happen it would happen.
But I turned around and watched him go into the science building. He might have been a teacher. Older men were cool. Or could be. If I’d any idea…but I hadn’t. Why this guy?
In spite of Karma I stuffed everything in my bag and stood up, looking at where he’d gone. I’d just come from a poetry class last period. I loved it. The professor was young, funny, eccentric cute…it was just a matter of time, I felt….I drifted across campus. No explanation. There was nothing to explain. I don’t regret it. Maybe I should but I don’t. Regret is stupid, too late to matter. Eat too much and regret won’t digest it. Fail in love and regret won’t fix it. Why be uptight about sex? It came and went like everything else and stretched from great to lousy.
I sat on the steps and went back to reading. But, really, why him?
When he came out things would happen or not. We’d screw or we wouldn’t. That’s how it was then and that was alright. And there was the young professor too and a few other scatterings…I would be a busy girl or not.
MIKE
Blocking out anything weird I went upstairs to my appointment.
I went on the job because I figured what could ever be worse than Khe San? Combat soldiers understand nothing’s random: Fate points a cocked finger. I’d been offered a teaching job here if I went back to grad school but not after the past two years in the exotic east; outdoor living under tropical skies; meeting interesting locals; studying amazing varieties of bugs; making and losing friends.
The police felt OK because you can hide behind the uniform, lots of rules and still have interesting locals longing for your doom. And you could do some good on the job. The most good I ever did over there was holding my fire a few times and letting some pregnant mother live or old man or kid….
With a degree and a half, fresh from the land of death I was expected to write my own ticket upwards in the department. Being a lousy sleeper was another plus. I could work any hours and doze in the car. I had a “hook” from day one: a Deputy Inspector who’d been a Colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers and liked to take me for the occasional quick one, give me sage advice about the Byzantine politics of the Force while further reddening his bony, long, dour, chapped-looking
Hibernian face with the booze. He always gave the impression something really dangerous was couched in him, flicking deep in his eyes like a shark glimpsed in a dark tidal pool.
A few months ago in company with a stocky, shiny-headed captain of detectives who looked like he hadn’t smiled since 1955, we inhaled whisky and beer and gulped cigarette smoke at a place I called Mc Mc’s since you couldn’t read the name on the spastic neon sign (dusk was blurring 8th avenue) though the shamrock was pretty clear.
“He’s a good guinea,” the Colonel said, confidentially, with a solid nod towards me and puff of tobacco breath. He liked to be called Colonel; maybe it made him feel like a Southern gentleman. That was as close he’d ever get. He looked significantly at the captain whose small, bleak eyes stayed remote and passionless. I carefully looked at the fascinating swirls of heavy-hanging smoke.
“Oh, yeah?” responded the captain, almost as if under threat.
“He’s going make something of himself, if you take my meaning.”
“Yeah,” managed the captain, already calculating how to be sure I wasn’t going to get in his way and maybe make less of him. He didn’t have to worry about me getting in his hair.
“We’re goin’ to skip a step or two.”
A cautious grunt was the next response. The Colonel put away a shot of whiskey, washed it down with beer then lit a fresh smoke in an elaborate gesture of power. Just from the way he lit up and leaned back in the worn, hard angled seat told you he had pull to spare upstairs.
“We won’t be bothrin’ with plain clothes,” said my “hook.”
“Um,” reacted the noncommittal captain. “Third grade?”
Past the smoke haze I could see ghostly traffic out the open door. A warm spring night. No air worth breathing. I was too green to realize they were enhancing my fate. “Third grade” might have been a crack about somebody’s education.
“Temporarily,” said the Colonel. “This boyo’s goin’ to do us proud.”
That remark brought no flash of good will to the face of my new captain. Not that his was a face that flashed much of anything.
So I was a detective. Minge, as my people say, meaning I’m impressed. I was worrying people. Lots of glad hands later at the station house told me I’d better be watching my “six.” You see, on the job, you don’t get a boost like that unless you collared Charlie Manson hiding in a pay toilet. So it was clearly high politics and nobody likes that. One old-timer told me I’d
be “under the scrutiny” and advised pickling my nuts in brine to toughen myself up.
Today detective 3rd Grade D’Angeli was back at school. There was no one at the main desk so I knocked on the department head’s door. A small man with rimless glasses, a roundish, pale face and flesh-colored hair opened and gave me the cold, wide-eyed blink. He reminded me of Heinrich Himmler photos. I’d never seen him before. He was the new man they’d brought in. Supposed to have worked at what eventually became known as Area 51. Dr Hush-hush he was called locally. He wasn’t much liked, as it turned out. He didn’t much care, either. Didn’t have to.
“Where is Ruth?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe among the alien corn,” I suggested. “The office is empty.” I remembered Ruth the departmental secretary: graying short hair bright, pale eyes, pale everted lips and too much rouge. Hot stuff for the scientists. “I could check the bathrooms.” This fellow made me happy to play cop. He was just lucky I hadn’t started the pickling process yet.
“Who are you?” He didn’t give me room to go in. His glasses flashed windowglare at me. Maybe he didn’t trust Mediterranean types. Well my suit was cheaper than his pale gray one but didn’t have dandruff on the shoulders. “What might your business be?” His voice was like chipped flint. His vest was odd: bright colored diamonds like a harlequin outfit.
“I’m a recovering scientist. I went to physicists anonymous.” He started to close the door but I had half a foot inside. I don’t know why I was breaking chops except the man looked like the type that tried out new weapons after doing the death math, comforted by acceptable casualties and confident that whatever country he happened to working with would rebuild after the holocaust. Actually, I hated him on sight. He felt like death without decay. “Look, I was sent here. I’m Detective D’Angeli. You were supposed to expect me. Dr. Grayson?”
He turned and went back to his desk and left me to shut the door. The room was pretty Spartan. More like a Monk’s cell: no papers or books all over the place, everything clean and polished-looking. No sign of food or drink; all hard chairs, even his. A good spot to meditate on megadeaths. Big bright windows reflecting everywhere but it still felt clammy and close like, maybe, one of those cemetery crypts that look like little houses with nice views.
“I expected a little more politeness,” was the clipped reply. “I read your paper on wormholes between universes, as a matter of fact.”
Nice change of pace, I thought as he motioned me into a seat. That wasn’t a
bad way to sum up one of my main points. I sat and crossed a leg. We were colleagues, now, two serious thinkers, elite and wary as chessplayers. I’d lost a lot of academic polish in the land of nightmare due to things like a buddy’s brains spattering my face at lunch or looking into a deep pit full of burnt and shredded women and kids….
“You didn’t say ‘interesting,’” I pointed out, trying to figure him.
“I wouldn’t have read it if it weren’t,” he replied, tenting his long-fingered hands on the spotless, almost bare desk as if about to pray or beg in Vietnamese sign language. Maybe he was just one of those detached brains from Science Fiction that kept thinking and thinking while their bodies atrophied and their eyes enlarged.
“No action at a distance if there’s no distance.”
“Something like that,” I rejoined. “But I’m retired, now, so time and space can stay the way they were.”
He almost didn’t smile at all. The thick lenses distorted his eyes when his head shifted and weren’t blank with reflected light. They were very big eyes, refracting cool and unsympathetic intelligence like H.G. Well’s Martians or an SS dentist.
“Your paper is why you’re here, young man.”
“You actually said ‘young man.’” I shook my head.
“You are part of the most irritating generation in history, I think.”
“Sure. I’m just a New York cop sent on loan to Connecticut. Why, Dr. Grayson? What does some graduate paper have to do with it?” My hands were fiddling with themselves. “May I smoke, sir?”
“No,” he said like an ice cube cracking.
“Am I supposed to investigate anything? Are you the reason I was offered a job here last year?”
His hands were still as a pale, blue-veined carving of a praying saint.
“Yes, to the first,” he said. “I wasn’t here last year.”
“A police matter? This is not my….” I didn’t bother. I’d been told to come up here and not say a word about it by high authority who’d been told I was the boy to carry the ball.
Dr. Grayson might have sighed or not. He was starting to worry me. I had a creepy feeling he could push a button on you like a Mafia Don. He was being very patient. I kept thinking about the government connection, the military, the big secrets…acceptable casualties…blue on blue. I’d experienced that color combination more than once over in the land of Balleree – or whatever it was. Nice song. I knew Puff the Magic Dragon well.
“Let’s say this is a police matter,” he said, judiciously. “And you may start at once.”
I didn’t ask “what?” I was already getting too cute for that.
“Un-huh.”
“It’s a missing persons case, Detective,” he went on, unstirring, stony. “We expect you will have a special affinity for the problem.” He moved, reaching a paper from his desk drawer and placing it facing me, a shock of white on the glossy darkness of wood. That would have been the time to call in sick but I couldn’t see the future then. “Read this and sign it. It’s a confidentiality agreement.”
I read fast. It was far more. This was a “treason paper.”
“This project has the highest classification,” he explained, back to his praying mantis hands position and lens bugged eyes. “Great work is being done here. Great work. You will play a part in it.” He shut his glass-distorted eyes. “Great work.”
“What do you need a cop for? Even if I uncovered murder I couldn’t tell anybody according to this.”
“We need you for reasons…” His eyes either glazed or went thoughtful. “…reasons that will become clear. You’re not here because you’re presently playing at policeman.”
“FBI no good?” Of course, I already knew that. “Military Intelligence?
Secret Service? Postmen?”
He actually did almost smile. I can’t say he liked me then or ever. I can’t say much when it comes to Dr. Grayson. He was all outside. He could stonewall the Devil and I think he did, in the end. “You’ve been requested by the highest authority,” he explained.
I stood up.
“Which highest authority? I think I’ll go home,” I told him. “It’s been great but I’m not coming back to school. I don’t care if the President wets himself. I don’t want to know any official secrets.” I leered at the paper.
He didn’t bother to argue. Just stayed even stiller (if that were possible) and looked at me until I sat back down. I didn’t know my depth so I couldn’t say how far out of it I was. It was like a dream or a movie. I signed. Where was I going to go? I would be fired, at the least, and I’d had enough dreams and seen enough film noir to imagine going home and finding my house gone and my identity dissolved while I ran around trying to explain myself or find out who put the radioactive isotope in my Pepsi. You knew this grim iceman was the real thing.
“I thought the Manhattan project was long over,” was the best I could come up with, scrawling my name feeling like I’d just signed the guest book at the gate to hell. “Do I work for you, now, is that the deal?”
“Of course not. Can you find your way to the particle physics lab?”
“Missing a proton, too?”
“When you get there see Professor Herman Short. A remarkable mind. You will learn much from him. He’s made astounding breakthroughs.”
I knew who he was, him and his Nobel Prize. For no reason I asked:
“Who’s the little round man with the uneven moustache? Dark shirt, going bald. Seersucker suit. Ran into him downstairs. Walked like a cripple.”
“Fascinating. Why do you care?”
“I thought maybe he was missing. I found him but then I lost him.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was talking because I could have sworn he’d reacted and for this one a big reaction was a double blink.
“Something odd about him, that’s all.”
“Please give my regards to Professor Short.”
I was dismissed. I almost said “Sir, yes Sir.” I just let myself out, instead.
LISA
Something drew me there. No one was close so I lit one up right on the steps.
An incredible evening as the sun went behind the massed trees and deepened the golden splashes. I could feel splashes on my legs and face. Tender and warm. I held the smoke until I coughed. I was still a little sore from last night. Excess with a couple of friends I’d met at a concert three months back…seemed like three months. They turned up on the campus yesterday with anti-war artwork some of which was fairly cool if crude. Nice guys. At first I didn’t recognize them because they were wearing clothes. They both were in love with me they said. Tender moments and I really got turned on and into the sex. What’s more intense than opening yourself up and being a part of people tripping on themselves? What’s the difference, when it’s just that, who it is or how many?
I’m doing my thesis kind of on why if two or more people agree on anything, art or what you’re seeing on an acid trip it has to be false. Agreement stops the flow and the magic flower shrivels. Good thing my family is loaded. Well, my grandfather came over with my grandmother’s jewels. She was a French converted Catholic who’d worked for the Russian royal family. The jewels weren’t all gifts, if you follow me and there were a lot. Like, Grandpa built a tannery and then bought some stock like Xerox or Polaroid. I went to Dalton School. Viewed life from our
I’d almost forgotten about the tall stranger in the dark suit when he came back out of Vanderziltch Hall, walking like he had no desire to get anywhere, hands in pockets, richly deep red tie loosened. I dug the tie. I wondered how he’d look wearing nothing else. He drifted slightly as if to keep going but didn’t disappoint me
and paused at the top of the steps not too near or far but his point was clear. The end of the day was looking better.
There wasn’t much of a roach left but I held it up, looking at him over my oval Lennon glasses.
“I’m out of matches,” I lied.
He nodded and took a beat. I liked that. All that me showing right down to
the bare feet he kept sidelonging; kept his cool.
“And I thought it was just pure altruism,” he said. Nice voice.
“Either way it needs a light.”
He was already there, sitting down one step above me.
“Was the law changed while I was asleep?” he wondered.
“You the fuzz?”
“Not in Connecticut.”
I laughed a little; liked that.
“Cool,” I told him as he held out a skinny, silver cigarette lighter. I lit up and passed the joint stub over. It was already too hot on the upper lip but he did a short toke without reaction. I liked that, too. He was adding up pretty well, on my calculator. As he held it down I asked: “You a scientist?”
“I told you, I’m a cop somewhere else.”
“Yeah. In space, man?”
I had the ragged-burning nub and took a snort and gave it back. It was
finger-searing short, now. He handled one more, yipped and dropped it on the stone steps.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.
I laughed and coughed. He just coughed.
“Sure, man.” I responded.
“I’m investigating.”
I really broke up, this time. My skirt shifted and I made a vague attempt to cover a little leg. I already could feel him in me, long wavy hair falling around his long, pale, artistic face, balling together, wide open and wet and wild. You could love anyone with all your soul for seconds, minutes, hours, days….It’s chores and money that screws it up. And rules you’re afraid to keep breaking. Like I said, the minute two people agree on anything important it’s already getting stale.
“Count me in,” I offered.
“Do you know Professor Short?” I shook my head. “Works at the cyclotron in the basement of…” Coughed, snorted, grinned and shook his head. “Wow…is that shit Mexican Pink or something.”
“Pink?” I broke up again. He was maybe a comic, a nerd or a cop at that, I decided. “You like pink?”
“On nighties.”
“You wear nighties? Like, that’s sweet. Are you, like, telling me something, man?”
“What?” He giggled. “That’s funny. What’s your name?”
“What’s your rank and serial number?”
“That’s funny. Wow.” He saluted. “Corporal D’Angeli, Michael U, 0711….”
He just kept laughing. “You are pretty fucking funny.”
“It’s the Mexican Pink. I’m pretty dull overall.”
Overall got to him. He was trying not to obviously ogle me again about as gracefully as a one-legged ballet dancer. He was too much. He was by degrees hot, cool, funky, far-out, freaky and nerdic. I took that all in, in a psychic glance and had a sudden sense I should excuse myself and go back to the dorm. The more I started digging him the more I felt I should run. Something was skewed, here. This dude was like a fishing lure: I was the fish this time; he was all over hooks. .
“Anyway,” he said, standing up, showing willpower. “Anyway I’ve got to see
Prof Midget down below.”
“You said that. More or less.”
“Right. I…I was in country….”
This was more than I needed. What I needed was more dope and a hit of opium. Though this stuff was very, very potent. I knew what he meant but I said:
“Which country?” This was going to get fucked-up.
“
“Oh, wow.”
This was fucked-up. It explained nothing and everything. I was hooked. The pain, the need, the horror, the tenderness….Shit, shit, shit, I thought. You could tell he hadn’t had a desk job over there.
“It was….”
I nodded.
“Sit down, man,” I said.
He didn’t.
“What’s your name?” he wanted to know, again. Shit, shit, shit.
“Lisa. It’s cool. Sit down.”
“Far from cool,” he said but he sat. “Far, far…far….”
“I dig it,” I said. I wanted to hold him, comfort him because he’d been in the arms of horror.
“My name is Michael.”
“Cool. You said that.”
“It sucks” he said.
‘I dig it.”
He blew out a long slow breath. He didn’t mean his name.
“No you don’t,” he said.
MIKE
She was waiting there, looking more naked than covered, sitting on those empty steps like somebody singing sailors to their doom and I’d left my earplugs in my other suit. What was in that shit?
She and her magic herbs brought things to the surface I’d hoped were sunk forever. The purity of meaningless, clean, abstract lust was blown away and bad things were swirling around me like the contents of a ruptured submarine: familiar, pathetic, tragic and ugly. My things.
What was in that grass? I mean, it hadn’t been that long since I’d smoked Laotian hash and yet I felt like I’d been punched in the head by this shit…seasick, fucked up...awash and going under…hoping to somehow make the sun-shocked, golden beach….
It was like falling out of your boat or your head and the only solidity in sight was a razor coral reef. I could see the two of us married, decades down the line wondering where it all went while we watched the kids grow up and pondered us with pitying sympathy. Poor old farts. Missed it all. “When I get older, losing my hair….”
“You don’t dig it,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” she insisted. She might have been about to weep.
There was fire…screams, impacts…twisted dead…kids, women, soldiers…a
world of shit…ruins and stink and she brought it all back…sucking down super potent dope the mind did flip-flops and imploded….That joint had triggered something. The joint and the babe.
“I won’t marry you,” I told her. “That’s death.”
She laughed so hard she rolled down two steps. That was something.
“That’s cool,” she gasped, sort of upside down.
“
“Lisa. I told you, man. What meth?”
I almost ran. The surreal and absurd was overdone. I had to see Professor Herman Short or bust. That pot was beyond Mexican anything. I don’t what it was.
Meth-laced was the weak best guess.
“Lisa, I….”
“That’s cool, man. I accept your unproposal.”
She was upside down on the pale stone steps. I aimed myself towards particle physics. Didn’t look back.
“Later, Lisa,” I said. “Later.”
“Like, I love you, Mike.” She flashed a V – peace.
My mind stayed blank down three flights of spiral steel stairs and in the tunnel I thought:
Love me? Love me? What the fuck is that…I...I….
In two minutes she’d peeled back everything. Horrible things were bubbling up. This was a nightmare. I kept telling myself it was the pot and it would wear off.
“Hippie bullshit,” I muttered, pushing through the swinging doors and stopping in front of the reception desk which had a leaden-skinned, gray-haired, dully-dressed, bony woman with a face that looked peeled and sunken eyes, writing in an oversized book. I had a vague idea she should have been knitting. Her dress had a design of multi-colored patches on it like an 18th century bedquilt.
“Yes?” she said. Why not?
“I agree,” I said. I was a mess, now.
Lisa, I thought. Goddamn hippie….
“Yes?” That was her best.
“She loves me,” I told her. “But it’s a generalization. The love generation generalization.”
“Yes?”
“Good God…OK…I need Professor Short. I need a lot of help.”
“And you are?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. I’m in big trouble. I’m one atom away from doom.”
“And you are?’
You had to love her.
“King of the living dead.” She was unmoved. She just waited. I had to break and I did. “Ok. Cool. Like, I’m stoned and I was like sent here by like….” That got no reaction either. Today was the day of immovable objects and I was no irresistible force. “Dr. Grayson sent me. Call me Ishmael.”
That was better. Instant promotion. I was being shown in like a respectable citizen, past the desk, down the hall into the deeper underground.
“You’ll have to wait down here, I’m afraid, Mr. Ishmael.” She opened a steel door that swung smoothly. The steel walls were bilious green as was the bare steel table and two unpadded chairs. The indirect light was weak and fluttery. “I’ll send the Professor to you. Please make yourself comfortable. You are fortunate to meet him. He is a remarkable man. Remarkable.”
Looking around in my inexplicably over-high state I felt a touch of claustrophobic paranoia.
“Don’t you have a room with a spiked couch?” I wondered.
She left me alone with my slow-motion brain. I kept thinking this was a good place for secret police interrogations. There was only a dull and distant sense of being at an institution of higher learning. Institution…I didn’t like that word…. “Look at those walls,” I might have murmured aloud, sitting down on the comfortless chair, wondering how I could tell if they were closing in on me ever so slowly, imperceptible and silent? I picked a scratch mark on the floor the way you look at a cloud on a still day and try to keep your head motionless so you see which way it’s going relative to that building or pole or tree. I kept thinking of all the different things that might be moving relative to anything at all and considered that I could stay in the same inertial frame of reference if I (and the stuff in the room) shrank synchronously with the wall it would never get near enough to crush me…you see, if you’re in Einstein’s elevator or spaceship in free-fall nothing happening that you can detect and then the thing accelerates and the floor smacks you, you gain energy but until it hit you, nothing – so if gravity is really equivalent to inertia gravity doesn’t do a thing until you bang on the ground and there’s plenty wrong with that notion…is gravity energy? All energy is kinetic, you know, the result of movement of some kind. Impacts and stuff. Magnetism, gravity is what I called “soft energy” because they make things happen, movement and impacts, without adding anything measurable to the systems they effect. But…but…but….
My wandering mind was getting many ideas. Lost the mark and then almost panicked for an instant when I thought I picked it up again closer to the dull molding than before.
“What the fuck did I smoke?” I asked blinking heavily at the steel door I hadn’t realize she’d closed behind her. The room was cool and made of steel but I was composed of fumes with eyes that someone was gently pushing a thumb into from each outer edge. I was surprised when my voice didn’t echo hollowly as in a 40s detective film. “What the fuck?” I repeated. I liked the sound at first but now the two closed doors worried me. Had to get those unseen thumbs out of my eyes.
Why were there now two doors?
I shut the lids hoping that would help. Some help. Instead of closing walls I saw…just a flash which blasted my eyes open again: there was a hole in the world and something was coming through that might have been a face or a mouth full of fangs or a window to Hell with Satan picking his teeth with a fingerbone.
When they opened Professor Herman Short was in the doorway. There was just one door again and one person. I knew it was the Prof because he had two horns and a goatee.
“Hey, baby,” I said. “I’m coming down again.”
He came closer. No horns but the Van Dyck was real. He was outlandishly tall for a white man of his generation. I made him at six foot six. He didn’t stoop, either, which you’d expect but had wide shoulders, held back in a kind of military way. He was “as bald and hairlesse as an egg.”
“I assume you are Detective D’Angeli.” His voice was a deep rumble.
The drug effect was wearing off.
“A piece of him,” I said. “The broken piece.” I blinked around at the steel room. “Nice office.”
“It’s insulated,” he explained in his deep voice that sounded like it had vast power in reserve. He reminded me of milk even his voice: his face was a soft, pale round blot with curds for features. Wispy, overall, in shirtsleeves and loosely knotted school tie. “Due to radiation and some potentially toxic by-products of our research.”
“Which is what, more or less? Looking for the last anti-neutrino?”
He smiled a little. He wasn’t like Dr. Grayson. There was something affable about him.
“Most amusing,” he said, pleasantly. “We have been, well, achieving great breakthroughs. We know your background. You can help us more, we believe, if you understand something of what is being done here.”
He stood over me, arms at his sides. They were very long and the big hands stayed very still as he spoke. I was regaining my focus.
“You know it makes no sense from my side,” I told him, frankly, head tilted
back looking up a long way to his curdled-looking face. When he spoke his mouth opened wide and it was a big mouth with too many teeth. “I barely made a start in my field and there are police just as good in
He seemed to gain energy suddenly and I had a strange impression (it might have been residual drug effect) that his face took firmer, sharper form as if there were sharp edges under the paffy flesh and his eyes seemed brighter. His voice was no louder but suddenly intense, vibrant and the sound seemed to grip my guts. It was something like a Hitler documentary when he really got in his groove and sounded amazing if you didn’t understand German: pure power, volcanic rumbling and eruption that shook you inside, all that force and supernatural resonance generally expressing vicious nonsense. But this powerhouse was speaking English neither vicious nor quite nonsensical. He stunned me for a moment or two.
“Our researches have gone far beyond petty definitions,” he said with subdued thunder. “A new world is upon us and absurd affirmations confirmed on you or anyone by any society or organization, have no force or meaning. Truth cannot be conferred. Genius cannot be conferred.” Once he was talking no one was more than a shadow or blur. I came to know he would have been as eloquent talking to a wall as to a vast audience; which was impressive in a way. His presence made you feel like an inanimate object. “Reality is not subject to opinion or point-of-view. No frame of reference can be preferred to another.” My concentration seemed blurred as he spoke; I couldn’t decide why what he was saying was wrong or why he was saying it; like being in class with a hangover. “We are, here, entering new places, new dimensions, new, so to speak, mansions in ‘my father’s house.’” The curds may have whipped into a fleeting smile, I wasn’t sure. It either meant something or was as empty as a senator’s promise. “I do not mean that literally, of course, my boy.”
I got the Christ quote. He paused and looked down at me with what might have been intended as a benign, fatherly look or maybe a casual glance from a white shark.
My boy? Maybe he’s just stoned too, I thought.
“Of course,” I replied. “So it doesn’t matter how much I know or don’t know or did or didn’t do in the eyes of the world. That’s fine. But what’s my job here? Why call in Sherlock D’Angeli?”
He looked cagy. It might have been a fake smile or a real grimace.
“Have you noticed how easily you’ve been advancing in your career?” A
touch of faint, faint scorn?
“Have you?”
“Do you really imagine it has been accidental?”
I shook my head.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I figured it was because I worship Satan.”
This time it was a grimace. He was a little irritated. I did that to some people.
I glanced around at the steel room but no walls were contracting. I hoped he
wouldn’t make a speech again; and what would happen if I just got up and left? Somehow I felt like some perp in the squad room who should be asking for a lawyer. A toke of whatever and now it was
“The first pill makes you bigger and the second makes you small and the one your mother gives you don’t do anything at all.…”
Nothing touched him but what he said himself, it seemed.
“This is a great opportunity for you, Michael.” His face had settled back into pale, unfocused blots. “Many of your ideas are…well…close to the mark.”
I rubbed my eyes. They were working better. My mouth was dry, fuzzy. Pot effect except I was more thirsty than hungry.
The pale-gray, bony secretary or Norn was suddenly in the doorway with a bottle of Perrier water in her hand and some plastic cups. She set them on the table.
“Your water, professor,” she said, needlessly.
He nodded, absently, unscrewed the top and poured himself some. Gestured at me and I nodded. I gulped mine and had a second.
“Thanks, Norna,” I said.
No reaction.
Close to the mark, I reflected.
“What mark am I close to? So you want me to…what? Come back to school?”
“Two of our people are missing.” He was curd-like and distant on this topic.
“That’s your first problem to solve. There will be others.”
I drummed my fingers arhythmically on the metal table which caused a satisfying booming. Drank the rest of the faintly salty, fizzy liquid.
“What’s wrong with missing persons?”
He seemed irritated. His eyes suddenly had a look I’d seen in photos of Josef Stalin.
“Follow me, young man,” he said, heading for the door. “You’ll see something now. We don’t wish to have you not taking your work seriously.”
I followed.
LISA
Twilight was now seeping out from under the trees in a kind of misty tide of stillness where fireflies surfed and dove and I was digging it. The clock tolled some time or other as I walked across the campus. I was in some mellow place where the pot had floated me. I’d almost forgotten about the automatic trip I’d been off and on for the past maybe, month. That is until two ghosts took shape out of the mistiness where unseen bugs were starting to shriek and din quietly. The ghosts wore leather vests over their skinny, bare chests. I knew them. They’d died yesterday.
“Like, wow.” One said. His voice wasn’t hollow or anything. “We were
guided here, man.”
“Cool,” said the other one, the drummer.
So they weren’t ghosts in the usual sense but they were pretty shadowy to me, I mean, they were yesterday. Maybe astral projections. What’s yesterday? Stuff you try to keep in sequence with clocks and calendars. What I did yesterday could have been a month ago or whenever. I might be mixing yesterday up with tomorrow.
Maybe a month ago I ate some green tabs. At first it seemed like any other trip. I was sitting on the grass digging the sunset which had left itself like stains of varnished paint on the trees so that even as the sky went deeper into bluish dark the luminous stains remained and were fascinating to watch. But then it went weird and never seemed to completely wear off, I mean, it kept coming back and without warning I’d be tripping again. The next day...night…week…two, three….Not normal bad tripping but most extreme. Like, usually the world is there, you know, enhanced with amazing details, colors, shapes…but this was more like a totally cosmic dream: I might suddenly be looking across endless plains where gigantic golden flowers broke like surf under thick, glowing breezes…once I was truly shaken by a black valley where chill razor-sharp went up sheer for miles into what seemed a solid black sky and straddling both sides like a mile long bridge was an ancient fortress of black razor stone somehow familiar and terrible where blurry things with tentacles floated….The acid didn’t seem to be getting weaker and whenever the world came back there was no residual high. These scenes would just be all around me...the illumination would brighten and dim…big drops of rain might fall full of soft fire…rivers of blinding gold would appear and sometimes I’d see living things, winged golden human-like beings blurred by soft, glowing light. The more I tried to focus the harder it was to be sure what anything looked like….I wanted to get closer to the beings. They felt familiar. But that castle over the dark valley wasn’t good. Didn’t want to see that again. There’d been a sense of something…being watched…
So I wasn’t sure right now if this voluptuous twilight was one world or the other.
“We were looking for you, man,” the first said, Tommy, I think. See me, hear me, touch me, feel me….
“That’s cool,” I said. “Like, I’m a little fucked-up, right now.”
We stood among the goldengreen dots and streaks of firefly light as the twilight tide rose and gradually submerged us.
“We need to score, man,” said Tommy. “You holding?”
“I’ve got a little upstairs,” I told them. I suddenly flashed on lying naked on my back with the two of them feeding on me, sucking, licking and then taking them into myself maybe chanting “Yes and yes I said yes….” like in the book.
“Cool,” the other one said. “Far out.”
MIKE
I followed Professor Short down a descending, green corridor with a tin-colored floor. At one point there was a series of what looked like storefront displays or the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History where forever motionless “natives” or animals are posed in painted, depthless papier-mâché environments; except these were human and animal (noted a sheep, goat and pig) heads that looked real. Each window had a row of these with various expressions ranging from terror through boredom to bliss.
“Hey,” I said, “what does this have to do with particle physics?”
Short didn’t have to look back.
“Our experiments encompass a wide frame of reference,” he said.
“Medicine?”
He might have chuckled. I was trying to figure his accent. Something
European, maybe.
“Hardly.”
“Are those really heads from the formerly living?” I said with baffled dread and some reflex scorn.
“Formerly living.” He tilted his head, chuckled. “You are apparently quite the wag, my boy. “Living and dead turn out to be relative states as you, yourself, suggested.”
They were impaled on metal spikes. Some seemed to have creases of dried blood zigzagging from their lips. Few looked really happy.
“So this is an experiment? Dead heads?”
“Michael, you know better than to assume death is an absolute state.”
“Absolutely.”
I started humming Sugar Magnolia. Forget the dead or the relatives watching me follow him down the ramp. He was hurrying a little as if worried we might be late for the Mad Tea Party.
We kept going deeper and it got steeper until you were leaning back. I was surprised how far and wondered when and why this tunnel was constructed. We circled like a corkscrew. Were we descending around the outskirts of a huge cyclotron? The old machine was not on such a scale. The corridor was almost sickening as the corkscrew effect worked down to a virtual point and the walls got closer and closer in some weird proportion until I was cold sweating and we were in single file. I had a stub-barreled .32 “detective special” under my arm but, except for a logicless desire to pull it out, it brought no comfort. Something was teasing the corners of my mind like an afterglow in the eyes: one of those heads seemed familiar but the more I tried to focus the more it blurred.
“Will we have to turn sideways soon?” I wondered.
“Here we are,” he said without looking back, his wide shoulders almost scraping the sides.
There was a round door giving on a chamber with no other exit or entrance. The space inside was a huge globe with a tiny flat stage where we came in. It reminded me of a planetarium except there was a softly glowing greenish egg about 30 feet high and 10 wide made of what looked like translucent
plastic. The dull metallic curved walls had a sickly, bilious glow in the light of the egg. I felt weak and nauseated. It was faintly familiar like scenes in a fever dream. The chill air, the gleaming, immense smoothness gave an alien impression.
“This isn’t the accelerator,” I said. “What’s going to hatch, Rodan, the Japanese movie monster?”
This amused him enough to make him look at me. The curds condensed for a moment into a thoughtful expression, almost cheerful. He made me think of my father who always shook his head at me, impressed by what I had and depressed by what I didn’t.
“Very good,” he said. “A greater than the accelerator is before you.” He chuckled for the second time. I had no concept then how remarkable that was. His totally shiny head reflected greenish highlights. “It was, originally, much smaller.”
“So it’s growing?
“Your paper,” he said, almost jolly, “helped. You are special, my boy.”
“My paper. Why don’t I believe that?”
The thing was humming. Bands of sickly mould-colored light flickered around it. The room (I suddenly noticed) was round and (as in some Frankenstein movie) halos of what resembled static electricity bolts lifted away and vibrated around the round room. I jumped as the bands passed right through me and the professor. There was a weird twisting sensation as if my insides were being pulled out. I’d blocked the memory of seeing this before; it would come back.
“What’s happening?”
“A side effect. Pay no attention.”
“Why are there heads behind glass, really?” It was bothering me.
“Where would you put them?” he chuckled, watching me, intently. “You posited a series of universes or dimensions like onion-skins layering away from this world.”
“So what?” I reacted, squinting, thinking I could hear a distant, almost too-high-to-hear keening coming from the egg that might have been a billion lost souls or a bent gear. “I’m not the first. My point was -”
“We understand your point. Each dimension would produce intelligent, inorganic beings. All intelligence, which is not memory, is independent of time and space. Intelligence...” His curds shifted. “…and other atemporal frames of reference have no start and finish point and thus are independent of physical laws of conservation. Such energies are unaffected by any possible transformations or ordering of characteristics. We are obligated to you for your input. Of course your math was insufficient.”
This was like a science fiction movie lecture to the earthling by the Brain from Planet Arous.
“Somehow I don’t exist independent of stupidity. I chose combat duty. Now I’m a cop. That’s where ideas like mine get you.” I eyeballed around. “How far down are we?”
He was pleased with himself and didn’t really pay attention, if he ever really did. You had a sense he anticipated what you probably would say. My insides had stopped twisting but my eyes and ears were funny. It looked like the egg was a three-D TV set. The early show was on. It looked like hippie Lisa and she was all naked this time, on her back with somebody sucking her foot while another tenderly
licked between her breath-stopping legs. Nice place to be.
“Porn?” I might have said. I went closer. Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully. “Hey, this is 3-D.” I’m great with the obvious. As I reached to touch the thing there was no surface; my hand went into the twilight scene and that was bad. “What was in that water?” I asked, trying to turn and pull my hand free.
“Focus water,” I think he said because I thought, how do you focus water except maybe with a hose?
“Is that an order? I should focus water?” I wondered as the rest of me was instantly pulled in and I was surrounded by dim, shadowy trees that had syrupy liquid moonlight poured over them. The pornography was right there: it was she or a good reproduction.
Enough is enough, I thought or maybe said except there seemed to be no actual sound there. A silent 3-D sex movie starring the incredibly sexy girl, skinny boys and featuring lots of nameless, obscure players who seemed to be lurking or melting into the shrubbery and introducing the hallucinating scientific detective.
There was a big, dark shadow in the background that moved like wings in slow-motion. I didn’t like that. I turned around but the room and the Professor were gone: just the strange, pale-shot landscape and half-seen moving figures.
She was looking up at me as they worked on her incredible body. This was insane. I’d walked into a dream and now I wasn’t sure I wanted to get out.
Hello, I thought-said. This was a silent movie.
You come here too? She replied.
That’s what you said in singles bars.
I’m sleeping, I responded. This bullshit. Maybe I ODd on
That’s heavy, man, said one of the two stoners.
No such luck, she informed me.
I didn’t take any acid, I responded.
Far out, said the other one. Hey, man, join the party, man.
Shove it, I said.
I knelt over her and her body seemed formed out of moonlight shaped by flowing water. I was drawn to touch, to kiss, to somehow swim into her, to bathe in her ineffable being….
Tiny creatures proportioned like cherubs floated at the outskirts of my vision and seemed to be silently giggling. I glimpsed something four-legged circling in a blur just behind what seemed underbrush. I was almost certain the “cherubs” had giant erections like something on a wall in
Then the huge thing with wings moved, rose up, loomed and there were flashes of feral red that might have been eyes. Now it was nightmare. There were glints of what might have been moon-sparked talons or fangs….
Fight or flee. This thing was over me, ripping and shaking the night with beating wings that seemed the size of windmill blades. And standing behind it was something like a man with face of a mantis or locust or something.
This is bullshit! I thought/shouted. Some kind of show….
LISA
I wasn’t surprised to see him. He was wearing the same suit. I was being sucked inside out at the moment and I’d decided to relax and go with whatever happened. When you’re stoned enough it’s hard to tell one place from another and what does it matter? Really. But something was bothering me. Where was this? How did I get here?
Something came out of the shadows. Expanded, filled the night, blurry and savage. Enough, man, enough. I was instantly back in the thick brush and trees with the campus bell still tolling and the two guys who weren’t actually ghosts making love to me. No sign of the hot guy in the black suit. But I knew he was important to my strange life so he’d be back. It felt like total fate.
No more of this stuff. I actually had a paper due. That was my first thought. Needed to straighten up. Except the silky touching down there was expanding in a ball of sweet incoherence and as I spasmed the deep twilight came into me, the sultry, hot earth, the freshening breeze, the greengold lightning bug stains on the sweet air, all melded with my body and I heard my voice (like someone else’s) shouting a sigh that spread and fell in a mist of ecstasy across the breathing evening, meaning without words saying this was my world and I love you, all, everything, budding, filling and dying…..
“Aaaaahhhhhhh…ahhh…hhhh…hhhhh…h….”
And as I melted in the anonymity of passion there were the wings and eyes again, here, in my loved world, hovering above me as if compressed and shaped by the shadows and the melting moon; eyes like dark jewels freezing, into still and infinite points, cold, cold tiny stars that hurt to see; and I cried out again as if another cried through me:
“You! Begone! Back to thy stupid darkness!”
MIKE
My thesis was really about dimensions not subject to laws of motion, gravity, conservation of energy and so on. The first dimension up from here was defined by dreaming. Simple dreaming. The first step to heaven and beyond or below. I made a good case for consciousness not resulting from cause and effect, not memory like a computer and what happened when you lost your body in sleep was a beginner’s or poet’s paradigm for physical death. Only mechanisms really die. Rust out and rot like bodies. I didn’t come clean with it. I was still an academic. The implications were there. My road to
After
I returned to my roots. Being a wiseass was almost as good as drugs or a stiff drink in a world of pain and shit.
“Explain,” I demanded. “Something. Anything. Hated the show. Want my money back.
He liked that. The curds that formed his strange puss hinted at smiling, again.
“Aren’t you pleased to have been proven, in a certain sense, correct, youth?” he wondered.
“What sense? Nonsense?” I took a short step with maybe an idea of slugging him but my legs melted and I was looking at the cool, dull green tin-colored floor from inches away. Nice effect. “Something’s not right,” I said to the tile.
“Your body’s not used to you being back in it,” Prof. Short explained, explaining nothing.
My nose was taking most of my head’s weight. My body was jelly. This was
TV comedy. My thoughts were jellied. I spoke to the blurred floor.
“Fabulous explanation. I’m well satisfied, Professor. We used to say ‘professor’ is what they call a piano player in a whorehouse.”
“Have you heard of what they call the ‘
Great. Fine. I read that book by the physicist who they said killed himself. It didn’t sound like he killed himself. We were just leaving the decade of public assassinations of anybody you pleased and they didn’t always have to use a pitiful fall guy like Oswald or the King killer. Conspiracy is a natural thing for governments, cops and criminals. Why not kill a pushy scientist with offbeat ideas?
There I was lying on my pointy nose, discussing disappearing destroyers with a Nobel Laureate whose face was like half-formed yogurt.
“Sure, I remember the story,” I said. “Trying to bend light with magnetic fields.” I tried to get my arms under me. No luck. I could have used a magnetic field. “But the energy you’d need would make the ship as undetectable as a fart in an elevator. Will this wear off?”
“Yes. They were on the right track but the methods were, well, incoherent and quite unsound.”
“This was sound? I get sucked into an egg and watch sex? You’re saying I was just teleported?”
“Not precisely. Not your physical body.”
“I have another body I haven’t noticed?” I knew what he meant, though. If the universe results from wave-particle spin then no-spin creates a “ghost” wave-particle. No matter or energy, no spacetime restrictions. A dream. Consciousness: spin consciousness (not memory) you get matter-energy. Space and time. You could teleport. Time-travel but not physically. Ghosts can go anywhere without effect.
My nose hurt. I was finally able to turn my face and rest on my cheek. My legs weren’t there. They weren’t going to be able to sell this experience to the public.
“This was like giving a bloodhound a sniff,” said Short. “Don’t forget, you are a policeman.”
I strained and finally got my rubbery self to my watery knees.
“I wish I could arrest you. If I ever get up, Professor,” I said, with little
conviction, “I might actually kick in your numerous teeth.”
He laughed like a sink gurgling.
“Do your job, Holmes,” he said, chuckling. “The game’s afoot.”
LISA
We’d drifted back to “
remnants, pocket fuzz included.
Look, I know I have witch karma. A psychic did a reading and told me I’d been a superhuman something in a former life. She said I’d be bigger this time. She said she was scared of me. I told her I was out of spells. She crossed herself and mouth-breathed until I left. Didn’t let me pay.
This happened in the year of some people’s Lord 1966 AD on the magical hilltop of
So that’s fine. I got used to the seriously strange.. Like now. Like yesterday.
Like anytime
Got my sketchy clothes more or less back on as I stood up. There were lots of stars and that first look always takes your breath away. I stared while they kept worrying about getting more dope.
I was gone for those moments, looking at a sky full of fractured diamonds and other jewels that filled you with their silence.
“I mean,” I said, “like really, man, who needs weed or tabs?” I gestured up. I was earth mama bringdown tonight. “I mean, it’s all here, man.”
“That’s cool, Li,” one said. “But we need to score a lid.”
He had his pants back up now. The other was still sitting naked on the dark grass. Made me think of
“I’ll scrounge around,” I told them. “Meet me at the quad, later.”
“Groovy,” the naked one said.
For some reason I walked back up the science building steps before heading
for the dorm. I had no conscious thoughts about the cute cop in the dark suit. I was worrying about falling back into that weird trippy landscape. There should be a warning sign….
MIKE
My body wasn’t quite there yet as I wobbled out of the particle physics exit still trying to take it all in.
After corkscrewing back up the effectively endless tunnel with Short encouraging me from in front, gesturing as if we were hiking on safari or going over the top, my shaky legs finally wobbled my limp body and faded soul up to where the pale “Norna” with the peeled face took over. As Short went away, high-shouldered and brisk, down a side passage I called after him:
“Hey, Virgil, you wasted your time. I’m out of poetry.”
He turned and stopped, in that order.
“Clever reference,” he responded. “But you have not yet seen Hell, my dear Italian.” He sketched a slight bow. “There are great powers behind us, my boy.”
“Did I tunnel into a classically forbidden zone?” I called back, you know, a wave-particle breaking the ‘rules” of Classical Mechanics. He went through what looked like hospital double-doors.
I went on learning to walk again behind her, now. When we reached the display cases where the introspective-looking severed heads gazed through the glass, I planned to ask her some pretty sharp and probing police questions. Except this time there were just photos of protons, electrons and whatnot trailing through cloud chambers. The centerpiece was some dense nucleus done by an artist (unless science had leaped wildly ahead while I was away) showing the pancake effect of near light speed which amounted to this: from my point of view you are skinny but from your point of view you are fat and vice versa. The relativity shell game or 3 card quantum Monte.
Where were those heads? More bad movie tricks. I call in cops, get wild-eyed and yell: “No, no, they were here, right here!” “Sure, buddy,” responds the straight-jacket team, “anything you say. Come with us to the land of lobotomy.”
Just get back to NYC. This was it; all over. If they didn’t like it I’d walk the beat.
“I really never saw any heads,” I told her as we parted and she shut the steel door (or portal) behind me. “I’ll swear to it.”
“Good night, Detective Ishmael,” she said, pleasant and cold as a corpse in a snowbank.
A few steps away and I took a deep breath and felt better.
“I don’t need this,” I said into the mellow, soft, beautiful night. “Teleporting ships. Porno, heads and fucking evil drugs.” And then the resemblance hit me: the very tall Professor Short with his washed-out eyes and creepy pale skin reminded
me of a floater who hadn’t been in the water quite long enough to come off the bone.
He says I’m special, I pondered. Now I’m first worried as the Jews say….
I was crossing the plaza to the steps where I could go back along the main walk to where my car was. My legs were almost solid, now. I was slightly hungry, believe it or not. Secretary Norna from the underworld (or whatever she was) had handed me an envelope which I hoped held a bribe of apology. I was still giddy and strange and taking refuge in silliness until the impossible illusion down below could be dismissed like that cigarette cough that was really bad yesterday but not much now. I was sure I would get to see Hell yet. Something worse than
Under a lamppost where moths were already going mad for the light that might as well have been exquisite sirens luring the sucker Greeks to destruction, I lit a smoke and ripped open the envelope and found 2 bad photographs and a note. Some bribe. The note wasn’t apologetic. On a cop’s salary I’m supposed to be drugged, put into a Walt Disney-looking sex show and left limp as overcooked spaghetti all while being talked down to by an arrogant master of destiny that reminded me of Captain Nemo on the bridge of the Nautilus though a lot less lively.
These are our missing scientists. We believe you will succeed in locating them. Don’t be disturbed if and when you encounter overlapping dimensions on your quest, as just occurred in what we like to call the “theater entrance” or “stage door.” Your superiors are aware that these two must be brought into custody for their own sake and safety. You should reflect on your thesis. Certain aspects of it were vital to refining our work here. The logical consequence of living in multiple worlds at once brings up the question of which one is primary. Good luck on your quest! You are part of perhaps the greatest work in the history of humanity. Your masquerade as a policeman and failed physicist fools no one. When the time comes you will join us, take your rightful place in a new world ordered like fractals: ever different, never random. Welcome to the most select company on earth and elsewhere. Again, good luck, which is not, of course, random either. Call me or the good Dr. Grayson at anytime using the following numbers.
In the faintly greenish yellow light from the street lamp I blinked at this remarkable missive. I kept worrying about why writing that paper would make me “special?” Of course I recognized the man with his asymmetrical moustache, my favorite ghost but the problem was the woman professor three-quarters view was vaguely familiar and I knew I’d never met her. But seen her…seen her and it was disturbing. I tried to recall, to focus….
“Welcome to Wonderland,” I voiced. “Join us at the tea party. The good doctor Grayson.” Something was coming through the foggy brain. “What the fuck are fractals?”
I’m being played like a cheap piano, I said to myself. With elbows and fists. But why? Why? Is what’s his face, Grayson, is he just the White Rabbit? Short is who…the hookah-sucking caterpillar? The Dormouse? Where’s the Hatter? Maybe that’s me….
Because here was
just molted on her. She didn’t seem the worse for wear (she never would, not even when the wind blew all the playing cards away in the end) and between the soft lamplight and the hinting moonglow she may have been the most beautiful woman I’d ever met in person. It just hadn’t sunk in all at once.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“Forgotten but not gone,” as somebody once said. “Feed your head,” I suggested, chewing some smoke.
She liked that. She stopped just close enough to melt my insides and convince me that when I spoke bubbles of babble were coming out of my mouth. I felt goofy and awkward as a singing telegram.
“So you’re the Dormouse?” she asked.
“Whatever you like,” I bubbled.
That’s a stupid crack, I barely didn’t say.
“This may be fate, man,” she decided.
“Nothing’s random,” came out. What I wanted to say was can I bury my body and soul in you? But she knew that too.
“Come back with me and mellow out,” she suggested. “I’ve got mellowing material.”
Bubbles filled my mouth all with yeses in them. I gulped and shook my head. The thing was this woman offered all the apples of love plus intelligence and sympathy, independence and compassion too so that this was the one, the one who had it all…but you knew you weren’t going to be able to keep her anymore than you could hold a puff of smoke….
“I’d love you,” I said “but…I mean, I’d love to but….”
She was laughing, soft and sweet.
“That’s cool,” she said. She came closer her deep, dark eyes full of moon and lamplight and mysteries. “Were you there, too?” she asked.
“What?”
“You know, man. I saw you.”
There were no more bubbles. Michael’s himself again.
“Where?”
“You freaked out when you saw the big bat, man.”
“Big bat.”
“Or big bug. I call it a bat but…maybe you weren’t there.”
“Hallucination.”
“What is that, exactly? Were we seeing things?”
I shut my eyes and shook my head.
“I have to get out of here, Lisa,” I told her. “Back up the rabbit hole.”
I couldn’t tell how she felt about it if she felt anything. Why should she feel anything? Why should anybody?
“Cool,” she said. “See you here and where.”
As Lisa started to drift out of the light I suddenly got braver.
“I’ve got to eat something,” I said. “We could go to the diner if it still exists.” The bubbles were back and popping out of my mouth. “The Greek one, I mean, they’re all Greek.”
“The Starlite?” she wondered, pausing partly in and out of the darkness. Her
long legs were astonishing and she looked graceful as a statue of a goddess, speaking of great Greek creations, which the Starlite wasn’t. “Maybe next time, man. I dig what you’re saying but I have to work on a paper.”
“Due in the morning?” I found myself trying. I wondered if the bubbles could be actually visible. Well, maybe I was still under the influence of whatever I’d imbibed down in the Particle Physics catacombs.
“Yes,” she said.
I almost said: I’ll help you write it; instead:
“That’s cool. Well, I’ll see you again or around or something.” That was lame enough drop a chill in my stomach and for all I knew I blushed. The unfazed, worldly-wise cop with the Bogart sneer remained a science nerd in the end.
Her breathy laugh was nice. I didn’t have the bubbles to ask which dorm or if she had a phone. She was already walking, leaving me in the light like a crippled moth.
“Hey…excuse me, I mean, Lisa, what’s your last name?”
She paused without turning.
“Zeit. What’s your name again?”
“Mike. Michael D’Angeli. I think I told you.”
“Maybe you were kidding. Michael of the Angels,” she said, looking over her shoulder. The curve of her, half-lit in silhouette, made jelly of my soul and minced my mind.
Then she went on, gracefully gathering and taking the moonlight with her
across the esplanade, seeming indifferent to her own effect or anything else, utterly self-contained without being at all selfish. I stood as if pinned to the spot and gazed into the mysterious universe of Lisa Zeit, full of stars, galaxies; depth, dark and light and strange laws of nature. Zeit, in German, that means time.
I wanted to follow her. That was going to be our principle: I’d vainly fly in pursuit and she’d always just find me. The scientific detective, maybe a cinch for his own TV show down the line. Professor D’Angeli’s Greatest Cases tonight how he found the fly in the ointment using a telescope and differential geometry.
Back to the same meeting in Mc Mc’s where the twilight blur out on
“This kid is scientific, see what I mean?”
The bald captain didn’t but nodded and added another gout of lung-blasting cigar smoke to the general haze.
“Yeah,” he said, meaninglessly.
The Inspector looked into distant vistas like maybe an astronomer at
“Big people,” he confided, “set great store by this lad, here.” Nodded his long face that should have been background in a leprechaun movie. “Really big people if you take the meanin’?”
That was a meaning the captain could take. His grunt was comprehensive.
“Hmn.”
“He’ll bring science to the job,” the inspector went on looking like he wanted to pat my cheek with what they used to call ham-like hands. “They expect great things a him, I been informed.” Gazed paternally at me.
“Which things?” I had to wonder.
“Don’t get ahead a yourself, lad,” he said like the firm wise doctor, wagging a cautionary forefinger. “You’ll soon be in the thick of it.”
Which is what I was afraid of. I had a faint, uneasy sense that “big” people were making a big mistake like when I’d been put up for a combat medal for sleeping through an ambush. Details another time…I took a long swallow of beer and wished I had a joint to put a perspective on this meeting. I didn’t know it yet but this was the first official session of the burgeoning tea party.
“You’re a lucky young pup,” the captain said in words that were smoke. I could tell he wished he could hit me. I was guilty of excess favor. “The inspector here is your best friend. What we call a ‘rabbi.’”
“I didn’t realize you were Jewish,” I said.
The inspector got a chuckle out of that; the captain looked disgusted.
“Look, son,” the inspector said, “they…we all expect you to use your skills to get to the bottom of some pretty tricky stuff. All your skills and so forth.”
“Sherlock the kid,” the captain quipped heavily, grinning, tilting back his head, exhaling smoke like a breaching whale. It glowed like a sickly nebula in the greenish flashing neon shamrock.
“Lad,” the inspector said, “I should say detective. Er, you are about to get a
very important assignment. Very, very important.”
So this was very, very important. I would have loved to bring the Inspector
down to meet Professor Short and his device and look at the heads under glass. I assumed they were already back at their posts. I was still paranoid in patches: maybe they were taking out the brains and feeding them to creatures in the egg.
Anyway I flopped after her, favoring my bad wing, pretending this was as good way to go to the diner. Suddenly, as if they’d come out of the ground, there were dozens of people holding candles and humming or wordlessly singing. It looked like a protest. I had a fleeting idea that they were slaves of the egg world. Short clearly was the eggman. Stop right there.
She’d stopped as they passed and I came up to her, feeling even more awkward. I was back in high school walking by a classroom to check out a certain chick…there she’d be at her desk and I’d look away instantly, stomach-scared she’d caught me. I convinced myself they couldn’t tell I was sick with love. I was the same kind of poker player: my face was a mask of the obvious. Lost back in the river of a lifetime the girl would always be the same to me as she stood in the same place on the same shore forever. There’s human memory for you.
I came up behind Lisa realizing how tall she really was just as 20 or so candle-carriers cut between us to join the marching hundreds.
“It’s a miracle,” one told me without pausing; a stout, middle-aged woman who looked like she mopped the halls after classes.
There didn’t seem to be that many students in the throng: a few old and
young in wheelchairs, gray and white-haired senior men and women, families with kids…peculiar.
“What miracle?” I asked a sweaty fat man in a Hawaiian shirt, limping along in broken-looking shoes. He had a candle, nearly all of them did. I noticed Lisa Zeit joining the crowd as somebody handed her a candle, too. I kept pace with the man, with one eye on her.
“It’s a sign,” he puffed. “The Holy Mother is among us.”
She was but none of us knew it yet.
“Join us,” said a lanky woman in shorts with a face like sun-shriveled leather. Somebody you’d expect to see at
I stopped, noting campus police at the outskirts, wary and uncertain. I saw flashbulbs and TV lights locating the press (and obviously the sacred event) half a mile away at the athletic fields.
The Madonna of the 50 yard-line, I thought. A miracle if they won a game next year….
“Where’s the Pope?” I wanted to know but the worshippers moved on leaving a few children in their wake, dirty, sweaty and full of senseless sound and excess movement.
Couldn’t locate Lisa. I watched the lights get smaller as they went between buildings and under trees until they were just fireflies too. The humming singing was sound blowing over surf seeming to mean something. My mind was still a half-turn to the left from the leftover whatever it was from what I’d inhaled and swallowed.
Had to get out of here and go back to the city except who wanted to be the one who walked past a miracle? Besides, she was there, a candle-carrying worshipper and maybe Mary Magdalene’s right-hand girl. The new plan was to follow the faithful to the football field and then go eat and drink and pass out so as to put this insane day into perspective. Let sleep knit up my raveled sleeve.
As I followed the human fireflies a big, foggy shadow seemed to blot their light for a second: reminded me of the huge wings in the egg world. I stopped again. Maybe the best thing was to eat…or drink…maybe just drink…then go home…maybe just go home, eat another day and catch up with Lisa later…if ever…go home and think about the Philadelphia Experiment which no one ever wanted to own up to. Field effects could bend light and radar and so on. Why not at least have tried it? It fit the fringe expressions I liked to take seriously. I bet they tried it. Come on, an intense enough magnetic field has to derange the currents in your body. Your brain could start emitting dance music in ¾ time.
Turning my back on the miracle I headed to my sad Volvo. Grab a bite on the road home. Get to bed.
Someone plucked my sleeve: a fattish, sweaty item with a Rolling Stones tee-shirt and a face like a bitter Jerry Garcia.
“This whole area is haunted, man,” he informed me. “I’ve seen some fucked-up shit, man. Fucked-up.”
“You may have a point,” I agreed.
“I’ve seen some strange shit, man. Spirits from the past.”
I nodded and kept walking. He tailed along.
“You look like the fuzz, man. What’s with that?”
“Peach fuzz. Nice and soft.”
He kept a half-step behind me. I could see the gate a hundred feet ahead. The dense trees were dark, overhanging blots defined by light and shadow from the staggered brass lampposts. The air was nice, light breezes taking off the heat.
“That’s cool, man. That’s cool.”
“You’re too stocky to be the Ancient Mariner,” I said, not looking back, “so what’s the deal? Are you solid or hatched from the egg?”
“Everybody’s from an egg, man. This area is fucking haunted. I mean, man,
I have seen things.”
“Did you change your smoking mixture?”
“You are the fuzz. That’s cool.”
We were almost to the gate.
A Novel
By
Richard Monaco
Dedicated to Federico Fellini, my old friend and genius in the classical sense, who convinced me I was no more insane than he was.
MICHAEL D’ANGELI
Summer 1970
The old Volvo had a new rattle in the engine, somewhere between a gasp and a click. Summer heat, I decided. This was a northern machine and always ran hot. I front-parked partly in a fire zone where the curb was sawgrass and powdery earth with a concrete sidewalk bright white in the impacting sunlight. I had a police card on the visor in case some local officer happened not to be snoozing under a shade tree somewhere and actually on a call.
I sat a moment and thought about lighting a smoke. Killed the motor and knew it would be unbearable in there in 3 minutes. If it idled the temperature would red-line. Through the big gate and brass-colored high fence things looked lush, green and deceptively cool. A dusty-looking little bird looped by and quick-stopped on a long pine branch that poked through the bars, swaying it slightly in the almost windless air.
If you could communicate with the bird, I automatically thought, then you’d know when it would perch and take off again... if you could communicate with all the birds on campus none of their movements would seem random from your point of view….If you could talk to dust motes….
I always hated randomness. It’s not equivalent to probability which is just a by-product of our defects in seeing and measuring stuff. There were always arguments in school. It never made sense. If you knew everybody in
I was tall and thin in high school and except for a learner bike tire at the belt line nothing too different today. I was good at boxing and running. Wish I’d been better at running, in the end. Tall and thin with dark hair and dark eyes. I liked to think they gleamed with piercing intelligence. Well they gleamed, anyway.
I was back at school in a way I’d never have imagined, unfolding myself from the dull red coupe, which wasn’t quite old enough to be vintage or new enough to have decent air-conditioning. Perfect for long winters and crisp falls.
This was the most golden mellow August scene imaginable: lush, soft lawns with rows of old, dense trees where the late sunlight lay like melted honey among lucent flowers. Here and there summer school people reading, chatting, dozing off on the rich grass: bright clothes, bare feet, strains of music (thought I heard The Doors chanting one out, distant, blurred away by shifting air) and the hint of pot on the soft, scented, sluggish breezes.
Most anti-war radicals had gone to
The air smelled of life’s richness. It made me want to sit under a tree. Take off the square shoes and navy blue socks and dream, think about sex, the pliant sweetness and taste of a sleek young body under my hands and mouth…or smoke a joint and drift away thinking about how Pascal had it right, that the opposite of randomness wasn’t absolute cause and effect, just absolute order. I had no concept of how close I was to the opposite just then. I liked poetry: “A sweet
disorder in the dress/Kindles in clothes a wantonness….” Sweet disorder. I was just about to meet her.
I’d been married in grad school though the bonds were never too tight. We had what they starting calling “open marriage” rather than consensual adultery. The straw that collapsed our camel was when I came home one headache-bright dawn and found a guitar player we’d met at a club the day before sitting naked in my walk-in closet doing yoga. My nude wife was deep in non-REM sleep in the bedroom amidst signs of sweet violence. Eventually she went to the West Coast in a psychedelic bus with a band and I was drafted. It might have been Sly and the family Stone, I’m not sure.
Must have sighed, walking off the campus road onto the loamy earth, studying a bubble-bodied young beauty whose tanned treasures seemed to be finding loopholes in her casual sketch of a skirt and attenuated braless top. Her hair was tied in two loose, unbraided braids. Her legs looked long enough for two knees apiece. I definitely sighed and ogled. Some women have a paralyzing effect and leave you fumbling and desperate at first sight.
So I nearly went into a trance of lust and got lost in the timeless drowse of desire and discovery. Her rimless glasses flashed sun and green lawn. I blinked nervously. Started walking again. I hadn’t realized I’d actually stopped and stared. The almost thirty pervert in a dark suit and dull red tie. She flexed her toes (they looked soft and perfect) as I stared away towards the science building, looking (I hoped) serious, remote, lost in deep contemplations. I thought she smiled. I refused to look again.
I wasn’t here for meeting young babes. I was dressed for business and as serious as my slightly baggy and wrinkles outfit. Women would ask: “Why don’t you buy cool clothes?” I always thought I did. Let’s not bandy women at this point.
These things come out as you tell a story. Lies and truth and all in between. Nothing is random and I want things remembered.
I didn’t yet know I was Marlowe in the Heart of Darkness heading upstream to Mr. Kurtz. We met, up the
It was already too late to go back and sit near the girl. Oh, I couldn’t have escaped, couldn’t cause anything to come out differently. Edmund the bastard had no more chance than Lear or any Kennedy, King or other poor sucker. To see this as an abstraction or academic debate is nothing like having to live it. The Greeks had it right: fate points a finger.
Half-step back: I got a degree in philosophy here with a minor in astrophysics. Graduate school was in
I looked around and shook my head. It had only been a few years (some pretty dark) and suddenly the students here were all kids.
My senior thesis got favorable attention. Physicists as Philosophers is what it broke down into. Scholarships to grad school, publication, lots of pipes smoked at me in dark paneled offices, sherry with Old Boys who still wished Britain had won in 1776, touting me as a nearly white Italian who might be fine-tuned into a radical, less practical version of maybe Carl Sagan. Some shrewder ones became vaguely disenchanted when my second paper came out suggesting Pascal (who wasn’t much in) had the right idea on determinism and Einstein on God. There were cautious complaints that the paper suggested the ancient Vedic Yogis were physicists. Still,
lot of hearts by breaking up; students took off their clothes and took over schools and draft boards. Ali was a hated hero, Johnson a goat and Nixon finally was having his shot at screwing up the world. I loved Ali. I always lean towards the high ground even though that’s where they drag you to be hanged.
My mind had been elsewhere most school days plus wall-to-wall sex with a joint in every mouth that wasn’t otherwise occupied. Cocaine hadn’t yet become the Holy Grail of partying. I remember wondering while ticking towards orgasm beat by varying beat if our coital rhythms both measured and expressed time like an atomic clock being constantly recalibrated by acceleration. Time isn’t subjective, just measured from different points of views. Nothing is absolutely subjective anyway, that idea’s just another way to avoid tough facts. We love binary fragmentation: good/bad; male/female; Heaven/Hell on into seconds, minutes, hours; centimeters, kilometers, parsecs – measurement by bits and pieces while everything flows along smooth, unbroken, forever….
Between smoke, booze and a brain full of big ideas the Army took me when I deserted graduate school after meeting Hunter Thomson. There was a connection. One night he came into a biker bar that was walking distance from my off-campus housing in a neighborhood with old refrigerators on weathered porches and rusted-out cars up on blocks in front yards. Red-neck Meadows. I’d been a kid in a suburb one wobbly half-a-step up from that.
Thompson came in stripped to his pale, skinny waist with a long cigarette holder clamped in his aggressive jaw. I expected this deranged homosexual hippie (as I saw it) to be quickly flung back into the moist, warm, star-filled night by the bikers massed around the sagging, battered bar that reeked of sour mash and humid wood rot. The whole joint smelled like an armpit, anyway and you could find the toilet with your eyes closed. It took me back to teenage years trying to be tough so I could get the bad girl. Real tough guys want the near-virgin while the fakes dream of the wild slut with the pure, untouchable spirit. You see, on one side there was this beauty, order and wonder of the universe and on the other was a strange anger and frustration that brick wall in your face called death you crash into and are blanked-away forever. Now I almost wish it were true.
Some parts of my teenage years weren’t a blur. I’d spend days reading back issues of Scientific American and taking out physics books from the local library. My father owned a gas station; he liked to shake his head and say that Einstein had never been brought home by the police so maybe I was no Einstein. Fair enough.
To my surprise the stinky, tattooed, greasy, violent pack of motorcycle mental cases made room for this skinny, half-naked weirdo. He stood next to me where I was shifting my center of mass around a hard, seriously tilted barstool that kept threatening to dump me off to the left. He peered at me like a mad bird and I hoped he wasn’t going to put his hand on my leg or something. I must have showed it. I later learned he was about as gay as Humphrey Bogart. But he made me nervous. He clamped on the cigarette holder and said things I couldn’t understand because there seemed to be no actual words most of the time. Mutters and murmurs with significant pauses. I took a shine to him and we hung out.
He explained (I think) that he was there visiting a friend who had just gone to another dimension. I liked that. He told me he was writing something but the conversation was like talking in a hurricane where most of the words blew away before you could hear them.
After telling him I was trying to find ways to speak to electrons he decided we better drop acid. He wanted in on the conversation. I had never done that. I never did it again until…let that come in time.
Dropped Lysergic Acid, dropped out as in the stupid Timothy Leary chant: Tune in, turn on, drop out. The professors, the subjects, the history, the math, the limited theories all melted away as I got inside time and space in some unmeasured way walking around the bar parking lot with Hunter T. (though I can’t swear how long he was actually there) and expressing things without words or math or anything else…I shook hands with a few sub-atomic particles that night. It was the real unmaking of me.
A changed man after seeing infinite variations and structures all around me in a supernal light that had no photons exciting my eyes (footnote to come, professor) like a dream where everything was clear, perfect, absolute but not a dream, not a shrink’s shrinkable dream, at least. And something more…and that something more is why I never intentionally did mind-expanders again or anything like it. And that’s coming up soon, that something more which turned out to be waiting just across campus (or up the Congo) as the sun interfaced the massive oak treetops while I hesitantly walked through broken shade and shatters of softly melting gold, wanting to look back, wanting to go over to the girl I’d never met reading with eyeglasses full of light and legs without end. I needn’t have worried because she was waiting on ahead, too. All ordered. Terrible and wonderful.
The war was as pleasant as rectal cancer. I insisted on combat. They wanted me to use my education but I was stubborn. I knew survival out there depended on knowing something useful. I refused (being so young and so right) to put any buffer between me and senseless, organized violence. Look, armies want to produce selective sociopaths: kill who we tell you to without hesitation or pity but be nice at home. Songs and stories go with it.
Lying in a hooch in a burned out village, looking out the open door as an exhaled lungful of pot smoke slowly dispersed in the wet, heavy air, watching the full moon set and stain the massed, dark jungle trees with soft silver, sweating in the thick, rich, sour air that smelled like charred wood and meat while evil bugs danced around my ears, it occurred to me that God was on everybody’s side. Conscience was equivalent for everyone everywhere and always. Morality was political. Conscience was absolute and eternal; true intelligence. Creation’s mind arranging yours. It shook me up as ruthless truth will. It blew my high.
Crossing the quiet campus I half-consciously lit a cigarette and remembered nice things. Like meeting my second wife and making love around midnight over there in the dense, misty, underbrush under the ancient, massive trees that should have had Druids under them, the thick soft grass crushed under us, the September summer sunheat pulsing back from the rich earth. The campus clock had tolled and I remember timing the beats of our bodies to that deep, haunting, measured sound….
The campus clock now sounded five as I went up the old, stone steps worn smooth by generations. It was The Doors I’d heard, the song was clearer here, finishing: “…when you’re strange, faces come out of the rain when you’re strange, when you’re straaaangge….”
The sun was unobstructed and glancingly left me with a blast of purple afterglow as I went through the dim entranceway. In the blurred mix of cool shadow and stunned optics I saw someone standing to my left, coming at me fast. He was strange. My impression was of a small, almost impossibly thin young boy with a big head and huge dark eyes, naked, bug-like with small bat wings.
Reflexes took over and I half-crouched and put up my hands, sensing a savage, cold anger and hair-trigger violence about to rip at me. The shock set my heart pounding.
“Stop!” I barked.
“Why?” asked a papery, thin voice.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes and saw a small, round, balding man with a wildly asymmetrical dark moustache (left spiking up, right down) walking past from my right, heavy briefcase tilting him as if he had one short leg. There was an elevator directly across and a wide staircase to the right.
“Sorry,” I murmured, shaking my head and taking a deep breath. Shut my eyes. When I opened them the big, cool marble foyer was empty. I peered around, blinking. Where was the rotund son-of-a-bitch? “Hey!” I called out. “Where are you?”
Nothing. Cocked my ears. Nothing.
Human senses, I thought. What a joke... “Little things upset them…” how did it go? “An undigested bit of beef…a fragment of an underdone potato….” Add the odd hit of acid or high grade hash.
But I wasn’t laughing. For no apparent reason I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to leave. Thought about the girl under the tree and thon (peripherally) about
glowing, charring nub.
I groaned and snarled. Conscience.
“Shit,” I said, “what the fuck?”
The hall was still, cool and dim. My eyes were free of the afterhaze. I went to the stairs a little too quickly. One flight up and I should have turned around and run except you can’t escape. You just keep thinking you can.
LISA
The guy was dressed like an undertaker. He looked over and I knew he dug me. That was cool. He had a long, sensitive face. I gave him an up from under look hoping he’d come over. I didn’t want to beckon. Why bother? Karma controls this shit. If it was going to happen it would happen.
But I turned around and watched him go into the science building. He might have been a teacher. Older men were cool. Or could be. If I’d any idea…but I hadn’t. Why this guy?
In spite of Karma I stuffed everything in my bag and stood up, looking at where he’d gone. I’d just come from a poetry class. I loved it. The professor was young, funny, eccentric cute…it was just a matter of time, I felt….I drifted across campus. No explanation. There was nothing to explain. I don’t regret it. Maybe I should but I don’t. Regret is stupid, too late to matter. Eat too much and regret won’t digest it. Fail in love and regret won’t fix it. Why be uptight about sex? It came and went like everything else and stretched from great to lousy.
I sat on the steps and went back to reading. But, really, why him?
When he came out things would happen or not. We’d screw or we wouldn’t. That’s how it was then and that was alright. And there was the young professor too and a few other scatterings…I would be a busy girl or not.
MIKE
Blocking out anything weird I went upstairs to my appointment.
I went on the job because I figured what could ever be worse than Khe San? Combat soldiers understand nothing’s random: Fate points a cocked finger. I’d been offered a teaching job here if I went back to grad school but not after the past two years in the exotic east; outdoor living under tropical skies; meeting interesting locals; studying amazing varieties of bugs; making and losing friends.
The police felt OK because you can hide behind the uniform, lots of rules and still have interesting locals longing for your doom. And you could do some good on the job. The most good I ever did over there was holding my fire a few times and letting some pregnant mother live or old man or kid….
With a degree and a half, fresh from the land of death I was expected to write my own ticket upwards in the department. Being a lousy sleeper was another plus. I could work any hours and doze in the car. I had a “hook” from day one: a Deputy Inspector who’d been a Colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers and liked to take me for the occasional quick one, give me sage advice about the Byzantine politics of the Force while further reddening his bony, long, dour, chapped-looking Hibernian face with the booze. He always gave the impression something really dangerous was couched in him, flicking deep in his eyes like a shark glimpsed in a
dark tidal pool.
A few months ago in company with a stocky, shiny-headed captain of detectives who looked like he hadn’t smiled since 1955, we inhaled whisky and beer and gulped cigarette smoke at a place I called Mc Mc’s since you couldn’t read the name on the spastic neon sign (dusk was blurring 8th avenue) though the shamrock was pretty clear.
“He’s a good guinea,” the Colonel said, confidentially, with a solid nod towards me and puff of tobacco breath. He liked to be called Colonel; maybe it made him feel like a Southern gentleman. That was as close he’d ever get. He looked significantly at the captain whose small, bleak eyes stayed remote and passionless. I carefully looked at the fascinating swirls of heavy-hanging smoke.
“Oh, yeah?” responded the captain, almost as if under threat.
“He’s going make something of himself, if you take my meaning.”
“Yeah,” managed the captain, already calculating how to be sure I wasn’t going to get in his way and maybe make less of him. He didn’t have to worry about me getting in his hair.
“We’re goin’ to skip a step or two.”
A cautious grunt was the next response. The Colonel put away a shot of whiskey, washed it down with beer then lit a fresh smoke in an elaborate gesture of power. Just from the way he lit up and leaned back in the worn, hard angled seat told you he had pull to spare upstairs. Turned out to be downstairs but that comes later too.
“We won’t be bothrin’ with plain clothes,” said my “hook.”
“Um,” reacted the noncommittal captain. “Third grade?”
Past the smoke haze I could see ghostly traffic out the open door. A warm spring night. No air worth breathing. I was too green to realize they were enhancing my fate. “Third grade” might have been a crack about somebody’s education.
“Temporarily,” said the Colonel. “This boyo’s goin’ to do us proud.”
That remark brought no flash of good will to the face of my new captain. Not that his was a face that flashed much of anything.
So I was a detective. Minge, as we say, meaning I’m impressed. I was worrying people. Lots of glad hands later at the station house told me I’d better be watching my “six.” You see, on the job, you don’t get a boost like that unless you collared Charlie Manson hiding in a pay toilet. So it was clearly high politics and nobody likes that. One old-timer told me I’d be “under the scrutiny” and advised pickling my nuts in brine to toughen myself up.
Today detective 3rd Grade D’Angeli was back at school. There was no one at the main desk so I knocked on the department head’s door. A small man with rimless glasses, a roundish, pale face and flesh-colored hair opened and gave me the cold, wide-eyed blink. He reminded me of Heinrich Himmler photos. I’d never seen him before. He was the new man they’d brought in. Supposed to have worked at what eventually became known as Area 51. Dr Hush-hush he was called locally. He wasn’t much liked, as it turned out. He didn’t much care, either. Didn’t have to.
“Where is Ruth?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe among the alien corn,” I suggested. “The office is empty.” I
remembered Ruth the departmental secretary: graying short hair bright, pale eyes, pale everted lips and too much rouge. Hot stuff for the scientists. “I could check the bathrooms.” This fellow made me happy to play cop. He was just lucky I hadn’t started the pickling process yet.
“Who are you?” He didn’t give me room to go in. His glasses flashed windowglare at me. Maybe he didn’t trust Mediterranean types. Well my suit was cheaper than his pale gray one but didn’t have dandruff on the shoulders. “What might your business be?” His voice was like chipped flint. His vest was odd: bright colored diamonds like a harlequin outfit.
“I’m a recovering scientist. I went to physicists anonymous.” He started to close the door but I had half a foot inside. I don’t know why I was breaking chops except the man looked like the type that tried out new weapons after doing the death math, comforted by acceptable casualties and confident that whatever country he happened to working with would rebuild after the holocaust. Actually, I hated him on sight. He felt like death without decay. “Look, I was sent here. I’m Detective D’Angeli. You were supposed to expect me. Dr. Grayson?”
He turned and went back to his desk and left me to shut the door. The room was pretty Spartan. More like a Monk’s cell: no papers or books all over the place, everything clean and polished-looking. No sign of food or drink; all hard chairs, even his. A good spot to meditate on megadeaths. Big bright windows reflecting everywhere but it still felt clammy and close like, maybe, one of those cemetery crypts that look like little houses with nice views.
“I expected a little more politeness,” was the clipped reply. “I read your paper on wormholes between universes, as a matter of fact.”
Nice change of pace, I thought as he motioned me into a seat. That wasn’t a bad way to sum up one of my main points. I sat and crossed a leg. We were colleagues, now, two serious thinkers, elite and wary as chessplayers. I’d lost a lot of academic polish in the land of nightmare due to things like a buddy’s brains spattering my face at lunch or looking into a deep pit full of burnt and shredded women and kids….
“You didn’t say ‘interesting,’” I pointed out, trying to figure him.
“I wouldn’t have read it if it weren’t,” he replied, tenting his long-fingered hands on the spotless, almost bare desk as if about to pray or beg in Vietnamese sign language. Maybe he was just one of those detached brains from Science Fiction that kept thinking and thinking while their bodies atrophied and their eyes enlarged.
“No action at a distance if there’s no distance.”
“Something like that,” I rejoined. “But I’m retired, now, so time and space can stay the way they were.”
He almost didn’t smile at all. The thick lenses distorted his eyes when his head shifted and weren’t blank with reflected light. They were very big eyes, refracting cool and unsympathetic intelligence like H.G. Well’s Martians or an SS dentist.
“Your paper is why you’re here, young man.”
“You actually said ‘young man.’” I shook my head.
“You are part of the most irritating generation in history, I think.”
“Sure. I’m just a
“No,” he said like an ice cube cracking.
“Am I supposed to investigate anything? Are you the reason I was offered a job here last year?”
His hands were still as a pale, blue-veined carving of a praying saint.
“Yes, to the first,” he said. “I wasn’t here last year.”
“A police matter? This is not my….” I didn’t bother. I’d been sent here by high authority who’d been told I was the boy to carry the ball.
Dr. Grayson might have sighed or not. He was starting to worry me. I had a creepy feeling he could push a button on you like a Mafia Don. He was being very patient. I kept thinking about the government connection, the military, the big secrets…acceptable casualties…blue on blue. I’d experienced that color combination more than once over in the
“Let’s say this is a police matter,” he said, judiciously. “And you may start at once.”
I didn’t ask “what?” I was already getting too cute for that.
“Un-huh.”
“It’s a missing persons case, Detective,” he went on, unstirring, stony. “We expect you will have a special affinity for the problem.” He moved, reaching a paper from his desk drawer and placing it facing me, a shock of white on the glossy darkness of wood. That would have been the time to call in sick but I couldn’t see the future then. “Read this and sign it. It’s a confidentiality agreement.”
I read fast. It was far more. This was a “treason paper.”
“This project has the highest classification,” he explained, back to his praying mantis hands position and lens bugged eyes. “Great work is being done here. Great work. You will play a part in it.” He shut his glass-distorted eyes. “Great work.”
“What do you need a cop for? Even if I uncovered murder I couldn’t tell anybody according to this.”
“We need you for reasons…” His eyes either glazed or went thoughtful. “…reasons that will become clear. You’re not here because you’re presently playing at policeman.”
“FBI no good?” Of course, I already knew that. “Military Intelligence?
Secret Service? Postmen?”
He actually did almost smile. He was acting. You could tell. He was all outside. He could stonewall the Devil. I wondered who he was before he became what he was. “You’ve been requested by the highest authority,” he explained.
I stood up.
“Which highest authority? I think I’ll go home,” I told him. “It’s been great but I’m not coming back to school. I don’t care if the President wets himself. I don’t want to know any official secrets.” I leered at the paper.
He didn’t bother to argue. Just stayed even stiller (if that were possible) and looked at me until I sat back down. I didn’t know my depth so I couldn’t say how far out of it I was. It was like a dream or a movie. I signed. Where was I going to go? I would be fired, at the least, and I’d had enough dreams and seen enough film noir to imagine going home and finding my house gone and my identity dissolved while I ran around trying to explain myself or find out who put the radioactive isotope in my Pepsi. You knew this grim iceman was the real thing.
“I thought the Manhattan project was long over,” was the best I could come up with, scrawling my name feeling like I’d just signed the guest book at the gate to hell. “Do I work for you, now, is that the deal?”
“Of course not. Can you find your way to the particle physics lab?”
“Missing a proton, too?”
“When you get there see Professor Herman Short. A remarkable mind. You will learn much from him. He’s made astounding breakthroughs.”
I knew who he was, him and his Nobel Prize. For no reason I asked:
“Who’s the little round man with the uneven moustache? Dark shirt, going bald. Seersucker suit. Ran into him downstairs. Walked like a cripple.” Didn’t want to mention the hallucinatory bug-eyed character.
“Fascinating. Why do you care?”
“I thought maybe he was missing. I found him but then I lost him.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was talking because I could have sworn he’d reacted and for this one a big reaction was a double blink. Look, no way to guess what was really going on. He was acting and I’d been written into the story.
“Something odd about him, that’s all.”
“Please give my regards to Professor Short.”
I was dismissed. I almost said “Sir, yes Sir.” I just let myself out, instead. It felt strange but strange was just beginning and grew and grew like Jack’s beanstalk until dreaming and waking were fused and illusions were the only solid things left.
LISA
Something drew me there. No one was close so I lit one up right on the steps.
An incredible evening as the sun went behind the massed trees and deepened the golden splashes. I could feel splashes on my legs and face. Tender and warm. I held the smoke until I coughed. I was still a little sore from last night. Excess with a couple of friends I’d met at a concert three months back…seemed like three months. They turned up on the campus yesterday with anti-war artwork some of which was fairly cool if crude. Nice guys. At first I didn’t recognize them because they were wearing clothes. They both were in love with me they said. Tender moments and I really got turned on and into the sex. What’s more intense than opening yourself up and being a part of people tripping on themselves? What’s the difference, when it’s just that, who it is or how many?
I’m doing my thesis kind of on why if two or more people agree on anything, art or what you’re seeing on an acid trip it has to be false. Agreement stops the flow and the magic flower shrivels. Good thing my family is loaded. Well, my grandfather came over with my grandmother’s jewels. She was a French converted Catholic who’d worked for the Russian royal family. The jewels weren’t all gifts, if you follow me and there were a lot. Like, Grandpa built a tannery and then bought some stock like Xerox or Polaroid. I went to
I’d almost forgotten about the tall stranger in the dark suit when he came back out of Vanderziltch Hall, walking like he had no desire to get anywhere, hands in pockets, richly deep red tie loosened. I dug the tie. I wondered how he’d look wearing nothing else. He drifted slightly as if to keep going but didn’t disappoint me and paused at the top of the steps not too near or far but his point was clear. The end of the day was looking better.
There wasn’t much of a roach left but I held it up, looking at him over my oval Lennon glasses.
“I’m out of matches,” I lied.
He nodded and took a beat. I liked that. All that me showing right down to the bare feet he kept sidelonging; kept his cool.
“And I thought it was just pure altruism,” he said. Nice voice.
“Either way it needs a light.”
He was already there, sitting down one step above me.
“Was the law changed while I was asleep?” he wondered.
“You the fuzz?”
“Not in
I laughed a little; liked that.
“Cool,” I told him as he held out a skinny, silver cigarette lighter. I lit up and passed the joint stub over. It was already too hot on the upper lip but he did a short toke without reaction. I liked that, too. He was adding up pretty well, on my
calculator. As he held it down I asked: “You a scientist?”
“I told you, I’m a cop somewhere else.”
“Yeah. In space, man?”
I had the ragged-burning nub and took a snort and gave it back. It wasfinger-searing short, now. He handled one more, yipped and dropped it on the stone steps.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.
I laughed and coughed. He just coughed.
“Sure, man.” I responded.
“I’m investigating.”
I really broke up, this time. My skirt shifted and I made a vague attempt to cover a little leg. I already could feel him in me, long wavy hair falling around his long, pale, artistic face, balling together, wide open and wet and wild. You could love anyone with all your soul for seconds, minutes, hours, days….It’s chores and money that screws it up. And rules you’re afraid to keep breaking. Like I said, the minute two people agree on anything important it’s already getting stale.
“Count me in,” I offered.
“Do you know Professor Short?” I shook my head. “Works at the cyclotron in the basement of…” Coughed, snorted, grinned and shook his head. “Wow…is that shit Mexican Pink or something.”
“Pink?” I broke up again. He was maybe a comic, a nerd or a cop at that, I decided. “You like pink?”
“On nighties.”
“You wear nighties? Like, that’s sweet. Are you, like, telling me something, man?”
“What?” He giggled. “That’s funny. What’s your name?”
“What’s your rank and serial number?”
“That’s funny. Wow.” He saluted. “Corporal D’Angeli, Michael U, 0711….”
He just kept laughing. “You are pretty fucking funny.”
“It’s the Mexican Pink. I’m pretty dull overall.”
Overall got to him. He was trying not to obviously ogle me again about as gracefully as a one-legged ballet dancer. He was too much. He was by degrees hot, cool, funky, far-out, freaky and nerdic. I took that all in, in a psychic glance and had a sudden sense I should excuse myself and go back to the dorm. The more I started digging him the more I felt I should run. Something was skewed, here. This dude was like a fishing lure: I was the fish this time; he was all over hooks. .
“Anyway,” he said, standing up, showing willpower. “Anyway I’ve got to see
Prof Midget down below.”
“You said that. More or less.”
“Right. I…I was in country….”
This was more than I needed. What I needed was more dope and a hit of opium. Though this stuff was very, very potent. I knew what he meant but I said:
“Which country?” This was going to get fucked-up.
“
“Oh, wow.”
This was fucked-up. It explained nothing and everything. I was hooked. The pain, the need, the horror, the tenderness….Shit, shit, shit, I thought. You could tell he hadn’t had a desk job over there.
“It was….”
I nodded.
“Sit down, man,” I said.
He didn’t.
“What’s your name?” he wanted to know, again. Shit, shit, shit.
“Lisa. It’s cool. Sit down.”
“Far from cool,” he said but he sat. “Far, far…far….”
“I dig it,” I said. I wanted to hold him, comfort him because he’d been in the arms of horror.
“My name is Michael.”
“Cool. You said that.”
“It sucks” he said.
‘I dig it.”
He blew out a long slow breath. He didn’t mean his name.
“No you don’t,” he said.
MIKE
She was waiting there, looking more naked than covered, sitting on those empty steps like somebody singing sailors to their doom and I’d left my earplugs in my other suit. What was in that shit?
She and her magic herbs brought things to the surface I’d hoped were sunk
forever. The purity of meaningless, clean, abstract lust was blown away and bad things were swirling around me like the contents of a ruptured submarine: familiar, pathetic, tragic and ugly. My things.
What was in that grass? I mean, it hadn’t been that long since I’d smoked Laotian hash and yet I felt like I’d been punched in the head by this shit…seasick, fucked up...awash and going under…hoping to somehow make the sun-shocked, golden beach….
It was like falling out of your boat or your head and the only solidity in sight was a razor coral reef. I could see the two of us married, decades down the line wondering where it all went while we watched the kids grow up and ponder us with pitying sympathy. Poor old farts. Missed it all. “When I get older, losing my hair….”
“You don’t dig it,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” she insisted. She might have been about to weep.
There was fire…screams, impacts…twisted dead…kids, women, soldiers…a
world of shit…ruins and stink and she brought it all back…sucking down super potent dope the mind did flip-flops and imploded….That joint had triggered something. The joint and the babe.
“I won’t marry you,” I told her. “That’s death.”
She laughed so hard she rolled down two steps. That was something.
“That’s cool,” she gasped, sort of upside down.
“
“Lisa. I told you, man. What meth?”
I almost ran. The surreal and absurd was overdone. I had to see Professor Herman Short or bust. That pot was beyond Mexican anything. I don’t what it was.
Meth-laced was the weak best guess.
“Lisa, I….”
“That’s cool, man. I accept your unproposal.”
She was upside down on the pale stone steps. I aimed myself towards particle physics. Didn’t look back.
“Later, Lisa,” I said. “Later.”
“Like, I love you, Mike.” She flashed a V – peace.
My mind stayed blank down three flights of spiral steel stairs and in the tunnel I thought:
Love me? Love me? What the fuck is that…I...I…just hippie talk….
In two minutes she’d peeled back everything. Horrible things were bubbling up. This was a nightmare. I kept telling myself it was the pot and it would wear off.
“Hippie bullshit,” I muttered, pushing through the swinging doors and stopping in front of the reception desk which had a leaden-skinned, gray-haired, dully-dressed, bony woman with a face that looked peeled and sunken eyes, writing in an oversized book. I had a vague idea she should have been knitting. Her dress had a design of multi-colored patches on it like an 18th century bedquilt.
“Yes?” she said. Madame Lafarge.
“I agree,” I said. I was a mess, now.
Lisa, I thought. Goddamn hippie….
“Yes?” That was her best.
“She loves me,” I told her. “But it’s a generalization. The love generation generalization.”
“Yes?”
“Good God…OK…I need Professor Short. I need a lot of help.”
“And you are?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. I’m in big trouble. I’m one atom away from doom.”
“And you are?’
You had to dig her. The magic herbs caused Lisaspeak.
“King of the living dead.” She was unmoved. She just waited. I had to break and I did. “Ok. Cool. Like, I’m stoned and I was like sent here by like….” That got no reaction either. Today was the day of immovable objects and I was no irresistible force. “Dr. Grayson sent me. Call me Ishmael.”
That was better. Instant promotion. I was being shown in like a respectable citizen, past the desk, down the hall into the deeper underground.
“You’ll have to wait down here, I’m afraid, Mr. Ishmael.” She opened a steel door that swung smoothly. The steel walls were bilious green as was the bare steel table and two unpadded chairs. The indirect light was weak and fluttery. “I’ll send the Professor to you. Please make yourself comfortable. You are fortunate to meet him. He is a remarkable man. Remarkable, Mr. Ishmael.”
She had a sense of humor. They all did in their way. Looking around in my inexplicably over-high state I felt a touch of claustrophobic paranoia.
“Don’t you have a room with a spiked couch?” I wondered.
She left me alone with my slow-motion brain. I kept thinking this was a good place for secret police interrogations. There was only a dull and distant sense of being at an institution of higher learning. Institution…I didn’t like that word…. “Look at those walls,” I might have murmured aloud, sitting down on the comfortless chair, wondering how I could tell if they were closing in on me ever so slowly, imperceptible and silent? I picked a scratch mark on the floor the way you look at a cloud on a still day and try to keep your head motionless so you see which way it’s going relative to that building or pole or tree. I kept thinking of all the different things that might be moving relative to anything at all and considered that I could stay in the same inertial frame of reference if I (and the stuff in the room) shrank synchronously with the wall it would never get near enough to crush me…you see, if you’re in Einstein’s elevator or spaceship in free-fall nothing’s happening that you can detect and then the thing accelerates and the floor smacks you, you gain energy but until it hits you, nothing – so if gravity is really equivalent to inertia gravity doesn’t do a thing until you bang on the ground and there’s plenty wrong with that notion…is gravity energy? All energy is kinetic, you know, the result of movement of some kind. Gravity just makes movement happen without adding anything measurable to what it affects. Until something is accelerated you just float along and I was just floating along….
My wandering mind was getting many ideas. Lost the floor mark and then almost panicked for an instant when I thought I picked it up again closer to the dull molding than before.
“What the fuck did I smoke?” I asked blinking heavily at the steel door I hadn’t realize she’d closed behind her. The room was chilly and made of steel but I was composed of fumes with eyes that someone was gently pushing a thumb into from each outer edge. I was surprised when my voice didn’t echo hollowly as in a 40s detective film. “What the fuck?” I repeated. I liked the sound at first but now the two closed doors worried me. Had to get those unseen thumbs out of my eyes.
Why were there now two doors?
I shut the lids hoping that would help. Some help. Instead of closing walls I saw…just a flash which blasted my eyes open again: there was a hole in the world and something was coming through that might have been a face or a mouth full of fangs or a window to Hell with Satan picking his teeth with a fingerbone.
When they reopened Professor Herman Short was in the doorway. There was just one door again and one person. I knew it was the Prof because he had two horns and a goatee.
“Hey, baby,” I said. “I’m coming down again.”
He came closer. No horns but the Van Dyck was real. He was outlandishly tall for a white man of his generation. I made him at six foot six. He didn’t stoop, either, which you’d expect but had wide shoulders, held back in a kind of military way. He was “as bald and hairlesse as an egg.”
“I assume you are Detective D’Angeli.” His voice was a deep rumble.
The drug effect was wearing off.
“A piece of him,” I said. “The broken piece.” I blinked around at the steel room. “Nice office.”
“It’s insulated,” he explained in his deep power voice. He reminded me of milk: his face was a soft, pale round blot with curds for features. Wispy, overall, in shirtsleeves and loosely knotted school tie. “Due to radiation and some potentially toxic by-products of our research.”
“Which is what, more or less? Looking for the lost anti-neutrino?”
He smiled a little. He wasn’t like Dr. Grayson. There was something really affable about him. And I felt, in some obscure and oblique way he actually liked me.
“Most amusing,” he said, pleasantly. “We have been, well, achieving great breakthroughs. We know your background. You can help us more, we believe, if you understand something of what is being done here.”
He stood over me, arms at his sides. They were very long and the big hands stayed very still as he spoke. I was regaining my focus.
“You know it makes no sense from my side,” I told him, frankly, head tilted back looking up a long way to his curdled-looking face. When he spoke his mouth opened wide and it was a big mouth with too many teeth. “I barely made a start in my field and there are police just as good in
He seemed to gain energy suddenly and I had a strange impression (it might have been residual drug effect) that his face took firmer, sharper form as if there were sharp edges under the paffy flesh and his eyes seemed brighter. His voice was no louder but suddenly intense, vibrant and the sound seemed to grip my guts. It was something like a Hitler documentary when he really got in his groove and sounded amazing if you didn’t understand German: pure power, volcanic rumbling and eruption that shook you inside, all that force and supernatural resonance generally expressing vicious nonsense. But this powerhouse was speaking English neither vicious nor quite nonsensical. He stunned me for a moment or two.
“Our researches have gone far beyond petty definitions,” he said with subdued thunder. “A new world is upon us and absurd affirmations confirmed on you or anyone by any society or organization, have no force or meaning. Truth cannot be conferred. Genius cannot be conferred.” Once he was talking no one was more than a shadow or blur. I came to know he would have been as eloquent talking to a wall as to a vast audience; which was impressive in a way. His presence made you feel like an inanimate object. “Reality is not subject to opinion or point-of-view. No frame of reference can be preferred to another.” My concentration seemed blurred as he spoke; I couldn’t decide why what he was saying was wrong or why he was saying it; like being in class with a hangover. “We are, here, entering new places, new dimensions, new, so to speak, mansions in ‘my father’s house.’” The curds may have whipped into a fleeting smile, I wasn’t sure. It either meant something or was as empty as a senator’s promise. “I do not mean that literally, of course, my boy.”
I got the Christ quote. He paused and looked down at me with what might have been intended as a benign, fatherly look or maybe a casual glance from a white shark.
My boy? Maybe he’s just stoned too, I thought.
“Of course,” I replied. “So it doesn’t matter how much I know or don’t know or did or didn’t do in the eyes of the world. That’s fine. But what’s my job here? Why call in Sherlock D’Angeli?”
He looked cagy. It might have been a fake smile or a real grimace.
“Have you noticed how easily you’ve been advancing in your career?” A touch of faint, faint scorn?
“Have you?”
“Do you really imagine it has been accidental?”
I shook my head.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I figured it was because I worship Satan.”
This time it was a grimace. He was a little irritated. I did that to some people.
I glanced around at the steel room but no walls were contracting. I hoped he wouldn’t make a speech again; and what would happen if I just got up and left? Somehow I felt like some perp in the squad room who should be asking for a lawyer. A toke of whatever and now it was
“The first pill makes you bigger and the second makes you small and the one your mother gives you don’t do anything at all.…”
Nothing touched him but what he said himself, it seemed.
“This is a great opportunity for you, young Michael.” His face had settled back into pale, unfocused blots. “Many of your ideas are…well…close to the mark.”
I rubbed my eyes. They were working better. My mouth was dry, fuzzy. Pot effect except I was more thirsty than hungry. Young Michael. He reminded me of
Dad, suddenly.
The pale-gray, bony secretary or Norn was suddenly in the doorway with a bottle of Perrier water in her hand and some plastic cups. She set them on the table.
“Your water, professor,” she said, needlessly.
He nodded, absently, unscrewed the top and poured himself some. Gestured at me and I nodded. I gulped mine and had a second.
“Thanks, Norna,” I said.
No reaction.
Close to the mark, I reflected.
“What mark am I close to? So you want me to…what? Come back to school?”
“Two of our people are missing.” He was curd-like and distant on this topic.
“That’s your first problem to solve. There will be others.”
I drummed my fingers arhythmically on the metal table which caused a satisfying booming. Drank the rest of the faintly salty, fizzy liquid.
“What’s wrong with missing persons?”
He seemed irritated. His eyes suddenly had a look I’d seen in photos of Josef Stalin.
“Follow me, young man,” he said, heading for the door. “You’ll see something now. We don’t wish to have you not taking your work seriously.”
I followed.
LISA
Twilight was now seeping out from under the trees in a kind of misty tide of stillness where fireflies surfed and dove and I was digging it. The clock tolled some time or other as I walked across the campus. I was in some mellow place where the pot had floated me. I’d almost forgotten about the automatic trip I’d been off and on for the past maybe, month. That is until two ghosts took shape out of the mistiness where unseen bugs were starting to shriek and din quietly. The ghosts wore leather vests over their skinny, bare chests. I knew them. They’d died yesterday.
“Like, wow.” One said. His voice wasn’t hollow or anything. “We were guided here, man.”
“Cool,” said the other one, the drummer.
So they weren’t ghosts in the usual sense but they were pretty shadowy to me, I mean, they were yesterday. Maybe astral projections. What’s yesterday? Stuff you try to keep in sequence with clocks and calendars. What I did yesterday could have been a month ago or whenever. I might be mixing yesterday up with tomorrow.
Maybe a month ago I ate some green tabs. At first it seemed like any other trip. I was sitting on the grass digging the sunset which had left itself like stains of varnished paint on the trees so that even as the sky went deeper into bluish dark the luminous stains remained and were fascinating to watch. But then it went weird and never seemed to completely wear off, I mean, it kept coming back and without warning I’d be tripping again. The next day...night…week…two, three….Not normal bad tripping but most extreme. Like, usually the world is there, you know, enhanced with amazing details, colors, shapes…but this was more like a totally cosmic dream: I might suddenly be looking across endless plains where gigantic golden flowers broke like surf under thick, glowing breezes…once I was truly shaken by a black valley where chill razor-sharp peaks went up sheer for miles into what seemed a solid black sky and straddling both sides like a mile long bridge was an ancient fortress of black razor stone somehow familiar and terrible where blurry things with tentacles floated….The acid didn’t seem to be getting weaker and whenever the world came back there was no residual high. These scenes would just be all around me...the illumination would brighten and dim…big drops of rain might fall full of soft fire…rivers of blinding gold would appear and sometimes I’d see living things, winged golden human-like beings blurred by soft, glowing light. The more I tried to focus the harder it was to be sure what anything looked like….I wanted to get closer to the beings. They felt familiar. But that castle over the dark valley wasn’t good. Didn’t want to see that again. There’d been a sense of something…being watched…
So I wasn’t sure right now if this voluptuous twilight was one world or the other.
“We were looking for you, man,” the first said, Tommy, I think. See me, hear me, touch me, feel me….
“That’s cool,” I said. “Like, I’m a little fucked-up, right now.”
We stood among the goldengreen dots and streaks of firefly light as the twilight tide rose and gradually submerged us.
“We need to score, man,” said Tommy. “You holding?”
“I’ve got a little upstairs,” I told them. I suddenly flashed on lying naked on my back with the two of them feeding on me, sucking, licking and then taking them into myself maybe chanting “Yes and yes I said yes….” like in the book.
“Cool,” the other one said. “Far out.”
MIKE
I followed Professor Short down a descending, green corridor with a tin-colored floor. At one point there was a series of what looked like storefront displays or the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History where forever motionless “natives” or animals are posed in painted, depthless papier-mâché environments; except these were human and animal (noted a sheep, goat and pig) heads that looked real. Each window had a row of these with various expressions ranging from terror through boredom to bliss.
“Hey,” I said, “what does this have to do with particle physics?”
Short didn’t have to look back.
“Our experiments encompass a wide frame of reference,” he said.
“Medicine?”
He might have chuckled. I was trying to figure his accent. Something
European, maybe.
“Hardly.”
“Are those really heads from the formerly living?” I said with baffled dread and some reflex scorn.
“Formerly living.” He tilted his head, chuckled. “You are apparently quite the wag, my boy. “Living and dead turn out to be relative states as you, yourself,
suggested.”
They were impaled on metal spikes. Some seemed to have creases of dried blood zigzagging from their lips. Few looked really happy.
“So this is an experiment? Dead heads?”
“Michael, you know better than to assume death is an absolute state.”
“Absolutely.”
I started humming Sugar Magnolia. Forget the dead or the relatives watching me follow him down the ramp. He was hurrying a little as if worried we might be late for the Mad Tea Party.
We kept going deeper and it got steeper until you were leaning back. I was surprised how far and wondered when and why this tunnel was constructed. We circled like a corkscrew. Were we descending around the outskirts of a huge cyclotron? The old machine was not on such a scale. The corridor was almost sickening as the corkscrew effect worked down to a virtual point and the walls got closer and closer in some weird proportion until I was cold sweating and we were in single file. I had a stub-barreled .32 “detective special” under my arm but, except for a logicless desire to pull it out, it brought no comfort. Something was teasing the corners of my mind like an afterglow in the eyes: one of those heads seemed familiar but the more I tried to focus the more it blurred.
“Will we have to turn sideways soon?” I wondered.
“Here we are,” he said without looking back, his wide shoulders almost scraping the sides.
There was a round door giving on a chamber with no other exit or entrance. The space inside was a huge globe with a tiny flat stage where we came in. It reminded me of a planetarium except there was a softly glowing greenish egg about 30 feet high and 10 wide made of what looked like translucent plastic. The dull metallic curved walls had a sickly, bilious glow in the light of the egg. I felt weak and nauseated. It was faintly familiar like scenes in a fever dream. The chill air, the gleaming, immense smoothness gave an alien impression.
“This isn’t the accelerator,” I said. “What’s going to hatch, Rodan, the Japanese movie monster?”
This amused him enough to make him look at me. The curds condensed for a moment into a thoughtful expression, almost cheerful. He made me think of my father who always shook his head at me, impressed by what I had and depressed by what I didn’t.
“Very good,” he said. “A greater than the accelerator is before you.” He chuckled for the second time. I had no concept then how remarkable that was. His totally shiny head reflected greenish highlights. “It was, originally, much smaller.”
“So it’s growing?
“Your paper,” he said, almost jolly, “helped. You are special, my boy.”
“My paper. Why don’t I believe that?”
The thing was humming. Bands of sickly mould-colored light flickered around it. The room (I suddenly noticed) was round and (as in some Frankenstein movie) halos of what resembled static electricity bolts lifted away and vibrated around the round room. I jumped as the bands passed right through me and the professor. There was a weird twisting sensation as if my insides were being pulled out. I’d blocked the memory of seeing this before; it would come back.
“What’s happening?”
“A side effect. Pay no attention.”
“Why are there heads behind glass, really?” It was bothering me.
“Where would you put them?” he chuckled, watching me, intently. “You posited a series of universes or dimensions like onion-skins layering away from this world.”
“So what?” I reacted, squinting, thinking I could hear a distant, almost too-high-to-hear keening coming from the egg that might have been a billion lost souls or a bent gear. “I’m not the first. My point was -”
“We understand your point. Each dimension would produce intelligent, inorganic beings. All intelligence, which is not memory, is independent of time and space. Intelligence...” His curds shifted. “…and other atemporal frames of reference have no start and finish point and thus are independent of physical laws of conservation. Such energies are unaffected by any possible transformations or ordering of characteristics. We are obligated to you for your input. Of course your math was insufficient.”
This was like a science fiction movie lecture to the earthling by the Brain from Planet Arous.
“Somehow I don’t exist independent of stupidity. I chose combat duty. Now I’m a cop. That’s where ideas like mine get you.” I eyeballed around. “How far down are we?”
He was pleased with himself and didn’t really pay attention, if he ever really did. You had a sense he anticipated what you probably would say. My insides had stopped twisting but my eyes and ears were funny. It looked like the egg was a three-D TV set. The early show was on. It looked like hippie Lisa and she was all naked this time, on her back with somebody sucking her foot while another tenderly licked between her breath-stopping legs. Nice place to be.
“Porn?” I might have said. I went closer. Sex also concentrates the mind wonderfully. “Hey, this is 3-D.” I’m great with the obvious. As I reached to touch the thing there was no surface; my hand went into the twilight scene and that was bad. “What was in that water?” I asked, trying to turn and pull my hand free.
“Focus water,” I think he said because I thought, how do you focus water except maybe with a hose?
“Is that an order? I should focus water?” I wondered as the rest of me was instantly pulled in and I was surrounded by dim, shadowy trees that had syrupy liquid moonlight poured over them. The pornography was right there: it was she or a good reproduction.
Enough is enough, I thought or maybe said except there seemed to be no actual sound there. A silent 3-D sex movie starring the incredibly sexy girl, skinny boys and featuring lots of nameless, obscure players who seemed to be lurking or melting into the shrubbery and introducing the hallucinating scientific detective.
There was a big, dark shadow in the background that moved like wings in slow-motion. I didn’t like that. I turned around but the room and the Professor were gone: just the strange, pale-shot landscape and half-seen moving figures.
She was looking up at me as they worked on her incredible body. This was insane. I’d walked into a dream and now I wasn’t sure I wanted to get out.
Hello, I thought-said. This was a silent movie.
You come here too? She replied.
That’s what you said in singles bars.
I’m sleeping, I responded. This bullshit. Maybe I ODd on
That’s heavy, man, said one of the two stoners.
No such luck, she informed me.
I didn’t take any acid, I responded.
Far out, said the other one. Hey, man, join the party, man.
Shove it, I said.
I knelt over her and her body seemed formed out of moonlight shaped by flowing water. I was drawn to touch, to kiss, to somehow swim into her, to bathe in her ineffable being….
Tiny creatures proportioned like cherubs floated at the outskirts of my vision and seemed to be silently giggling. I glimpsed something four-legged circling in a blur just behind what seemed underbrush. I was almost certain the “cherubs” had giant erections like something on a wall in
Then the huge thing with wings moved, rose up, loomed and there were flashes of feral red that might have been eyes. Now it was nightmare. There were glints of what might have been moon-sparked talons or fangs….
Fight or flee. This thing was over me, ripping and shaking the night with beating wings that seemed the size of windmill blades. And standing behind it was something like a man with face of a mantis or locust or something.
This is bullshit! I thought/shouted. Some kind of show….
LISA
I wasn’t surprised to see him. He was wearing the same suit. I was being sucked inside out at the moment and I’d decided to relax and go with whatever happened. When you’re stoned enough it’s hard to tell one place from another and what does it matter? Really. But something was bothering me. Where was this? How did I get here?
Something came out of the shadows. Expanded, filled the night, blurry and savage. Enough, man, enough. I was instantly back in the thick brush and trees with the campus bell still bonging and the two guys who weren’t actually ghosts making love to me. No sign of the hot guy in the black suit. But I knew he was important to my strange life so he’d be back. It felt like total fate.
No more of this stuff. I actually had a paper due. That was my first thought. Needed to straighten up. Except the silky touching down there was expanding in a ball of sweet incoherence and as I spasmed the deep twilight came into me, the sultry, hot earth, the freshening breeze, the greengold lightning bug stains on the sweet air, all melded with my body and I heard my voice (like someone else’s) shouting a sigh that spread and fell in a mist of ecstasy across the breathing evening, meaning without words saying this was my world and I love you, all, everything, budding, filling and dying…..
“Aaaaahhhhhhh…ahhh…hhhh…hhhhh…h….”
And as I melted in the anonymity of passion there were the wings and eyes again, here, in my loved world, hovering above me as if compressed and shaped by the shadows and the melting moon; eyes like dark jewels freezing, into still and infinite points, cold, cold tiny stars that hurt to see; and I cried out again as if another cried through me:
“You! Begone! Back to thy stupid darkness!”
MIKE
My thesis really was about dimensions not subject to laws of motion, gravity, conservation of energy and so on. The first dimension up from here was defined by simple dreaming. I made a case for consciousness not subject to cause and effect unlike memory. Your brain in sleep was a beginner’s or poet’s paradigm for physical death. Only mechanisms really die. Rust out and rot like bodies. I didn’t come clean with it. I was still an academic. The implications were there. My road to
After
I returned to my roots. Being a wiseass was almost as good as drugs or a stiff
drink in a world of pain and shit.
“Explain,” I demanded. “Something. Anything. Hated the show. Want my money back.
He liked that. The curds that formed his strange puss hinted at smiling, again.
“Aren’t you pleased to have been proven, in a certain sense, correct, youth?” he wondered.
“What sense? Nonsense?” I took a short step with maybe an idea of slugging him but my legs melted and I was looking at the cool, dull green tin-colored floor from inches away. Nice effect. “Something’s not right,” I said to the tile.
“Your body’s not used to you being back in it,” Prof. Short explained, explaining nothing.
My nose was taking most of my head’s weight. My body was jelly. This was
TV comedy. My thoughts were jellied. I spoke to the blurred floor.
“Fabulous explanation. I’m well satisfied, Professor. We used to say ‘professor’ is what they call a piano player in a whorehouse.”
“Have you heard of what they call the ‘
Great. Fine. I read that book by the physicist who they said killed himself. It didn’t sound like he killed himself. We were just leaving the decade of public assassinations of anybody you pleased and they didn’t always have to use a pitiful fall guy like Oswald or the King killer. Conspiracy is a natural thing for governments, cops and criminals. Why not kill a pushy scientist with offbeat ideas?
There I was lying on my pointy nose, discussing disappearing destroyers with a Nobel Laureate whose face was like half-formed yogurt.
“Sure, I remember the story,” I said. “Trying to bend light with magnetic fields.” I tried to get my arms under me. No luck. I could have used a magnetic field. “But the energy you’d need would make the ship as undetectable as a fart in an elevator. Will this wear off?”
“Yes. They were on the right track but the methods were, well, incoherent and quite unsound.”
“This was sound? I get sucked into an egg and watch sex? You’re saying I was just teleported?”
“Not precisely. Not your physical body.”
“I have another body I haven’t noticed?” I knew what he meant, though. If the universe results from wave-particle spin then no-spin creates a “ghost” wave-particle. No matter or energy, no spacetime restrictions. A dream. Consciousness: spin consciousness (not memory) you get matter-energy. Space and time. You could teleport. Time-travel but not physically. Ghosts can go anywhere.
My nose hurt. I was finally able to turn my face and rest on my cheek. My legs weren’t there. They weren’t going to be able to sell this experience to the public.
“This was like giving a bloodhound a sniff,” said Short. “Don’t forget, you are a policeman.”
I strained and finally got my rubbery self to my watery knees.
“I wish I could arrest you. If I ever get up, Professor,” I said, with little conviction, “I might actually kick in your numerous teeth.”
He laughed like a sink gurgling.
“Do your job, Holmes,” he said, chuckling. “The game’s afoot.”
LISA
We’d drifted back to “
Look, I know I have witch karma. A psychic did a reading and told me I’d been a superhuman something in a former life. She said I’d be bigger this time. She said she was scared of me. I told her I was out of spells. She crossed herself and mouth-breathed until I left. Didn’t let me pay.
This happened in the year of some people’s Lord 1966 AD on the magical hilltop of
So that’s fine. I got used to the seriously strange.. Like now. Like yesterday.
Like anytime
Got my sketchy clothes more or less back on as I stood up. There were lots of
stars and that first look always takes your breath away. I stared while they kept worrying about getting more dope.
I was gone for those moments, looking at a sky full of fractured diamonds and other jewels that filled you with their silence.
“I mean,” I said, “like really, man, who needs weed or tabs?” I gestured up. I was earth mama bringdown tonight. “I mean, it’s all here, man.”
“That’s cool, Li,” one said. “But we need to score a lid.”
He had his pants back up now. The other was still sitting naked on the dark grass. Made me think of
“I’ll scrounge around,” I told them. “Meet me at the quad, later.”
“Groovy,” the naked one said.
For some reason I walked back up the science building steps before heading to the dorm. I had no conscious thoughts about the cute cop in the dark suit. I was worrying about falling back into that weird trippy landscape. There should be a warning sign….
MIKE
My body wasn’t quite there yet as I wobbled out of the particle physics exit
still trying to take it all in.
After corkscrewing back up the effectively endless tunnel with Short encouraging me from in front, gesturing as if we were hiking on safari or going over the top, my shaky legs finally wobbled my limp body and faded soul up to where the pale “Norna” with the peeled face took over. As Short went away, high-shouldered and brisk, down a side passage I called after him:
“Hey, Virgil, you wasted your time. I’m out of poetry.”
He turned and stopped, in that order.
“Clever reference,” he responded. “But you have not yet seen Hell, my dear Italian.” He sketched a slight bow. “There are great powers behind us, my boy.”
“Did I tunnel into a classically forbidden zone?” I called back, you know, a wave-particle breaking the ‘rules” of Classical Mechanics. He went through what looked like hospital double-doors.
I went on learning to walk again behind her, now. When we reached the display cases where the introspective-looking severed heads gazed through the glass, I planned to ask her some pretty sharp and probing police questions. Except this time there were just photos of protons, electrons and whatnot trailing through cloud chambers. The centerpiece was some dense nucleus done by an artist (unless science had leaped wildly ahead while I was away) showing the pancake effect of near light speed which amounted to this: from my point of view you are skinny but from your point of view you are fat and vice versa. The relativity shell game or 3 card quantum Monte.
Where were those heads? More bad movie tricks. I call in cops, get wild-eyed and yell: “No, no, they were here, right here!” “Sure, buddy,” responds the straight-jacket team, “anything you say. Come with us to the land of lobotomy.”
Just get back to NYC. This was it; all over. If they didn’t like it I’d walk the beat.
“I really never saw any heads,” I told her as we parted and she shut the steel door (or portal) behind me. “I’ll swear to it.”
“Good night, Detective Ishmael,” she said, pleasant and cold as a corpse in a snowbank.
A few steps away and I took a deep breath and felt better.
“I don’t need this,” I said into the mellow, soft, beautiful night. “Teleporting ships. Porno, heads and fucking evil drugs.” And then the resemblance hit me: the very tall Professor Short with his washed-out eyes and creepy pale skin reminded
me of a floater who hadn’t been in the water quite long enough to come off the bone.
He says I’m special, I pondered. Now I’m first worried as the Jews say….
I was crossing the plaza to the steps where I could go back along the main walk to where my car was. My legs were almost solid, now. I was slightly hungry, believe it or not. Secretary Norna from the underworld (or whatever she was) had handed me an envelope which I hoped held a bribe of apology. I was still giddy and strange and taking refuge in silliness until the impossible illusion down below could be dismissed like that cigarette cough that was really bad yesterday but not much now. I was sure I would get to see Hell yet. Something worse than
Under a lamppost where moths were already going mad for the light that might as well have been exquisite sirens luring the sucker Greeks to destruction, I lit a smoke and ripped open the envelope and found 2 bad photographs and a note. Some bribe. The note wasn’t apologetic. On a cop’s salary I’m supposed to be drugged, put into a Walt Disney-looking sex show and left limp as overcooked spaghetti all while being talked down to by an arrogant master of destiny that reminded me of Captain Nemo on the bridge of the Nautilus though a lot less lively.
These are our missing scientists. We believe you will succeed in locating them. Don’t be disturbed if and when you encounter overlapping dimensions on your quest, as just occurred in what we like to call the “theater entrance” or “stage door.” Your superiors are aware that these two must be brought into custody for their own sake and safety. You should reflect on your thesis. Certain aspects of it were vital to refining our work here. The logical consequence of living in multiple worlds at once brings up the question of which one is primary. Good luck on your quest! You are part of perhaps the greatest work in the history of humanity. Your masquerade as a policeman and failed physicist fools no one. When the time comes you will join us, take your rightful place in a new world ordered like fractals: ever different, never random. Welcome to the most select company on earth and elsewhere. Again, good luck, which is not, of course, random either. Call me or the good Dr. Grayson at anytime using the following numbers.
In the faintly greenish yellow light from the street lamp I blinked at this remarkable missive. I kept worrying about why writing that paper would make me “special?” Of course I recognized the man with his asymmetrical moustache, my favorite ghost but the problem was the woman professor three-quarters view was vaguely familiar and I knew I’d never met her. But seen her…seen her and it was disturbing. I tried to recall, to focus….
“Welcome to Wonderland,” I voiced. “Join us at the tea party. The good doctor Grayson.” Something was coming through the foggy brain. “What the fuck are fractals?”
I’m being played like a cheap piano, I said to myself. With elbows and fists. But why? Why? Is what’s his face, Grayson, is he the Red Queen cross-dressingt? Short is who…the hookah-sucking caterpillar? The Dormouse? Where’s the Hatter? Maybe that’s me….
Because here was
just molted on her. She didn’t seem the worse for wear (she never would, not even when the wind blew all the playing cards away in the end) and between the soft lamplight and the hinting moonglow she may have been the most beautiful woman I’d ever met in person. It just hadn’t sunk in all at once.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“Forgotten but not gone,” as somebody once said. “Feed your head,” I suggested, chewing some smoke.
She liked that. She stopped just close enough to melt my insides and convince me that when I spoke bubbles of babble were coming out of my mouth. I felt goofy and awkward as a singing telegram.
“So you’re the Dormouse?” she asked.
“Whatever you like,” I bubbled.
That’s a stupid crack, I barely didn’t say.
“This may be fate, man,” she decided.
“Nothing’s random,” came out. What I wanted to say was can I bury my body and soul in you? But she knew that too.
“Come back with me and mellow out,” she suggested. “I’ve got mellowing material.”
Bubbles filled my mouth all with yeses in them. I gulped and shook my head. The thing was this woman offered all the apples of love plus intelligence and sympathy, independence and compassion too so that this was the one, the one who had it all…but you knew you weren’t going to be able to keep her anymore than you could hold a puff of smoke….
“I’d love you,” I said “but…I mean, I’d love to but….”
She was laughing, soft and sweet.
“That’s cool,” she said. She came closer her deep, dark eyes full of moon and lamplight and mysteries. “Were you there, too?” she asked.
“What?”
“You know, man. I saw you.”
There were no more bubbles. Michael’s himself again.
“Where?”
“You freaked out when you saw the big bat, man.”
“Big bat.”
“Or big bug. I call it a bat but…maybe you weren’t there.”
“Hallucination.”
“What is that, exactly? Were we seeing things?”
I shut my eyes and shook my head.
“I have to get out of here, Lisa,” I told her. “Back up the rabbit hole.”
I couldn’t tell how she felt about it if she felt anything. Why should she feel anything? Why should anybody?
“Cool,” she said. “See you here and where.”
As Lisa started to drift out of the light I suddenly got braver.
“I’ve got to eat something,” I said. “We could go to the diner if it still exists.” The bubbles were back and popping out of my mouth. “The Greek one, I mean, they’re all Greek.”
“The Starlite?” she wondered, pausing partly in and out of the darkness. Her
long legs were astonishing and she looked graceful as a statue of a goddess, speaking of great Greek creations, which the Starlite wasn’t. “Maybe next time, man. I dig what you’re saying but I have to work on a paper.”
“Due in the morning?” I found myself trying. I wondered if the bubbles could be actually visible. .
“Yes,” she said.
I almost said: I’ll help you write it; instead:
“That’s cool. Well, I’ll see you again or around or something.” That was lame enough drop a chill in my stomach and for all I knew I blushed. The unfazed, worldly-wise cop with the Bogart sneer remained a science nerd in the end.
Her breathy laugh was nice. I didn’t have the bubbles to ask which dorm or if she had a phone. She was already walking, leaving me in the light like a crippled moth.
“Hey…excuse me, I mean, Lisa, what’s your last name?”
She paused without turning.
“Zeit. What’s your name again?”
“Mike. Michael D’Angeli. I think I told you.”
“Maybe you were kidding. Michael of the Angels,” she said, looking over her shoulder. The curve of her, half-lit in silhouette, made jelly of my soul and minced my mind.
Then she went on, gracefully gathering and taking the moonlight with her
across the esplanade, seeming indifferent to her own effect or anything else, utterly self-contained without being at all selfish. I stood as if pinned to the spot and gazed into the mysterious universe of Lisa Zeit, full of stars, galaxies; depth, dark and light and strange laws of nature. Zeit, in German, that means time.
I wanted to follow her. That was going to be our principle: I’d vainly fly in pursuit and she’d always just find me. The scientific detective, maybe a cinch for his own TV show down the line. Professor D’Angeli’s Greatest Cases tonight how he found the fly in the ointment using a telescope and differential geometry.
Back to the same meeting in Mc Mc’s where the twilight blur out on
“This kid is scientific, see what I mean?”
The bald captain didn’t but nodded and added another gout of lung-blasting cigar smoke to the general haze.
“Yeah,” he said, meaninglessly.
The Inspector looked into distant vistas like maybe an astronomer at
“Big people,” he confided, “set great store by this lad, here.” Nodded his long face that should have been background in a leprechaun movie. “Really big people if you take the meanin’?”
That was a meaning the captain could take. His grunt was comprehensive.
“Hmn.”
“He’ll bring science to the job,” the inspector went on looking like he wanted to pat my cheek with what they used to call ham-like hands. “They expect great things a him, I been informed.” Gazed paternally at me.
“Which things?” I had to wonder.
“Don’t get ahead a yourself, lad,” he said like the firm wise doctor, wagging a cautionary forefinger. “You’ll soon be in the thick of it.”
Which is what I was afraid of. I had a faint, uneasy sense that “big” people were making a big mistake like when I’d been put up for a combat medal for sleeping through an ambush. Details another time…I took a long swallow of beer and wished I had a joint to put a perspective on this meeting. I didn’t know it yet but this was the first official session of the burgeoning tea party.
“You’re a lucky young pup,” the captain said in words that were smoke. I could tell he wished he could hit me. I was guilty of excess favor. “The inspector here is your best friend. What we call a ‘rabbi.’”
“I didn’t realize you were Jewish,” I said.
The inspector got a chuckle out of that; the captain looked disgusted.
“Look, son,” the inspector said, “they…we all expect you to use your skills to get to the bottom of some pretty tricky stuff. All your skills and so forth.”
“Sherlock the kid,” the captain quipped heavily, grinning, tilting back his head, exhaling smoke like a breaching whale. It glowed like a sickly nebula in the greenish flashing neon shamrock.
“Lad,” the inspector said, “I should say detective. Er, you are about to get a
very important assignment. Very, very important.”
So this was very, very important. I would have loved to bring the Inspector down to meet Professor Short and his device and look at the heads under glass. I assumed they were already back at their posts. I was still paranoid in patches: maybe they were taking out the brains and feeding them to creatures in the egg.
Anyway I flopped after her, favoring my bad wing, pretending this was as good way to go to the diner. Suddenly, as if they’d come out of the ground, there were dozens of people holding candles and humming or wordlessly singing. It looked like a protest. I had a fleeting idea that they were slaves of the egg world. Short clearly was the eggman. Stop right there.
She’d stopped as they passed and I came up to her, feeling even more awkward. I was back in high school walking by a classroom to check out a certain chick…there she’d be at her desk and I’d look away instantly, stomach-scared she’d caught me. I convinced myself they couldn’t tell I was sick with love. I was the same kind of poker player: my face was a mask of the obvious. Lost back in the river of a lifetime the girl would always be the same to me as she stood in the same place on the same shore forever. There’s human memory for you.
I came up behind Lisa realizing how tall she really was just as 20 or so candle-carriers cut between us to join the marching hundreds.
“It’s a miracle,” one told me without pausing; a stout, middle-aged woman who looked like she mopped the halls after classes.
There didn’t seem to be that many students in the throng: a few old and
young in wheelchairs, gray and white-haired senior men and women, families with kids…peculiar.
“What miracle?” I asked a sweaty fat man in a Hawaiian shirt, limping along in broken-looking shoes. He had a candle, nearly all of them did. I noticed Lisa Zeit joining the crowd as somebody handed her a candle, too. I kept pace with the man, with one eye on her.
“It’s a sign,” he puffed. “The Holy Mother is among us.”
She was but none of us knew it yet.
“Join us,” said a lanky woman in shorts with a face like sun-shriveled leather. Somebody you’d expect to see at
I stopped, noting campus police at the outskirts, wary and uncertain. I saw flashbulbs and TV lights locating the press (and obviously the sacred event) half a mile away at the athletic fields.
The Madonna of the 50 yard-line, I thought. A miracle if they won a game next year….
“Where’s the Pope?” I wanted to know but the worshippers moved on leaving a few children in their wake, dirty, sweaty and full of senseless sound and excess movement.
Couldn’t locate Lisa. I watched the lights get smaller as they went between buildings and under trees until they were just fireflies too. The humming singing was sound blowing over surf seeming to mean something. My mind was still a half-turn to the left from the leftover whatever it was from what I’d inhaled and swallowed.
Had to get out of here and go back to the city except who wanted to be the one who walked past a miracle? Besides, she was there, a candle-carrying worshipper and maybe Mary Magdalene’s right-hand girl. The new plan was to follow the faithful to the football field and then go eat and drink and pass out so as to put this insane day into perspective. Let sleep knit up my raveled sleeve.
As I followed the human fireflies a big, foggy shadow seemed to blot their light for a second: reminded me of the huge wings in the egg world. I stopped again. Maybe the best thing was to eat…or drink…maybe just drink…then go home…maybe just go home, eat another day and catch up with Lisa later…if ever…go home and think about the Philadelphia Experiment which no one ever wanted to own up to. Field effects could bend light and radar and so on. Why not at least have tried it? It fit the fringe expressions I liked to take seriously. I bet they tried it. Come on, an intense enough magnetic field has to derange the currents in your body. Your brain could start emitting dance music in ¾ time.
Turning my back on the miracle I headed to my sad Volvo. Grab a bite on the road home. Get to bed.
Someone plucked my sleeve: a fattish, sweaty item with a Rolling Stones tee-shirt and a face like a bitter Jerry Garcia.
“This whole area is haunted, man,” he informed me. “I’ve seen some fucked-up shit, man. Fucked-up.”
“You may have a point,” I agreed.
“I’ve seen some strange shit, man. Spirits from the past.”
I nodded and kept walking. He tailed along.
“You look like the fuzz, man. What’s with that?”
“Peach fuzz. Nice and soft.”
He kept a half-step behind me. I could see the gate a hundred feet ahead. The dense trees were dark, overhanging blots defined by light and shadow from the staggered brass lampposts. The air was nice, light breezes taking off the heat.
“That’s cool, man. That’s cool.”
“You’re too stocky to be the Ancient Mariner,” I said, not looking back, “so what’s the deal? Are you solid or hatched from the egg?”
“Everybody’s from an egg, man. This area is fucking haunted. I mean, man,
I have seen things.”
“Did you change your smoking mixture?”
“You are the fuzz. That’s cool.”
We were almost to the gate.
“I’m the scientific detective, man,” I told him.
He stopped at the gate as if he wasn’t allowed outside. Then he spoke and went back.
“You’ll see, man. I’ve seen devils and angels at war and the dead walking around. Fucked-up, man. Totally fucked-up.”
“Why talk to me?”
“I saw you with Mother Mary, man.”
“Sure. It was my time of trouble.”
“People call her that, man. She’s far-out.”
“I noticed. And?”
He shrugged. I started walking again.
“She is beautiful, man,” he said after me. I shook my head. I need him to tell me that. “Trust her. She’s important, man. Not just to you.”
I stopped and rubbed my eyes and face. Hippie hyperbole. Jerry Garcia making with deep meanings for the obvious. By the time I turned around the walk was deserted except for a pair of girls three lampposts away on a bench smoking what could have been cigarettes.
“The old alma mater is a loony bin,” I muttered. Soul mother. Interesting.
Mother Mary from the old soul mother. “Where the fuck did he go?” I asked the air. “Let it be.”
Outside the gate wasn’t so hot either because there was the little guy with the up and down moustache. I had his picture. He still held the briefcase in the same hand. This time I wanted a word with him. He was paused by the fire hydrant a few feet up from my car. He looked at me. Maybe he and Jerry belonged to the same fraternity.
“Hi,” I said. “Are you the Walrus?” He grimaced and blinked like there was glue in his eyes. I came closer, focused. “Don’t disappear on me.” He stood there, twitching his nose as if he were trying not to sneeze. Didn’t speak. “Don’t disappear.
I’m supposed to be looking for you. But why?”
He gave the impression he was late for an appointment. I went to grab his free hand or something but the world was gone. As if I’d been hit on the skull the street jerked and tilted and I was in the dark landscape again where the trees were a mile high and silvery light spilled like water, almost viscous where strangeness lurked in the undergrowth. I seemed to be alone this time.
Concentrating on where the car should be I went that way like a blind .man sure everything was really where it ought to be and this was a vision not a location….
LISA
It was cool, walking with the pilgrims like in a movie about
I thought about Mike and wondered if he really was the police. I’d been with cops. Some were fairly cool. This one was like no other. I sensed a strange vibe.
.
At the open stadium people were kneeling, praying in a semi-circle around the western goalposts. There must have been two thousand on the field and track. I’d heard nothing about this which seemed strange, I mean, this was just a medium small college town. Funny, I’d never been to the stadium; that was for jocks and the right-wing.
In the stands I sat with a few other uncommitted and dug the scene.
The TV cameras and trucks were right up there. Flashbulbs popped. A guy a row over was checking me out like maybe I was the Holy Mother’s stand-in. That’s a joke. He was a semi-furtive leg and foot man. I moved a little for fun to make him sweat. Whatever turns you on I guess it’s all good. Up to a point. A case: in
Those weird flashaways I’d been having were into that “dark world.” Then there was a moaning and stirring in the crowd and I thought I saw something under
the goalposts: a greenish bubble shape that looked like when there’s fog with a dim bulb behind it or when you look away from a bright light, you know, and there’s a blot shape that shifts and fades as you try to focus on it. Like that.
I got up and went closer; staying in the stands so there was a pretty good angle. People were shouting to the blurring.
“She speaks!”
“O God! O God!”
“Holy one, save us!”
Somebody yelled:
“Make them end the war!”
Right on.
I was trying to concentrate on whatever it was down there. All I heard were the sighs and sobs of the crowd. This was wild, I mean, this was like
There was someone standing close to me and I assumed it was the cat who’d been digging my legs. At Pisky High (in
Lisa Legs except by the mammary freaks. That word, you note, has Maryand mama in it.
Nothing means everything but everything means something, right?
For a moment I thought there was a face in the blur and a voice in my head saying something like:
“The door is opening. Walk through the door.”
An impression. Felt like the creep beside me put his hand on my bare midriff. Touching is fine but not without permission. I turned on this uncool motherfucker, like saying unto him:
“Fuck off, man!”
Except there was just a human-shaped outline like a hole in the scene, an opening into that dark world of amazing trees and liquid moonlight. It was pulling me in. I didn’t want to go. I was losing the struggle, the human shaped entrance seemed to walk over me and I was on the inside again. What the hell were the rules?
Behind me I heard distorted sounds like screaming, howling, agony and panic….
MIKE
I walked into the fender and was back on campus. The bugs were dinning, streetlight gleaming on the car. I half ran around and slammed myself inside. Fumbled the key into the ignition and got going. City bound. Back to the 3rd floor studio my last girlfriend dubbed: “the apartment of eternal darkness.” That wasn’t altogether true; for an hour a day around the solstice a stray ray or so of sun sometimes lit the grimy brick across the airshaft like
A fucking ghost, I thought. What is this shit?
“Stop haunting me!” I yelled out the window.
He stopped and frowned as I rolled past; wrinkled his nose; seemed to glance at his wrist watch. I belatedly hit the brakes and looked back and, what do you know folks, he’d vanished again. As was said, enough is enough….
Sometimes the only thing that will do is a whiskey, cheeseburger, coffee and a cigarette. It was a great day when some paleo-Greek got the first diner liquor license. I’d quit smoking again yesterday due to a sore tongue and scratchy throat. I sat in a booth at the big window and looked at my car and the street seen through the shadow-eaten reflection of my head. I vaguely wondered if Lisa Zeit might happen by.
The waitress set down my double neat on the bright Formica table. The glass looked like it had been rubbed with dirty wax; I wasted little time sucking the drink down. It burned and felt soothing. Before long there was a charred burger that looked like the meat had been thinly painted with yellow cheese. This specialty came presented with wilted fries, brown lettuce and a tomato slice like a greenish-yellow hockey puck.
Still classy, I thought.
And then I had company: two men in dark suits with narrow lapels, one-style, one size fits all with shiny black hats and greenish ties that looked like clip-ons slid into the booth, one beside, one across. At first I took them for Narcs but the hair was too short and the faces too clean.
“Are either of you hallucinations?” I had to ask. It was the secret word that night. The Groucho duck came right down.
They gave me fresh looks harder than the ones they were already wearing.
The pink-pale face across had traditionally unsympathetic blue eyes that hinted at the sly humor you see in photos of Bugsy Siegel. They might be a pair of killers but far from the Mob.
“Sir?” asked the one across, the senior partner.
I liked the sir. FBI? Not quite right.
“So you are hallucinations,” I concluded. “I was worried you wouldn’t show
up. Will you keep following me go where I list?”
“Where you list?” inquired the one across. “Where you list your laundry?”
“Come on,” I said, “you’re college boys. Older English.”
“You’re a wiseguy,” said the second. His breath smelled faintly like peppers and eggs. Egg…there was a thought. My mind strayed, again. Feeling shadowy, I had high hopes for the burger settling me down so I took a bite. Managgia, It had those gristly little bits from the horse’s tendons. I reached for the ketchup.
“And you don’t like wiseguys,” I said back, chewing. “Go figure.”
“In Shakespeare the ghost says ‘list’ meaning listen,” blue eyes said.
“I’m a smart-aleck and you’re an intellectual,” I said, sucking a sip of hot, slightly poisonous coffee. Poured a stream of sugar from the glass dispenser and stirred the thickness. “And he’s a cop.” Gestured my head at pepper breath. “What are you boys doing together?”
“List, pal,” said number two, too close to my nose. “You better do some listing.” He chuckled.
“I’m listing to port,” I said, trying another bite. “Close to sinking. This was not my favorite day.”
“By the way, pal, we will follow you where you list.”
“Ease up, Phil,” said number one.
“Follow me to the station house and maybe I’ll lock you up,” I suggested. “And stop calling me pal or I’ll call you gidrool.” Italian slang for cucumber, a minor insult. “What do you want from me?” I asked blue eyes.
A long, narrow-eyed, thoughtful pause ensued for number one while big Phil
caught up on his controlled breathing. He wasn’t likely to start singing along with the song playing on the raspy jukebox: “come on people now, smile on your brother.” Forget the name of the song that was from. “Everybody get together try to love one another right now.”
Coffee; acidic; burger, more gritty bits. I leaned back and lit a cigarette; resisted blowing smoke at either of them. During these activities the orange-haired waitress came over, set down two ice waters and asked them what they wanted.
“They play it close to the vest,” I told her. “Bring me another double.”
“Nothing,” said Phil.
She looked at them scathingly.
“The water’s on the house, officers,” she said, heading away.
“See that,” I said, “you fool everybody. No one can make you.”
“Why did you use the term ‘hallucination?’” blue eyes wanted to know, leaning across the table, serious, clean-cut, almost intimate. His face was somewhat small for his head.
“I’ve been giddy today.”
“Ha, ha,” said Phil. “You been smoking grass all day and getting in line for that hippie sweetie pussy, pal.”
“OK, gidrool. Why are you boys haunting me?” I grinned at blue eyes and
Chewed some smoke. “You’re no cop. CIA or MI. Too tough for a fed, too smooth for police work. Why are you working with this one?”
I gestured at Phil. The waitress came back with the glass pot and refilled my cup without a look for them. I nodded thanks.
“We’re more interested in what you’re doing here.” Blue eyes said, cocking his small0faced head. “Sure, we don’t have an obvious right to ask but we’re all in more or less the same line of work and it would be a courtesy, don’t you think?”
“Which line of work? Are you scientific investigators too?”
He was rummaging in his inside pocket and pulled out an ID folder which I gestured away. I didn’t need convincing. If he was a fake his papers would be perfect so what was the point? He’d put Phil on hold, for now.
“Do you love this country?” he asked.
I oversugared the bitter steaming java, sighed, watched the loops of smoke curl up in the shadowless fluorescent air. Like much of my life you could track the rising swirls as if they were going somewhere until they blurred and dissolved into nothing.
“Parts of it,” I said, brightly.
“You fought for your country.”
I reflected.
“Over there,” I said, “I would have fought for a hit of pot and a blowjob. Go yourself and see what you’ll fight for.”
“Would you give this country to the commies?” Phil couldn’t hold in. He was shaking a filterless cigarette from a pack. Talking to me triggered cravings.
“No. It’s bad enough the way it is,” Enough is enough. “Man, no motherfucking Charlie is coming here to do shit to this geographical location and the semi-conscious inhabitants thereof. Enlist or shut the fuck up. And, guess what, if you do enlist shut the fuck up anyway.”
“You were a fucking college boy officer, right?” Phil concluded.
“I was a corporal, like your hero Hitler.”
“You are a hippie in disguise,” Phil sneered.
“Be cool,” said Blue eyes aka Mr. Hip. “Why provoke people? Would you help end the war if you could?”
“But I love people getting maimed and dying for nothing. You want me to peace march?” I shook my head, remembering things. “Correction, in country most people die for one another.” I got it. “You mean win the war.”
“This is like the a-bomb here, Mike,” he explained. “A world changing deal. We have to be sure there are no
“I could learn to love you,” I told him, “so long as you don’t stick electrodes up my ass.”
“You have us wrong, Mike,” he said.
“If I’m Mike and he’s sweet Phil who are you? It hurts not knowing.”
“Dennis,” snarled Phil in a gust of peppers and eggs, “he’s a freaking hippie in disguise. You can’t trust this prick.”
“Shut up, please,” said Dennis. “Look, Mike, if we were sure you weren’t loyal…well, it isn’t always handled by the book in special circumstances.”
I grinned and shook my head. This was too much. I sipped more bad coffee and looked out the window through myself and them to where my sad little car sat by the curb in blurs and shadows. No Lisa.
“So you’re saying you’ll kill me if I don’t repeat the pledge of allegiance and tap dance to the Star Spangled Banner.” I sighed, staring out the window. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, man, and if you mean the weird fucks in the particle physics lab and their fucking egg, man, I can’t wait to call the Kremlin and fill them in. Let them suffer too.” I shoved sideways into Phil who felt like a bag of rocks. “Move, bud. You guys remind me of a movie I wish I’d missed.” I thought about that as Phil on grimace cue from Dennis let me loose from the booth. I signaled the waitress for the check. “One I walked out of. Tell you what, you charge this one to Uncle Sam.” I tossed a few singles onto the gleaming white table. “Watch your ass,” snarled the irrepressible Phil, as I headed for the glass doors.
“Loan me your mirror,” I said back and was gone into the warm, sweet-smelling Lisa-less night.
They were acting the way cops do when they’re worried they may have given something away that the subject didn’t have to begin with. Cops of whatever stamp, even spy cops like Dennis there, are usually cheap with everything, especially information. They have to be in the know and you’re the chump. The way they reacted to my “hallucination” crack told me there was something they thought I might have and they didn’t like it. I was a little surprised at how much they pissed me off.
Fuck you, I thought, getting in the car. CIA motherfucker…go kill babies for the great society or whatever the Republicans call it now….
I sighed. I was full of crap. I was in the famous dark wood, all of a sudden. Una silva oscura,
LISA
I was back in the dark, silver-stained, silent world but this time there were three serious differences: first, I could see back into the scene I’d just left as if there were a window in the strange landscape of hints and shadows and second I wasn’t so sure it was really silent, just that I was impaired in some way and number three, it had nothing to do with any sunshine or windowpane or electric banana I might have absorbed into my being.
When you can’t tell dreams from visions from what you see on Monday morning you develop a certain distance which might be termed cool by those who aren’t. So I just watched while nightmares evolved before whatever had replaced my normal eyes. Was anything real, I mean, in the everyday world sense where you had to pay for a sandwich and gas for the car? Like I was deranged, tripping or...it was something else worse than real….
So there was the Holy Mother under the goalposts and she glowed like dirty burning charcoal and around her strange, blurry, stained somethings bounced and danced. They didn’t suggest angels. They had hooks like scythes instead of hands and bug-eyed faces. They were ripping into the crowd of believers. I felt the soundless screams and burbles of agony. They seemed to have pets: something with the head of a lion and the body of a winged horse…a dragon with a lot of heads…other pets, blurry and scary….
“What is this?” I asked, aloud.
“The truth,” someone said behind me and I turned and there was someone made of silver and shadow, neither man nor woman. A beautiful shape, exquisite. “Man…like, this is a bummer.”
“Follow me. I will bring you to your mother.”
“My mother is in fucking
“You cannot,” was said back by this filmy shadow. “Follow me. I am not one of the enemies. You need knowledge.”
I watched the football field where the true believers were being sliced-up by blurry demons. Something like a green-glowing mushroom or a neon dome poked up from the ground and seemed to trap dozen of screaming people, sinking back down with them its edges losing definition like it didn’t have enough power or something. In a few seconds all of them were gone except the bodies on the yard lines. I stopped watching.
“Follow yourself, man,” I said or thought or whatever.
“Your mother is waiting. Her name is Sem-zaza.”
“Sem-zaza?” I repeated. “That sounds Israeli.”
MIKE
I was partway home on the
Before dropping out of the world I worked over a few thoughts:
They set me on a quest, I realized, I wish it was the Holy Grail….Lisa…what is she or is that just Sylvia? Sylvan..Sylvia…Silva oscura….She paralyzes all reason…she…she’s porn she’s magic she’s the girl next door if you happen to live in the land of Oz….
First I thought about the disappearing destroyer…about how much power it would take to tunnel into the next universe and teleport…about Lisa’s legs and all t
he rest of her…and then, as I went under, I reviewed that maybe it really would not take any energy at all as we know it since for all our speculations about space and time and dimensions we dealt with only kinetic energy, you know, the result of motion…even the H-bomb is just transformations of what was already there and nothing is lost, just changed and scattered…but if there’s no motion, just change, then our rules amount to fish trying to make sense of birds...but…but Lisa’s navel was oval and deep like a dark star I was being drawn into…some cop I was...the guy with the suitcase and moustaches walked across the inside of my eyes and I fell out into dreaming….
The scene was liquid moonlight and shadows. I was tall and translucent with silvery wings and there were silver flowers and soft rocks. My people were gathered in a semi-circle, floating and standing. All my people watched her because she was golden, glowing like a soft sun. As sleep ate my head with soft, dark teeth I grasped that physical gold is sunlight condensed in the earth as silver is the moon. Moon and sun were in love.
And then I was gone and might have been weeping along the way. I should have known the worst place for me to go was into dreamland. I had too many contacts there, now.
Waking into sleep and there was everything worth avoiding. Solid things. Bad. No porn, just black rocks like razors and green air like poison gas. And the stuff drunks screamed at while rolling around in gutters, the things that got you extra medication in the mental ward. It sucked; I mean sleep ought to be left alone. It wasn’t fair. There was no quest; the quest was for me….
LISA
Very fucked up altogether. The shape had what might have been stubby wings.
“Forget my mother,” I thought/said.
The shifting outline went past that.
“Impossible. You must come. Will your powers and enchantments not be perfected?”
Good question. I looked back at the nightmare on the football field were spectators and cops were milling around. What’s real? Everything. All equal. Just different.
“Home,” I said/thought. But I was hearing him now.
“Your kingdom, O Queen.”
And speaking. Maybe getting used to being here. Bad sign.
“You mean my Queendom. Wow,” I said…no
I was trying to focus on its face. It looked like a tall, wide-shoulder outline of a person whose features seemed made of thickened blurs like pale lumps in spoiled cream or something. After some of the trips I’d been on and the kind of dreams I’ve had since childhood very little in the twisted perception line is likely to faze me.
“Your questions are wise. I speak as you have desired.”
When had that been? I reached to touch this milky, gleaming, ironic substance. I could hear the people shouting, police sirens on the field behind me like through a wall of thick glass. My hand seemed to stick to the stuff that felt like tingling mist and netted gossamer; he moved forward into me and we blended together in strange and subtle caresses. It was intimate but it suddenly made me sick. There was nastiness like a bad smell, nauseous. I saw flashes of horror like he or it was part of me.
And then at dream speed I was in the great castle that straddled the dark valley like a gigantic bridge. In a hall with a ceiling that seemed miles high. A long way off was a raised dais with two thrones. There were jagged, carved pillows, statues of the winged bugs attacking other strange creatures.
Man, this is fucked-up, I thought or said.
And the huge queen bug lazed down from the distant roof and collapsed itself over one of the high seats, wings puffing up and down as if breathing. Her face was human-like but as if fashioned out of blades, all gleaming sharpness. The huge eyes gleamed with strangely soft lights.
“Fuck this,” I said.
“Come to me,” it said. “All this is yours.”
“All what?” I wondered. “You have a face like a Cubist self-portrait.”
MIKE
Dozing at the rest stop
It was Short. He was blurry; he was dark and made of something like rotted cheese. The air was green fog. He was sitting on a razor sharp black rock. A queasy landscape. All I could think about was getting home to bed. In the background were long-armed humanoid somethings with insectile faces.
“Go away, man,” I told him. “You are a sick fucking vision, man.”
I kept telling myself to wake up.
“What is real is what you dream awake,” he told me.
“Everybody is so fucking deep,” I said or thought or what you will.
I wanted to wake up. Out of there. Goodbye! Back home to the regular nightmare. Give me the familiar pain.
“You will mate with her and fuse both worlds.”
“Of course, of course,” I responded. “Why not? I’m special.”
“The worlds will unite.”
“Great. That’s great.” Help. Help. Help.
“All beings will live in both at once.”
“Naturally. Solid. Dynamite.” Help. Help. Help.
“You will soon remember who you are. The slave creatures are wax for our candles and oil for our lamps, as you once said.”
Shook it off and started the motor. What happened to electric light? I wondered. Maybe slave peoples were electrons for my light bulb. As I once never said or something.
I stared and let my breathing stabilize. Dreaming has a way of bringing up unwanted memories and here was a good one:
In
This was near the end of my tour and I wasn’t even clear about whether I wanted to stay or go home. My world had been vastly bent and disordered. She understood insanity better than anyone ever in my life except maybe Hunter S. Thompson. I was there one night at her apartment with the thick, hot, sticky air coming in the big, French windows. Outside was the city nightlife: brittle, shrill, too urgent because of the fear that was in everyone’s sweat 24 hours a day. Fried smells, burning meat and hints of refuse, conflicting music, too-loud laughing, shouting….
She was nude sitting at a cane table where a mirror showed two sides of her, both beautiful. I was nude and not-so-beautiful, cross-legged on the messed-up bed,
holding a bong fuming super strong pot, sucking it down in gurgles and staring at nothing like it meant everything.
My face and arms were tanned reddish like a farmer; the rest of me was pale
as a water soaked worm. Around my neck I wore my dogtag and a peace sign bent by a bullet. I’d taken it off a dead acquaintance after an ambush.
We communicated mostly in French and broken-up English. It was interesting and didn’t keep me from loving her with a very focused passion. I adored every inch of her golden body. I was, as they say, besotted. I was also somewhat insane from combat and drugs.
She was clutching thin reeds and putting them in piles on the table. I took note. She was burning subtle incense which blended well with the grass.
“Are you playing pick-up-sticks?” I asked.
“C’est que ce?”
“Le jeu?” I sucked down amazing smoke that hit like a sledgehammer. “A game, you know.”
“Mik,” she said. “I do
“That’s cool,” I said, inhaling and staring. The street sounds washed in the windows blurring my head with a steady ululation so there was no time, which was good. Tomorrow was somewhere deep and far away where the jungle waited in mist, shadow, misery and rotting green.
“Pour vous I read you life.”
I part closed my eyes and the window was like a hole in the night where light moved and flashed.
“Eh bien,” I said. “Cool shit…”
“Very big serious. C’et important.” She looked at me with deep eyes that seemed to look through the world like it was a reflection in a window glass.
She had something like the ten mile stare of battle-shot troops. In the general fog of my perceptions she was always strangely clear. Whenever I remembered her (often at night) I’d physically long for that soft, sleek, elastic body under me or over me, around me…scent, heat, breath…the rich honeyed perfume of her sweet loins. “You are great dragon. Good and not good. Very strong.”
“What is that, like tea leaves?” She had no idea what I was saying, of course.
“You want tea?”
“No.” I took another hit off the bong. “This tea. Tres bien.”
“Very serious.” She was holding an old Chinese hand-printed soft cover
book. “Tu ne comprende pas. You are marked out. Can no escape. Bad and good.
Big, big powerful, Mik. Big, big. How you say, angels and devils all around you. All around. Can no escape the…the….”
“Baby, I love you,” I said. Took another hit. She was naked, as I said. She was an infusion of heaven into the thick, smoke-scented atmosphere. I had no idea what she was trying to tell me.
“Ai,” she sighed. “Oui, sure…you soon tombre…fall under world…down…very, very bad…L’hommes merchant desire…they want…you power…you.”
“Je t’aime,” I said. “Come here, baby. Come here.” Nothing was ever more beautiful, her soft goldenness in the melting, raucous night and my broken sight was the last hope in a doomed world. I think I loved her more than anyone ever, maybe because being near hell made any angel the brightest one. “Please come to me.” I was weeping. For everything and all of us. The tears melted her into abstract light.
“Please, baby.”
“Not let them take you, mon chere. No, never take you.”
She was holding me and trembling and so was I….
I did fall down a hole; it’s now clear I never really got back out. She was
“psychic” as anybody and like anybody didn’t see around her own corner because the next time I came back to Saigon, limping a little from a light dose of shrapnel in my thigh from a grenade (blue on blue) with obsessive ideas that we could get married and live in the mountains in Laos or move to Hawaii...or…just to think of her was taste; hallucination more real than the fact…except there was a strange family in her apartment who kept closing the door on me saying “No here! No here!” so I got the explanation downstairs from the Vietnamese version of a superintendent who told me: “Vary bad. Vary bad. Somebody they kill her. Vary bad. She dead.”
She’d been found naked on the floor with her throat cut, probably raped and so forth but nobody looked too closely, not in those days, not there.
Ms. Mai, she dead. She dead.
I went to her grave in the morning among wooden markers that looked like birdhouses. I recited some Buddhist prayer…I lay on my belly and stared at the earth and eventually it was night…on the next mission I fell down the hole….
Time to go home. Veni, vedi, vado al caso. Except another car put on its lights behind me, blinking them like some distress signal. I peered back out the window as a smallish figure crossed the headlights making shadows like a film projector.
LISA
I saw what looked like an open doorway and I ran for it – if run is the right word because it was more like fast floating. I did not want to stay and discuss my future with a maternal bug-bat.
Out the doorway was the street just off-campus across from the diner. The diner was like a magnet. Would Mike would be there? I needed to talk about this shit. Maybe he could detect something. Maybe I’d been in a trance and walked here. Doubtful. As my father liked to say: “In life there are always two possibilities except when there are three.”
Well, I was hungry so I crossed the street in front of a cab and a convertible VW bug going opposite ways and went in. Why aren’t all potheads fat? All they do is eat pizza and utter crap all the livelong day. Does grass have a diet side-effect?
The moon was high and brilliant. The diner was a glare of indirect fluorescence and shiny surfaces. Like, what a relief…amazing how many times I’d fed my head just to enhance the ordinary and now enough was enough, you know?
I felt safe and solid sitting down on the sticky booth cushion and putting my palms flat on the cool, solid, gold-flecked table.
“I’m here, man,” I murmured, leaning back. “Wow. This table is Formica.”
A pink-haired townie woman at the counter in a dumpiness-enhancing flower print dress that looked like a cheap shower curtain, part-twisted to give me the gimlet eye of moral disapproval. Her black stockings were lint traps. The counterman and an old guy in the corner with fuzzy ears and a straw hat looked at me like I was a ripe peach swollen with the juice of life. I could dig it. I leaned back and over the burble and hiss of the jukebox I heard two men talking in the booth behind.
“This steak stinks,” one said.
What a surprise. A food critic. I wanted to listen to boring human talk to ground me so this was perfect…except the other, younger and cooler sounding one said:
“I’m not happy with his story.”
Knife and fork clicked and scraped the plate and there was a belch. Good old reality. A stout waitress with orange hair and what seemed, in the light, bluish-silver skin, was heading my way as the eater spoke through his food.
“Aaaah. Bullshit. That punk is bullshit. Why a punk like that is a cop boggles me.”
I smiled. A turn of phrase. Somehow I felt if I could concentrate on things like this it would keep the bad stuff away. I wondered about the punk. The waitress tilted her face down to me. I ordered a Greek salad. The stuffed grape leaves weren’t bad here though the leaves themselves tended to become unchewable knots as mastication progressed.
“He knows something.” The non-eater with the educated voice said. “I don’t like it. He might have to be taken out.”
What kind of talk? Taken out? They didn’t mean for drinks and a good time. I didn’t want to turn my head in case they’d notice.
“What could he know?”
“He knows you’re a cop and I’m straight government. He talked about
hallucination.”
“He hinted.”
“He’s a Johnny-come-lately detective,” the eater said, chomping the second-rate steak. “He don’t know shit.” Grunted. “D’Angeli. He talks like a fucking commie or…or hippie or something.”
Ohhh Kayyy. Like, wow.
“Don’t under-rate this fellow,” the intense one said. “He saw the professor. We know that. I don’t know how he got in.”
“You think these eggheads are playing games with the government?”
“No. But I think he may be a spy. That’s my exact thinking.”
“Awright, so we play it safe and get rid of the cocksucker. It’s your call, chief.”
The Greek salad came and looked like swamp weeds. I mean, like man, am I really hearing this shit? This was not likely to relax me. Sweat gathered on my face even in the fierce air-conditioning.
They’re talking about Mike, I thought. Motherfucker…what am I into here?
My instinct was to confront them. I tended not to because my father (who was weirdly anarchist elitist) used to make the point that fighting with soldiers and policemen is like getting mad at the club and not the man hitting you with it.
Instead I stood up and smiled at the square, thick-faced cop-looking character facing me in the opposite shiny green banquette. The smooth-voiced one with his back to me had a small head with short, near-blond hair and pink ears. The head turned around as the meaty-looking guy went into breast shock.
Small head might have been really hot with long hair and a cool beard. There was too much pink in his face and his eyes were shut windows, cop eyes. The other guy had that look that pulsed between begging and rape.
I smiled and went to the bathroom watching the flower-print lady roll her eyes and a few furtive male heads turn as I passed. A bunch of students and townies came in just then, all abuzz (as I hit the push open ladies door) with what shit had gone down at the miraculous football field.
As the door hissed shut behind me I headed for the nearest stall with a sick sense that maybe the horrors I’d seen from inside the dream wall weren’t just figments. I shut the door and made myself uncomfortable on the plastic horseshoe; stared at the scarred green walls and idly read the graffiti scratched and scrawled there while I waited for nature to take its course.
A couple of chicks came in. One hit the neighboring stall.
“Shit,” she said in the local accent. “I’m gonna need a blood transfusion.”
“Betty, what was that?” said the other in an almost whiney voice, running water in the sink. “I mean…what was happening out there?”
I was reading: Fuck Pigs!...Emma is a freehole…Nobody loves you Marlene….Up against the wall motherfucker….
“Maybe a miracle?” Betty said. “I believe in miracles.” She was shifting around and then flushed the toilet with a sucking whoosh that sounded like it could swallow a melon. . Serious plumbing technology in the Starlite.
“It was, like…” The other shut off the water. I just kept sitting there, thinking about finding Mike to check out what those pigs were saying. “Like at
Mass when they ring the bell…mystical, you know?”
“Yeah…Jesus, I had to put in two, can you believe it? Emma Zinga had a miscarriage last year and she bled like crazy. She had to go to the doctor from school.”
“Oh yeah? You think that’s what it is? You let Larry do it without protection? That’s pretty bright.”
“Shut up, Jeanette. Just shut up.”
The bleeder left the stall. I saw her feet under the door as they turned to face in my direction.
“I think maybe we saw a true miracle. I’m going to ask Father Yeager.”
“Hey,” said the bleeder, “who’s in there?”
I knew she meant me and figured it might be one of her group who was getting an earful. I was, like, in a mood.
I stood up and poked my face over the top. Two really straight-sisters looked back at me in the dreary light. I widened my eyes.
“Greetings,” I said. “I am the Bug Queen. I am lady miserecordia of the bleeding vagina.”
“She was probably doing drugs in there,” said the chubby one to the skinny one, with a scathing tone. That was Betty.
“No such luck,” I told them, coming out and washing up at the sink. “Are either of you holding?” I faced the mirror half-afraid I’d be pulled into it or something. I didn’t look so hot. My eyes were swollen and sore, for one thing.
“What?” wondered the tall and straight one, Jeanette, in her almost whiney voice. “Holding what?”
“You know,” said chubby. “That means drugs.”
I was patting cold, sour tap water over my face in hopes of washing away my appearance.
“You’re a hippie,” declared skinny Jeanette.
“That’s an uncool generalization,” I responded, drying off on a harsh, brown paper towel, “and limits me by stereotype. How will we ever become friends at this rate?”
Chubby Betty was in the process of lighting a cigarette without offering. They were both wearing sack-like dresses from well behind the fashion front-lines. Chubby was a vision in pink and blue that made her look like a cheap cake. Jeanette wore dull colors not found in nature, as Cezanne might have said. They both had Beatle bangs and teazed wasp nests.
“Friends?” she managed with a “euyuue” of sheer disgust.
“She has a point though,” slim Jeanette said in an uptight voice. Betty probably did her mother’s prescription shit locked in the bathroom at home. “I mean, people shouldn’t be uptight.”
“So why don’t you two go do some pot together?” Chubby Betty asked, going to the pebbled glass window that was open a little from the top, blowing cigarette smoke up at the supposed draft except, if anything, the air was sluggishly flowing in so the pale grayishblue clouds kept thickening.. “Then you could take off your clothes and protest something.”
“There are better reasons to take off your clothes,” I said, cheerfully.
“I guess you’d know,” Betty said, sneering.
I headed for the door then turned. “Hey, what was going on down at the field?” Because either I’d vanished, teleported or gone into a trance and wandered back here. None of the possibilities were especially desirable.
“Oh, amazing,” skinny Jeanette said, eagerly. “I think it was a miracle maybe but then there was a panic or something…like a riot.” She looked at her friend by the window for confirmation. “We got out of there but we weren’t that close anyway.”
“An ounce of prevention,” I said, nodding. I knew I was going to have to find Mike the Sexy Cop (I was calling him that in my head) and what a potential drag that might prove to be. “Is worth a pound.”
“You’re very smart,” sneered Betty from the window, exhaling up again so that she seemed like a lumpy pink and white dragonette about to really breathe some fire. “I’m so impressed.”
Before I could rake a casual catty claw at her she screamed; the cigarette rebounded off the ceiling then mirror and she slammed herself into the glass which didn’t break but seemed, instead, to be softening, taking the too-round shape of her head and melting around it like hot wax.
Jeanette screamed and slammed out through the door which muffled the rest of her outcries. She was decisive at the sight of the dark razor insect face that seemed to be revealed by the gouts of tobacco smoke gathered near the low ceiling. The bat bug was pushing in. An extreme fury shook me. I wanted to rip the thing’s throat out. Peace and love in its time and place.
Huge taloned hands clutched her. I gestured as if a hurricane wind blew
through me.
“Go back!” burst out of my lungs without my will. “Back to your foul cesspool wherein you feed!”
Where did that come from? Very freaky moment. The eyes ripped icy hell at me as the girl dropped to the tile floor and the thing seemed to lean closer through the smoke. My king. Daddy. The nightmare that apparently had the hots for me; hey, it had already offered marriage. It was a mask but who was wearing it?
Something like a wind blew me forward at it, arms outstretched, hands ready to rip and my voice booming as if through a loudspeaker, shouting with enough force to chip the wall paint:
“Begone, motherfucking demon! Begone!”
MIKE
Unclear why I didn’t just hit the gas. The shadowy figure came up to the window and the headlights from his car didn’t really show his face which seemed a pool of night where big eyes gleamed. I’d reached the point where I just wanted to slug somebody or pull my gun and blow holes in something. I don’t like myself when
I’m that way. It wasn’t just the war it was the
“OK, pal,” I snarled, “who the fuck are you?”
“Professor Winston Langue,” the blot of darkness said.
I drew a long, deep breath.
“Incredible,” I said. “Is this part of…I mean, am I awake? Is this the egg world again?”
He’d been one of my professors. My favorite. A colored man, what they were
now calling Afro-Americans. A Creole but I don’t think there was a special term for that. He was bald. Short and stocky, incisive and feared no issue. He taught “Post-Relativistic Inquiry.”
“Egg world?”
“Down under Particle Physics,” I explained, getting out and standing on the pebbled drive in the exhaust smell and headlight flare. “Everything has been…bizarre…why are you here?”
I could see his face as he turned and the light spilled over him directly. He had a wide face with minimal details.
“I followed you,” he told me. “I saw you going into the Starlite Cafe.”
“Café?” I grinned. “You’re an optimist, sir. Why didn’t you stop me then? I could have avoided heartburn.” I already felt the first slight acidity as well as a broken-sleep headache.
“I wanted to get away from the campus.”
“That’s understandable.” Light and shadow would shift as cars came by and then you’d hear the uuumwhoosh as they passed. The wind was still sweet and cool.
“So did I, sir. Nearly always. Except for your class.” He had better credentials that Grayson or Short, for that matter except he only cared about science, about the truth. A black Mr. Chips, in a way.
He was wearing a sweatshirt and workout pants. This was surreal like everything else since I’d returned to school this afternoon. I’d never seen the Professor other than in pin stripes and a school tie.
“This is grave, Michael. Most grave. I know, though it seems baffling and
disturbing, that you have become a policeman. You are, potentially, an excellent theoretician.”
“Theoretically.”
“Though weak in mathematics.”
“I passed, Professor.”
“Yes. Weakly. But…” He looked over his shoulder when a car on the parkway slowed up and the accelerated again. He seemed very nervous. “Why am I here?”
“I forget. You followed me.”
I sat on my fender and watched the headlights come and go. Thought about shutting off the car. Leaned in around and did.
“Yes. Of course.” He rubbed his hands over his nearly hairless skull. “It is quite upsetting and awful. Why am I here?”
“Sir?” Teachers have no idea they’re asking rhetorical questions, after awhile.
“I am here because of the situation on campus. There was a disturbance tonight. On the football field. There were casualties.”
That got my attention. That’s where Lisa had been headed. I let out a slow breath and sucked the cigarette. The taste was sour. I flicked it onto the pebbles in a scatter of sparks. I barely knew her but I’d have to go back now; me and the ache that was already like pins stuck in my eyes.
“Casualties?” I asked. “Wasn’t it a religious miracle? The only casualty there is usually common sense.”
“I have no details.” He turned and leaned against the closed door, watching the road. “Perhaps there was a panic.” He folded his hands together in front of his chest just like in the classroom. “I know why you came here.”
“You’re one up on me, sir. I seem to be looking for ghosts.”
I watched the cars. The moon was behind a huge overhanging branch. He studied me, eyes gleaming like stones in dark water.
“Michael,” he said, confidential, “something is going on in the department.
Something suspicious. It troubles me. It even frightens me.” He clenched his hands tighter. He would clench when another man might wave them or gesture violently as if he were pressing everything into himself.
“It troubles me too,” I agreed, nodding, sliding down from the fender. “That’s why I’m going home.” That was just talk.
He was breathing too hard. I saw the whites as he kept flicking his eyes around as if he expected to be surprised. I could understand that. He went to his car and shut it off; the headlights died. The only shine came from the spread-out passing traffic on the unlit parkway.
“Listen, Michael, I really am fearful.” His face was shifting and reforming as headlights came and went. “There are disturbing activities in the particle physics lab. And they are keeping people out, senior professors and students and so on. They have armed, cold-eyed people who seem to be soldiers without uniforms preventing access to certain labs. They say the cyclotron is broken Complaints to the administration achieve nothing.”
“If it’s a national security issue we can’t do much.” I sighed. God how I
wanted to get back in my car and go. “Something’s very fucked-up.”
“I don’t understand?”
“You never got down there.” I lit a new cigarette. “I was down there. In the pit. So what’s really scaring you, sir?”
The pit, a choice of words. As predicted by my poor golden darling in the jungle one moonless night on patrol while looking for a spot to urinate I fell down a hole whose camouflage covering had been dislodged by a bomb burst. Too deep to climb back out, shouting for help would have been senseless and suicidal. I’d said “Oh shit!” because I was sure I was about to be impaled by sharpened pungi stakes tipped with excrement. I hit on damp mud.
It was a tunnel system. We’d heard about them. Victor Charlie lived down there under us in an ant’s maze that no one on either side would ever really know the full extent of. The patrol was moving so I was as deep in shit as humanly possible. I learned later these openings were usually near the surface so a fighter could pop out, shoot, drop back and get out of Dodge so this was likely an abandoned section which was good and damaged enough to have lost a level which was not so good. I was a floor too deep. I tested the sides and abandoned the climbing idea. Maybe a spider monkey could have done it.
If there’s no choice you push on. Prayed my flashlight batteries were fine because the sun was never going to come up. Nothing like being under the earth alone and not dead yet. Dank soil was the only smell in the heavy, dead air.
I moved into the darkness flicking the flash off and on, crouching along.
Charlie was small and even he would have to stoop here. The tunnel seemed to be curving down and it was as humid and hot as the Ukrainian steam bath on St. Mark’s place where I sometimes go to melt away my hangovers. I soon regretted not shooting my gun off and yelling for help up the hole.
I tripped on a rock, cut my cheek on a root. The light showed only wet-looking earth ahead and I was panting from duck-walking in the sticky, thick air. I squatted there with the light out in the heavy silence. Thought about going back.
Thought about digging my own tunnel. The dark squeezed me like a sweaty fist.
And then there was a glimmer ahead, a flicker and I unslung my rifle. This was no place to surrender; if anyplace was. I thought I heard voices. This was it. I knelt and aimed. At least I was already buried. I thought about my mother and father; growing up, playing in the park, dreaming on the banks of the Bronx River where the sunlight would always be special, honey and richness in the summer trees…flowers along the banks…giant chestnut trees…butterflies weaving past…fish in the water like strange secrets….
The point is what didn’t happen because there was just one Vietnamese up ahead and he was no problem. Somehow this was all connected to the world under the physics building. My memories came back because now there was a place to put the impossible and absurd.
The hint of light was gone and I hunkered forward. Flashed my flash. Almost fired because a VC in black was around the next bend, arms outspread as if to leap and claw me except he was pressed into the damp dirt wall as if he’d been run over by a sideways steamroller. He looked flattened-out like Bugs Bunny in a cartoon. There was a baseball-sized hole in his expanded forehead; in the beam it looked like his head was hollowed out because I saw skull inside but no brains. I remember wondering in stressed abstraction if my CO would look like that if you opened his head.
There were no signs of anything else having happened here. Was this some weird commie burial rite? Torture? My mind was enjoying a useless ramble. I flashed the light around and saw the same claustrophobic, dank earth. It was hard to breathe down here and I was panting from both fear and bad air.
Just don’t freak out, man, I told myself as it hit me. My Lay warned me…she warned me about this...how the fuck?
Then there was sickly greenish light pouring around the next bend. I
scrambled over there and there was a hole in the earth and I believed some gas in the air or lack of oxygen had affected my head because it was like a TV screen set between two huge squared off rocks that looked like something from Stonehenge. and I was looking at scenes near and far together, compressed yet open and there were landscapes and vast machines that dripped sparks; seas of what seemed like blood with dark boats sailing piloted by creatures like distorted men with too many heads and arms; deserts of soot and ash with human heads poking up…then clean, gleaming rooms with tables and chairs, windows looking out on a city that might have been New York then changed and resembled Washington DC under pure blue skies…lush sofas, fine rugs, glorious paintings of old American scenes on the walls…a pale, silky soft couch beside a desk in an oval room with rich drapes and windows full of sunlight and the incongruous horror of what sat on the couch, staining it with the exudations of its toad-like, greenish-black body that was an evil sweat, its face thin and edged with sharpness, many hands gesturing obscurely, drooling as it mumbled speech, opening its mouth so wide it seemed a bottomless hole…and it looked at me with eyes that had no surface and held up a thin, spiked crown that seemed made of carved black rock…looked at me and welcomed me in unwords that fell like stones on my mind…then there was only the mouth filling the whole space, the whole world trying (I believed) to inhale me, suck me into itself and I shuddered and probably screamed in the thick, muffling underground air and fled, somehow, in some way, bouncing off the semi-soft tunnel sides, falling, crawling, running while my breath failed and I fell in utter darkness and lay facedown until I came back a little…remembered my flashlight still gripped in one hand and shone it around and there were more VC pressed flat into the walls and some kind of really big tracks that weren’t made by feet slashing and squashing the soft floor, something like tank treads with claws, ripping and crushing the earth. Row after row of flattened dead with holes in their foreheads and I though maybe this was some new US underground weapon….I half-crawled and staggered on around bends, through (in wild flashbeams) what looked like some command post…on…and there were dead men and women pressed into the walls and I couldn’t look; this was when I learned it was all true, that our world barely held back others whether dark or light, pressing, wearing away the thin barrier that dissolved in dreams….
I can’t say how many bodies I’d passed when I just knelt there panting, empty, legs like jelly, mind like mud….
“I give up,” I think I said. “This is it…enough….”
Something gleamed, dim, pale and then came closer as if coming out of a fog:
a tall, whitish, softly glowing being without clear features except for clear, soft, golden eyes that filled my soul with a welling of weeping and incongruous tenderness. Then it was a man in a ranger uniform, black beret and all; I wasn’t fooled but I followed just because he said:
“Follow me.”
Back in the rest stop
“What’s scaring me, Michael?” There were no passing car headlights for the moment and his dark skin and clothes had become the night itself. Just a mellow, controlled, tense voice now as if the dark exhaled words. “Among other things, my observation, confirmed by others, that neither Grayson nor Short ever leave the buildings, neither do they appear to sleep.”
I rubbed my eyes. I wanted a few hours of same.
“Maybe they catnap,” I offered. “They must love their work.”
“It has a sinister quality.” There were no cars for now and the moonhints and soft, deep shadows were magical. There’s really no other word for that. “Why do I say this? Because a graduate student reported seeing Dr. Grayson in his office sitting quite motionless at his desk and not responding when spoken to.” He took a sighing breath.
“So he sleeps sitting up, Professor? Or maybe he doesn’t condescend to a mere student.”
“Yet, at the very same time I was engaged in a conversation with him downstairs in the laser laboratory.”
“Well, there are the basic issues of simultaneity, no?” I was kidding but when it came to Relativity Professor Winston Langue had less humor than a mortician’s hired mourner.
“Are you suggesting that at a distance of a few floors there was a measurable clock differential?”
“Of course not.”
But then a nagging, oblique thought tickled my mind like a butterfly’s wings. Ghostly appearances might fit what I’d been experiencing: you wouldn’t be in two places at once if you were manifesting in an alternate universe where time didn’t operate - as in dreams. Time for somebody watching you sleep and checking his watch said nothing about the dreamer’s measurements; both depended for order on what they perceived. Objective is the most subjective word I know. That was the key: dreams had their own laws of nature; light speed was unlimited, conservation laws of matter and energy didn’t apply so suggesting dreams might be a model for alternate realities that extended higher and higher or more and more subtly around us as if we were all like atoms surrounded by layers of energy, life and light that really couldn’t be measured with the yardsticks of our world. Our consciousness was influenced, maybe even derived and determined by those higher bands but our solidness, our very specific senses blocked it off, drowned it out except in sleep or in exceptional moments of perception, at death’s door, in trances, using psychedelics…things were trying to come together in my unhappy head and I was really getting a little scared because it was starting to feel practical, somehow.
“Well, Mr. D’Angeli what is your point? I assume you have one.”
“Well…I think we ought to figure out a clock experiment to…determine….”
By God I was into it as if there had been no
“Yes, yes?”
“Professor, I…they sent me here to do police work and I’m back wishing I had a blackboard and a team of mathematicians.” I rubbed my face. “They trapped me.”
“Trapped? Who?”
“I think, I can’t prove it, but I know he was in two places at once. I’ll prove it, one way or another and then arrest somebody.”
“What sort of clock experiment? Why am I asking this?”
I shut my eyes and buried my face in my hands. Breathed really hard.
“I’d like to measure dream-time. Not REM sleep and so forth. Our past, present and future are all equivalent in dream-time because nothing physical can actually move back and forth across the calendar…but a dream, call it a dream image of our space-time past and future, has no such limits….” My head was drawing up magmic pain from unknown depths; but I had a glimpse and felt that strange feeling you get when something fits, comes to life. “We have to see if when I entered that world my physical body was still here, in space/time or was it neutralized?”
“Neutralized?” I forgot how penetrating Lange’s perceptions were so he was already ahead of me while barely aware of the information I had. “So they’re experimenting with phasing matter in and out of space/time and caught you up in it. So where does the quantum bundle go in the non-measurable, undetectable space? Is it suddenly free of conservation laws? Would energy in a so-called ‘wormhole’ not be energy?”
Good points. Conservation of matter and energy was basic to our physics. Matter is energy. E=mc2. Everything is moving, spinning or flying forward and when you goose something it produces an increase in movement and when something hits something else the impact is the energy. From sub-atomic particles to asteroids smacking the earth. We assume atomic matter is spinning, clumped, stable-seeming until something hits it like in a chain reaction and then everything’s flying around until the impacts spread out like a bubble, less and less particles hit one another until the atomic stuff recollects, re-clumps into stable-seeming matter. So really, as the professor knew, there was only one actual conservation law and it boiled down to if we banged heads we shared the energy and the guy with the bigger, harder head gave more than he got. So that energy was conserved. Like when President Kennedy was shot and they made the argument (worth a D/F in physics 101) that struck from behind by a high-powered bullet his head went back into the impact. I experimented shooting everything from fruit to bocce balls and everything either rolled sluggishly away or bounced away from the blow but in every case the material went out in the direction of impact like the man’s brain matter and skull fragments. What a snowjob! The point: in this world, on gross physical levels,
“Good point,” I said.
“But what is a particle in a dream state?” the professor went on. “Most interesting. One assumes, perhaps too automatically, that memory and dreams are equivalent and are produced by the same electromagnetic process. But…most interesting as I consider dream light. We must not take for granted what we hope is obvious. As you I hope do not, Michael.”
“Not just particles, sir.” I almost had it. “Look, we assume electrons and other particles spin for various reasons. They only exist because of spin and so forth. The spin in mass may well generate gravity. In a perfect vacuum, uninfluenced by any other field and if not actually spinning it wouldn’t age. It would have no shape in fact there would be no motion producing energy…no time…nothing...a ghost. Everything ages because of acceleration, not relative motion. We exist in gravity and even in free space all transformations of our physical beings go on with rotations and transfers of kinetic energy…but in dream dimensions zero time….”
A pause as if the whole night inhaled and held its breath. Gravity is passive producing movement without moving and adds or takes away energy depending on whether you’re falling free like a spacecraft coming home or one fighting to get out of the attracting field.
“Ah,” he finally said. “So they’ve gone so far. If there are dream dimensions, of course. But, even so, wormholes are not out-of-the-question.” Pause. “You conclude too-quickly, as ever. I think they want to neutralize you, Michael. Somehow you may find their Achilles heel.”
“They brought me here. Why do people think I can do anything at all?” I asked him and the silvery hush of the night. “Jesus…in
“Your speech is colorful, these days.” He sighed. “Soft energy?” He chuckled. “I see. Perhaps.”
“There’d be no gravity in dream environments.”
He nodded, almost invisible in the night.
“Yes,” he whispered, clasping his hands tighter and almost bowing. “You and I will do what we can and what we must. I am with you.”
“Professor?”
“We will explore this together. We will need experimental validation.”
“I need ten aspirin. But…I’m just a cop now...I….What I’m saying is nuts.
You know it’s nuts. How can you believe the student upstairs really saw him while you were talking to him? That’s not your kind of science. That’s not anybody’s
science.”
He sighed and maybe softly groaned.
“It isn’t science at all, Michael. That’s why I’ve all come to you, it appears. I don’t intend offense. Uncorrelated observations without substantial evidence…any evidence. It goes against all that I have come to trust and rely on.”
“That’s right. So why?”
“Things are not true because of science, Michael. Why do I say this?”
“Observation doesn’t cause things though it may affect them,” I said. “Truth isn’t created by the method you try to understand it with. The door is always wide open which scares conservatives...hell, it scares me. If a Gypsy fortuneteller gets the right answer it’s not science but it’s still true.” I was back in school. I stuck another smoke between my lips but didn’t light up. “I’ve got ideas but no answers. I want to go home and sleep.”
“Please, D’Angeli. You may well be the fulcrum. Essential because you are the single point a force rests on. Please put aside your weakness and doubts. I don’t understand what is in progress here but I sense we must act and investigate come what might. I’m afraid. I must say I am very, very afraid as I have never been.” He sighed. “We are ever surrounded by darkness and mystery and disorder that exist only in our minds because we want to make our kind of sense out of everything. In the end all reason and theories fray.” He sighed again. “Your generation cannot distinguish derangement from arrangement yet…yet….”
“We’re all in the same sinking ship. OK, professor, I’m with you. We’re partners in this…I don’t know what it is. But you have to help me pin down the ghosts or whatever they are. And for some reason I really, really deep down want to arrest Short and Grayson for something. The same way I’d like to see Nixon in handcuffs.” I shrugged and sucked air through the unlit cigarette. “No explanation.”
“Arrest?” he said, soft and thoughtful. “I cannot imagine being a policeman.
Think of the contradictory laws in every state and city. Imagine all the laws of the entire world from tribes in jungles to vast civilizations. How to tell which are just would paralyze me, I fear.”
“It’s impossible,” I said, “without a conscience.”
LISA
The thing in the window was gone: there was just smoke in the bathroom and the girl dressed like a cake lying on the white and black tile floor flat on her face. The other one had left screaming; the door thumped and hissed open admitting the pale nervous face of the orange-haired waitress.
“What’s goin’ on in heer?” she wanted to know. “Are you takin’ drugs?”
“No such luck,”
I knelt over the girl. I was scared I’d see something like from a horror movie.
One thing about my lifestyle, very little seemed too strange. If Frankenstein’s monster came in the door I could dig it. She was shuddering breaths and twitching. What was the voice that had seemed to speak through me tonight and before?
Begone and so forth.
A man with a Greek accent I knew was one of the owner’s family said:
“What going on here?”
I stood up. He was stocky with a thick, black moustache. Kind of sensual.
“I think the Devil tried to grab her,” I explained, shrugging. “He missed.”
His name, I remembered, was Spyros. A brother-in-law or whatever. Cool name.
“Devil?” He frowned with his entire face. I was heading out the door, thinking about the murderous feds. “Bad things happening all over place.”
“Bad things,” I agreed. “Very uncool shit going down.”
I went out and saw the booth where the pair had been was empty. Orange-hair gave me a suspicious sidelong glance. I smiled.
Outside I paused on the steps and took a deep breath. How would I ever find Mike the cop? Most store and house lights on the street and school were out, now.
The air was sweet and cooler. Could have used a cotton sweater.
Spyros had come out behind me full of instant lust and real concern.
“Girl,” he said, “tell me what you see inside?”
He had nice eyes. Understanding, deep and dark.
“Maybe my imagination,” I answered. “Who knows?”
He didn’t go for that. He came down the steps beside me.
“I don’t think so,” he said, wagging a forefinger. “Something not right.”
“Something?”
“Very strange reports I am hearing. I am Grik. I understand Devil and such things.”
“I don’t, man.”
“You are hippie?”
I smiled and didn’t nod or shake my head, just rocked it slightly.
“Not too hip just now. Or even hep.” I sighed. Mike, Mike, Mike. “I got to go, man.”
“Wait. I like to talk with you. Maybe you want drink or food?”
“You’re basic, man. Maybe another day. This is all too extreme and fucked-up right now. Sorry, man. Another time, man.”
There was a soft mist opposite where the campus lawn and trees bordered the street, deep and dark and still. Nothing stirred; no strange shapes or freaky landscapes.
MIKE
I followed Professor Langue back to school. As my mind bounced off the sides of sleep and the leftover effects of whatever had happened the parkway seemed to express my future: rising, falling, curving away into a darkness lit now and then by oncoming lights that got brighter and brighter and then were gone….
The air was good on my face and full of strange promise of more strangeness. I was trying to open my mind to the problem: I was sent here to find a man and a woman who might be something like ghosts as a result of…what? Obviously, the “egg” was in the picture. And the hints of Short talking about the so-called “experiment” that maybe never happened where some destroyer was subjected to intense force fields and sailors were shoved or twisted into another dimension…a brilliant professor tailed me to a roadside stop and was taking enough weirdness seriously to seriously worry me. Meanwhile, I’d met a girl who left me sick with desire…that was good. A “…heart sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal….” I hadn’t felt like that since the golden light went out in
The Viet cops assumed Mai had been killed by a jealous lover and told me to be careful which was pretty funny to a grunt on combat duty. Now I was starting to wonder if knowing me had somehow proved fatal.
The trees were close overhead and I thought of the tunnels, dank and utterly silent while above in the green, poisonous jungle hell people crawled and crouched and still hid over there to murder one another.
A black beret had led me out which was completely absurd. I had to be hallucinating from something in the foul air. Maybe I was dying or dead. That’s the best I could come up with at the time. OK, it was a ghost story and that’s the point. I got out of there following an impossible soldier who didn’t really seem to be crouching and creeping as I was which was equally impossible. And now it looked like more ghosts were in the picture.
“Nel mezzo de camin de nostra vita,” I said. “Mi ritrovai…” I forgot the rest and even this much was wrong. Dante, assist me, I don’t want to go down there again.
I passed the professor’s sober Buick Skylark and pulled over about where I’d parked the first time. I got out and stood staring through the gate at the college walk where the old-time fake gas lamps were spaced for a couple of hundred yards and thought about Heisenberg walking from light glow to light glow and thinking how, like an electron, he could only be detected, measured when he was in the light if you were watching him. He could stand on his head in the dark place, spin and hop and jump and you’d never know. Quantum limitations on knowing things. What Langue was talking about; what lay between the pools of lost brightness in the vast dark that swallowed all comprehension….
The professor came up to me, determined and uneasy-looking.
“Do I look scared?” I wondered.
“Pardon? There is cause for concern.”
I was beat but what was the point of waiting? Let’s find out if anybody ever slept or was in two places at once. I about qualified at this point. I had a gun and a badge and vague authority but no actual crime except, maybe, the heads that weren’t there the second time. I had a fed and his pet monkey with eyes like slow death but nothing, really. No facts. Not even a warrant for the ghosts not to mention
the fucking bug bat or whatever it was.
“We’re going in with guns blazing,” I said, “and the power of right on our side.” I sort of laughed. “The left side.”
“Guns?”
“A metaphor, professor,” I said.
“Inexactitude.”
“That’s me all over. Inexact, oblique but hell with the ladies.” I thought it over. “I need coffee and whiskey again before we go over the top.” Sink’s bar was around the corner so we could leave the cars. Off-season but it would still be a zoo. “Allow me, professor.” Started walking. “Maybe just whiskey.”
LISA
It was fucked-up to think I’d overheard a discussion about killing someone much less someone I now knew. Which way to go? Call who? Police headquarters in NYC? Hey, I need to get in touch with this detective D’Angeli because two fed-like dudes in a diner seemed to be talking about murdering him. Sure.
The moon was high and bright. I sat on a bench across the street and tried to collect myself and looked up as if the man in it might have some answers. Maybe it was a woman. The moon belonged to women in nearly all human traditions. Felt a slight cramp and my mood shifting. I knew it. Women have tides within them. The chick in the bathroom was an omen. Anyway, she wasn’t dead.
I sighed and couldn’t decide whether to go home and get high with the last of my stash or sit there and figure nothing out. I sat, watched the moon get eaten by a mass of clouds that now covered half the sky. The air was getting heavy and there were flickers and ever–so-faint vibrations of thunder. Walking in the rain would be fine. I started back to the dorm figuring it was out of my hands as most things were.
As I passed Sink’s pub a fight broke out. This was common when the locals met the students. A skinny guy was punching wildly at a fat guy. Then they rolled around in the gutter. Violence is sick and stupid. To me all the most wonderful things in the world result from love in one way or another from babies to the Sistine Chapel. Violence is pathetic. You live in a world of beauty and wonder and magic so you drink beers and hit one another, live in fear of the poor or Negroes; sing the national anthem and go kill foreigners.
I went past and some dude said “hey baby” which indicated he was a local. I didn’t look up, just walking past the hollering and laughing jerks.
“Break his head,” somebody yelled. That met with approval.
The idea that if you could turn all these people on they would see the magic, mystery and wonder and head for the nearest commune or follow the Grateful Dead around the country was silly. I knew mad cats who liked to fantasize and scheme how to dose Congress with LSD water and turn
Hating war and having people held back and down was one thing; hating gross injustice and callous indifference to life was one more but sometimes there was
too much wonder and mystery like right now.
I kept my head down and hoped I’d make the dorm before the town streets melted into a too solid dream. I already knew it wasn’t just (or even) acid that fucked me up like this. It was something that would find you anywhere, in your bed, in class, dreaming under the trees as sure and dark as Death. When the Snark caught the banker the banker “offered large discount” but to no avail. Yeah, like, right on, man. “Timor mortis conturbat me,” fear of death troubles me. You can’t wish or fuck it or smoke it away. At momma’s breast sucks the “babe full of benigite” and death has no problem with that. We were studying poets from the Black Plague period. What’s new? No problem with the doctor, the lawyer…the town crier…the cop…the hippie…the king, president, dictator, scientist, pope….And when the seventh seal was opened there was silence in heaven…that incredible movie where you see all these medieval people dancing, hand-in-hand, behind death with his scythe…
Honestly, I used to dream of getting through the looking glass but having just been there I’ll take a double feature of the Marx Brothers for something sensible.
“Lisa,” I heard from behind me so I stopped and there was a black professor I’d seen a dozen times and my new doubt and obsession, himself. Far fucking out.
“Mike,” I said. “You better be careful.”
He came close, the professor at his shoulder. He had really nice eyes, soft and concerned. The flashing green neon sign that said Sink’s seemed to make them bigger and smaller.
“What more could happen?” he asked. He looked at the bar. The stupid fight was over. “I need a drink or something.” Part turned. “Professor Langue, this is
Lisa Time.”
“Hello,” the black man said. I knew he was important though I don’t know what he taught.
“It’s really Zeit,” I explained.
“Time is time, I suppose,” he said. “I hope we have enough of it tonight.”
Inside we found one chair for me at the corner of the bar. We clustered there and the professor seemed kind of pleased with himself just to be hanging out. Mike kept rubbing his eyes between swallows of black coffee and shots of Jamison whisky.
I told him what I’d overheard in the diner.
“I might be misinterpreting,” I added on, leaning close to his ear because the general roar enclosed you into a bubble in a sea of music and noise and flashing light.
“No,” he said. “I met them.”
The professor had a pale beer in one hand and joined the huddle.
“This is exciting,” he said. “But troubling, too. It’s remarkable I’m involved in this intrigue. Why?”
“Because the government thinks they have a great prize,” Mike answered, rubbing his eyes, “and what they have is a great wooden horse.”
“Ah ha,” said the professor.
All our heads were close enough to bonk. I felt him feeling me, you know, not
physically…like our auras touched. That feeling when if you’re alone the next move is falling into kissing and touching and on from there.
“Man,” I said to him, “I mean be careful. These cats were fucking cold, man.”
He looked at me, eyes focused someplace else.
“I think you should stay home,” he told me. “This thing is evil and twisted.”
“We need a plan,” said the professor.
“Hey,” I said to Mike, “I’m not like bugging out. I know you were in that place with me. We should, like, seriously discuss it.”
There was a lull in the bar roar and the music came through for a few seconds: “…go ask
“Discuss what?” he came back with. “Words won’t help, Lisa. We have to go there on purpose.” He leaned closer and I put my hand on his shoulder. The muscles surprised me. “We have to get down to the egg. We have to control it and find the two ghosts of whom I have only seen one.”
“And we better avoid that Virgin Mary and her friends,” I put in.
MIKE
Except I was haunted by the heads and knew I was missing something crucial. It wasn’t just some surrealist absurdity or psychopathic excess (not to exclude that, of course) because these boys were actually doing amazing if horrifying science; you had to figure it was part of some experiment. People and animals…maybe they did whatever it was to the creatures first to perfect the horror. I tried to remember the human faces and except for one woman it was all blur.
It was clear there was no point in avoiding the obvious. I went back to the
bathrooms where I knew there was a phone. I had enough nickels and dimes to call the precinct and got the captain who was working a late shift.
“I’m up here,” I said instead of hello. “What the fuck is the story, captain? I’m dealing with ghosts and mad scientists. I need a little advice on procedure. I got feds putting me in the crosshairs. Can you enlighten?”
“It’s D’Angle, right?” was the raspy response. I could see him, his sweaty bald head, chewing the cigar.
“Detective D’Angeli, at your service, captain.”
“Listen here, D’Angle, this ain’t my problem. Take it up with your rabbi.”
The music and crowd roar made it seem his voice was in my head and not my ear. I didn’t want it there.
“Why am I here? Have you got one single fucking idea, captain?”
“Hey, hey, you got an insubordinate attitude, D’Angle.”
“I’m in the middle of something and I want to know who to lock up.”
“It ain’t my problem, kid. Do your best.”
“It’s an unbelievable horror movie, captain. Who’s the director?”
“What?”
The recorded phone voice was warning me I was running out of time – as if I didn’t know.
“Skip it,” I said. “I’ve been set up and I want to know why. And you don’t know. If the shit up here gets loose you’ll end up with your head on a spike too, I got a feeling.”
“Hey, hey! What the fuck you saying you son-of-a-bitching-“
The phone cut off. I listened to the seashell emptiness in my ear. And then a new voice that wasn’t the operator that sounded like it was woven out of rasps and buzzes.
“Go to the bathroom,” it seemed to say. Not a bad idea. The whiskey was warm and soft behind my eyes. Nothing could surprise me at this point.
“What do you recommend? Number one or two?” I wondered.
I hung up and peered out at the bar. Saw Lisa and the professor talking.
That had to be interesting. Did she have the same effect on him she had on the rest of mankind? The roar from the bar was like wind pressure. I went into the bathroom. It was small and stank the way you’d expect. There was a mirror over the urinal which was a lousy place for it. I tried not to look at myself for many reasons.
And then the rabbity-looking guy was in the reflection and I knew better than to turn around.
“Stay there,” I commanded. “Don’t fucking move. Don’t vanish. Talk to me.
Are you really here? Are you real?”
The up and down moustache, the briefcase, the wrist watch, the twitching nose.
“Feedback loop,” he said. “Feedback loop.”
I got it.
“Can I get you out of the loop?”
“Yes. And Rita.”
That was the other professor.
“How?”
I turned around which was a mistake because he was gone. Like that. I had the message, however. There was a way to de-ghost them. It was obvious that everything led back to the bottom of particle physics which could just as well be a trap. Why should I believe an image in a mirror? Well, we were in Wonderland….
How is right, I thought.
LISA
The professor got a little flirtatious for a minute but was fairly cool. My mind was more and more focused on Mike. It was one of those sneak up on you relationships and before you knew …well…you know and if you don’t I feel sorry for you.
“Do you dig what’s going on?” I asked him.
“Ah,” he replied. “I think there has been a very loose, very informal…very unscientific set of experiments or, perhaps, better put, reckless. Yes. Why? Because when you enter a new place in science you must tread oh so carefully. Not clump in on big, muddy boots.”
“So you don’t know what’s going on. That’s cool.”
I saw Mike coming back, making his way through the crowd. He looked pale and even more stressed, if possible. His eyes were getting to me. They were deep and sensitive.
He leaned in on the bar and took a deep breath. Shook his head.
“I don’t know…I don’t know,” he said. “I have to settle down….”
I touched him and realized it was for the first time not counting finger
bumping when we passed the joint; stroked his cheek a little. Nice soft skin above the unshaven chin. Wondered how he’d look in a beard.
“You need to crash, man,” I told him, leaning close enough to hear and be heard in the din. “Seriously. Get your head together.”
He nodded.
“Glue back the missing pieces,” he replied. “Good idea, Lisa.”
“Crash at my dorm room.”
The barmaid was a thin, pale Irish redhead with hair like Brenda Starr in the comic strip. She refilled my beer mug, his whiskey and the professor’s beer.
“Michael,” he said, “the young lady and I were discussing alternate universes and psychic effects which, as you know, I am totally skeptical about yet still suspect that just because we lack appropriate tools to measure such things their reality is not necessarily obviated.”
The professor spoke in mouthfuls. I liked him. He was no cold fish and the way he ate his fat bar pretzels suggested a sensual nature.
“Good point,” Mike said. “It’s really starting to look like the first gate is dreaming.” He shook his head hard like a wet terrier. “I’m getting strange…dreams or something like dreams is breaking through into waking.”
“I know someone we should see,” I told him. “After you crash.”
MIKE
So Now I’m a detective who has to solve crimes in multiple worlds…or am I a semi-scientist who has to find equations for dreams? I wanted to sleep but knew it
was improbable even if it wasn’t going to be attempted in the room of one of the most attractive, sexy, mind-altering women since Lilith beat Eve to Adam.
Professor Langue headed back to his office. We agreed to meet in the morning. We walked across campus and nothing strange happened. Our shadows jumped and shook in lightning flashes as the storm roiled closer. The moon was gone. The air felt thick and oppressive.
In her second-floor room the single window that faced the school was suddenly full of rain spattering and wet wind gusts. The coolness was a relief and the air was sweet with green and earth smells.
I stretched out on the single bed while she went out into the hall communal bathroom. Life in the dorm; better than in the field. I shut my head down and this time there was just darkness…and then my eyes popped open far too soon literally shaking in the post vibration of an immense thunderclap.
Another flash and some goddess took form out of the wild, flapping light as if she’d gathered her substance from the storm. I was stunned by the perfect outline shifting in a series of flashes that racked the air; thunder so close you could hear the hissing of the bolts.
There wasn’t to be much sleep. The goddess was nude and in my arms as if she formed there too and it was all silk and a warm, rich scent uncheapened by any perfume but her being. Between sleep and pain she floated; between wild, flailing light and bangs and booms and then we were fused together as if we were one flesh and I’d never had that sensation before, not like that, not…no…melting and blending becoming a sensation without boundaries…no me…no she…no….
“I love,” one of us said without saying you. Maybe we both said it as one. I looked over her back at some intense moment and she was still at the window in the wild, flailing light, my goddess, forming and unforming in incredible electrical perfection and I put it down to one more hallucination except as I spasmed into shattering ecstasy a soundless voice seemed to tell me without words something like lightning is another door….Then was gone. The afterglow in my eyes was a golden glitter.
The storm was over by the time we fell into that lull of breath and thought coming back from ecstasy like waking from an infinitely deep, sweet dream…. I tried to roll over but she kept me locked there. The moon was back and glanced softly over us so her face was like an image in a dark pool.
“Hi, goddess,” I breathed out. All this in under 24 hours.
I nestled my face down and went to blankness again and again was jarred awake the worse for wear except this time it was a gasp and violent jerk not a lightning blast.
“What? What?” I groaned. I was still inside her in a vague, rubbery sense.
“Mike,” she whispered, “the window. Do you see it too?”
My twisted neck allowed my twisted sight to badly focus on the rectangle of night, the moon in a crease of treetops not yet set and dimmed not blocked by what seemed to sit on the sill. I would have assumed I was still in a doze if her long-fingered, soft and firm, wonderful hands hadn’t been pulling my shoulders aside as she struggled to sit up.
“Mike?”
“I see it…I see it...I…”Saw waving heads; fangs, fluid snake-like shapes.
“Mike, what? What?”
I was naked but that didn’t matter because I was freaked-out and furious. I went for the window likely to be as effective as an angry gnat. I try to sleep, I experience amazing, almost life-threatening passion and now these fucking things are poking into my in a dreaming flow of madness. That glowing field effect filled the window. There were other shapes in the background, blurry, humanoid, skinny with big heads.
That was a peripheral impression only because the snake mouth lashed at me and seemed to squeal like hot metal on hot metal. The fangs at the end of the strike sank into my chest and my heart and lungs seemed to freeze. Except she was beside me and it felt like we still overlapped which was good because instead of pain or death there was a joint burst of energy that was like when you fight in a dream and knock your opponent down with strange, muscleless and massless strength like a balloon popping.
It popped. We were both naked in the window, shoulder-to-shoulder. Outside
looked like animation gone mad: the amorphous greenish field stirred like a fog bank across the campus lawn where it met the wall-like wooded area and in the blurring a huge frog with the head of a hawk was hopping after a chicken with the head of a woman; a three-legged man with five heads and four arms was ripping the limbs off a screaming man and chewing his flesh from the bones like a pit bull. There were a few dogs too but none you’d even seen while conscious: I liked the one with a head at both ends like the crocagator joke, crocodile and alligator unable to crap which made him the meanest of all creatures. You could see the field starting to firm into semi-spheres and then fail and sag back into shapelessness.
I put my arm around her.
“Baby, this is not just us,” I said.
Because there were people on campus running and being chased down or surprised by these distortions of life that struck me as reflections of all the distortions that were inviting them here. I’d felt the fangs and it was personal now. “This is fucking Hieronymous Bosch, man,” she said.
“I want to sleep it off,” I said. “Man, do I want to sleep it off.”
Because a huge wolf with bat-wing ears was mounting a phosphorescently pale nude girl who vomited fire in rhythm with his short, quick strokes and my head was vomiting a few sparks too and my bones still seemed to be melting and not just from exhaustion. I could still feel those chill teeth closing on my heart.
LISA
Something like a wind seemed to shake the scene and blur and blow the visions away. It was freaky. You knew they’d be back. I’d floated from the bed where…indescribable love to be described another time…
The crazy thing was that we were closer at the window than when we were plugged into one another, I mean we were fused for a moment like two souls in one body so that the thing that was attacking him became a shadowy nothing as if love
itself overcame the mad, twisted hallucinations and banished them.
I’d never felt like this ever…ever…never…while visions and insanity erupted and hell opened and I was in love and felt like a whore and a nun and an Amazon warrior and….
“Sleep,” I said.
“I have to go back down there,” he said. “I have to ask questions. To which there won’t answers but I have to ask, you see?”
“Yes, baby.” I sighed and held him, slim, strong, intense, him.
“This is beyond fucked-up. This is…is….”
“Yes, baby.”
We got dressed, more or less, and went out after some deep kissing. Neither of us wanted to let go and it was too soon to even begin to assess what this was. He told me not to come with him but that wasn’t happening.
“We should find professor Langue,” he said as we went down the stairs to the lobby.
“I gave him this address,” I told him. “And my number.” As we went out the dorm door I nearly tripped over the professor who was kneeling there as if in prayer.
MIKE
His face was swollen and I knew the dark streaks were blood. It was clear and sickening at once. Clear what had happened. I sat beside him; his breathing was like sighs.
“Professor,” I half-asked, “it was those two pricks?”
One eye was banged and swollen closed. The other wasn’t too hot, either.
“Ah…thank God…Michael, these are very extreme people….Why am I here? I recalled you…were in Marlowe Hall….”
She was cradling him so we probably looked like a pieta.
“Where are they?” I wanted to know. My blood was up, as they say. “What did they want from you?”
“Ah…what happened? Unclear…they insisted I was a spy of some sort and took me upstairs….”
“Where?”
“They used racial epithets…very displeasing….Not sure where…I….”
“We better go my room and let him rest,” Lisa said.
“Might have been…Vanderzilch Hall…I clambered out a window and fortunately fell in a bush….”
We had him on his feet and went back inside. We put him to bed and she washed his cuts and dabbed on iodine.
“What did they want?” I asked him. I was already sure they’d let him go so he’d find us.
“They seem quite deranged…I say this because they felt you and I are Russian spies or some such absurdity.” He winced as she dabbed a cut above one eye. “This is mad.”
“Professor,” I told him. “You rest. Lisa, stay with him.” I already understood that was a waste of breath. I was getting to know her. Russian spies. Sure thing. Those cruel bastards with their American flag underwear. Fuck them and who dressed them in the morning.
“That’s lame, man,” she said. “We’re sticking together. In case you missed it together we’re bigger than life or something.”
“You’re a romantic, after all,” I told her.
“Not hippie free love?” She smiled as she showed another aspect of herself.
“Can you be romantic about 200 lovers?”
She laughed.
“Can’t say I didn’t try.”
“Un-huh.”
“That’s all behind me, now.”
We were heading to the front of the science building with an idea of seeing who wasn’t sleeping in the office when I saw her, the other missing professor, Rita Heisen, standing across the sidewalk. I told Lisa to freeze.
“Professor,” I called over, “are you actually here?”
She moved her mouth, silently, pointed at a telephone booth a few yards away.
“Wait, Lis,” I told her, heading over to the booth keeping an eye on the professor who was a vision in a dress as leaden as her flesh.
Inside the booth I picked up the receiver and gestured and she nodded. Put it to my ear and there was nothing. I looked for help. Then dropped a dime in the slot and the dial tone buzzed into words that might have started out human.
“Ask questions,” it said.
“Professor?”
“The professor...zzz…dead.” I could see her lips moving, speaking to me. “In effect…bzzzzt….”
“In effect?”
“I know you…eeeeffft…You understand…cannot be here in…buuuz…body. Your world is life after death for souls and angels and demons too.”
The sound was painful, grating, whining, rasping and the inside of my skull already was scraped raw. Eeeoooowvvvvvveeee!
“Where is your body?” I asked.
“Lost.”
“Can it be found?”
“Think of us…zzzzz…as ghosts. Short is one of the Rache…wrrrrr…we fled to escape...left bodies behind….rrrrr…stuck.”
“Why do they want you?” Eeeeoooeeeooovvvveeee!! “Ouch.”
Lisa had come over to the booth and leaned inside, looking at Professor Rita through the glass with me. She put her arm around my waist, warm, firm, sleek, magical.
“We know maybe how to seal hole…we…bxxxzzz…we are drawn to you…vvvrrrr…must leave.”
“Why are you drawn to me? What are the Rache?”
Eeeeeoooohhhzzzzzsssstttti!!!
“They’re coming….”
“How can we help?”
“Come other way….” Zzzzzzzz. “Must not come as we came or all are lost.”
She moved, maybe ran…anyway, faded and right behind was one of the insect-looking characters gnashing himself in a stiff fury and Short, the Rache, seeming more curdled and excited, looking like he shouted orders to the creatures, snarling as they tried to catch her.
“Run,” I think I yelled. “Run!”
I held Lisa and we just looked at one another. I was working my raw brain hoping for a ray of insight.
“You spoke to her, baby?”
“Yeah. It just gets worse. Constantly.”
“And?”
“I’m shot…I’m beat up and broken-down…Managgia…I think I understand…I think I have to go down there. I….”
Not all is lost; all are lost.
LISA
The lightning kept bouncing the scene back and forth and whipping and ripping shadows around. Far out. But horrors were mounting. I expected to see more monsters or be sucked back into that other place. Getting stoned was one thing but I’d never felt reality was so tentative, so fragile; I’d been flipping in and out of death all day.
We left the phone booth. The rain was now falling straight down. We both were soaked but it was warm and felt good. We didn’t go in the science building. Back behind it was a big door something like a subway entrance. I’d never noticed it
before.
“Aren’t we going to look for those feds?” I wondered.
“What will we do if we find them?” Good point. “Anyway, they’ll find us when they get restless or run out of teachers to beat up.”
He kissed me, nicely and we held one another, wet face to wet face; his suit smelled like laundry.
We went down…down…more down past a deserted reception desk then into a curving sickly hospital green hallway and I felt like I was, like, descending through some mechanical bowels.
My new love kept pausing like some hunting animal almost as if he was sniffing the air. I really dug just looking at him. He was graceful, compact, light on his feet. He was sensitive, I mean, he didn’t just climb on board and fuck away as if he was scared to stop or he might lose it – something you become familiar with, if you’re an active woman.
He was relaxed, gentle and took his time. Let things build naturally. The more I thought about it the more I vaguely hoped we’d take a quick break in some side-corridor. What’s wrong with me? I mean, if you have enough sex enough times it levels off and you’re like some reformed whore in the Bible suddenly open to what she really needs…call it romance but that’s a pale shadow of it. What we really need.
He stopped and cocked his head. Held out one hand as if for balance.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.
“There should be security. Why am I asking that?” He grinned, wryly.
“Why?”
“I wish you weren’t here.”
“You need me. It’s some witch shit, man.”
“Something’s really bad. I feel like a mouse sniffing the cheese in the trap.”
“I dig how you talk, man. Like you’re compensating for being an egghead.”
MIKE
Egghead, I laughed. Here on the slide to Hell she says egghead. Let’s go back, get married and live in the country; I could be deputy sheriff or teach science in the local high school. That John Prine song: “blow up the tee vee, throw away the paper, go to the country, build you a home….”
Where were the guards? Maybe they didn’t need them anymore. Maybe the Bosch things were comfortable, settled-in. It was obvious the government, sly, conniving scumbags that they were, had been dead fooled and was rolling the Trojan horse through the city gate.
“You like the way I talk?” I asked her. “Groovy.”
“I used to like it,” she said.
We went around the next bend and then we hit the display cases with the heads except this time there were animal heads, too.
We stood there like it was Macy’s Christmas window. There was a dog, sheep, wolf, goat, bull and various humans. She made a sound.
“Michael,” she said, “I swear that one moved.”
I swear a dog growled, something snorted and a voice rasped across my bared nerves saying things I didn’t want to understand.
“It’s a dream where you fall asleep into the next dream and the next until you’re screaming,” I said.
On impulse I drew and fired two shots high, shattering the glass which slooshed and glittered down. She jumped back.
I reached to touch one just to check on being nuts. I assumed we were attracting whatever strange demons the boys were loosing down here. The man’s face was like ice, mouth open, eyes frozen and then it twisted on the spike as the jaws side-snapped at my fingers. I jumped away and took Lisa by the shoulders. Then I saw the two humans farthest back behind a pig and shaggy dog. Maybe it was illusion and meant nothing…maybe…maybe not.
“Go back,” I said. “Look this is beyond bad. Just go, OK? There are lots of unused spikes here.”
“No, man. Let’s get to the bottom. Like, we don’t know what’s behind or in front and no way do I want to, like, stay here.”
What a girl. All this in one insane night. The nightmare was thickening.
“The bottom,” I said. My head throbbed. Those two heads: the two professors. Shit and double shit…well, there was no doubt where they were, now.
LISA
He was right; it was like a movie where the hero has to go into the dragon’s lair or Dracula’s house or where the thing with 9 heads lives; except this wasn’t a movie.
He reloaded his stubby gun and we continued around and around bottom
bound….
“What did she tell you on the phone, man?”
“She and the other guy are ghosts.”
“They’re dead?”
“Not exactly. I think I get it. We have to go where they are a different way than by dying.”
MIKE
A nasty midget was sitting on my shoulders bonking my skull with a pointed shoemaker’s hammer with every step; there might as well have been one. So we twisted deeper down into what I’d decided was the colon of darkness. Who cares about pain, dread and exhaustion? I was in trouble: shooting out the glass was one count of vandalism and then there was improper discharge of a firearm. I could picture the balding captain writing me up...well, I’d arrest somebody…maybe “Norna” the receptionist upstairs if Short was untouchable…one head had snapped at me so what was the charge if they weren’t really dead? Very aggravated battery? Kidnapping? Body-snatching compounded by head-leaving? Attempted murder might not stick….Things to ponder while the midget went on tip-tapping my skull.
“Like, what did the woman tell you on the phone?”
“Noises and nonsense,” I told her after thinking it over. “That was what she told me on the phone.”
We held hands until the tightening turns put us into single file, me first.
“I think you’re Excalibur,” I suggested.
“That would be a cool name for a dog?”
“The blade of the righteous.” I sighed. “Or at least the victors.” Sigh again. “We have to find that woman, the other ghost because they’re scared of her, too.”
Lisa was an unlikely sword but sword she was. The victor part was what worried me.
“Are they actually ghosts, baby, I mean are they leftovers from dead people?”
“Maybe. Unless they’re not dead which is far worse. That one tried to bite
me.”
“Maybe it was, like, a delayed reflex?”
Bodies left to decompose fill with gas as if they’d eaten green peanuts with cabbage and, in the right weather, will move, sit up, gesture and so on. Electricity, of course, could move the heads but…if they were dead something was preserving the flesh.
“We’ll ask them on the way back,” I said.
“You ask them, man,” she said.
We had to face what we had to cut. And now something was coming up the tightening corkscrew. We both sensed it. Like being a kid out in the moonless night and there’s the terror in the shadows ahead or behind or beside.
You could feel it coming, a deep vibration like million-ton footsteps. I could feel the spike in my neck already unless this was the thing that crushed VC into tunnel walls and this was a tunnel. Things were clicking from the past. Was there something like the “egg” under
I kept the gun in my hand; asked myself why we kept walking. I probably might as well have been holding a wet noodle.
“Trojan eggs,” I muttered.
LISA
“You’re the sword,” he told me.
“That’s comforting, baby. Who swings it?”
“Figure of speech. What are you doing here? You were sitting under a tree when I….”
“Things happen, man. There’s no escaping it.”
“Right on,” he said, with mockery which made sense.
And then it was there, coming round the corner.
MIKE
It was small and naked. Like a baby with wings. A cherub. Each step reverberated and boomed hollowly. What next, dancing girls, Donald Duck? Damn close.
As we passed it smiled with a mouth full of fangs and evaporated. Puff. The footsteps kept coming. Nothing there. The walls narrowed; curves tightened.
“Wow,” she said.
“This is staged.”
“Staged?”
“They’re fucking with our heads.” Nice word choice. “Like the spook house at a carnival.”
Next was a pig walking upright smoking a cigarette; a young deer trotting past us had to be Bambi; then a shambling giant troll stooping forward in the cramped space with a single eye in the center of his face and a gap-toothed, drooling mouth.
I grabbed her hand and thought how
I was missing something – the point, obviously. Nobody was trying to stop us. And then I felt the electric tingling that I’d only felt in that viridian room the first time. The ovoid force field or whatever it was obviously kept enlarging.
We were forced into single file as before, nearing the door at the bottom.
“I think maybe Professor Rita and the rabbity guy is bullshit, too,” I suddenly said. “Maybe.” My brain was lead. Detective Lead Brain sniffing no clues.
The door opened and there was a tall, perfectly formed, naked male-looking being, apparently sexless with oversized eyes.
I am the angel
“Ok,” I said. “Where are the golden plates?”
“Plates?” she wondered.
“Mormons. Revelations to Joseph Smith. Probably not important right now.
Curiouser and curiouser.”
He came forward and went through us as expected. But there was another and this one worried me. The Jerry Garcia look-alike again. We stopped with her right at my back, shoulders almost touching the walls. Jerry was nodding slightly as if keeping time to the beat of a different drum. I expected his head to sprout snakes any second.
“Yes?” I wondered.
“Man, this is uncool,” he said.
“Uncool,” I repeated. “We’re here where the fucking universe is breaking down and you say ‘uncool.’ Who the fuck are you? This is some kind of show, right?”
Here we are talking to hallucinations again. Practice was key.
“A preview of thing to come.”
“Is your name Garcia?”
“You couldn’t pronounce it. Man, dig it, you haven’t done your job,” Jerry said.
“So you’re Lithuanian? What job have I failed at this time?”
“Like, where are the two scientists, man?”
“Now you’re my boss too?” I snarled. “Lisa, come on, let’s cut through this prick.”
“Like, you mated with her, man. You fulfilled the prophecy.”
“What? How….”
Then I remembered the Short-like creature announced we’d produce some kid somebody wanted. An annunciation; all that that was missing were two fingers upraised like in the Italian paintings.
“Like, who are you, man?” she wanted to know, over my shoulder. “You’re another mask, right? For what? What are you hiding, man?”
Good for her. Could have used her back in the shit. Well, we were in the shit. Behind him the room was blazing electric green, swirling like a storm that would have excited Tesla. It wasn’t like the last time. I aimed the gun at him.
“Step aside,” I said in my best gunfighter style. I was curious about vulnerability. Mostly I wanted to shoot something, anything.
LISA
I was looking over his shoulder at the Dead look-alike who had that too-
intense no sense of humor I’d found in communes and up on Haight. All serious like the Weathermen and Black Panthers who, I must admit, freaked me out to an extent; they were a lot like the people they hated.
“Step aside,” I said and shoved Mike forward, more or less.
Jerry changed. He filled the whole room as we went in. Like some kind of blowfish, puffed-out and all sharp spines, gleaming, greenish, poisonous. His bearded face was the same, however. The electric green clouds swirled and spilled around us. There was no “egg.”
“There’s no egg,” Mike said.
“Maybe it hatched,” I said, not kidding.
The Jerry face was opening its mouth. There were teeth…no, a beak, really…four beaks like a squid or something. That mouth was a pit so dark and deep you shuddered to pull your eyes away.
“You haven’t done your job,” it seemed to say, repeat.
“So fire me,” Mike responded.
“Go back,” was the command.
It didn’t resemble Jerry anymore. Just an expanding hole full of gnashing beaks and something like octopus arms. As it was fading like the others I thought I had it.
“Michael,” I said, “we’re trapped in a fairytale, man.”
We were going through the unblocked door still like locked together kind of flowing and riding the electric-like charged air into a huge spherical space, all the color of blurry rotting grass. Ahead was something that might have once been an egg except it was runny, green and broken. Green eggs; where was the ham and Sam?
MIKE
The egg was now a blotting of curds filling the whole chamber. The inhabitants were all around us in various stages of blurring. It reminded me of Short’s strange complexion.
“Trapped is right,” I agreed.
In front of us were jet black, gleaming big-eyed creatures that looked like giant winged ants and hornets crossed with humans: two arms and legs but glossy, hard bodies with a bulging thorax and mandible mouth gnashing sideways. Lots of them. You knew at once these were soldiers but in what army? This was bad.
I aimed my gun in a stupid reflex. It’s our world. Kill things. Sometimes it’s right. She wrapped her fingers around the gun-toting wrist.
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“Too soon, man. Don’t know why. We can’t fight now.”
Everything was seething and boiling in a bilious porridge. I wanted to go in but there was no actual in. Where was the long Short? We came to the bottom and there wasn’t even a bottom. It was hard to move in the fluid-like stuff and even my thoughts seemed to thicken and thin as if the porridge flowed through my brain – what brain was still available.
“We’re not going back,” I told her. “They want us to go back, So we don’t.”
“Maybe they want you to think that, baby.”
“Then it’s still one or the other. I love you,” I blurted on purpose because I did. I was flash remembering the amazing, electric feel of her skin under my hands. Embracing her had stunned me. “Please don’t ask me things.” I took a deep breath which included viscous, suffocating seaweed-colored stuff. “Charge!” I felt like a chicken at a fox convention.
LISA
Maybe he was right. Who knows what might have happened if we went back.
So we went forward. I loved him too. All so fast and inevitable. We charged into the green muck. Swam more than charged.
We sank and twisted and were stopped and started, like racing in two foot deep mud. Everything swirled and there were glimpses of landscapes some familiar and some so strange there was no way to relate. I felt we were moving through time or something. Weird. We were being watched. I felt the eyes.
“Mike,” I said, “what now?”
Our voices worked; it was like talking in a dream except sometimes it was as if we went through blots where things were normal and then struggled through curds of insanity, all in the same soup. Mike figured it out. He was amazing like that.
“Move toward the thinner stuff,” he told me.
Because we were in the thick and the soldier bugs (a fair description) seemed extra solid there and were coming at us really fast and nasty. He was right, you could see them move quickly in the “thick” and slow and float and struggle in the “thin.” Like us.
“Wow,” I said. “Like walking across a river on slippery stones, man.”
They almost had me just as we popped into the next bubble, long arms with human-like hands snatching. It really was swimming underwater because there was no actual floor.
“It’s a metaphor,” Mike said. The bugs were moving to cut us off from several directions above and alongside. “The rules change in each area. Impossible. Incredible.”
What would tripping be like here? I asked myself. Being totally straight?
MIKE
These were plasmic globs with varying laws of nature. No experiments could be performed there that would work twice. This was chaos; this was Hell. Lasciate ogni speranza….
It was a metaphor, too, so they were above us, covering the way to the surface. I grabbed her sweet hand and told her to dive.
“Your willpower, baby,” I told her. “Say dive! Down is up, for us.”
Don’t ask how but I knew this was the only way out. The insectile fighters were diving, too. The funny stuff was absent here and I was starting to get a sense of it: a two-way street because when you opened the worlds the overlap was chaos for everybody. So why do it? What was their ace? Were they a race of Nihilists?
“Are we breathing air?” she wanted to know as we went down like swimmers.
“Scientific of you, kid,” I said. I felt like some comic book guy like Flash
Gordon in the Planet Mongo. The great thing about being stoned or dreaming is the
humor and detachment. It’s real because that’s all there is at the time but not like going to the dentist or standing trial. The fear is softened because you are going to get sober or wake up so hell was being stuck there forever, as previously noted. “Let it be.”
“Cool,” was her reply.
We were still going down and I’d vaguely expected a bottom. This was on faith which meant I was guessing. Well, everything had a bottom, ask my ex-wife.
What were we breathing? It wasn’t water or air.
There was a blue shimmer under us now with the sun in it which turned out to be a tunnel and I realized it took longer for the field effect to alter solid earth and rock than surface air. I was right about which way to go. Too bad there was no time to do a paper on it and get some credit.
LISA
We were just falling now into blue sky and sun. You might say I’d trained myself for this by everything I’d done to my head previously. Mike actually agreed with that at some point. He thought it might have been part of the creepy plan to mate us and produce superbaby; that I’d been worked on psychically to do drugs. An idea, anyway. Ask
We ended up falling and spinning through the shattering sun and sky like through a pane of glass. We ended up in a bathroom that looked familiar. Except it was the men’s room this time.
“Baby,” I said from my knees, “I think this is the diner.”
MIKE
We’d been passed through the anus of darkness. I just sat there on the cold tile looking at the urinals. There was a nice mix of aromas including the pink air freshener which was worse than the piss. She was standing by the sinks doubled by the mirror. She had a lovely profile kind of like the wooden bust of Nefertiti in the Met. She had…I was in love, so let it go.
“Here we are,” I said. “It fits.”
“What, Mike?”
“Chaos…always ordered which is always chaos because we’re assholes….” They had to have a way to pull it together or why bother? They were no more comfortable or effective in that mush than we were. “I’m missing something really obvious.”
She was looking at me.
“Are you comfortable down there?”
“It’s cool, I mean, on my butt.”
“What’s missing, Michael?”
“They didn’t open this thing up to surf from bubble to bubble. So why open it?” And which side had it really been opened from? And what the fuck lived inside Dr. Short?
“That was nothing like the other times, Michael. “Like, I mean….”
“I know, I know, baby. The other stuff was…was visionary…traditional non-reality like some UFO experiences or going to fairy worlds…out-of-body dreams…this other shit is brand new.”
“Do you need a hand up?”
“I love it down here. I feel real.”
I wanted to take her arm and run. Just run and keep feet flying to the end of the earth with her on my arm except there was no end to the earth or any of the rest of it so there was nowhere to go.
She gave me a hand anyway and we just held each other for awhile, romantic in the toilet like others before us. The moment ended when the door piston hissed as someone came in: stocky, dark with a thick moustache and a perpetual scowl. I assumed he was with management.
“Hey,” he said with an accent, “you again? Hey, how you get in here? You don’t come in door.”
“Hey,” I responded, “there are bars on the window.” Which there were. I was fast with the comebacks just then.
“You must have not noticed us,” she suggested.
“Maybe him but no you.” he said, leering a grin.
He obviously liked her. Most did.
“Then it’s a mystery, man,” she said.
“No good woman in here,” he went on, opening the door for us.
I knew what he meant but said:
“Hey, she’s a good woman. She just went eye-to-eye with the Devil and didn’t flinch.”
He nodded and kind of chuckled; liked that idea. We went out into the harsh and sterile brightness of the dining room.
“Sure,” he said, following. “I think maybe you right.” Doubled-scowled. “I
see couple things I don’t like much. Pretty strange.” He gestured us into a booth in a way hard to refuse. “Have drink with me. I tell you a thing.”
Why not? I was shot, my head ached worse and it felt like my eyes were about to permanently cross and we’d just come back from dancing with the Wicked Witch of the West’s Winkies.
“We have no plans at the moment,” I said, sitting.
She slid in beside me. Strangeness never fazed her. Some things (I learned) did but never the mad, the absurd, the logic-less chaos. I think her brain at that time had been acid-cured. He sat across the round table on a reversed chair with his arms on the back, chin on his forearms.
“So how you get in there?” he wanted to know. “And why the hell?” Looked
at her. “This you boyfriend?”
“You full of questions,” I informed him as he signaled a waiter who came over pretty fast.
“Why hell not? You in my bathroom and it not co-ed.” He grinned.
“Social mores have pretty much crumbled,” I said, “especially on campus.”
“Eh heh,” he responded. “Buncha Reds. I no give crap. Make a living and live life. Love and wine.” He winked at her. The waiter was waiting. “Bring retsina.”
“Coffee, too,” I put in.
“Love and wine,” she said. “Bring it on.” She part-smiled. “But keep away from the broken egg.”
“Egg? You want some eggs and toast?”
“No much appetite,” she said. “Funny thing.”
The waiter came back with coffee, small wine glasses and a bottle with Greek writing. He poured; we toasted the air and drank. The wine smelled like the resin box at ringside you rub your feet in. It cleaned out your mouth.
“Ah,” he said with satisfaction. “So what’s up? I see you with cops and then she -”
“Lisa,” she put in to his pause. “And you are Spyros.”
“Liza. Good. You I see in the correct bathroom before with the girl on the floor.”
“That’s not exactly the way it sounds,” she pointed out for my benefit.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, sagaciously, “that girl is hysterical saying a demon seizes her.” His hand demonstrated. “In the Starlite Women’s room!” Scowled and swallowed another glassful. “Meanwhile again, what things are happening at this school? Injuries. Ghosts. The press everyplace.” Jutted his wide chin at the black and white TV which showed a basketball game: long mainly black men in short shorts with mainly bushy hair going up and down the court that (in my state) I decided might have been one of Dante’s punishments continuing into eternity. Eternity as a
“Problems, problems,” I agreed.
“You guys not fooling me. What’s going on, eh?”
I shut one eye. The head still hurt and the world stayed uncertain. But something was nagging at my sorry brain, something it was missing.
“I thought you were going to tell us something?”
“Don’t I? I tell you about the girl and the devil in bathroom.”
“That’s worth the price of admission, I guess,” I said. “Spyros, you’re alright in my book. Which no one reads. My advice to you is get out of town or you are going to be scrambled.”
On cue the head chefs came in and came over. The big clock said five. They stood there, Mutt and Jeff. My double vision was back. What were their names? Blue eyes and Phil. I kept one eye closed to minimize their advantage in numbers.
“You winking at me, sweetie?” asked Phil. His face looked like a cheap cut of flank steak. “I hope we ain’t interrupting a party meeting.”
“Winking, Phil? I was hoping you’d look better with one eye closed.”
“Oh, yeah?” he responded. “How about I close it for real?”
“So we’re all together,” blue eyes said, looking at Spyros, then back to her,
naturally. “Different backgrounds in a common cause.”
“A commie cell,” said Phil.
“Hey,” grunted the Greek, “watch you mouth.”
“Yeah?
“Over there,” I put in, “the army boys and cops beat them to death.”
“Maybe I’ll take my retirement there.”
“Beat the rush, start now,” I suggested.
“I am American citzen of this country,” Spyros said.
“Mind if we park it?” Dennis (that was it) wondered.
“Kind of, man,” she said, pleasantly.
“You don’t care for us?” Dennis wondered.
“I’m sure you have your fans, man.” She sipped retsina and winced. “You plan to shoot us all?”
“What?”
He didn’t like that. Phil bristled; sat down next to me and indented the cushion like the sack of stone and shit he was.
“Nice talk,” he said to her while ogling the obvious as if against his will.
Dennis just stood there with his hands in his suit jacket pockets like a
“Look, boys,” I said, “do you have any idea of what’s really going on here?”
“Smart guys,” said Spyros. “Cop guys.”
“Where’s the professor?” Dennis asked.
“Did he crawl away from where you left him?” I wondered. “Couldn’t you follow the blood trail?”
“You motherfucking pigs,” she said, almost sweetly.
“Cop guys,” muttered the Greek. “Don’t need your business. You can go arrest somebodies.”
“Shut up, punk,” snarled big Phil. “We got all your numbers.”
The stocky Greek was no pushover. He was a blink from tackling the son-of-a-bitch. Phil sneered at him and called over to the waiter who was fidgeting at his station, the big windows full of darkness and garish reflection behind him.
“You, pal, bring me coffee and a doughnut.”
“Bring shit in glass!” overrode Spyros.
“Calmly,” I recommended. “Like the French say: Du Calme. This is worse
than you think.”
“Smart boy,” approved Phil. “A fucking lingist.”
Dennis was still standing there, face like vanilla ice-cream, almost smiling.
“We need answers from somebody,” he said, thoughtfully. “The professor didn’t care to provide them.”
“Maybe he didn’t have any?” I suggested. “Ever think of that?”
“We can’t take chances,” he replied, shrugging. “This is too important.”
“No,” I told him, “it’s too late. Don’t dream you’re off the hook. Think of yourselves as two big, dumb fish about to be reeled in.”
“Man. You are a sick prick,” she told him. “You torture people. You’re just thugs adding one more disgrace to the American flag, man.”
“Up against the wall, motherfucker,” I couldn’t resist.
Phil put his right hand just above my knee and squeezed. The hand was big enough to crush a chicken and felt like it was made of nuts and bolts.
“Tell her to shut her commie hole,” he recommended. “You’re under arrest. All a you.”
I was sweating from the pain but holding back. My right hand could feel the lump of gun in my jacket pocket.
“Gonna take us down to the city dump to be booked?” I asked while he
improved his clamp grip. This had gone all bad. They were in torture and kill mode. Nothing but blood was going to satisfy. “You’ve had your squeeze. Lay off you big queer.”
Phil let go of my numbed flesh to reach over and backhand Lisa. He missed and before I could react the Greek leaped like a pit bull and must have hit him a dozen times in the face. Talk about fast hands and big knuckles. Blood spattered me and the table.
Dennis was already reaching and so was I. Instead of shooting (which I longed to do) I jammed the short barrel into Phil’s ribs to make sure he slid off the seat as Dennis aimed at Spyros’s head and the people in the place began reacting. But it was Lisa the “Sword” who did the deal because Dennis fired point-blank clearly intending to kill us all just for some demented insurance.
Something blurred as if we were underwater and she was across the table like in slow-motion film, all of us slowed while she reached ahead of the gun and almost seemed to deflect the bullet with the blur of her hand. And, worse, the chaos broke just behind her move like a wake. All of it. Complete with insect men and bats with human faces which had an interesting effect on the patrons.
LISA
We were in one of those bubbles. When I tried for the gun it felt like my hand pushed into thick liquid, burst a film or something and it seemed to fill the room. I was furious; zero peace and love. This was all too ugly and had to be slapped.
So I slapped and learned one of the rules of this stuff: what you wanted could become solid. I actually felt the bullet in my fingers like a blob of jelly and I realized we could move in it like witches riding brooms without even brooms. Wow. I grabbed Mike and the sexy Greek’s hand and we sailed across the room and though the misty building wall out into the campus about tree-high except the stuff kept changing, like hitting air pockets where suddenly you dropped back to regular gravity and rules. Behind us there were screams and shouts as the creatures ripped around before they faded out.
So we wobbled, rose and fell like a sick glider until we ran out of stuff as if it broke like a wave we’d been surfing and we rolled together on the grass not far from the promenade. The humanoid insects and bats were close but crashed too, the pincer hands flailing furiously, chewing up the cloudy turf. When you used this…like, power, they could pop in.
MIKE
We just lay there for a little while along with the damp grass, faint morning mist and the first soft blurrings of dawn. Again we were subject to gravity with light doing a constant velocity except where it didn’t move at all as in my blanked consciousness….
I was one-on-one with Short, his curdly face shape-shifting as if being stirred by an unseen spoon while his eyes were utterly still like holes in his head.
“What is fractals?’’ I was asking.
“Are,” he responded, didactically.
“You’re not all human.”
“Neither are you.”
And then there was bright pain that burned my eyes open. Sunlight creased
the treetops. My headache was reactivated. Everything danced in a nasty rhythm. She was sitting on her on her heels over me looking every inch some goddess of morning. Less delightful was the stocky form of Spyros the violent and lusty Greek they could have used at
I looked back at the diner which was still there 50 yards or so away. Nodded at Spyros.
“You’ll get used to it,” I told him.
“Son-of-bitch,” he uttered with feeling, shaking his head like a baffled bull. “What the shit?”
“We better stick together,” I advised. “They have you in their sights, too.”
I held my head with both hands. It didn’t much help.
“You better, baby?” she asked, sweetly concerned. Oh, Li, I love thee however many have enjoyed thee prior. Thy true virginity can ne’re be penetrated save by the prong of my soul.
“Did I snore?”
“Yes. Like a kid.”
“Mother Mary,” I said, shuddering through a yawn.
She chuckled, light and bright. She had more guts than me when the chips were down and the chips were always going to be down from here on.
“Mona Lisa,” she said.
“How long was I out? I feel like stepped-on shit.”
“Not long, man. What next?”
“Anything weird?”
“How could I tell at this point?” She was looking at the dawn. “Incredible colors, man.”
I guess the light didn’t hurt her. Spyros was on his feet and stepped closer.
“Colors, yeah,” I muttered.
“Hey,” said the Greek, “give me some help here.”
“Could we, like, split the scene?” Li asked.
Nice thought. I just lay there, averting my eyes from the sun as it went from red to unbearable gold, spattering the dense, misty trees.
“No,” I said. “We’re stuck.” I touched her leg; God, it felt, like the flesh were an electric dream and my soul spasmed. “Jesus…Jesus….” To Spyros: “Help? You can help us. You were pretty handy with your dukes.”
“Those bastard stink. I got to go back to place.”
“No,” I told him. “You’ll be shot – if you’re lucky. Come with us. We have to fight the real bastards.” Maybe those two had been ripped-up or abducted by the creatures but I had my doubts not to mention their back-up.
“Fight is good. Where is fight?” He scowled again. “What in fuck happened? How we get here?”
“Alternate unrealities, man,” she said.
“Close.” I rubbed my eyes and sighed.
“What, Michael?” she asked.
“How many hours have I known you?”
“What does time have to do with it?”
“Nothing…something…I don’t know. I love you, kid. It keeps hitting me over the head.”
“Why can’t we take off, man?”
“No place to go. It will find us. Like when you have to go to the dentist because there’s no choice and we have none. It sounds grandiose but I think we’re maybe the last chance to put a plug this sewer.”
“So what do we do?”
“I knew you’d ask that.”
“So,” wondered Spyros, “this you boyfriend?”
LISA
“Look,” I said, pointing because under the trees in the sunrise shadow, hard to see against the fresh light, where the branches massed towards lover’s lane something shimmered and seemed to drift like a giant bubble distorting the view like bent glass.
“Shit,” Michael said.
“Never seen one in the light.”
“It’s a loose one. The force is getting stronger. They’ll be bubbling up all over the place.”
Inside you could see the insect men and other things: flashes of strange landscapes; mythic monsters…creatures like dinosaurs….expanding towards us up across the open grass. He got his feet under him, gripped my wrist and got ready to like fight or flee. Spyros dropped his jaw but stood his ground.
“What in the fuck?” he wondered.
“Come on,” he said, as the creatures seemed to spot us and flail in fury and frenzy. Except it popped, huge and silent and there was just the sun and dewmist on the grass.
“We better check on the professor,” I suggested.
Mike nodded.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “The field is percolating. Oh brother. Oh fucking brother. But maybe the daylight melts them or something.”
“What was that?” Spyros asked.
“I’ll explain as we walk,” Mike said. “And then it’ll make less sense.”
MIKE
Our three shadows walked a long way ahead of us as we went back to her dorm. The sun hit me like shrill sound blasts the sore ear. I had a vision of sleep, soothing, infinite like Sunday school heaven. Back to that narrow bed and pull the covers of life over my head. Oblivion never seemed so sweet.
Spyros was unsatisfied with what I told him which was reasonable. He kept glancing around and at us, frowning and blinking like he’d been stunned by a rubber mallet.
“What is this?” he asked. “I am crazy. I better go back.”
I understood he was really following her as who wouldn’t be? Being with Lis would always be like trailing a parade. I felt something warm and gentle and sweet which I took for her hand touching the back of my head and sending waves of tenderness into me except she was on the other side of Spyros.
I turned to see what was behind and the only thing unusual was someone
standing way back at the edge of the tree shadows, outline blurred by the bright sunbeams so that to my bent eyesight and sluggish brain it might have been a nude, blonde sexual ambiguity floating a few feet above the green-rich earth in an aura, bubble or just blur of gold. And I knew it was the goddess I’d seen while making love to Lisa and it was clear we weren’t all by ourselves in this situation; we had allies or at least supporters.
I squinted and twisted my head this way and that, still feeling that strange warm touching that almost seemed to be telling me something just before or beyond words. Stopped, shut my eyes hard and reopened; just the swell of sweet grass, the sun-shot trees and nobody there. OK. Nothing was strange anymore. I started walking again.
“I go back,” said the Greek.
“No, my new friend,” I said. “Believe you me. Bad as it is you’re are better off with us.”
Wanting to sleep was hopeless because the professor held the bed and there was dried blood on the pillow as well as his battered head. He was snoring and then jerked awake and sighed.
Spyros just stood there. Turned out to be his MO. His mind and his glands were running extra hard and the glands were leading in the home stretch.
“Who he?” he asked.
“Those bastards asked him his favorite color and he didn’t answer fast enough.”
I collapsed in her desk chair and rolled my eyes. The sunbeams came in
almost flat into the pale wall and set heatless fire to her long hair where she sat on the edge of the bed all tender pity and concern. There was a coppery tint in it, soft as heaven’s gossamer.
I shut my eyes and the world jerked sideways into a long tunnel of darkness.
His voice brought me right back.
“Ahh,” he voiced. “Did you find them?”
He meant the scientists.
“In a way,” I sighed. “A lousy way.”
“It’s, like, spreading,” she said. “We went to the bottom and there is no bottom.”
“Ah…well, that is description without content. Why do I think so?”
“No, Professor Langue,” I put in, “it’s all content. Believe me. The Laws of nature…well, we require relativistic expressions for hallucination…dreams…it’s really far-out….”
She chuckled, like music.
“Language follows form, man, or something like that,” she quipped and I laughed through my pain and stupor. “Now you’re talking like a hippie.”
Langue groaned and stirred on the bed.
“You went into the field effect,” he said, wincing with his own pain. “I have been considering certain points and there may be a Riemannian math format for these extreme dimensions.”
I sighed at the ceiling. Shut my eyes again and twitched away and back. Glimpsed something that might have been a truth or sheer insanity. You tell me.
“There isn’t,” I said. “Forget it.” Took a deep breath. “I think we’re totally fucked, sir.”
He groaned and moved his bloody head.
“Maybe we should get him to the hospital,” Lisa said.
“Which?” I wondered. “Sisters of Ghenna?”
He sighed.
“No, no,” he responded. “I’ll be fine. I need more rest. Don’t be so sure, young D’Angeli, that we cannot find expressions and subsequent operational means to contain this…problem.”
“Forget it. There’s no time. There’s no clock time anyway except locally and….” I shut the aching eyes again. Darkness bubbled up. Horrors worked out their terrible choreography. I gut-wrenched around and came back. “We have to go all the way through the fucking looking-glass next time…all the way to the real bottom and collect those two. I don’t want to do it. I want to sleep for 100 years, minimum.” I grunted and made myself sit straight. “I don’t believe we’ve seen the real stuff yet. The real locale.” I cleared my throat like an irritated pit bull. “It’s all been a peep show for suckers.”
LISA
Spyros was looking pretty thoughtful at this point.
“Well,” he said, “we are no suckers, right?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. He was the sexiest short dude I’d met in some time. I generally liked them long and lean. I knew from this point on Mike was going to be my main interest so any need to explore new ones was slightly unurgent.
“Who is he?” His wide chin indicated the professor.
“A good man,” I said. “We’re trying, you know, to figure out some shit here.”
“What crazy stuff happened? Must be drugs, no? Crazy things, flying through air and that. Crazy animals or ants. Those bastard slip us LSE or something.”
“Trust me, man,” I assured him, “nothing like that.”
He looked around.
“This your place?”
“Sorry about the mess,” I kidded a little.
“Where is bathroom?”
“In the hall.”
I pointed from the door while Michael talked with the Professor. The daylight was hard to look at filling my drapeless half-open window. My eyes kept melting into blinking blurs. Sleep would be cool; then I remembered I had a few greens in my stash. I rooted in my desk behind the second drawer while looking at a pretty nice print above of Klimt’s The Kiss where the couple blends into their lush robes, heads tenderly squared-off, pale, intense and kissing with the most delicate, infinite abandon.
I found them and filled a glass at the little sink. Handed him two and said swallow.
MORE TO COME
3 comments:
Hi Richard
So good to hear from you. Thanks so much for starting a blog. I am really happy you put out another Parsival book. It is great for you to have opened up this channel for those who love you and/or your work to contact you and hear from you.
Us 60 year old men are not the easiest people in the world so we have to support each other whenever we can.
Can't wait to read more. Your references to Thompson,LSD, flashbacks, 70's politics stir up memories. Your anti-hero(i'm assuming) is like a lone blade of grass, separated by an inner-consiousness.
Write on!
LSD
Love your work, and Parsival, the warrior-monk rocks!
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