by Anthology
“Hold it right there, Miss,” Colonel Halbors said in command voice. The helicopters were now circling over the village. He spoke into the intercom, saying the drop could begin, as Mari fought off Blake’s efforts to get her back in her seat. “Now. Did I hear you right? You were actually saying—”
“Colonel, the survivors at Daksun said, they threw fire at us. Colonel, in the real hamlets, not pretend ones, we throw fire at them. Can you tell me how from their point of view one thrown fire is different from—”
The words were still coming from her mouth when a small, energetic body, a jackrabbit, went arcing fast across the desert on the near side of the village. Heading for the village, with mathematical, measured bounces.
At this moment Mari stopped talking and screamed. Screamed again. Shrilled, “My God! Here! Bisk! Back, Bisk!”
There was Bisk on the desert, going fast toward the village. The rabbit was streaking across the sands, Bisk was streaking after it.
Blake saw what had happened. In her outburst, Mari had been gesturing strongly at Colonel Halbors, with her hold on the leash relaxed. Bisk, seeing the rabbit, had simply pulled the loop off her fingers and dived out through the viewing slot. The leash was trailing after Bisk as she flashed along, the happy hunter.
“Happened so fast!” Mari bubbled. “She goes crazy when something on four legs moves fast! Bisk! Please! Bisk, girl!”
“Colonel,” Blake said fast, “can you possibly, is there any chance—”
“Started,” Colonel Halbors said, pointing. “Can’t call back what’s dropping.”
He was right, objects were descending from all three helicopters.
The rabbit, Bisk hot after him, was tearing around the bamboo huts, Mari, face come apart, was halfway through the bunker opening, trying to climb out. Blake took her by the hips, slender, boyish roundings, well remembered, pulled her back.
“Nothing to do,” he said, holding her down on the bench. “Easy now. You’d get yourself killed and that’s all.”
Mari was shaking, looking around wild-eyed.
“You couldn’t give up your war,” Blake said, holding her. “If there’s a casualty, it’ll at least have a different dogtag.”
Black objects from the helicopters were dropping on things, not people. One by one, things belched up, and out, in flame.
An ammunition dump gushed flame. A sniper’s platform in a tree spewed orange. A machine-gunner’s blind, hidden with piled brush, erupted in an all-directional lick. Huts kept popping flashes of flame, here, there, everywhere. Bisk kept dogging the rabbit between the igniting huts, full speed.
“Bisk—you—come—back—here!” Mari screamed from the deeps of her lungs.
The rabbit shot into view around the comer of a hut, Bisk inches from his heels. At this moment the hut metamorphosed, as by the push of a button, from structure to flame, and at that moment, Bisk metamorphosed. One second, running dog, next, standing flame.
She’d skidded to a halt, frozen as in a stop-action movie. Through his binoculars Blake saw how she stood still, puzzled, how she turned to bite the attacker all over her body to find her jaws closing on flame.
She looked everywhere overhead, as at sneaky birds, as she burned. She found no explanations, the big birds in the sky only burred, in a language that to her was only loudness. Burning, she turned her eyes at last toward the bunker, to the one source of all correctives, to all impedings and harassments, Mari.
Mari moaned, pushed again toward the opening. Blake pressed hard on her shoulders.
“Don’t look,” he said, forcing his body in front of her to block her vision.
Bisk stood motionless, looking to Mari, a fire with four legs. Now she did the only thing she knew to do, when the ultimately wanted was not forthcoming, flopped over on her back in the bisquit position. Paws flabbed over chest, barely in touch, were burning, paws stretched wide were burning.
She begged, she burned, mouth totally open for the ultimate bisquit, a cessation of heat, of being eaten by enemy with no bulk or outlines. Eyes still looking to Mari.
“Put your mind on something else,” Blake said mechanically, blocking Mart’s eyes.
The choppers rattled away. It was two or three minutes before Colonel Halbors judged it safe for Blake to go out, provided he was careful. The other members of Blake’s crew took Mari’s arms to hold her back.
When Blake got to Bisk, the colonel right behind, the dog was still alive, still burning in places, still on her back in position of ask, still asking.
Flames flicked from her belly, forehead, one foreleg. Black smoke came from these points, as from other points where the flames had subsided. Bisk was diminished. In places, instead of fur, dark smoking patches. In others, no flesh, bone bared within the charring.
All fur and flesh were gone from the soft, soft neck. Lower jaw gone, except for the armature of surprisingly frail bones.
Left eye gone. What had been eye was black hole, smoking. Above this hole, where the fuzzed brow had been, small flames fighting to live.
Bisk’s right eye, intact, looked straight to Blake, with all its uncomprehending blue. Asking all the questions.
The asking front paws were charred, bones showing, flames eating vaguely, afterthoughts, about the remnants of paws. An end to heat, this haphazardly cremated animal from a vanished dynasty of the icecaps, displaced monarch of remote snowlands, was saying, as the cremation continued.
Remnant of mouth, ringed with small flames, leftover mouth was in total crazed grin to total crazed environment, which must in the end relent and produce the bisquit of bisquits, a taking back of cannibal heat The inch by inch cremation continued.
“Need a gun,” Blake said. “One around?”
Colonel Halbors shook his head. Much napalm here, no guns. “Terrible thing to happen. You’ll turn this footage over, I assume.”
“Network decision, I don’t make policy. There’s got to be a gun somewhere.”
Colonel Halbors shook his head. “Would you rather I confiscated all your reels?”
“What’re you afraid of?” Blake was looking everywhere. “Shots of one dog burning’ll give you another Dien Bien Phu?”
“You can’t leave this area with that footage, Mr. Arborow.”
“All right, you get it.”
The nearest hut had just caved in, its understructure was creeping with spent flame and smoking. The supports on which the hut had rested; were four-by-fours, good. Blake ran over and pulled a charred beam free, a four-foot length. He ran back, holding the beam by one end.
“Couldn’t even save the film. Be cool again,” he said to the dog, and brought the beam down as hard as he could, on the head.
Bisk jerked, her head shook, then her good eye settled on Blake again, asking. Manipulating him full force with the eye.
“Go home to snow, Bisk. What’s so worth seeing out here. You’ve got the whole picture.”
He swung again, with all his strength.
Bisk’s body shook, the eye rolled away, came back, gelled again, held steady on Blake, asking.
“Leave us to our leashes, Bisk,” Blake said, and swung again.
The magnificently blue eye quivered, began to take the dim view, then dimmer, then closed altogether, and Bisk was cool again, as finally, Blake thought, with luck, with luck, we’ll all, the invaded and the sucked, all bisquit wanters, be free from burning.
2: The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements
On the night of April 22, when I got back from lecturing to FANNUS (For A New Novel Undergraduate Society) on Hemingway (“A Psycho-Statistical Survey of the Broken Bones in Papa”), my answering service gave me a cryptic message. From Kid Nemesis, pronounced Quentin. Call no matter what the hour. There was no way to call at any hour, the number he left was wrong. The harpie at the other end said in Placidyl tones that she didn’t know any Quentin, and if she did she’d turn him in for what, considering he was a friend of mine, must be his main activity, child molesting. I said she had n
o grounds for assuming I was in a child molesting ring since the people I molested on the phone sounded 300 years old, and senile. She said she wasn’t too senile to know that molestation professionals will practice on anybody when there’s no child around, to keep their hand in, in what she wouldn’t say, being a lady. I said if she was a lady any one of the Gabor sisters was Miss Twinkletoes, and asked if anything she kept her hand in was mentionable, a question I hinted was in order about any member of her sex, lady or not, who went to sleep before nine. She said if she could get within reaching distance of me she’d show me what she’d dearly love to put her hand in, my mouth, and rip out my filthy degenerate’s tongue to use for a pincushion.
Enough of this conversation. I reproduce its high points mainly to show how frayed nerves everywhere are getting, maybe due to Vietnam. What made me boil was not the old hellhag’s tone but Quentin’s typical sloppiness in leaving a wrong number, urgently.
I didn’t call him the next morning. I gave him until noon to feel urgent enough to call me. When my curiosity peaked and threatened to zenith, I dialed his home number. The phone rang a dozen times before he answered; his voice seemed to have its origins at the bottom of a barrel, out of a mouth brimming with molasses. More simply put, out of a mouth in a molasses barrel.
“Gordon, zow, I’m desperate for sleep. Can I ask what this is in reference to?”
“Your call last night. Its reference.”
Time went by.
“You’re crazy. I didn’t call you.”
“You mean my answering service is hallucinating?”
“They probably make up calls so you won’t feel nobody cares. No kidding, they really said I called?”
“And gave the impression lives were at stake. And left a number to call back. A wrong number, as a result of which I was treated to a long string of insults from somebody I don’t even know.”
More time passed.
“That nibbles, Gordon. Dhzz. I remember calling Cedars of Lebanon, zhmm, yes, and the L.A. Times Information Desk, right. But you, uh, uh.”
“Reconstruct the circumstances. Where were you?”
“Some friends’ house off Laurel Canyon, I’ve told you about them, The Omen. May be pertinent that we were stoned to a tilt, the third time down, and I have the impression I still am. We were really stretched out on this grass.”
“I take it you’re not talking about a lawn.”
“Maybe Forest Lawn. Where I believe I still am, hear embalmers coming, hypo needles jingle. Gordon, I’d be greatly in your debt, which I’d be willing to settle for money, a sizable amount, if you’d stop cross-examining me and let me get back to sleep. You get so goddamn cross when you examine.”
I don’t let people go back to sleep after it’s established that in the course of a social evening they’ve placed calls to Cedars and Times Information. Especially when I learn that in their thinking I was on a par with a great hospital and a foremost metropolitan daily.
“I’ll see you’re stoned, Quentin, out of town, if you don’t clear this up. Why did you call the hospital and the paper?”
“See, now. Oh. There you go. It was about cracking knuckles.”
“Sure.”
“See, we were sitting around, listening to records, and we got to cracking our knuckles, first I did, then everybody. First in time with the music, then not. Then somebody said, what makes a knuckle crack. We got to discussing it. That’s a scary thing to discuss, Gordon. The more we got into it, the more we realized we’re not so brainy. Your knuckles are more a part of you than Jean-Paul Sartre, say. We know all there is to know about Sartre, not the first thing about our own knuckles that we’ve been hearing all our lives. If I don’t get some sleep my teeth’ll fall out. What makes knuckles crack, Gordon?”
“Bending your fingers backward is the usual cause, Quentin.”
“I know what you do to bring it about, what I’m asking is the why. See, we got into it, and we were absolutely in the dark as to the mechanisms. We started to get panicky. It’s like first hearing your heart without any prior warning you’ve got such a loud organ. You feel you’ve been invaded by enemy aliens. That was when somebody said, call Cedars, get some staff doctor who could give the professional view. Nobody there would talk, and that’s supposed to be a hospital serving the public. If an institution looks out for the public, wouldn’t you think it would have some interest in preventing panic? You know what runaway panic can lead to in these times, once it spreads.”
“So you tried Times Information.”
“Gordon, it’s the right of the public to be informed, and the duty of a newspaper to give information. The Times people got very wiseass. Said sleep it off and when we woke we wouldn’t be stampeding about knuckles or any joints. That kind of sneery talk is a cover for ignorance.”
“So then you called me.”
“Did I?”
“You’d better remember before I make liverwurst out of your knuckles.” It occurred to me that I should have said Knucklewurst, but this was no time for anatomical niceties. “Think, now.”
“Let’s see. Hnng. Don’t threaten my knuckles, Gordon, I resent it. About that time there was something else. See, now. Fmmp, it’s coming, I was scared stiff, I was sweating. Somebody said, Gnothi seauton. I said, that’s Greek. Somebody said, yes, Greek for, Know thyself. Somebody said, the essence of the Greek philosophers’ wisdom was, Know thyself, and if you don’t even know what makes the sounds in your knuckles how much can you claim to know about thyself. Somebody said, well, if doctors and newspapermen can’t help, and if philosophers try to study thyselves, call some philosopher. Somebody said, Sartre’s a philosopher and he’s never written a line with any insights about knuckles. Somebody said, Sartre’s no test, existentialists study alienation, so naturally he’d be more interested in fractures than in joints. Somebody said, they don’t list philosophers in the Yellow Pages, even under Thyselfhelp. Sure, course, that’s how it went. Ah, right. I said, I know a philosopher, older man thinks about everything and has looked into all human phases quite deep. Somebody said, well, Christ, give him a call, and I guess that’s when I called, Gordon. It’s not so important now. It can wait, now that I look it over. What’s important is that you stop shaking your fist at my knuckles and I get back to sleep before I have a heart attack, Gordon.”
“Not just yet. The answer, in case you’re interested, is, synovial fluid.”
“What, Gordon? Synovia? The flamenco guitarist? He flew what?”
“That’s Segovia, not Synovia, besides, we’re discussing fluids, not musicians. The cracking has to do with synovial fluid.”
“I’m not going to sit here and have an hour discussion about fluids, Gordon, laying the groundwork for a coronary, my God. I don’t care how gorgeous a philosopher you are, when I bring up bones, don’t change the subject to fluids, Jesus. I’m begging, Gordon, I’ve got to get me some sleep before I turn blue.”
“You were in a panic last night. The panic could come back, you’d better know about this, Synovial fluid is a colorless, viscid lubricating juice. It has in it a mucinlike substance. It’s secreted by the synovial membranes of articulations, bursae, and tendon sheaths. Its purpose is to prevent a lot of scraping in the sockets when you move their parts. This fluid is found in knuckles, as well as knees, elbows, hips, and so on—”
“Gordon, what, for Christ’s sake, would this or any fluid have to do with the cracking sound I’ve been referring to?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Quentin.”
“Ah. Znnk. Huh?”
“I haven’t looked into that end of the thing yet, I’ve had other matters on my mind. I’m just saying that if you’re really serious about Gnothi seauton, you have to know about the synovial fluid in thyself, your most intimate greases, that’s a starting point—”
“You dirty, rotten, miserable, miasma-jawed, thumbsucking—”
All things considered, including the evenness of the score, plus my dazzling outburst on the w
orkings of the skeletal hinges, which told me I didn’t Gnothi much about my own seauton because I never guessed I had such information in my head—all things considered, this seemed the logical time to hang up.
I’d known Quentin Seckley for what is usually called the better part of a year, but I won’t call it that. The part of a year in which you know Quentin, whatever number of months it embraces, is not the better part.
Beware of wellwishers. Often they are people wishing themselves wells, oil or gas, to be obtained through your good offices, in extreme cases over your dead body, so they can flash a lot of money in your face. It was well-wishers of this type, I think, who suggested that after 20 years of writing I should have the profit of teaching writing to the youths. Everybody thought I should be put in touch with the electric new generation. Nobody stopped to look into the matter of my insulation.
I listened. When I was offered a lectureship in creative writing at Santana State, close by Los Angeles, I took it. My subject, it turned out, was recreative rather than creative writing. Some students took the course for refreshment, as they’d take gymnastics or folk dancing, or a butterscotch float. Others were hard at work composing meticulous recreations of Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, net to mention, though I’m obliged to, O. Henry and Albert Payson Terhune.
Quentin, a New Yorker who’d arrived at Santana after being expelled from four eastern universities, sometimes for unplanned pregnancies, sometimes for plans to synthesize STP in undergraduate chemistry laboratories, was the exception. He had no interest in writing for diversion, he was concerned with one thing only, writing for money. Neither was he moved to write imitations of well-known prose, he didn’t care to write prose at all. What he began to inundate me with were rock-and-roll lyrics.
An intimate of psychedelic musicians, Quentin was composing lyrics for one of their groups, for, if it worked out, money. Two of his songs had already been recorded, with results closer to a thud than a splash. He was taking my course, he explained, to learn how to write better rock lyrics. He accused me of deliberately perpetuating the generation gap when I pointed out that, even if “better rock lyrics” was not a contradiction in terms, lyricism of any order, very definitely of this electronic order, was not within my expertise. Quentin had concluded that I was a philosopher of cosmic scope, an authority on you name it, and as such the best guide for rock-lyricism. Lyrics are made of words, aren’t they? I was a word expert, wasn’t I? Well, then? Why, except out of orneriness, plain and simple withholding, wouldn’t I instruct him in bettering his lyrics so he could better his income?
