Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  They ate and drank and stared at the television, with Andy using the controller to switch up and down.

  “Daytime TV has gotten so degenerate and foul,” said Andy after awhile. “It’s kind of great, isn’t it? Watching this makes me want to start vomiting and never ever stop.”

  “I don’t like TV,” said Carlo. “It reminds me of being in jail.”

  “Are you and Dina going to fuck now?” Andy wanted to know.

  “Oh man …”

  There was a knock on the door and the maid was back with their cleaned clothes, all warm and fluffy from the drier.

  “Come on, now, Andy,” urged Carlo. “Let’s go down and make that giant sandcandle. It’s stopped raining and, look, there’s even some sun.”

  Here inside town, there were rangers to stop you from building a fire on the beach, but handy Carlo knew where there was a nearby hardware store that sold hand-held propane blow-torches. So they walked over there and got a blow-torch and, while they were at it, they glommed onto as much paraffin as the three of them could carry.

  Down on the beach it was sunny and nice. They made a small sandcandle just to warm up the torch, and then Andy told his idea for the big one.

  “We’ll make it the shape of a head. Let’s get into some of that really wet sand over there. I’ll carve out the shape of—of my head. A negative image. Wow. I’ve never carved in negative before. It’ll be like doing a painting by starting with a black canvas and filling in the white background.”

  Andy knelt down near the water’s edge, his face for once looking alive instead of dead. Carlo watched him, getting the hang of what he was doing, and then he set to work carving out a head-shaped hollow of his own. Only Carlo’s hole kept collapsing. Somehow Andy was able to manipulate his sand so that his negative shape held firm. At Andy’s signal, Dina lit up the blow-torch. She really liked the flame; she lit herself four cigarettes in a row off it and started smoking them all at once. And then she got to work melting pan after pan of paraffin. Carlo gave up on his crumbling mold and helped Dina with the wax. As soon as they’d filled up Andy’s hole, Andy started on another one.

  “I’ll go ahead and make three heads,” he said. “One for each of us. We’ll light them all up tonight and we’ll never have to come back to the nineties again.”

  The wax heads cratered down a little while they were cooling, so Dina and Carlo melted extra wax to pour in on the top, making sure to keep the wicks pointing straight up. Finally they’d used up all of the paraffin and it was nearly night-time and they were done.

  “What a complexion,” said Andy, digging up his head. Carlo and Dina each dug up their own, and they all stood there looking at the big heavy sandcandles. The resemblances were quite good.

  Back in the room they drank up the rest of the Oddfella juices. Once she’d really started in on the cigarettes, Dina found she needed to maintain her boosted nicotine levels; smoking one at a time just wasn’t doing much for her. The possession of an entire carton had made her giddy and carefree. Four at a time was a bit much, but she could handle three. The only problem was the smoke alarm in the room went off, drilling holes in Carlo’s freefloating sense of happy anticipation. He took the chair from the little desk, stood up on another chair, and tried to remove the plastic case from the alarm, but the case shattered like an egg-shell. Carlo pulled one of the two wires free from the dangling little battery, and the shrill beeping stopped. Proud of his small victory, he chuckled at the way the alarm had fallen to pieces, thinking about how near the ocean people’s things were always cheesy and damp and swollen and touched with corrosion, thinking about how this applied to his art.

  Dina thanked Carlo, turned on MTV and sat there staring at that, smoke pouring from her nose and mouth as if her brain were on fire. Andy got to work using a heated-up metal spoon to put the finishing touches on the sandcandles, scraping off the sand and carving in the facial wrinkles. Carlo got bored and started begging Andy until finally Andy gave him some money to go out and get a fifth of vodka.

  Carlo drank about half the bottle in the street. When he got back in the room, Andy had lined up the heads on a shelf which was set into the wall behind the head of Dina and Carlo’s king-size bed. Carlo’s head was by the window, Dina’s by the door, and Andy’s in the middle. “I’ll drink some vodka too,” said Andy. “I’d like to go to sleep really soon.” He took the bottle and poured himself a half-glass of it. “Have you ever tried to stop drinking, Carlo?”

  “Not in a long time. I’d be as glad as anyone else if my addiction could be removed. But I don’t have the energy to change no more.”

  “Well since I’m being the good fairy, maybe I’ll fix you. How about your ants, Dina? Would you like to get rid of them too?”

  “They are me,” said Dina. “The ants are little Dinas.”

  “But wouldn’t you like to stop being crazy?”

  “Yeah. I don’t like getting in so much trouble.”

  “Then let’s go to sleep and let the magic begin,” said Andy, draining off his glass of vodka. “Let’s all get in your bed together and light the candles and fly back to New York City.”

  “I’m keeping my clothes on,” said Carlo quickly.

  “That’s quite all right, Carlo. You and Dina can just lie there like mannequins on either side of me. I was just joking about wanting to see you have sex.”

  So Dina turned off the TV and Carlo turned off all the lights and pulled down the blinds. Andy lit the three huge candles. Once the flames really took root, the faces glowed with yellow light: Andy very realistic and waxy, Carlo kind of scary and twisted looking, Dina angelic and spacey. The three of them lay down in the bed, each of them under their candle. They got under the blanket and sheets, but kept their clothes on. Outside it had blown up cold and windy again.

  Carlo sipped a little at his vodka, but then Andy took it away, and Carlo was too drunk to look for it. The light of the three candles fluttered hard against the opposite wall, making tripled little reflections on the convex screen of the TV. Carlo didn’t think it was going to work this time, but once again it did.

  The candle flames reflected in the TV screen began to crawl up the wall, until Carlo could see their three softly luminous faces looking down from an angle high above them. Then fluorescent light took over, soaking in around the TV, so they could see it mounted on a high bracket on the wall. It wasn’t a motel wall anymore; the wall was high and blank and institutional green. There was a curtain, like a shower curtain, pulled back alongside the bed. And next to the bed was a little metal tray bearing a plastic cup and a straw, and beyond that a window whose sill was a vented heater blowing stale air through faded venetian blinds. Carlo felt himself get up out of bed, drawing Dina with him. And really there was no room for the two of them in the bed; the bed was narrow and it had rails; it was just big enough to hold Andy in the middle. Andy looked so pale and frail and wasted down there, sleeping without his wig on.

  Carlo realized they were in a hospital. This third sandcandle trip had brought them to a bad place, the worst place, the hospital where Andy had died ten years ago.

  “Andy, man! Wake up!” shouted Carlo. “You have to get out of here!”

  Andy opened his eyes slowly, as if it were the last thing he wanted to do. “What are you doing here?” he asked haltingly.

  “You brought us, man,” said Carlo. “Don’t you remember?”

  “You said you could make Carlo stop drinking and make me stop being crazy,” chimed in Dina. “Now it looks like you’re the one needs help. Do you feel okay?”

  “I—I don’t know,” said Andy, still groggy. “I said I’d help you?”

  “Forget about that now,” said Carlo. “Just — where’s your clothes? We’ve got to go!”

  Carlo went to a little closet like a storage locker in a corner of the room. He pulled it open but there was nothing in it. He went to the door but it wouldn’t open. He put his ear to the wood and listened for hospital sounds, the clatter of ca
rts, phones, the intercom.

  Nothing. He looked around for the phone, but there wasn’t one.

  The whole room felt as if it were sinking, like an elevator car in free fall, plunging down a shaft that might not have a bottom.

  “Something’s really wrong,” said Carlo, feeling a hollow, dropping sensation in the pit of his stomach. Dina and Andy looked at him calmly. Dina perched herself on the side of Andy’s bed by the door and lit another cigarette.

  “Andy said he’d make us better, Carlo,” said Dina. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, yes, I remember now,” said Andy, suddenly growing animated and pulling his arms out from under the bed covers. “Come here you two. Lean over me and let me touch your heads.”

  Carlo hesitated, walking over to the window. The blinds were tilted down, as if to keep the sun out. He peered through the slits, trying to see the street below. But there was glare on the glass, so much glare, and it seemed to be brightening, flaring into the room. In a panic, Carlo turned to Dina, but she was kneeling there on floor on the other side of the bed with her head bowed and with Andy’s hand trembling on her crown. Andy beckoned with his other hand and Carlo thought, It’s okay. It’s Andy. It’s not like this is just some bum who latched onto us, some random weirdo messing with our heads. It’s Andy. Carlo pushed aside the little rolling table and knelt down on the floor next to the bed, bowed his head, and let Andy’s trembling hand settle on him.

  Andy’s touch felt as if there were a red hot finger reaching inside Carlo’s skull. Carlo wanted to jerk away, but he was scared something would break.

  “Hold still,” said Andy. “I’ve almost got it.”

  From Dina’s moaning, Carlo could tell that Andy had gotten into her skull as well. And now all of a sudden Andy groaned and there was a squinching sound like a tooth being extracted, and Carlo felt a bumpy writhing like something being pulled out of him. He and Dina snapped their heads back upright at the same time, staring at each other across the bed with frightened faces. The room lurched and seemed to fall even faster than before.

  Andy was holding up two big gnarly things like ginseng roots, a black one from Carlo and a silver one from Dina. “These are your diseases,” said Andy. “They’ll never bother you again.”

  But Carlo didn’t feel better, he felt like hot stuff was running over him, and the air was getting thick and hard to breathe. He looked up at the ceiling, over the door, and for an instant he saw a smoke alarm with a battery dangling from one wire. It meant something but—what?

  And then some part of Carlo’s mind realized that he was burning to death in the room in the Ocean Inn motel, burning to death in a fire started by the melting of the oversized sandcandles. He tried to jump up out of the dream, tried to take them all with him — but none of them made it. Not Carlo, not Dina, not Andy.

  Like three winged ants, their souls flew down and down, perhaps to heaven.

  ============

  Note on “The Andy Warhol Sandcandle” (Written with Marc Laidlaw)

  Written in 1995.

  Gnarl!, WCS Books, 2000.

  Creating the character of Carlo was a way for me to convince myself that I was truly ready to get some help in giving up drinking. Working on the story, Marc and I had a lot of fun thinking about Andy Warhol. By way of research, I read all of The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. An alternate version of the story makes it a UFO abduction tale, with Andy an alien, and with a happy ending where Carlo makes a successful career of selling celebrity-head-shaped sandcandles.

  Cobb Wakes Up

  Cobb Anderson had been dead for a long time. It was heaven.

  But now someone was bringing him back to life. First came a white-light popping-flashbulb panic attack feeling of not knowing who or what or why, a pure essence of “Huh?”—but not even the word, not even the question mark, just the empty spot where a question would be, were there a way to form one. Yes, Cobb’s new-started mind was like a cartoon image of something missing: a white void with alternating long and short surprise lines radiating out from a central lack. Huh?

  Then came an interval of autonomous, frenzied activity as his encoded boot script mined his S-cube database to reconstruct the fractal links and dynamic attractors of his personality. Cobb became aware of himself waking up, and then went into an eidetic memory flash of the time back in 1965 when he’d had surgery to remove his accidentally ruptured spleen, had woken from dreams of struggle to see an attractive private nurse leaning over him, and had realized with embarrassment that this pleasant woman, one of his father’s parishioners, was the unseen force he’d been druggedly fighting and soddenly cursing while trying to pull a painfully thick tube from out of his nose. Ow.

  Right after the nurse memory, Cobb felt his personality flaring up bright and lively, as if in a hearth pumped by the bellows of iterative parallel computations. He visualized a cozy fireplace, reflected on the image of fire, and was then off into another childhood memory, this one of visiting newly dead president JFK’s grave and seeing the little eternal flame fluttering from a mingy metal rosette in the cold stone tombstone on the trampled muddy grass by the gray Potomac River.

  But that meant nothing. Here and now, Cobb was alive, and just a few impossible seconds ago, he’d been dead. He made a convulsive crash effort to remember what it had been like.

  Materialism to the contrary, there were indeed some haunting, phantasmagoric scraps of memory from the void downtime of no hardware, no wetware, no limpware. When Cobb was turned off, totally dead, he still did exist—in an supernal, timeless now. In that other state—Cobb readily thought of it as heaven—there lived all the souls of all the lives, woven together in a joyous, singing tapestry of light that added up to a kind and great cosmic mind, aka God. Cobb loved being inside God. And now he was back out in the cold. Born again.

  “Oh no,” were Cobb’s first murmured words.

  His initial sorrow was quickly tempered by excitement at being back in the intriguing tangles of mortal time. He’d return to paradise soon enough. And meanwhile who knew what would happen!

  Cobb had no sensation of a body, which suggested that he was being simulated as a subsystem of some larger computation. Though he had no ears, a sweet voice spoke to him. How quickly life’s juicy, burdensome intricacies could become real.

  “Hello, Cobb. Yee-haw and flubba geep. I’m Chunky, the seven-moldie grex who’s running this emulation. Your grandson Willy hired me and my neighbor Dot to help do a limpware port of your sorry-ass old bopper machine code. I think we’ll be ready in an hour, and then you get your own imipolex body, dear pheezer. Dot and I are running parallel sessions of you to confirm that there are no bugs. So welcome back! If all goes well, you’ll be here for a good long time.”

  “And eventually it’ll be over again,” said Cobb. “And I won’t mind. I’ve been in—oh, call it the SUN. Or just call it God. It’s beautiful there; a serene and eternal river of joy. God is a song, Chunky, and all the dead souls sing it.”

  “What does it sound like?”

  “It sounds like this,” said Cobb and intoned the sacred syllable. “Auuuuuum.” The resonant vibration. “Haven’t you ever been dead, Chunky? And what do you mean by saying that you’re a seven-moldie grex?”

  “I mean that I’m made up of seven individual moldies,” said Chunky. “A moldie being an intelligent imipolex slug with veins of fungus and algae growing inside it, you wave. We moldies evolved out of the flickercladding skins that the original bopper robots used to have, the original boppers being of course invented by you, Dr. Cobb Anderson. Which was why, as you got older and sicker, the boppers coded up your personality as the crusty old software that we just finished booting. Yes indeed. Now for the grex part of your question. A grex is a group organism voluntarily formed by moldies in order to accomplish life’s main goal of earning enough imipolex to reproduce themselves. When a group of moldies are joined into a grex, they’re an I and not a we; they think as one. After enough scores,
a grex dissolves and the member moldies go off on their fucking way, ‘fucking’ in the literal sense of having sex to make a baby. Finally, with regard to the been dead question, no I haven’t, though of course most of my fourteen parental units are in fact dead and perhaps in heaven singing ‘Aum.’ I don’t suppose you noticed them?” Chunky giggled mildly, not seeming to expect an answer.

  Floating in Cobb’s sea of inchoate perceptions was a bright spot that he recognized as an optic feed. He focused his attention on it, and the spot grew to become a hemispherical visual field. Wobbly images flickered and died, hopelessly scumbled by feedback moirés of spiral diamonds.

  “Ow, that’s one of my eyes,” said Chunky gently. “Which I’m only temporarily lending to you. Turn down the gain, Cobb. We’re talking about a delicate organ, old cruster. Um—act like you’re rubbing your face.”

  Cobb made the phantom gesture of rubbing his face, and the gesture was reinforced by a pleasant feeling of skin contact. His vision cleared. He was looking out through a smooth stone arch, as if from the inside of a well-worn cave. Outside the hole was a clutter of stones and boulders, and beyond that stretched a boulevard lined with small buildings. Bright, flexing figures moved down the avenue, and in the distance was a patch of blazingly bright sunlight. In the far distance, on the other side of the bright patch, was high curving wall twinkling with spots of colored light. Curious to have a better look, Cobb made as if to step forward, but he was quite unable to move.

  “I’m glued here like a sea anemone,” said Chunky. “If I were to start humping around, it would tangle up my carefully cultivated mycelium dendrites, which are what make me so smart and employable in the first place. But you can push out your eyestalk. Just act like you’re craning your neck.”

  Cobb craned, and the moldie-flesh neck that held his—or Chunky’s—eye stretched out one, five, ten meters. Chunky’s reference to the sea had set him to wondering if perhaps she were an artificial creature lodged in some deep ocean reef, but his ease of motion told him he wasn’t in any water. Far from it. It felt like there wasn’t even any air. He made a turning motion and looked back along his eyestalk at Chunky’s bod.