The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Is mine the first painting?”

  “Oh no. I saw this big Hieronymus Bosch thing, hundreds of characters on a gigantic landscape, and both products had gotten to it. They were competing, trying to wrest away control of this sort of battlefield in the painting, and the characters were all divided up into two armies, the Walnuts versus the Fazzians—”

  “Jesus! How did you become the big expert?”

  “I was a technician in a hospital. I worked with the bloodstream ones. I recognized this other type when it turned up, that’s all.”

  “It’s such a fucking joke,” said the artist. “Their whole culture was fucking leveled.”

  “Yes,” said the man cheerily. “I may never have the pleasure of tasting a Fazz.” He pointed over the artist’s shoulder. “Look.”

  The artist turned and looked at his painting.

  His radiation sunset had grown donkey ears. And out of the swirling orange underneath, features were beginning to resolve. Cartoon eyes, and a gigantic grin.

  “The Fazz donkey,” said the man.

  “Oh god.” The artist’s head fell into his hands. “It’s horrible.”

  “I wonder how it got all the way out here,” said the man, getting up from the table. “Have you shown this painting?”

  “No,” said the artist. “It isn’t even finished. I took some others to Sydney last week, though—”

  The artist saw the man glance quickly over at the racks against the wall.

  “You aren’t saying—” The artist jumped up, but not before the man had walked over and pulled a painting from the rack. It showed the Fazz donkey, in full splendor across the landscape, a bubbling, frosty glass in hand, his eyes dazzling op-art pin-wheels, and over the artist’s sky a word balloon:

  SEX AND FAZZ

  AND ROCK AND ROLL!

  The artist flipped frantically through the rack. Each image was different, but each featured the leering donkey and plastic bottles of the green drink.

  “Everything’s ruined!” wailed the artist.

  The man knelt and squinted closely at the canvases, but didn’t say anything.

  “I can’t ever paint in here again, can I? It’ll all come out Fazz.”

  “Until we eliminate the microprocessors, yes,” said the man musingly.

  “Is there a way?”

  “It wouldn’t be easy, with so little technology at our disposal anymore. They’re programmed to defend themselves. But I’ve had an idea … If it worked, we might even be able to reclaim your artwork.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The surgeon micros. They work by assuming the expertise of the doctor, by recording a version of his brain into their own programming. In essence they become miniaturized copies of the human surgeon. If we could have them instead record your impulse, towards protecting these paintings …”

  “What does that involve?”

  “It’s simple if you’re not squeamish. I inject a vial of blank medical micros into your bloodstream. They’ll work their way to your brain, and document, in place of further medical skills, your painting expertise. If I’m guessing right they’ll also pick up your care for these works, and your dislike for the Fazz micros swarming over them. Then, once they’ve reproduced sufficiently, you touch them to the painting. With luck they’ll become your little avenging angels …”

  “I’m game,” said the artist grimly. “I’ve got nothing to lose. My work is all I have.”

  “Who knows,” said the man. “We may invent a new art form. You may get to put your brushes into storage. If your micros get strong enough they can go transforming all the old moldering advertising into your imagery. Hah! Then we’ll have you to deal with.”

  “A good deal more sightly than this crap,” muttered the artist. “When can we start?”

  “I’ve got the stuff in my car,” admitted the man. “I packed it up when your friend called and told me about your painting. I’d been hoping for this chance.”

  “You haven’t tried it before?”

  “No.”

  “But there’s no danger?”

  “None except failure. The medical micros might not adapt. But they’re used quite routinely by now.”

  They stepped out onto the porch together. By coincidence it was sunset, and the colors in the sky were incredible. They stopped and stared together. The visitor hadn’t much taste for painting, but he could see how this recent development in sunsets would make a fit subject.

  When it was over he went to the car and unpacked the medical equipment.

  Once the vial was injected the artist went downstairs and brought up more of the good water, for celebration. On sudden impulse he brought up two of his last remaining beers as well. “Here,” he said, tossing one to the man. “This won’t interfere, will it?”

  “What, the alcohol? No.” The man laughed. “The medical micros can fend for themselves; that’s the whole point.” He pried open the bottle and took a sip. “God, that’s nice. It’s been months.”

  The artist didn’t say anything. The two men sat together in the twilight, savoring the beer, waiting. After an hour had passed the visitor said: “Try touching your hand to the painting. If they’re ready they’ll crawl out through your pores and go to work.”

  The artist shuddered, then did as he was told. No immediate effect was visible.

  “Don’t worry,” said the man. “They’ll have jumped. I just hope they understand the assignment.”

  They went back to the table, though the beer was now long gone. The artist got out a checkerboard and the men played. It was hard, though, to keep from looking over constantly at the painting, and neither man resisted much. In the dim light it was too easy to imagine change that hadn’t actually occurred. After a while the visitor went over and took out his magnifying glass.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The lines of the donkey are still thickening.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying it didn’t work?”

  “Let’s hope your little soldiers are still marshalling their forces, surveying the enemies’ positions. They certainly haven’t attacked yet. The advertisement is still taking shape.”

  The artist paced the room angrily, while the man continued to pore over the canvas with the glass.

  “When—”

  “Be patient,” said the man. “This is a new process. It’s probably still too soon. In the meantime, I’m exhausted. Is there a place I can lie down?”

  The artist scowled. He went over to the painting and lifted it from the top. “Sure, sure,” he said. “I’ll unfold the cot—Ow!” He dropped the painting and held up his hand, wincing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It stung me! Look at this!”

  The man hurried over. The artist’s palm was dotted with tiny incisions, all beading with blood.

  “What did it do? What’s going to happen?”

  The man sighed. “It’s a failure, worse than I expected. The Fazz micros must have defeated the medical ones, and, what’s more, appropriated their skills. All we’ve done is add to their arsenal, I’m afraid. They’ve got the talents of a million tiny surgeons at their disposal now. The nip you took was just a warning. Hands off. They’re protecting their territory.”

  “You mean I can’t even touch my own paintings?” said the artist, incredulous.

  “They’re not your paintings anymore,” the man pointed out. “They’re the work of Fazz.”

  “Fuck the work of Fazz,” said the artist. “I want to destroy them. I don’t even want to see this ugly face again. I don’t care, I’ll give up painting if I have to.”

  “It’s probably better,” agreed the man sadly. “We shouldn’t let these new surgical ones spread. That’s nasty what they did to your hand.”

  The two men spent the better part of the night loading the paintings into a pile on the lawn, then lighting the pile into a bonfire. At the end they staggered back into the house, exhausted, faces streaked with sweat and ash.

  �
��I’ll get out the cot,” said the artist. “You shouldn’t have to drive back like this, before you’ve slept.”

  “That’s good of you, man. It’s been quite a night.” The man paused. “You know, you ought to come back to the city with me in the morning, get your mind off this thing for a few days. Your friend was asking about you—” The man stopped, his jaw hanging open, and stared at the artist’s forehead.

  “What?” said the artist.

  “Your flesh,” said the man, dumfounded. “Your head.” The artist reached up and felt his head. At first he thought he’d put on a hat. But no. Whatever the knobby protrusions were, they were sprouting right out of the skin.

  What’s interesting (and uninteresting) here is mostly plain, but I’ll mention that the aggression of pop culture on the fine arts—on a painter of oils on canvas specifically—rehearses my own creative paternity. After all, I’m a painter’s kid. On the one hand, I’ve given my dad’s artistic medium the high moral ground; on the other, I’ve fated it to drown in banality or be thrown on a pyre. The story glances ahead to my interest in notions of artistic influence, and the propagation of cultural stuff by automatic or viral processes. The story’s not completely un-germane to “The Ecstasy of Influence,” it just isn’t good. But here’s another.

  Walking the Moons

  “Look,” says the mother of The Man Who Is Walking Around The Moons Of Jupiter, “he’s going so fast.” She snickers to herself and scuttles around the journalist to a table littered with wiring tools and fragmented mechanisms. She loops a long, tangled cord over her son’s intravenous tube and plugs one end into his headset, jostling him momentarily as she works it into the socket. His stride on the treadmill never falters. She runs the cord back to a modified four-track recorder sitting in the dust of the garage floor, then picks up the recorder’s microphone and switches it on.

  “Good morning, Mission Commander,” she says.

  “Yes,” grunts The Man Who, his slack jaw moving beneath the massive headset. It startles the journalist to hear the voice of The Man Who boom out into the tiny garage.

  “Interview time, Eddie.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Kaffey. Systems Magazine, remember?”

  “O.K.,” says Eddie, The Man Who. His weakened, pallid body trudges forward. He is clothed only in jockey undershorts and orthopedic sandals, and the journalist can see his heart beat beneath the skin of his chest.

  The Mother Of smiles artificially and hands the journalist the microphone. “I’ll leave you boys alone,” she says. “If you need anything, just yodel.”

  She steps past the journalist, over the cord, and out into the sunlight, pulling the door shut behind her.

  The journalist turns to the man on the treadmill.

  “Uh, Eddie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, I’m Ron Kaffey. Is this O.K.? Can you talk?”

  “Mr. Kaffey, I’ve got nothing but time.” The Man Who smacks his lips and tightens his grip on the railing before him. The tread rolls away steadily beneath his feet, taking him nowhere.

  The journalist covers the mike with the palm of his hand and clears his throat, then begins again. “So you’re out there now. On Io. Walking.”

  “Mr. Kaffey, I’m currently broadcasting my replies to your questions from a valley on the northwestern quadrant of Io, yes. You’re coming in loud and clear. No need to raise your voice. We’re fortunate in having a pretty good connection, a good Earth-to-Io hookup, so to speak.” The journalist watches as The Man Who moistens his lips, then dangles his tongue in the open air. “Please feel free to shoot with the questions, Mr. Kaffey. This is pretty uneventful landscape even by Io standards and I’m just hanging on your every word.”

  “Explain to me,” says the journalist, “what you’re doing.”

  “Ah. Well, I designed the rig myself. Took pixel satellite photographs and fed them into my simulator, which gives me a steadily unfolding virtual-space landscape.” He reaches up and taps at his headset. “I log the equivalent mileage at the appropriate gravity on my treadmill and pretty soon I’ve had the same experience an astronaut would have. If we could afford to send them up anymore. Heh.” He scratches violently at his ribs, until they flush pink. “Ask me questions,” he says. “I’m ready at this end. You want me to describe what I’m seeing?”

  “Describe what you’re seeing.”

  “The desert, Mr. Kaffey. God, I’m so goddamned bored of the desert. That’s all there is, you know. There isn’t any atmosphere. We’d hope for some atmosphere, we had some hopes, but it didn’t turn out that way. Nope. The dust all lays flat here, because of that. I try kicking it up, but there isn’t any wind.” The Man Who scuffs in his Dr. Scholl’s sandals at the surface of the treadmill, booting imaginary pebbles, stirring up nonexistent dust. “You probably know I can’t see Jupiter right now. I’m on the other side, so I’m pretty much out here alone under the stars. There isn’t any point in my describing that to you.”

  The Man Who scratches again, this time at the patch where the intravenous tube intersects his arm, and the journalist is afraid he’ll tear it off. “Bored?” asks the journalist.

  “Yeah. Next time I think I’ll walk across a gassy planet. What do you think of that? Or across the Pacific Ocean. On the bottom, I mean. ’cause they’re mapping it with ultrasound. Feed it into the simulator. Take me a couple of weeks. Nothing like this shit.

  “I’m thinking more in terms of smaller scale walks from here on in, actually. Get back down to earth, find ways to make it count for more. You know what I mean? Maybe even the ocean isn’t such a good idea, actually. Maybe my fans can’t really identify with my off-world walks, maybe they’re feeling, who knows, a little, uh, alienated by this Io thing. I know I am. I feel out of touch, Mr. Kaffey. Maybe I ought to walk across the corn belt or the sunbelt or something. A few people in cars whizzing past, waving at me, and farmers’ wives making me picnic lunches, because they’ve heard I’m passing through. I could program that. I could have every goddamn Mayor from Pinole to Akron give me the key to their goddamn city.”

  “Sounds O.K., Eddie.”

  “Sounds O.K.,” echoes The Man Who. “But maybe even that’s a little much. Maybe I ought to walk across the street to the drugstore for a pack of gum. You don’t happen to have a stick of gum in your pocket, Mr. Journalist? I’ll just open my mouth and you stick it in. I trust you. We don’t have to tell my mother. If you hear her coming you just let me know, and I’ll swallow it. You won’t get in any trouble.”

  “I don’t have any,” says the journalist.

  “Ah well.”

  The Man Who walks on, undaunted. Only now something is wrong. There’s a hiss of escaping liquid, and the journalist is certain that The Man Who’s nutrient serum is leaking from his arm. Then he smells the urine, and sees the undershorts of The Man Who staining dark, and adhering to the cave-white flesh of his thigh.

  “What’s the matter, Kaffey? No more questions?”

  “You’ve wet yourself,” says the journalist.

  “Oh, damn. Uh, you better call my mom.”

  But The Mother Of has already sensed that something is amiss. She steps now back into the garage, smoking a cigarette and squinting into the darkness at her son. She frowns as she discerns the stain, and takes a long drag on her cigarette, closing her eyes.

  “I guess you’re thinking that there might not be a story here,” says The Man Who. “Least not the story you had in mind.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that,” says the journalist quickly. He’s not sure if he hasn’t detected a note of sarcasm in the voice of The Man Who by now. “I’m sure we can work something up.”

  “Work something up,” parrots The Man Who. The Mother Of has his shorts down now, and she’s swabbing his damp flank with a paper towel. The Man Who sets his mouth in a grim smile and trudges forward. He’s not here really. He’s out on Io, making tracks. He’s going to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

 
The journalist sets the microphone back down in the dust and packs his bag. As he walks the scrubby driveway back to the street he hears The Man Who Is Walking Around The Moons Of Jupiter, inside the garage, coughing on cigarette fumes.

  Okay, that’s a little better. I liked the mood and voice of this piece when I wrote it, and still do, despite the blatant failings: the slipshod, secondhand misogyny—an unwelcome influence from Dick—and the hint of body-horror, as though a trickle of urine disqualifies anyone’s dignity (the writer of this story obviously hadn’t yet changed a diaper). The Man Who recalls Dick’s shambling-sacrificial antiheroes, like Mercer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or Molinari in Now Wait for Last Year, but he’s enough my own, enough a product of observation and self-inspection, that I can take pleasure in him, especially when he requests the chewing gum.

  What interests me most, though, is how the relationship between the callow journalist and The Man Who now looks like an early, guilty allegory of my own attempts to enlist Philip K. Dick or any other “crazy friend” for my lucid artistic purposes—an unconscious warm-up to what I’d later pursue in a couple of short stories from Men and Cartoons: “Planet Big Zero” and “Interview with the Crab.” The relationship even forecasts the betrayal enacted between object-friend and subject-friend in The Fortress of Solitude. This short story hangs in there for me, finally, because in it I see myself knocking on my own door (Chestnut Street), not just Dick’s (Francisco Street).

  11.

  Believing I’d written a breakthrough piece and knowing what manner of breakthrough would mean the most to me, I sent “Walking the Moons” to Gordon Lish at The Quarterly. He rejected it flamboyantly. I sent it to Howard Junker at ZYZZYVA; he teasingly subjected the story to two rounds of edits before rejecting it. When the story was published in a tiny SF magazine out of Austin, Texas, called New Pathways—Junker’s edits intact—it was picked up for The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Whether this was vindication or epitaph for my literary aspirations, I couldn’t say. Self-marginalization was well under way; self-gentrification would wait.