by Tom Robbins
“Here, let me help you with that.”
Throughout Dr. Dannyboy's monologue, he had been trying to unzip Pris's dress, to part the teeth of the Talon that ran down the length of her green knit back; trying to maneuver it coolly, unobtrusively, as if Pris, suddenly noticing her dress falling away, would regard it as a spontaneous act of nature, organic and ordained, but he couldn't budge the damn thing, though he tugged until sweat burst out on his brow, and finally, she said . . .
“Here, let me help you with that.”
And with one smooth stroke, she separated the interlocking tracks, the 'gator yawned, and, lo, there she sat in her underwear.
Her bra was rust-stained and more than a size too big.
Is that a brassiere or a flotation device? Wiggs wondered.
At least it was a cinch to remove. He simply pulled it over her head without unhooking it, catching her breasts as they tumbled out, like croquet balls from a canvas bag. They were as smooth as peeled onions and perfectly pinked. He squeezed one, nuzzled the other. The pink did not lick off.
There was a run in the seat of her nylon panties. Neither of them seemed to notice. His hand passed over the run like a streetsweeper passing over a skid mark, maintaining momentum, registering nothing. The longest finger on his left hand curled like a celery stalk and dipped into the bowl of her buttocks, a bowl in which metaphors were easily mixed.
“Sweet Jesus, 'tis wonderful you feel!”
“Wiggs . . . you're still dressed for dinner.”
In a minute he was wearing nothing but his eye patch.
“You feel wonderful, baby,” he said, fingering her again. He had dropped his brogue with his shorts.
Priscilla had forgotten how it was with older men. The last man with whom she had lain was a twenty-year-old dishwasher from El Papa Muerta. During a single evening, he had made love to her four times—for three minutes each time. Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio.
“I . . . had . . . ummm . . . forgotten . . . how . . . it is . . . with . . . older . . . men.”
That must have been the wrong thing to say. Wiggs paused in midstroke. “Age,” he grumbled. “There are only two ages. Alive and dead. If your man is dead, he should go lie down somewhere and get out o' the way. But if 'tis alive he is . . .”
He completed the stroke, then paused again. Oh, no, thought Priscilla. Surely he isn't going to get pedantic at a time like this?
Her worry was soon abated, for although Wiggs cleared his throat and tapped his patch with his finger, a clear signal that he was on the verge of expounding, he became distracted by the wiggly thrust of her pelvis, and gradually, after mumbling something about senility being wasted on the old, and something else about never having met an adult who really liked him, he fell silent, except for the occasional sweet grunt, and gave full attention to the further stoking of the hot box in which he found himself.
“Yes, God, yes,” moaned Pris. This was the way Effecto had loved her: muscular and tender, relaxed and confident, carefully modulating rhythm and tempo, prying her apart with sweet determination, kissing her adoringly all the while; a far cry from those young guys who were either trying to score touchdowns in bed or else practicing to join the tank corps. “Daddy!” squealed Pris.
“Daddy?” asked Wiggs.
“Uh, no, Danny,” said Pris. “Dannyboy.”
“Your man,” said Wiggs.
Effecto had played Priscilla like an accordion. Wiggs worked her as if she were an archaeological dig: spading, sifting, dusting, cataloging. Now, lying in a puddle on the sofa, she felt like she was ready to be shipped to the British Museum. Accompanied by a crate of late twentieth-century come shards.
Wiggs covered her with a Sepik war blanket and lay down beside her. A fresh Pres-to-log sputtered in the fireplace, and rain tapped messages in Morse code against the windowpanes. “You can't stay indoors forever,” and “There's plenty more where this came from” was what the rain was sending.
“Did you invite me here to seduce me?” asked Pris. She didn't care, at that point, she was merely curious. She caressed his flaccid shillelagh, wondering if Ricki would ever forgive her; wondering, too, if she would have felt half this good after sex with Ricki.
“I wish I could say yes, but the truth is, darlin', I wasn't that smart. This was an unexpected bonus.”
“Then why did you invite me?”
“Smell,” said Wiggs.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Now don't be takin' offense. Personally, you smell dainty as a lamb.” Dr. Dannyboy ducked his head beneath the blanket and took a vigorous whiff. “They can have their loaf o' warm bread, their new-mown hay. Nothin' beats the smell of a lassie freshly laid.”
“Hey . . .”
“Again, no offense.” He surfaced, and kissed her with earnest affection. “See here, Priscilla, I have an interest in smell. That is, I have an interest in the evolution o' consciousness. Smell is the only sense to communicate directly with the neocortex. It bypasses the thalamus and the other middlemen and goes direct. Smell is the language the brain speaks. Hunger, thirst, aggression, fear, lust: your brain interprets these urges with a vocabulary o' smell. The neocortex speaks this language, and if we can learn to speak it, why we may be able to manipulate the cortex through the nose.”
“For what?”
“For expeditin' the evolution o' consciousness.”
“For what?”
“So's we can be happy and live a long, long time and not be bloody blowin' each other to bits.”
“You're going to disappoint a lot of generals.”
“Worse. It could mean the end o' Monday Night Football.”
“Well, fuck the Dallas Cowboys if they can't take a joke. But, Wiggs, wait a minute. What does any of this have to do with me?”
“You make perfume, don't you, darlin'?”
Priscilla raised herself on one elbow. “Uh, yeah, sort of. How did you know that?”
“I've learned a lot about perfumers since I met Alobar.”
“Alobar. The guy in prison.”
“Him.”
“The janitor.”
“And former king.”
“Who's a thousand years old.”
“Yes.”
She sat completely upright. “This is the nuttiest thing I've ever heard. I'm getting more confused by the minute. . . .” She sounded genuinely distressed. Wiggs gripped her sticky thigh.
“'Tis a long story.”
“I don't care. And cut the brogue, please. You talked like an American when we were making love.”
“Sure and 'twas because your wild little wooky sobered me up. Now the grape has got hold o' me tongue again.”
“All right, fine, I don't care if you talk like Donald Duck. Just tell the story.”
“Should I start at the beginning?”
“If that's not too traditional.”
“But what about your date?""Her?"
“You've already eaten her share.”
“Never mind. Talk to me. Now.”
“I'll start with the sixties.”
“Fine. You were probably more interesting then. I understand everybody was.”
“I'll start with the seventies.”
“I like you, Wiggs.”
“Sure and I like you, too.”
He cleared his throat and, tapping his patch with a wooky-scented knuckle, commenced to pin a tail on the beet.
By then, it was that part of the day that is officially morning but which any dunce can see is purest night. The streets of Seattle were as wet and greeny black as freshly printed currency. Despite the hour and the weather, people were lined up outside the Last Laugh Foundation as if the Last Laugh Foundation were a radio station giving away rock stars to pubescent girls. Some of the people looked at Ricki's tea strainer of a car as it ever so slowly rattled by. Others persisted in gazing expectantly at the darkened mansion.
Squint as she might, Ricki could detect not a glimmer in the house. She bit her lip to keep from crying. “It's two-thirty,” she said sorrowfully, as if “two-thirty” were the name of a fatal disease. “It's two-thirty in the son-of-a-bitching morning.”
Were Ricki concerned with precise expression, and she was not, she might have added, “here,” for while it was indeed, two-thirty in Seattle, in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic. Still awake, Alobar lay upon his prison cot, practicing Bandaloop breath.
That's what he called it, what he and Kudra had called it all those years: Bandaloop breath. Of course, there was an absolute lack of evidence that the Bandaloop ever breathed in that manner. For that matter, there was precious little evidence that the Bandaloop ever existed. Absence of proof failed to faze Alobar, however, since, thanks to the Bandaloop, he had witnessed three hundred and eighty-five thousand, eight hundred and six sunrises in his life, and judging from the milky molluscan glow seeping through the barred window, was about to witness yet another.
Moreover, if he concentrated on his breathing, and the parole board soon ruled in his favor, he might go on witnessing sunrises indefinitely, despite the aging that worked in him now like naphthous bees in a leathery hive. That was his hope, although, considering his prospects, why he should want to go on—and on and on and on—was a question he could not easily answer. One thing was certain, he didn't intend to risk the Other Side without a splash of K23, and he was starting to wonder if he shouldn't have gone ahead and given Wiggs Dannyboy the formula for it. Dr. Dannyboy could have had some made and smuggled it in to him. His intense secrecy about K23, his long-standing refusal to tap its commercial potential, was a bit irrational, he must admit. But, then, were he a rational man, he would have been dead a thousand years. Ho.
Joints creaking like the lines of a storm-tossed ship, Alobar arose and hobbled to the window. He looked for his old benefactor, the morning star, but the window was tiny, and the only celestial light in the slice of sky available to his scrutiny was a blinking satellite circling the Earth. “The world is round-o, round-o,” he started to sing, but embarrassment shut him up. “If the parole board doesn't act soon, I'll send Dannyboy the formula,” he promised.
Alobar wasn't the only person thinking about a secret formula that morning (or night). Distracted by first one thing and then the other, Wiggs and Priscilla hadn't gotten around to it yet, but in New Orleans—time: four-thirty—Madame Devalier lay in her canopied bed, bejeweled hands crossed upon the vault of her belly, pondering a possible bottom note, mixing dozens, scores of ingredients in her mind's nose, not ever imagining how simple it could be; and not imagining, either, that in a cheap motel near the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where it was, yes, two-thirty, thank you, Ricki, V'lu Jackson slept with the answer—a drop or two of the answer—in an ancient bottle beneath her vinyl-wrapped, foam rubber pillow; and, of course, neither of them, Madame, awake, formulating, nor V'lu, dreaming, fist pressed against lonesome labia, could imagine that before they lay abed again, Bingo Pajama would be shot at their feet and that his little swarm of bees, masterless, would be frightening New Orleans half to . . .
. . . death. Arrgh! How Wiggs Dannyboy hated that word.
His reaction to “death” was neither terror nor resignation, avoidance nor morbid longing, shock nor denial, but, rather, fury. Controlled fury. Challenge, if you please. Combat. Wiggs was at war with death and had vowed never to surrender.
The declaration of war had been drawn up while he was in Concord State Prison. He had been transferred to Concord from a federal penitentiary in the Midwest at his own request after the incident in which a guard had poked out his right eye with a matchstick.
In the investigation that followed the blinding, it was revealed that Dr. Dannyboy had been subjected to almost continuous physical and mental harassment during his months in federal custody. The media, which, while it may have condemned Dannyboy's life-style and philosophy, had always found him good copy, fanned the story into a scandal. In addition, there was the threat of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. The government was hardly in a position to deny the request for transfer.
At Concord, Wiggs was near friends, mavericks who had managed to remain on the Harvard faculty or who had entered one or another of the “New Age” businesses that flourished in Cambridge and Boston. His pals kept him supplied with books from the university library and with the latest journals and papers in his fields of interest: anthropology, ethnobotany, mythology, and neuropharmacology. They paid him gossipy visits, monitored his health, and delivered his occasional contributions to The Psychedelic Review. They smuggled out the half-frozen dinner roll into which he had freshly ejaculated, rushing it to the parking lot where his ovulating wife (who was eventually to jilt him for a more available partner) received it and immediately did with it what she had to do: the origins of Huxley Anne.
It was, despite the many difficulties of prison life, a reasonably productive and stimulating period. There was plenty of time for contemplation, however, and Dr. Dannyboy used it to review what had been accomplished in the sixties, by himself and like-minded others. Then, he placed those accomplishments within the context of history, not merely the official history, with its emphasis on politics and economics, or the more pertinent history of the various ways that we have lived our daily lives since we first crawled out of the ooze or swung down from the foliage, but also the higher, more complex history of how our thought patterns, our nervous systems, our spiritual selfhoods have developed and changed.
This much Wiggs concluded: illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition; in every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals, living their lives upon the threshold, at the gateway of the next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization is probably still hundreds of years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of these elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole, thereby laying a significant patch of brick in the evolutionary road. He thought of the age of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. ("The Celts would have produced a major culture, too,” he told Priscilla, “if the Church hadn't got hold o' them first.") Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1971.
Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age, Wiggs admitted. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
Moreover, Wiggs believed that the American womb eventually would bear fruit. The United States was the logical location of the next enlightened civilization. And since the sixties phenomena had at least prepared the soil—many of the individuals who had successfully mutated during the sixties were carrying on, out of view of the public eye—the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away.
Even though, in social terms, the sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone, and Wiggs was proud that he had been able to lend a helping hand in ushering in that dizzy period of transcendence and awareness (transcendence of obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of inner reality). Still, he was dissatisfied. Anxious. Unhappy. It wasn't prison or the blinding that was bothering him, they were small sac
rifices to make for what had been accomplished. It was something else, something that had haunted him since boyhood, undermining his every triumph, dulling his ecstasies, amplifying his agonies, mocking his optimism, spitting in his ice cream.
It was, he came gradually to realize, the specter of death.
If a person leads an “active” life, as Wiggs had, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just above his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we “live on” in the memory of the lucky ones still kicking.
