Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  My mind was sizzling with burlesque and general relativity, alive with curved space.

  Following the Beats

  In the spring of 1962, at the end of his sophomore year, my brother Embry parted ways with Kenyon College. His grades were minimal, and he’d gotten in with a group of bad apples. After a night of heavy drinking, they’d phoned in a fire alarm. When the firemen arrived outside, one of the boys began sniping with a .22 rifle—supposedly he was only trying to shoot out the truck’s tires, or maybe to ring the bell hanging above the hood—but the school dean took the opportunity to get rid of the troublemakers.

  I was glad to have Embry at home that summer, if only to take my side in the dinner table conversations with Pop. The old man had begun taking exception to ordinary turns of phrase that Embry and I might use, phrases as innocuous as, “a lot of food.”

  “What do you mean a lot?” he’d demand. “A lot is a piece of land. And what is this disgusting phrase ‘make out’ that I heard one of you use? You make out in a business deal, fine. But to say you make out with a girl? That’s slimy, boys. Common.”

  Embry and I would look at each other and laugh. We were going to talk however we liked. Language marches on. Pop was out of it.

  My brother hung around the house for a few weeks, until one day Pop said, “Embry, come downtown with me, there’s a guy I want you to meet.”

  The guy turned out to be a recruiting officer for the U. S. Army—which didn’t really seem all that outrageous to Embry. Growing up indoctrinated by World War II movies, we boys all expected to end up the army some day. For that matter, given the jail movies that I’d seen, I expected to serve some time in a penitentiary as well. Those were all things that you did when you grew up: went to college, joined the army, got married, had children, got an office job, went to prison.

  As the Vietnam War hadn’t started yet, Embry got a good deal. He went to the Army Language School in Monterey, studied German, and ended up stationed near the East German border, billeted in a room over a beer-hall, and assigned to eavesdropping on the East German military radio. And eventually he finished college in night school.

  In the fall of 1962, with Embry off in the army, I spent more time in his basement room, studying his eclectic library. Realizing that the Evergreen Review magazine had curse words in it, I began combing through Embry’s back issues—looking for pornography. But that wasn’t exactly what I found. Instead I found a career.

  One particular excerpt of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch utterly blew my mind, it was about junkies and hangings and weird sex, written in a hilariously in-your-face dead-pan tone, utterly contemptuous of any notion of bourgeois propriety. Burroughs was a banner to salute, an anthem to march to, a master to emulate.

  The Evergreen Review stash was a treasure trove—I found poems by Allen Ginsberg, journals by Jack Kerouac and, somehow the most heartening, story after story by Beat unknowns. Men and women writing about their daily routines as if life itself were strange and ecstatic.

  Next I found an anthology in the library called The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, and this was where I first saw Ginsberg’s Howl. Niles and I read that amazing poem out loud to each other, reveling in the wild language and the bad attitude, exulting in the sense of liberation. From here it was a short hop to Kerouac’s On the Road. This book spoke to me like none I’d read before. To be out in the world, free as a bird, drinking, smoking, meeting women and yakking all night about God—yes!

  Niles also found a book on Zen Buddhism by Allan Watts, loaded with itchy koans. And in a slightly different vein, but even more importantly for me, he discovered Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.

  “It’s this weird flat world where the people are lines and triangles and other shapes. The main character is called A Square. They slide around like scraps of paper on a tabletop.”

  “How does it rain?”

  “The rain is a band of water that slides across the world. Never mind that. The neat part is that A Square travels up into our space. And then he goes back and tries to teach the Flatlanders about the mysterious third dimension, and the High Priest throws him in jail.”

  Although I didn’t realize it right away, the point of Flatland is to guide its readers towards trying to imagine the fourth dimension. Just as the third dimension is a mystery for a flat being in a plane, the fourth dimension is baffling for us humans in our three-dimensional space. In the future, I’d spend months and even years working out the details of this analogy—but initially, all I got out of Flatland was an increased sense of excitement about higher dimensions.

  I didn’t see how to fit all my new literary influences together until good old Mom happened to give me a paperback copy of Untouched By Human Hands, a collection of science fiction tales by Robert Sheckley.

  Somewhere Vladimir Nabokov writes about the “initial push that sets the heavy ball rolling down the corridors of years,” and for me the push was Sheckley’s book. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Not only was Sheckley’s work masterful in terms of plot and form, but it also had a jokey edge that—to my mind—set it above the more straightforward work of the other SF writers. There was something about Sheckley’s style that gave me a sense that I could do it myself. He wrote like I thought. Starting in 1962, I knew in my heart of hearts that my greatest ambition was to become a beatnik science fiction writer.

  I happened to read an article about modern French novels in a magazine, and finding none of these books in the public library, I pestered my parents into ordering me some of them through the University of Louisville bookstore. My favorite was Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist novel, Nausea, in which the alienated and neurotic main character develops a sense of disgust at the insistent physicality of the world. In a climactic scene he’s freaking out from staring at the gnarly trunk of a chestnut tree.

  I thought it would be cool to perceive the world that intensely, and then to write about it. I talked about Nausea a lot to Niles and my other high-school friends. Generally they enjoyed hearing me wax philosophical.

  One main thing that I was picking up from my readings was that there probably wasn’t any kind of afterlife at all. I was increasingly concerned about the inevitability of death. Although my parents regularly ushered me to church, I wasn’t feeling satisfied by what I heard there.

  Niles and I often talked about the meaning of life and the problem of death.

  “Time keeps passing, Niles. In a couple of years we’ll go off to college, and before we know it, we’ll be dead. Can there really be nothing after death?”

  Niles and I formed a theory that some kind of life force energized us, and that when a person dies, their life force returns to a central pool. The theory became very clear to me one cold winter day when we were walking in the Keiths’ pastures.

  The stream was frozen over. We squatted and watched the bubbles beneath the ice. The gelid surface was patterned in ridges and blobs, clear here and frosty there. Toward one bank, the ice domed up. A lone, large bubble wobbled there, braced against the flow. Smaller bubbles kept arriving to merge into that big bubble, and it, in turn, kept growing and sending out tendrils, silver pseudopods that pinched off into secondary bubbles that were swept further downstream.

  “That’s what it looks like,” I exclaimed. “The pool of life force is that big bubble under the ice. And each of us is a little bubble that can merge back in. The key thing is that once a little bubble joins the big one, the little bubble is gone. Your life-force is preserved, but your personality disappears!”

  “Hubba-hubba,” said Niles. “I done lost my life-force up Laura’s crack.”

  Music always seemed like a way out of alienation, a way of plugging myself into the wider world. From Elvis on, I’d always enjoyed hearing pop music on the radio. At night, as I did homework, and later in my bed, I’d stay abreast of the Top Forty, listening to WAKY on my little radio with its glowing tubes and faint smell of heated plastic.

  Sometimes I’d do
the box-step to one of the slow, sentimental songs like “Angel Baby” or “You’re a Thousand Miles Away,” imagining that I had a girl in my arms.

  My favorite musician of all was Bo Diddley—the only LPs that I actually owned were Diddley’s, and I’d play them good and loud when I was alone in the house. I worshipped his rueful song, “Crackin’ Up,” about a guy whose woman is always yelling at him. Listening to this song, I’d look at myself in my mother’s full-length mirror, imagining that someday I might be cool and hen-pecked and rising above it all. Bo Diddley made the pain of living into sweet, plangent art.

  In Louisville, quite a few of the high school boys banded together into fraternities. The most elite of these was the Athenaeum Literary Association, whose members were mockingly called Shakers, due to their businessman-like tendency to shake people’s hands. The Chevalier Literary Society was just a bit behind Athenaeum, along with Dignitas and Fidelian.

  Being out of circulation in the brainiac track at St. X, I probably wouldn’t have been asked to join a fraternity, but Embry had been a member of Chevalier—and thus I was invited in. I was happy to join—it made me feel important, and I already knew many of the boys from my early years at Louisville Country Day.

  We’d have meetings once a week, often in a spare room at a church. The main purpose of the meetings was to socialize and to share information about the weekend’s parties. There were some goody-goody types who wanted to run our meetings as if we were a board of trustees, but solemnity never lasted long. I remember a fat guy called Whale throwing a rubber dog-poop-pile into the aisle and calling out, “Mr. Chairman, there’s a movement on the floor!”

  Although it was mainly for good public relations that the fraternities called themselves literary societies, we each published a little magazine once a year. Chevalier’s was The Pegasus. These professionally printed, digest-sized journals contained photos, jokes, drawings, and a story or essay by each member. Now, looking back, I realize that quite a few of the articles were plagiarized. In any case, they were nice-looking magazines, with a certain buzz attached to them, and we sold a decent number of copies to other students. Plus we got parents and local merchants to chip in for ads.

  In the spring of my junior year, 1962, I wrote my very first science fiction story, “The Miracle,” for The Pegasus. In this story, some spaceship aliens pose as angels so as to bring peace to the Earth, and while this is happening, the main character gets drunk. And in the fall of senior year I wrote a Beat piece for The Pegasus, called “Bus Ride—December 20, 1962,” an anomie-filled first-person description of what I saw and thought while riding the bus home from St. X one day.

  At this point, writing down my actual thoughts was a very rare and unusual activity for me. In the coming years, I’d get the hang of this style by writing letters to my friends during summer vacations and after college. In typing out those letters, I’d slowly learn to write like I talk—in my opinion, that’s a key part of having a pleasant literary style.

  By now, of course, thanks to years of practice, writing has become all but effortless for me. When I’m at the keyboard, the words flow out through my fingers as if by telepathy. In some ways, writing is easier for me than talking. If anything, I wish I could talk as coherently as I write.

  One of the side-benefits of being in Chevalier was that it enabled me to purchase beer and hard liquor, that is, I could ask one of the older members to buy me something after one of our Saturday evening meetings—not that any of us was actually twenty-one, but there was one guy in particular who was very good at scoring. He was already out of high school and going to the University of Louisville, but he still came to the Chevalier meetings, lost soul that he was. He wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe.

  One of the first times I got drunk was in the fall of 1962, when I drove to a party alone. I’d broken up with Debby, and I was between girlfriends. I chugged two beers on the way to the party, listening to the spacy instrumental song “Telstar” on the radio. People were still excited about every satellite that went up.

  During the party, I went outside and drank a third beer, and that was enough to make me utterly bombed. Normally I was shy and quiet in groups, but now I was talking to everyone, telling them about the beatnik ideas I’d been nurturing, going on about the life force and the universal one mind. People listened to me, interested and laughing. I felt wonderful.

  That time, I managed to get home and into bed without my parents even finding out I’d been drinking, but in the months to come this would become harder and harder. They’d wait up for me and make me kiss them good-night so that they could sniff my breath. If I’d been drinking I’d be grounded for a week or two.

  “He who calls the tune must pay the piper,” my father once intoned.

  From his vantage point, Pop could see something that would take me years to internalize and to act upon: I was fated to have a drinking problem. Beer and liquor had an unnatural appeal for me. From the very start I was fervently scheming about how to get drunk on the next weekend or maybe on the weekend after that.

  As it happened, Niles shared my fascination with alcohol. We’d often drink together on our double dates—which wasn’t much fun for the girls. But I did notice that when I went out together with Niles I could often get a better class of girl to come along. Niles had grown to over six feet tall. He had blonde hair, blue eyes, and he was a star on the swimming team.

  Niles usually drove, as he was a lot better than me at keeping it together when he was tanked. He’d joined a fraternity called Sigma, on the basis of their sodden rush parties.

  “Hell, Rudy, those guys weren’t drinking any piddly little half-pints. They were runnin’ around wavin’ fifths!”

  On Derby Day, 1963, in the spring of my senior year, some of my younger Chevalier friends and I went over to the house of a boy whose family had a house high on a hill above a winding gravel driveway. His parents were off at the Churchill Downs racetrack, their fridge was full of beer, and they had a capacious liquor cabinet. I got wasted. And then it was time to go somewhere else.

  On this day, I was the one driving. I had my mother’s cute little blue VW bug with the sunroof. On the way down the hill I started showing off, veering the car to the left and right, making it skid. And then suddenly the steering wheel was twisting in my hands like a live thing. I’d lost control. The car slammed into a tree. The collision was a blaze of white, a sense of being twisted through space. I was unconscious for a minute, and I awoke tangled in a fence. I’d flown out of the car. If my head had hit the tree, I never would have woken up. Death would be like a light-switch turning off.

  In the coming weeks, I thought about this a lot. It was the same teaching I’d been shown when I ruptured my spleen, and the same fact I’d encounter again when I had my brain hemorrhage. It seemed like, when the end came, all my theorizing about the life force wasn’t going to be much use. What to do? Be more careful. Stretch out my span on Earth for as long as I could. And enjoy it while it lasts.

  I asked Mom if she believed in heaven and hell. “I think we make those things for ourselves while we’re alive,” she said. “I don’t know about anything after we die.”

  Mom had reason to think about heavy things herself, as she’d been having some health problems. The scariest had been her abrupt onset of diabetes, signaled by a sudden coma. Now she was giving herself insulin injections several times a day. And she had a problem with maintaining a good balance between the insulin and her diet, with the upshot that every so often or so her blood sugar would get so low that she’d have a so-called insulin reaction.

  At these times, Mom would become confused, slur her words, and stumble. The cure was simply to force some food into her, but often she’d perversely resist, insisting that she didn’t want her blood sugar to get too high. She tracked her blood sugar very carefully, even obsessively, measuring it many times a day.

  The insulin reactions were harrowing experiences for the rest of us. We always had extra tensi
on at our holidays, as our festive dinners inevitably came a little later than the precise noon moment when Mom normally had lunch. She was unwilling to adjust her food and insulin intake to take this into account, and when the mealtime approached, she’d often be in a daze. My father would beg her to have some orange juice, his voice breaking, and she would argue with him. It was terrible and sad.

  The worst was when, once or twice a year, Mom would go into an insulin reaction while she was asleep. She’d start thrashing and moaning, which would wake up my father, and then he’d get us boys to help. In the throes of a night reaction, she’d be too far gone to be able to drink any orange juice, and one of us would have to give her an injection of a special drug that would restore her blood sugar levels.

  Pop was always imploring Mom to be more careful with her food and her insulin, but she stubbornly insisted on working as close to the edge as possible. She said that if she didn’t keep her blood sugar low enough, she might get gangrene or go blind. At the time, it was hard to be sure what was right.

  By the time I was in college, Pop had begun to serve sherry and champagne to all of us before the Sunday and holiday meals, and that seemed to make things better—the alcohol helped Mom’s blood sugar, and, since we were all getting a little tiddly, we didn’t worry about the reactions anyway. For quite a few years, drinking with my parents was convivial and unproblematic—although eventually alcohol would become a problem for my father, and then for me.

  Even though my heart was with the beatniks, the existentialists, and the science fiction writers, I’d developed a facility for jumping through academic hoops while at St. X. I enjoyed my well-designed and challenging classes there. I got top grades, and I won a National Merit Scholarship.