Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Early in 1983, I had a little extra money from my advance for The Fourth Dimension and from the books I’d sold to Ace. I wanted to get Sylvia a new car for her birthday, and I hit on the idea of getting her some vintage wheels, like the cars she’d admired in high-school. Nosing around Lynchburg, I found a black and white 1956 Buick at a very reasonable price—something like $300. It was a car very much like the Buick that Barbara Tucker had driven me to kindergarten in.

  On the morning of Sylvia’s birthday in February, 1983, I gave her the crufty old car keys—and she didn’t understand what this meant. But in the night I’d parked the car in front of our house—I’d been hiding it up at the Vaughans for the previous few days. The kids thought it looked like a saddle shoe. Sylvia loved it.

  “Can I drive it? Right now?”

  So we did a tour around the neighborhood in our bathrobes. As part of the gift, I’d reserved us a room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. We had a great time, and then we got to stay away from home for an extra night up because of an unexpected blizzard—we spent that second night with Pop and his woman friend Priscilla, in their apartment in Reston, Virginia, that planned community just south of DC, the same town where he’d had his congregation before he quite the ministry.

  Pop had it fairly together again. He wasn’t drinking as heavily as before—in fact he’d taken to chiding me about my drinking. Not that I took his advice on the subject very seriously.

  By now I’d to some extent gotten used to Priscilla. She and Pop had opened a tiny food store in the Reston square plaza, picking up the slack from the supermarket, which tended to close early. To me it seemed like a really odd job for him—and they didn’t keep the store going for all that long—but while it lasted, Pop liked sitting in there and talking to people. He’d been working on his self-acceptance techniques, and he was into quoting the Popeye line from the old cartoons: “I yam what I yam.” I almost had to admire the way he kept reinventing his life.

  The day after the blizzard it was brilliantly sunny. Sylvia and I motored south on soft white highways. We passed through Ruckersville, Virginia, a town founded by my earliest U.S. ancestors, in the 1700s, a dead place now, little more than a traffic light and a discount shoe store.

  As we waited at the light, Sylvia drew our copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl from of our black and white Buick’s glove compartment and began reading some lines from it aloud.

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

  who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated

  All was well with us two.

  My office in the abandoned Design Group building was on the second floor, and, as I mentioned, the rest of the building held random art-junk. Some of the other rooms leaked in the rain, but not mine. I had a nice big desk with a soft black top, a creaky office chair, and a built-in bookcase where I kept a few select volumes—Einstein, Borges, the poet Anselm Hollo, Kerouac, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and a collection of William Burroughs’s letters from Tangier.

  Every weekday I’d go into that office to write. Nonfiction, stories, essays, novels—I loved it all. At any given time, my current project would be like an immense sliding-blocks puzzle in my head. I’d carry it around inside me all day and all night, fiddling with it, moving things around, working to improve the patterns.

  Even when I’d spend time doing other things, the steady river would still be flowing. In my subconscious mind, I’d continue trying things out, thinking ahead, feeling for the best idea. And when I’d focus back in on the work, I’d find that the river had changed a little.

  The characters in my fiction would get to be like imaginary friends—I’d laugh to myself about things they’d said or done, puzzle over what they might do to improve their situations, and interrogate them to learn more about their pasts.

  The best was when the world around me would begin to merge with my writing. I’d see or hear things that were just what I needed for the next chapter of my book. Conversely, I’d write something and the next day something very similar would actually happen. I came to think of this as the world dancing with me. The intense mental discipline of writing was putting me into such a sensitive state that I was touching the soul of the world, hanging out with the Muse. With the Muse at my elbow, it wasn’t like I had to sit at my desk alone all the time.

  Sometimes, if one of our three kids had a cold and couldn’t go to school, I’d take them to my downtown office with me. I remember Rudy coming along one day. He brought some plastic toy soldiers that he liked—the green kind that come two hundred to a bag—and his battery-operated Japanese robot. He put the soldiers in a circle around the robot and turned on the robot, and it was like seeing an SF flick right there. Later we walked down to a fast-food restaurant for lunch—Hardee’s—I liked their fried chicken sandwich, although Rudy preferred their barbecue.

  This particular Hardee’s was entertaining because there’d often be an odd man there wearing an orange knit cap—he’d be with his aged mother, and she’d always be trying to calm him down. The day that Rudy came with me, the guy in the orange hat was excited about his hot drink, and yelling about it.

  “Cup of tea! Cup of tea! Cup of tea! Cup of tea!”

  We loved it.

  The city Armory was right near the Hardee’s and they had wrestling there on the weekends. Rudy and I went in there and inspected the wrestling ring. We discovered that the floor of the ring was constructed in a special way so that it would make a really loud noise whenever anyone was thrown to the ground—or even sat down hard. The floor was of two parallel sheets of plywood, you see, held apart by fairly weak springs, and if you struck the upper sheet abruptly, it would clap against the lower sheet—wham! Rudy jumped up and down on it, filling the Armory with echoes. Nobody stopped us. Lynchburg wasn’t all that well organized.

  My new friend Rick Carrington had his framing shop and art gallery in a crumbling old building near my office. He was a real Southern rake, with a deep-fried accent and a taste for wild parties. He’d started out as an artist, and had drifted into the business end. The last work of art he’d made was a wall-mounted pinball device. You’d pull back a plunger and release it. A steel ball would race around a spiral under the glass and emerge from the mouth of a Joker, rolling out along his carved wooden tongue. And written on the tongue was, “You Lose.”

  “That sums it up,” Rick told me. “My art career.”

  Rick’s artist friend Bucky rented some space up there, too. Bucky was a far-out head who liked to stare at trees until they turned into halos or spirals. And then he’d paint what he was seeing, producing a beautiful Field and Stream type rendition of a landscape—but the trees would be mandalas and shooting stars. There was more to Lynchburg than met the eye.

  Henry Vaughan had an office downtown, too, and many afternoons he’d come by my workplace. He’d lounge on a comfortable white plastic couch that I’d found. His voice was a comforting buzz, like the sound of a cricket.

  “I thought I’d feel grown-up or something,” he complained on his fortieth birthday, in the early spring of 1983. “But it’s just another day.”

  “My father always says that he still doesn’t feel grown-up,” I told him.

  “Some people were already grown-up in high-school,” said Henry. “Assholes.”

  “That’s not us,” I said.

  That night Diana threw Henry a surprise party, for which all the guests had been told to dress up as if they were even older than forty. One woman was frighteningly good at it, she was hanging out on the porch in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, plucking at the loose skin on the backs of her hands, and querulously asking, “Does blue go with purple?”

  Now that I’m i
n my sixties, of course, it’s hard to imagine that I thought forty was old.

  On days when I was alone and I’d written enough for the day, I’d go out walking. As I mentioned before, Lynchburg was a strange patchwork of neighborhoods. In the downtown area, the white people lived on the tops of the hills and ridges, and the black people inhabited the vales and flat spots in between. It was interesting to wander past the faded gingerbread of the aging Victorian mansions, then slip down a flight of concrete stairs to a street with bars selling chitlins.

  There was a 7-11 store down there, where I saw a black guy counting out change to pay for a candy-bar. The coins were mostly pennies. He turned to me and said, “Look at that, my money turned brown.”

  There was a whole page of Ruckers in the Lynchburg phonebook, but so far as I could tell, all of them except for us were black. My Ruckersville ancestors had been farmers, and some of their slaves had taken on the family name. With this fact in my face, I thought about race quite a bit in Lynchburg. It was odd to me that so many white people would go out of their way to say nasty things about the blacks, given that the blacks in town were economically so much worse off.

  Once Georgia and I were riding our bikes through out-of-the-way neighborhoods, and as we walked our bikes up a steep little hill, we heard a young man’s drifting out from—where? We couldn’t tell. Maybe the voice was coming through the lattice work under a porch.

  “Black people’s neighborhood,” intoned the youth, speaking as softly as if he were talking to himself. “No whites allowed.”

  Georgia and I quoted that line to each other for weeks, pondering the meanings and the ramifications.

  In the late spring of 1983, I got to see Dennis Poague, my model for the hero Sta-Hi of my novel Software. This was in the context of a trip to Ames, Iowa. Recall that I’d been close friends with Dennis’s older brother Lee back in Geneseo. Lee was a professor at Iowa State University now, mostly teaching film courses, and he’d gotten me a gig to do a reading, give a talk, and have a conversation with their resident writer, Jane Smiley. Dennis showed up in Ames when I did, crazier than ever. He was traveling across the country in a red drive-away Triumph sports car, with a rough-cut girlfriend in tow.

  “I’m gonna get a back-hoe and dig a lagoon in Lee’s front yard,” Dennis told me. “We’ll breed Indonesian land crabs in there. They’re carnivorous. They’ll eat anything, man! We’ll open up a Crab Shack.”

  On one long night of partying, Dennis and I took off in his borrowed two-seater Triumph, his lumpy girlfriend riding in my lap. We shot along an arrow-straight two-lane country road, searching for city lights—and arrived at a hamlet called Story City. They had one bar, with an accordion band playing polkas.

  “We all work at the running board plant,” one of the friendly locals told me. I totally couldn’t parse what he meant. How could a board run? It turned out he was talking about metal steps to be welded to farm machinery.

  On the dance floor, Dennis was—oh God, please no—slam-dancing amid the half dozen locals doing the polka. After Dennis began diving off the accordion band’s six inch stage, I got the keys away from him and drove us back to Ames.

  The next day, my hosts had scheduled me for my literary lunch with the novelist Jane Smiley, who taught at Iowa State at that time. Our conversation was inconclusive. Neither of us had read any of the other’s books, and we had very little in common. Jane used a word-processor and had a literary agent; I was writing on a typewriter and selling my books directly to the publishers. I was an unemployed mathematician; she was an English professor. She was a best-selling novelist; I was a transreal cyberpunk. Talking to Jane, I felt a certain stubborn pride at being an underground figure. But I also felt like I was doing things wrong. I wanted to get a literary agent and a computer, and to start having my novels appear in hardback, too.

  Back in Lynchburg from Iowa, at the start of the summer of 1983, I got over my post-partum shock of finishing The Fourth Dimension and started a new SF novel, Master of Space and Time. In hopes of better sales, I was trying to write this one in something like the Golden Age SF style I’d enjoyed as a boy. It featured my two mad scientist characters, Fletcher and Harry, whom I’d written about in short stories before.

  The starting point for my novel was a question I’d been musing over. If you could create a world with any properties whatsoever, what would you ask for?

  I’d posed this question to Henry Vaughan one afternoon idling in my office. “There’d be some changes,” Henry had said with a laugh, leaving it at that.

  As a kind of thought experiment, I set up Master of Space and Time so that three people in succession would in fact be able to wish for anything at all—the science gimmick to justify this had to do with a physical constant called the Planck length. But really, it was a classic three-wishes fairy-tale.

  At the metalevel, of course, I was also writing about what it’s like to be a science fiction writer. For an SF writer is precisely in the position of being able to create a world exactly to his or her liking.

  Although I was enjoying my work on Master of Space and Time, I was nagged by a sense that, by writing something fairly pleasant and approachable, I was selling out. I mitigated this worry by getting in some good digs at the religious fundamentalists. In my novel, our planet is invaded by alien slugs who control humans by leeching onto their backs—and the slugs’ biggest local supporters were, of course, people like Lynchburg’s TV evangelist, Jerry Falwell.

  On Halloween of 1983, we went to a memorable costume party with the Vaughans. Sylvia was dressed as a Harlequin clown in a costume she’d sewn, I was a bum in a second-hand suit that I’d cut holes into, Diana had a nurse’s outfit, and Henry wore a Ronald Reagan mask in a wheelchair.

  “Time for your enema, Mr. President,” Diana whooped, wheeling Henry outside for another joint.

  When Sylvia and I came home from that party, she started singing “Au Claire de la Lune.” She’d sung bits of the song while finishing the costume during week, and during the party. Now she stood by our porch steps, sincere and moonlit, singing the whole verse through.

  “Au claire de la lune,

  Mon ami Pierrot,

  Pretez-moi ta plume,

  Pour ecrire un mot.

  Ma chandelle et morte,

  Je n’ai plus de feu.

  Ouvrez moi ta porte,

  Pour l’amour de Dieu.”

  The words seemed profound: “In the clear moonlight, dear Pierrot, lend me your pen to write a word. My candle is out, I can’t light it. Open your door to me, for the love of God.”

  As I watched her from the steps, it was as if our daytime personalities were blanked out now: we were a bum and a clown, but not just any clown. Pierrot. The song was serious as a sacrament, serious and somehow sad.

  Inside the house, we opened beers and sat on the couch. Pierrot fell asleep on the derelict’s shoulder; we were extras in a black-and-white movie.

  It had been a full year since the big fight that had sent me off to stay at Greg’s. I certainly hadn’t converted to clean living, but Sylvia and I were having fun. We were lovers and pals.

  Some of our new Lynchburg friends invented a semi-imaginary society called the Lynchburg Yacht Club. In the summer of 1984 they organized a big party at the boathouse at Sweetbriar College, about fifteen miles north of Lynchburg.

  Sylvia and I were excited about the event, and she even sewed me a new Hawaiian shirt, traffic-yellow with fans and cerise designs, billowing and lovely. At the party we danced to a live jazz band, jabbered, drank and flirted. Some of us rowed in the lake, some jumped in naked.

  One of fate’s kind gestures had brought my favorite poet Anselm Hollo to the Yacht Club party too. He was in Sweetbriar as a writer-in-residence that year. I’d been reading him for years, but I’d never met him before. Although he was maybe ten years older than me, we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Fellow beatnik writers.

  Anselm had an encyclopedic knowledge o
f world literature, and an exquisite mastery of the spoken word. He was wonderfully serious about writing. Whenever I was with him, I felt like I was talking to a sage on Mount Olympus, not that there was anything solemn about him. He’d often break into wheezing laughter while we were batting the ideas around. He had a cosmopolitan accent, having grown up Finnish. Anselm once remarked that every Finn deserved to have a biography written. He himself accumulated some wonderful memoir materials in a book called Caws and Casuistries—although his short, pungent poems are the most accurate memoirs of all, like X-ray snapshots of instantaneous mental states.

  We hung out with Anselm and his girlfriend quite a bit over the months to come. And meeting him rekindled my interest in poetry to the point where I put together my Xeroxed chap-book of poems, Light Fuse and Get Away in 1984. I called myself Carp Press after a line in Rene Daumal’s book, A Night of Serious Drinking: “I have forgotten to mention that the only word which can be said by carp is art.”

  In 1985, I got arrested while slowly piloting Sylvia’s Buick back from a poker party with Henry Vaughan and Mike Gambone. I was sentenced to a series of driver education classes. It was a kind of turning point for me—the first time that I really internalized the fact that I had a growing problem with alcohol. Not that I managed to give it up yet—that would take me about ten more years.

  In these classes, I sat next to a black guy called Otha Rucker. He wasn’t from Lynchburg proper, but from way out in the country. I had a kind of family feeling towards him, and I hung out with him at the breaks. Otha’s country accent was so strange that I could hardly understand a word that he said—often I couldn’t even discern the general topic he was talking about. But I liked being with him anyway. A little later, in my novel The Hollow Earth, I’d write about a white boy from a farm near Lynchburg who makes a fabulous voyage with his black half-brother, Otha.