Why are you leaving the party so early,
Just when it was getting good?
Were the crowds and the laughter just a little too tame,
Did the girl you had your eye on go and forfeit the game?
O tell me.
Where is there music any gayer than ours, and tell me
Where are wine and ladies in such ample supply?
If you know a better party in the Southwest
Protectorate,
Tell us and we’ll drop on by
(Right after this one)
Tell us and we’ll drop on by.
He reached the other side, adjusted the knapsack and began to trudge toward a distant clump of trees. After a few hundred yards he decided to look back after all. They still watched him and their hush now was a part of the same that hung over all the scrubland. The morning’s sun bleached their faces a Fasching-white he remembered seeing in another place. They gazed across the ravine dehumanized and aloof, as if they were the last gods on Earth.
Two miles farther on at a fork in the road he met a Bondel riding on a donkey. The Bondel had lost his right arm. “All over,” he said. “Many Bondels dead, baases dead, van Wijk dead. My woman, younkers dead.” He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn’t know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel’s scarred back. They seemed the only three animate objects on the yellow road which led, he knew, sooner or later, to the Atlantic. The sunlight was immense, the plateau country wide, and Mondaugen felt little and lost in the dun-colored waste. Soon as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest Ganna bush. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn’t understand it.
chapter ten
In which various
sets of young
people get
together
V
I
McClintic Sphere, whose horn man was soloing, stood by the empty piano, looking off at nothing in particular. He was half listening to the music (touching the keys of his alto now and again, as if by sympathetic magic to make that natural horn develop the idea differently, some way Sphere thought could be better) and half watching the customers at the tables.
This was last set and it’d been a bad week for Sphere. Some of the colleges were let out and the place had been crowded with these types who liked to talk to each other a lot. Every now and again, they’d invite him over to a table between sets and ask him what he thought about other altos. Some of them would go through the old Northern liberal routine: look at me, I’ll sit with anybody. Either that or they would say: “Hey fella, how about ‘Night Train’?” Yes, bwana. Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol’ Uncle McClintic, he play you de finest “Night Train” you evah did hear. An’ aftah de set he gwine take dis ol’ alto an’ shove it up yo’ white Ivy League ass.
The horn wanted to finish off: he’d been tired all week as Sphere. They took fours with the drummer, stated the main thyme in unison and left the stand.
The bums stood outside like a receiving line. Spring had hit New York all warm and aphrodisiac. Sphere found his Triumph in the lot, got in and took off uptown. He heeded to relax.
Half an hour later he was in Harlem, in a friendly rooming (and in a sense cat) house run by one Matilda Winthrop, who was little and wizened and looked like any elderly little lady you might see in the street, going along with gentle steps in the waning afternoon to look for spleens and greens at the market.
“She’s up there,” Matilda said, with a smile for everybody, even musicians with a headful of righteous moss who were making money and drove sports cars. Sphere shadow-boxed with her for a few minutes. She had better reflexes than he did.
The girl was sitting on the bed, smoking and reading a western. Sphere tossed his coat on a chair. She moved over to make room for him, dog-eared a page, put the book on the floor. Soon he was telling her about the week, about the kids with money who used him for background music and the musicians from other bigger groups, also with money, who were cautious and had mixed reactions and the few who couldn’t really afford dollar beers at the V-Note but did or wanted to understand except that the space they might have occupied was already taken up by the rich kids and musicians. He told it all into the pillow and she rubbed his back with amazingly gentle hands. Her name, she said, was Ruby but he didn’t believe that. Soon:
“Do you ever dig what I’m trying to say,” he wondered.
“On the horn I don’t,” she answered, honest enough, “a girl doesn’t understand. All she does is feel. I feel what you play, like I feel what you need when you’re inside me. Maybe they’re the same thing. McClintic, I don’t know. You’re kind to me, what is it you want?”
“Sorry,” he said. After a while, “This is a good way to relax.”
“Stay tonight?”
“Sure.”
Slab and Esther, uncomfortable with each other, stood in front of an easel in his place, looking at Cheese Danish No. 35. The cheese Danish was a recent obsession of Slab’s. He had taken, some time ago, to painting in a frenzy these morning-pastries in every conceivable style, light and setting. The room was already littered with Cubist, Fauve and Surrealist cheese Danishes. “Monet spent his declining years at his home in Giverny, painting the water lilies in the garden pool,” reasoned Slab. “He painted all kinds of water lilies. He liked water lilies. These are my declining years. I like cheese Danishes, they have kept me alive now for longer than I can remember. Why not.”
The subject of Cheese Danish No. 35 occupied only a small area, to the lower left of center, where it was pictured impaled on one of the metal steps of a telephone pole. The landscape was an empty street, drastically foreshortened, the only living things in it a tree in the middle distance, on which perched an ornate bird, busily textured with a great many swirls, flourishes and bright-colored patches.
“This,” explained Slab in answer to her question, “is my revolt against Catatonic Expressionism: the universal symbol I have decided will replace the Cross in Western civilization. It is the Partridge in the Pear Tree. You remember the old Christmas song, which is a linguistic joke. Perdrix, pear tree. The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. The partridge eats pears off the tree, and his droppings in turn nourish the tree which grows higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at the same time assuring him of a continuous supply of food. It is perpetual motion, except for one thing.” He pointed out a gargoyle with sharp fangs near the top of the picture. The point of the largest fang lay on an imaginary line projected parallel to the axis of the tree and drawn through the head of the bird. “It could as well have been a low-flying airplane or high-tension wire,” Slab said. “But someday that bird will be impaled on the gargoyle’s teeth, just like the poor cheese Danish is already on the phone pole.”
“Why can’t he fly away?” Esther said.
“He is too stupid. He used to know how to fly once, but he’s forgotten.”
“I detect allegory in all this,” she said.
“No,” said Slab. “That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of You.”
She’d wandered to the bed. “No,” he almost yelled.
“Slab, it’s so bad. It’s a physical pain, here.” She drew her fingers across her abdomen
“I’m not getting any either,” said Slab. “I can’t help it that Schoenmaker cut you off.”
“Aren’t I your friend?”
“No,” said Slab.
“What can I do to show you—”
“Go,” said Slab, “is what you can do. And let me sleep. In my chaste army cot. Alone.” He crawled to the bed and lay facedown. Soon Esther left, forgetting to close the door. Not being
the type to slam doors on being rejected.
Roony and Rachel sat at the bar of a neighborhood tavern on Second Avenue. Over in the corner an Irishman and a Hungarian were yelling at each other over the bowling game.
“Where does she go at night,” Roony wondered.
“Paola is a strange girl,” said Rachel. “You learn after a while not to ask her questions she doesn’t want to answer.”
“Maybe seeing Pig.”
“No. Pig Bodine lives at the V-Note and the Rusty Spoon. He has a letch for Paola a mile long but he reminds her too much, I think, of Pappy Hod. The Navy has a certain way of endearing itself. She stays away from him and it’s killing him and I for one am glad to see it.”
It’s killing me, Winsome wanted to say. He didn’t. Lately he’d been running for comfort to Rachel. He’d come in a way to depend on it. Her sanity and aloofness from the Crew, her own self-sufficiency drew him. But he was no nearer to arranging any assignation with Paola. Perhaps he was afraid of Rachel’s reaction. He was beginning to suspect she was not the sort who approved of pimping for one’s roommate. He ordered another boilermaker.
“Roony, you drink too much,” she said. “I worry about you.”
“Nag, nag, nag.” He smiled.
II
Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended. Across one of the laboratory spaces, features lit Frankenstein’s-monsterlike by a night light, facing Profane, sat SHROUD: synthetic human, radiation output determined.
Its skin was cellulose acetate butyrate, a plastic transparent not only to light but also to X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Its skeleton had once been that of a living human; now the bones were decontaminated and the long ones and spinal column hollowed inside to receive radiation dosimeters. SHROUD was five feet nine inches tall—the fiftieth percentile of Air Force standards. The lungs, sex organs, kidneys, thyroid, liver, spleen and other internal organs were hollow and made of the same clear plastic as the body shell. These could be filled with aqueous solutions which absorbed the same amount of radiation as the tissue they represented.
Anthroresearch Associates was a subsidiary of Yoyodyne. It did research for the government on the effects of high-altitude and space flight; for the National Safety Council on automobile accidents; and for Civil Defense oil radiation absorption, which was where SHROUD came in. In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40 percent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Such at least was Oley Bergomask’s notion of progress. It was the subject of his welcome-aboard lecture on Profane’s first day of employment, at five in the afternoon as Profane was going on and Bergomask off. There were two eight-hour night shifts, early and late (though Profane, whose time scale was skewed toward the past, preferred to call them late and early) and Profane to date had worked them both.
Three times a night he had to make the rounds of the lab areas, windows and heavy equipment. If an all-night routine experiment was in progress he’d have to take readings and if they were out of tolerance wake up the technician on duty, who’d usually be sleeping on a cot in one of the offices. At first there’d been a certain interest in visiting the accident research area, which was jokingly referred to as the chamber of horrors. Here weights were dropped on aged automobiles, inside which would be sitting a manikin. The study now under way had to do with first-aid training, and various versions of SHOCK—synthetic human object, casualty kinematics—got to sit in the driver’s, death, or back seat of the test cars. Profane still felt a certain kinship with SHOCK, which was the first inanimate schlemihl he’d ever encountered. But in there too was a certain wariness because the manikin was still only a “human object”; plus a feeling of disdain as if SHOCK had decided to sell out to humans; so that now what had been its inanimate own were taking revenge.
SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes cosmetic-plastic, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 19 percent of the American population, most of them respectable. Inside were a blood reservoir in the thorax, a blood pump in the midsection and a nickel-cadmium battery power supply in the abdomen. The control panel, at the side of the chest, had toggles and rheostat controls for venous and arterial bleeding, pulse rate, and even respiration rate, when a sucking chest wound was involved. In the latter case plastic lungs provided the necessary suction and bubbling. They were controlled by an air pump in the abdomen, with the motor’s cooling vent located in the crotch. An injury of the sexual organs could still be simulated by an attachable moulage, but then this blocked the cooling vent. SHOCK could not therefore have a sucking chest wound and mutilated sexual organs simultaneously. A new retrofit, however, eliminated this difficulty, which was felt to be a basic design deficiency.
SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he’d got used to it. The only thing at Anthroresearch that still fazed him a little was SHROUD, whose face was a human skull that looked at you through a more-or-less abstracted butyrate head.
It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped in front of SHROUD.
“What’s it like,” he said.
Better than you have it.
“Wha.”
Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.)
“There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents.”
But those are most likely. If somebody else doesn’t do it to you, you’ll do it to yourselves.
“You don’t even have a soul. How can you talk.”
Since when did you ever have one? What are you doing, getting religion? All I am is a dry run. They take readings off my dosimeters. Who is to say whether I’m here so the people can read the meters or whether the radiation in me is because they have to measure. Which way does it go?
“It’s one way,” said Profane. “All one way.”
Mazel tov. (Maybe the hint of a smile?)
Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the plot of Existentialist Sheriff. After a while he got up and went over to SHROUD. “What do you mean, we’ll be like you and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?”
Am I dead? If I am then that’s what I mean.
“If you aren’t then what are you?”
Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.
“I don’t understand.”
So I see. But you’re not alone. That’s a comfort isn’t it?
To hell with it. Profane went back to the guardroom and busied himself making coffee.
III
The next weekend there was a party at Raoul, Slab and Melvin’s. The Whole Sick Crew was there.
At one in the morning Roony and Pig started a fight.
“Son of a bitch,” Roony yelled. “You keep your hands off her.”
“His wife,” Esther informed Slab. The Crew had withdrawn to the walls, leaving Pig and Roony most of the floor space. Both were drunk and sweating. They wrestled around, stumbling and inexpert, trying to fight like a western movie. It is incredible how many amateur brawlers believe the movie s
aloon fight is the only acceptable model to follow. At last Pig dropped Roony with a fist to the abdomen. Roony just lay there, eyes closed, trying to hold down his breathing because it hurt. Pig wandered out to the kitchen. The fight had been over a girl but both of them knew her name was Paola, not Mafia.
“I don’t hate the Jewish people,” Mafia was explaining, “only the things they do.” She and Profane were alone in her apartment. Roony was out drinking. Perhaps seeing Eigenvalue. It was the day after the fight. She didn’t seem to care where her husband was.
All at once Profane got a marvelous idea. She wanted to keep Jews out? Maybe half a Jew could get in.
She beat him to it: her hand reached for his belt buckle and started to unfasten it.
“No,” he said, having changed his mind. Needing a zipper to undo, her hands slid away, around her hips to the back of her skirt. “Now look.”
“I need a man,” already half out of the skirt, “fashioned for Heroic Love. I’ve wanted you ever since we met.”
“Heroic Love’s ass,” said Profane. “You’re married.”
Charisma was having nightmares in the next room. He started thumping around under the green blanket, flailing out at the elusive shadow of his own Persecutor.
“Here,” she said, lower half denuded, “here on the rug.”
Profane got up and rooted around in the icebox for beer. Mafia lay on the floor, screaming at him.
“Here yourself.” He set a can of beer on her soft abdomen. She yelped, knocking it over. The beer made a soggy spot on the rug between them, like a bundling board or Tristan’s blade. “Drink your beer and tell me about Heroic Love.” She was making no move to get dressed.
V. Page 32
