The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Yeah, San Francisco!” Ted shouted, up on his haunches again. “That’s a groovy town.”

  “You’ve been to San Francisco, Ted?” Harvey said. “Yes, it is more relaxed and... But I think it’s more interesting to see how it struck a New Yorker.” The rank odor of fish suddenly filled the air. Harvey had pounced pretty quick on San Francisco. There was definitely some kind of mindgame being played here...

  “Well, it’s the most beautiful city in the country,” Ted said. “I mean, beautiful the way a city is beautiful, not a mess like LA. It’s as much a city as New York, except it’s smaller, cleaner and it’s... you know, part of the land. All those great hills, and you can see the Bay from most parts of town if you climb the nearest hill. I dunno... it seems... slower, more relaxed, less uptight. Funky, y’know? The houses have character. And from what I saw, living is more... possible.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Rhoda-in-front-of-me (Steiner, yeah, that was her name) said.

  “Just less hassle about everything,” Ted said. “You don’t have to put down a big deposit to get the gas and electric turned on, you don’t have to pay some fucking agent a month’s rent and a month’s security to get a good cheap pad, and the apartments are better than what you’d get for the same bread here. Just less hassle.”

  Harvey took a puff on his cigarette. Behind the glasses, his eyes got dreamy (or was it an act?). He blew smoke out slowly and said: “Yes... I’ve lived there. You could rent a big house up on a hill, two floors at least, with a garden and a view, for what this loft costs here. An open kind of place where you can feel a part of the land....”

  “Yeah,” said Ted, “living in San Francisco is just an opener, groovier feeling.”

  “So what’re you doing back here?” Arlene said. Man, she just would not let go! She seemed to be taking all the put-downs of New York as if they were put-downs of her. I couldn’t quite see why, but I was beginning to see how I could use it to score points with her....

  Ted sat back down. “I dunno...” he said. “Look, I’m here because I’ve got a consciousness problem, right? So something made me leave San Francisco, maybe something that New York did to me, like Harvey says. Maybe... maybe if I had something like the Foundation in San Francisco, it would’ve been different, I dunno....”

  “You think the Foundation would’ve helped you to adjust to living outside New York?” Harvey said.

  His eyes seemed hooded for a moment; he had said that awful fast, had leaped to Ted’s conclusion. No doubt about it now, he was playing Ted like a fish. There was nothing freeform about this meeting at all—Harvey was controlling it all the way. But he was doing it strictly with bank-shots, mainly off Ted. But what was he up to?

  “Well... I guess so...” Ted said. He laughed nervously. “Shit, if the Foundation can do me good in a crazy place like New York, it really oughta work in a place like San Francisco, right?”

  “You think that the Foundation would be better off in San Francisco,” Harvey said, real supercool.

  Click! Sure, that was it, that was the capper, that was no question. Harvey had maneuvered Ted right to that conclusion. That was what this meeting was all about. Harvey wanted the creeps to think that they had gotten the idea that the whole freakshow would be better off in San Francisco. But what was his percentage...?

  “Never really thought about it...” Ted said. “But... yeah, why not? We could sure have a better place for the Foundation... and I think the town might be better for our minds—”

  I studied faces around the room—here and there I could see the idea lighting up the empty space behind some eyes. Rich Rossi. Linda Kahn. Tod Spain and his chick Judy. Some kid named Johnny, looked like a reformed acid-head. Bill Nelson, boy Welfare Investigator. The younger ones, the ones with less to lose. But Doris had that look on her face that said: “Here goes Ted on one of his fantasy trips.” And when I looked back at Arlene, her jaw was clenched, and she was really scowling, very uptight.

  “Well, it’s a thought anyway,” Harvey muttered (was it an act?). “I don’t know how I’d feel about going back to San Francisco, but—”

  Ah-hah! “Hey Harvey,” I yelled, cutting through the murmuring that had sprung up, “you just said something about going back to San Francisco. You’ve lived there?”

  I could feel a certain tension in the room now; I had played the game Harvey had been playing all along: reached for control of the flow of things by seeming not to control, by asking a leading questions. Suddenly it was me and Harvey playing some kind of game mano a mano, and everyone else felt like an audience.

  “I believe I said that,” Harvey said evenly. Yeah, he sensed what was happening. “Now the point is—”

  “How long did you live in San Francisco?” I said.

  “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  I smiled, playing to the bleachers. “We’re supposed to just free-associate, right? Follow things where they want to go and not try to... control them, right? So let’s see where I’m going, okay?”

  I thought I could almost see anger in Harvey’s eyes. Almost. But he didn’t dare show emotion; he was trapped in his own chosen image of the Unmoved Mover.

  “Yeah, come on Harvey,” Blum said, “you keep putting down New York. What’s your thing with San Francisco?”

  “I was merely using San Francisco and New York as examples,” Harvey said. “The interesting thing is some people’s reactions. Have you noticed how some of you have been defending New York? As if you were defending you own sense of—”

  “Come on, man!” I shouted. “Answer a simple question. How long did you live in San Francisco? What are you afraid of?”

  I got a lot of funny looks. But Harvey was getting a few too, and more to the point, Arlene was eating me up with her eyes. Harvey puffed on his cigarette, sizing up the situation. The vibes I was getting told me that if he tried to get off the hook again, he would be in a little trouble: he was starting to show his own feelings, and that could blow his image.

  But Harvey was too good to make that mistake. “As a matter of fact,” he said with a cool I had to admire, “I’m a native San Franciscan. I lived there more often than not till I came to New York five years ago.”

  A moment of dead silence as that sunk in. A few people—Doris, O’Brien, Bill Nelson, Blum maybe—were getting the message. Arlene’s eyes had narrowed: like a handful of the others, she had gotten a flash of some personal motivation behind Harvey’s Buddha-mask. Maybe she was starting to think. Maybe I could ram it home....

  “You’ve been riffing about how New York’s done things to our heads, Harvey,” I said. “The obvious question is, what’s San Francisco done to yours?” Harvey smiled.

  “Very good, Tom,” he said, as if I had just shown myself to be the prize pupil. “You do seem to understand that any environment will deeply affect the consciousness of anyone who lives in it. Which is what we’ve really been talking about, not the relative merits of San Francisco and New York. Arlene felt the need to defend New York because her sense of identity is deeply bound up with this city. Probably the average San Franciscan would defend San Francisco in the same way. But I don’t feel compelled to do so because I’ve achieved enough consciousness to rid myself of environmental fixations. And you’ll all be able to do the same eventually—whether the Foundation stays here or actually moves to San Francisco—because the goal of the Foundation is Total Consciousness and the truly conscious individual transcends his external environment.”

  He paused, ground out his cigarette in the ashtray under his chair, got up, and said: “Well, I think I’ve done enough lecturing for one night. Let’s just relax and digest what we’ve heard.”

  And that was it, the end of the meeting. He had gotten by me as easily as that. Old Harv was still master on his own turf.

  The meeting became just a roomful of people rapping with each other. But an awful lot of the conversation seemed to be about the same thing: San Francisco. A bunch of people—
Rich, Linda, Tod and Judy, Blum, Bonnie Elbert, and of course Doris—gathered around Ted who was really wound up in the wonders of San Fran. And when Ted got started talking, a lot of people started listening. A second group—older types like Ida, O’Brien, Charley, Rhoda Steiner—were listening to Harvey talk about the same thing. But the roles were reversed—they were doing most of the talking and Harvey was playing the Reluctant Dragon. All very fishy indeed. I had no desire to join in. I looked for Arlene, saw her walking out of the room and down the hallway, and threaded my way through the mob scene towards her.

  Arlene was standing at the far end of the hallway, her back to the window. By the way she smiled when she spotted me, I knew that she had been waiting to talk to me alone.

  “Hello,” she said, as I took her hands, feeling the center of her body swaying subtly towards me.

  “Hello yourself.”

  “Just what were you trying to do in there?” she asked. But behind her glasses, her eyes were more possessive than hostile.

  “You know what I was doing. You were trying to do it yourself.”

  She turned her eyes downward. “I did get the feeling Harvey was trying... trying... I don’t know what.” She looked up at me. “You were way ahead of me,” she said. “You still are. I don’t know... maybe Harvey could be right... I did feel awful uptight when Ted started putting down New York. Probably New York is involved with my sense of identity, so when someone attacks New York, I feel they’re attacking me. I almost felt you were defending me.”

  “Purely intentional,” I said.

  We smiled at each other silently for a moment.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “intellectually, I can realize that we’re both wrong and Harvey’s right. But I felt I was right, and I felt good when you took my side, and for that, sick or not, I thank you.”

  She paused, stood absolutely still for a moment, then suddenly leaned forward and gave me a big open-mouthed kiss.

  “And I’d like to thank you for it at your place,” she said. Her eyes made it clear that I had come out of the meeting with what I had gone in there for after all.

  10 - Naked To My Friends

  Sitting beside her on the couch in the soft orange light, I looked at Arlene Cooper, her hair all bronzed, her body inviting under the green dress, and tried to understand the reality that existed behind the glossy green eyes behind the glasses. It occurred to me, almost shamefully, that I had never really tried to get inside her. I had manipulated her machinery—successfully once, unsuccessfully once, now maybe successfully again—but I had no notion of why her head worked the way it did.

  “Girl,” I said, making no move to touch her yet, “would it shock you to hear that I have no idea of where you’re really at?”

  She slowly took off her glasses and made a thing of putting them on the table, shrugged in a way that made her loose blonde hair bounce provocatively against her shoulders, said: “That makes two of us.”

  She leaned back against the big cushion that backed the couch, and angled her body in the general direction of my shoulder, though holding back from actually touching me. She seemed to be doing it quite deliberately, as if this were her way of saying “Shut up and fuck.” Perversely, though this was exactly what I had intended to do all the way down from the Foundation to my pad, I didn’t want to do it that way now; something inside was telling me that it was time I really go to know this chick. I didn’t want to fuck her now; I wanted to make love to her. She was a bad fuck—but if we could make it as lovers, if our minds were in the same place as our bodies, might it not be a whole new ball game?

  “What about me?” I said. “Do you understand me?”

  “I understand what you do to me,” she said. She leaned her head on my shoulder. I felt her sigh against me but I sensed a tension behind the sigh; she wasn’t letting go, she was pretending to let go.

  “What do I do to you?”

  “Aw, come on....” A nervous false laugh.

  “No, really. And I’m not talking about what you think I’m talking about. What did I do to you tonight, at the Foundation...?”

  She lifted her head and stared into my eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she said. I didn’t move a muscle; just sat there staring into her eyes, digging my reflection in them. Almost like an animal who isn’t supposed to be able to look a man in the eye, she refocused her vision on a point somewhere to the side of my head. It occurred to me that this chick really didn’t know how to be with a man at all. It was either all talk or all sex and neither communicated anything below the surface.

  “I guess you... spoke for me,” she said. “Spoke for a part of me, I mean.”

  “The part of you that doesn’t really believe that Harvey Brustein is the Living Buddha?”

  She nodded. “I think that’s why you get to me,” she said. “I feel there’s a part of me that’s always wanted to be the way you are. But I don’t know whether it’s the sick part of me or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or... or something inside me screaming to get out. The me I’d be if I dared to...”

  She smiled, ran a finger along the line of my jaw. “You know what I envy you?” she said. “I envy you your center.”

  “My what?”

  “Your center. Deep inside you, there’s a core of certainty. You may not know where the world is at, but you know who you are.”

  “That’s news to me,” I said truthfully.

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “Maybe you know who you are but don’t know you know.... How could you have gotten yourself off heroin otherwise? How could you... have put up with what I put you through last time we...? I mean, a man who had uncertainty at his center... would’ve... blamed himself for the bad time we had in bed. Every man I’ve ever made it with has turned away from me afterward... because of the way I hurt them, I guess.... But you...”

  I put my arm around her. She put her hand on my hair, began toying with it. I felt that she really had something to tell me about myself that she understood better than I did; it was a beautiful and unexpected feeling. And I felt that if I could really let her give me something of value, I would be giving her something she needed, too.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I really don’t.”

  She smiled. “I believe you. You don’t have to understand what you are because you... are. I’m not. There’s no center inside me. That’s why I go to the Foundation, I suppose. If I can understand why I am the way I am, maybe I can find my center the hard way.”

  I was beginning to understand her. She was chasing something that didn’t exist for a woman alone—or so good old male ego told me.

  “Did you ever think that maybe all you’re missing is a man?” I said.

  She stiffened. “Oh come on, you don’t have to hand me a line. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Are you? Really here? Look, you’ve never had a real thing with a man, have you? So maybe that sense of certainty you’re knocking yourself out chasing is something a woman can only find with a man. How would you know?”

  She stared at me; her lower lip trembled. Then I felt her body relax. “I think I understand,” she said. “I... I push men away, don’t I?”

  “You don’t exactly welcome them in. Did you ever think that maybe you don’t have a sex problem?”

  Blank stare.

  “Know what I think?” I said, riffing the wisdom of the universe off the top of my head. “I think you’d be just fine in bed if it weren’t for this ‘center’ bullshit. It’s not that you can’t let yourself go, it’s that you don’t want to. You think you’re empty inside so you’re afraid of really letting a man in all the way because you’re afraid he might just fill the void inside with himself.”

  She stared at me, real wonder in her eyes. “That’s the deepest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she whispered.

  “Even Harvey?”

  “Even Harvey,” she said humorlessly.

  “Okay, that’ll be fifty bucks for the first
hour. I’ll even carry it a step further. You’re hung up in a circle. You won’t let a man all the way inside because you’re afraid he’ll fill the void. Thing is, he would. But that’s what you’re really looking for. You need a real lover, is all. A woman needs a real thing with a man at her center; it is her center. But you’ve gotta go into the center of your fear. You’ve gotta trust a man.”

  Wow! I knocked myself out. Where in hell did all that come from? The words just seemed to pour out, as if... as if that certainty she claimed I had at my core really existed and had done the talking. Christ, we were really into it now: drawing things out of each other that neither had believed was there.

  “Trust me,” I said, taking her hands.

  “I’ll try. But I’m afraid... I’m really afraid....”

  So am I, baby, so am I. Magic was loose in the world.

  “That’s a good sign,” I told her. “If two people don’t scare each other a little, they’re not really alive to each other.”

  “Are you afraid too?”

  I nodded, feeling naked before her for the first time. It felt scary. It felt good.

  “Let’s go into the bedroom,” she said, her lower lip trembling, her eyes moist and shining.

  I got up, pulled her gently to her feet. I kissed her ever so lightly on the lips. “I dig a woman who can scare me a little,” I said.

  For the first time since Anne, I felt myself poised on the brink of the infinite possible, walking naked into a situation with a woman where I was really vulnerable, not in control. And grooving behind it.

  No words as we went into the bedroom. The alarm was set for eight, and she knew it this time; the magic building in the air between us did not have to be broken by logistical hassles.

  When I turned on the night table lamp, her hand moved toward the switch, then hesitated, went back to her side. She smiled at me; a sardonic little smile. I smiled back, letting her know I understood what a little victory that moment was for her, for us.