Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  Stuck in the anti-universe, still the Red Beards did not give up. They had faith in the potentiality of earthlings. Maybe they felt that alone in the universe we here on earth (perhaps because of our close proximity and special relationship to our moon) possess the humor, the playfulness, the romantic sentiment, the general warm and honorable looniness to counteract the rigid solar efficiency of the Yellow Beards. Surely the Red Beards would not accept that the pyramids have been built in vain. Therefore, they attempted to reestablish contact with earth. Of necessity, communication would have to be telepathic. And it would have to rely primarily on simple visual symbolism. Since the so-called anti-universe is a mirror image of the so-called universe, words would be reversed as they crossed from one dimension to the other, and language, even when translations were faithful, would make no sense at all.

  So the Red Beards beamed their telepathic vectors into earthly dimensions. Only a few humans responded, and they exclusively redheads—maybe a trace of racial memory, an ancient residue of Argonian DNA remained in their genes—and the response was far from desirable. Reception of the extra-dimensional transmissions confused them and frequently brought them grief. For example, Vincent van Gogh, the most famous redhead omitted from the Twelve-Most-Famous-Redheads list, took to painting vases, chairs, stars, etc. as if they embodied the life force, which they likely do; as if there were vibratory fields, auras, around them, which there probably are, but everybody thought poor Vincent on the weird end of the banana, and eventually he was driven to take his own life. After several centuries of similar failures, the Red Beards refined their technique. They began to concentrate on a specific redheaded individual with a specific end in mind. Thus, they were able to influence Thomas Jefferson, an ideal receptor because of his wide-ranging sensibility, to affix a pyramid to the first American paper money issued since colonial days. When, after a century, that play hadn’t turned any big tricks, they beamed to the brain of a redheaded lithographer a more ambitious transmission.

  The Red Beards had established a telepathic broadcast path, a channel that cut directly and deliberately through Washington, D.C., the most important of world capitals. Development of Camel cigarettes was occurring, fortuitously, within the mainstream of that channel. In 1913, most smokers rolled their own. Manufactured brands were just barely catching on, and while Fatima in Boston and Philadelphia, and Picayune in New Orleans were gaining appeal, Camel was to be the first cigarette to shoot for national (later, international) distribution. Moreover, R. J. Reynolds’s recipe for Camels called for a substantial amount of sweetener. Sugar, like lust, accentuates the reddish pigment in the hair and/or freckles of lunar-oriented people, especially when they’re exposed to direct sunlight. Leigh-Cheri had learned that from bona fide Argonians.

  All right. Now we’re cooking, now we’re dressing this alligator in gold lamé. There was something else about the new cigarette that made its package the ideal medium for a Red Beard communiqué. It already was wed to a potent symbology.

  The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our “hump”—that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable—that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. The camel symbolized a lunar truth, totemized a Red Beard lesson concerning survival in the desert, the desert being solar territory, any landscape bullied by the sun.

  Transmitting to the receptive antenna on the red roof of the nameless lithographer, the Red Beards saw to it that palm trees were included on the package, for the date palm, essential to those who must dwell in deserts, underscored the symbolism of the camel itself. Every desert has its oasis, there is nourishment and shade to be found in the most barren environs if one knows where to look. Aware that hard times were coming in the last quarter of the twentieth century, times of shortages, pollutions, political betrayals, sexual confusions, and spiritual famine, the Red Beards, via the cigarette package, were projecting a moon ray through our sooty curtains. A ray of encouragement and hope.

  Satisfied with the placement of the camel and the palm trees, the Red Beards turned their attention to their main concern, the pyramid. They considered the pyramid vital to the continuing evolution of earthlings, and they desired to confront earthlings with pyramids as often as possible. So successful was their telepathic prodding of the lithographer that not one but two pyramids appeared on the Camel pack.

  Since the fellow was still tuned in, and responding beautifully, thank you, the Red Beards also had him work into the design a naked woman, representative of the Moon Goddess, the Great Mother, the feminine principal of creation, growth, change and renewal. The Moon Goddess is the oldest recorded and most universally common deity, and it was only fitting that her abiding fertility make its presence felt in the desert on the pack. It was the Moon Mother, perhaps, who was behind the regenerative power of the pyramids. She symbolized that power, certainly. In order not to spoil the composition, she was rendered most subtly on the package, hidden in the yellow and brown coloration in the left forequarter of the dromedary. That was apropos, for this Queen of Love, this giver of fantasies and dreams, this Shepherdess of the Stars, this healer and nurturer of all life had always made herself manifest in subtle and mysterious ways. As a reminder that the Moon Queen is ever threatened by the Solar King (we witness this cosmic drama monthly as the waning moon is consumed by the light of the sun), a yellow-maned lion, the ancient and prevalent solar symbol, was also hidden in the body of the camel, above and to the right of the woman.

  That should have done it, that should have made the Camel pack a vessel of symbolic truth unprecedented in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a virtual lunar Bible, compact, accessible, and concise, as befitting a transistorized age. But the Red Beards, excited now, had a masterpiece by the tail and didn’t want to turn it loose. They decided to take a further, daring step. They would try sending a word from their dimension into ours.

  How carefully was that word chosen!

  The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.

  The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.

  The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.

  The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.

  The word that fires evolution’s motor of mud.

  The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.

  The word that molecules recite before bonding.

  The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.

  The word no mirror can turn around.

  In the beginning was the word and the word was

  CHOICE

  70

  DOWNSTAIRS —outside—all around—the world went on wobbling and warbling through space, like a jukebox in a canoe, oblivious to her theorizing. The talk out there was of oil and nukes, of prices and wages, of ball scores and celebrities, of careers and illness, of, in a thousand clumsy and evasive ways, how to make love stay. A millionaire had died in a secretary’s bed. Horticulturists announced the development of a square watermelon. Someone in Beverly Hills opened a disco for dogs.

  On the shores of Puget Sound, October had come in like a lamb chop, breaded in golden crumbs and gently sautéed in a splash of blue oil. Indian summer, some characterized it, incorrectly, for technically, Indian summer must follow a frost, and there hadn’t been a sign of frost since that freak freeze back in April. Rather, it was an extension of summer, summer had uncoiled and stretched itself out, like the garter snakes that, having heard no call to hibernate
, still sunned themselves in the blackberry patch; snakes, all belt and no pants, startled from their prolonged laze only by the occasional fall of a berry, grown fat as a dove’s egg and black as a curse in this longest of summers.

  The confectionary odor of rotting blackberries wafted to the attic windows on breezes off the Sound, a mixture of sugar smell and salt smell that could bring out the renifleur in the primmest nostril. But the attic was shut tight, and no berry scent got in, nor did the dinosaurian squawk of the mallards, taking their time this autumn flying south. One noise that normally did penetrate the attic, the muffled raves and roars of the sporting world that leaked up through two ceilings and two floors from Max’s television, was also absent. If it was strange that there was no rain that October, the lack of football cheers was stranger yet, so strange that Leigh-Cheri pried her gaze from the Camel package to ask Gulietta about it on successive weekends, but the old woman fed Prince Charming flies and could not or would not reply.

  Truth was, King Max continued to spend his waking hours in front of the Magnavox. He merely neglected to turn it on.

  In his homeland, the royalist revolutionaries were steam-rolling. A month, six weeks at the most, the junta would crumble. For thirty years, he had dreamed, in secret and with scarcely a dab of hope, of the restoration of the monarchy. Now that skinny, furtive dream was about to come true. Only they didn’t want him to be their king. There were archaic grievances against him, grudges held over like this same quasi-summer, from his previous rule. In addition, the younger revolutionary leaders felt that he had compromised with the CIA. His queen’s ties to the Vatican were suspected and scorned. What his country had in mind was a socialist monarchy, somewhat on the order of Sweden or Denmark, a bit to the left of England and considerably to the left of Max. Max would be welcomed home. He would be awarded the summer palace and its grounds on the lake. An allowance substantially more luxurious than that paid him by the Americans would be granted. Tilli would preside over the opera, as she had in the past, and weekends his old cronies would gather for grouse shoots and cards. But he would not be head of state.

  Someone different, someone fresh was needed, they explained. They intended to shuffle the deck. None of his worthless sons was considered. Too many scandals among them, too many land swindles, stock frauds, casino brawls, and public displays of greed. Leigh-Cheri was the Furstenberg-Barcalona they had settled on. Young and bright and beautiful, with a strong social conscience, Leigh-Cheri would be a perfect figurehead for the new regime. Yet, unsavory stories now circulated about her, too. In Europe, in the midst of the fighting, they’d heard that she’d lost her head over a common convict. That she’d locked herself in an empty attic and wouldn’t even come out to poop. They read in the gossip columns that she was “tragic.” They wondered if “daffy” might not be the word.

  Max longed to reassure them. How could he honestly do so? He had climbed to that attic. He had observed her, naked, dirty, and alone, yet shining with contentment, talking about “interests” when there were none to be seen.

  So Max sat before a silent Magnavox, his long equine head nodding at a frozen screen.

  Perhaps to the old king the screen was not empty. Perhaps he saw there, in colors more vivid than a picture tube could reproduce, the rich pageantry of his former life. Maybe he saw himself on horseback, a chestful of medals reflecting the noonday sun. Saw himself, silver saber skyward, reviewing his troops. Saw the steaming funnels of his small but seaworthy fleet. Saw the pheasant in aspic, the broad hams, the trouts in sauce, the crystal goblets awaiting wine. Dukes he saw and earls; barons and prime ministers, presidents, princes, and potentates; ambassadors, the tips of their mustaches twinkling with exotic waxes, the tips of their tongues slippery with familiar lies. Saw the white teeth of ladies, their cigarette holders of ivory and onyx, their beaded handbags concealing tiny bottles of custom-made French perfumes, and what mere king could imagine the exact kinds of laces and satins they wore beneath their gowns, next to lotioned loins? Grand parades clattered down grand boulevards (he saw this on the cold TV), private railway cars rolled through luminous acres of wheat, opera houses were strung with lights for Christmas, fine hounds pursued the fox. In Gothic state houses, the stylized din of legislation jostled the chandeliers. And late at night, in windowless rooms carpeted with the richest art of Persia’s looms, over mellowed brandy and Havana cigars, the real governments convened. Strong men with wide educations and polished wits met to gossip, grapple, and plot. They spoke of precious metals, of rail lines and currencies and cattle and corn; they positioned armies at this frontier or that one, raised or lowered tariffs, arranged powerful marriages, made decisions that would affect shopgirls in Budapest or camel jockeys in Kabul. Their voices were low and grave as they pondered intrigues against them, even lower yet musical with mirth as they concocted intrigues against others. To be sure, they acted to enlarge their fortunes as much as to protect the populations who depended upon them, yet, whether the subject was commerce or war, treaties, tributes, or personal perversions of their peers, they, to a man, were consumed by a great, enormous, burning love for the drama of it all, an unrelenting passion for the secret theater of the planet.

  Those days were gone. Now, the world’s decisions were made by smaller men; by gray, faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; committeemen who spoke committee-speak and thought committeethought, men who knew more of dogma than destiny, men who understood production but were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable with a file full of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse. Why, that bandit in black his daughter had dragged home was better fit to rule than any one of them, Communist or Fascist or Christian Democrat, alike as tasteless peas in a poisoned pod.

  It was just as well that they not restore his crown. This was not a time for kings. Nor queens. Let Princess Leigh-Cheri bed down with outlaws, let her moon in an attic if that brought her joy. The gong in his heart was a soft sound now. He wouldn’t respond to the queries of his countrymen. They could keep their honorary titles and their villa on the lake. Gulietta was his single remaining subject, and he’d see to it that she got the money she was due. Max, the once and never more king, would spend the golden October days right where he sat. Awaiting the rains. Awaiting the blackberries that sooner or later, like the anonymous barbarians of the last quarter of the twentieth century, would come slinking through the walls.

  On Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks were to battle the Dallas Cowboys. If he could remember to turn the knob.

  71

  ON THE HUMAN HEAD there are ninety hairs to the square inch. That’s an average. In Leigh-Cheri’s case, there were ninety-three or ninety-four, each redder than the last, and hovering over them, like a UFO over Haleakala, like a pan of bacon over a cook fire, there was a crown. Were they aware of the dangling diadem they might have blazed even redder in their follicles, but not one hair sensed the diamond craft that was considering landing on them, so they collected dust from Saturday bath to Saturday bath and glowed with no special effort. Beneath them, inside the skull, there was activity enough. Indeed, they feared they eventually might be driven as wild as Einstein’s hairs from the reverberations of seemingly preposterous theories.

  Seemingly preposterous? Hairs, you are kind. What was her theory, anyhow, but an elaborate, fanciful, and incredulous reworking of Bernard Mickey Wrangle’s beliefs? The philosophy of CHOICE was outlaw philosophy, insofar as outlaws have philosophy (they are more inclined to have hangovers, herpes, and lousy credit ratings). Determinists who view the universe as an agitation of billiard balls, caroming off one another according to predetermined laws, have always been threatened by “outlaws” who insist on playing the game with their own cues. Laws describe constraint. Their purpose is to control, not to create. The universe adheres to laws only when evolution is static, catching its breath, so to speak. When things start to
change again, when nature returns to its easel, its piano, its typewriter (not a Remington SL3, you better believe), as it has periodically forever, then laws give way to choice. Dullards are law-abiding because they choose not to choose. Outlaws, being less frightened by the bewildering variety of experience, being, in fact, slightly mad for encounters new and extreme, will seek to choose even when no choice readily presents itself. Leigh-Cheri, by this juncture, was familiar enough with outlaws to realize that they are living signposts pointing to Elsewhere, that they are apostles of otherness and agents of CHOICE. So what was her theory except the song of the Woodpecker, bounced a few times too many off bare attic walls? It was the Woodpecker, after all, who introduced her to the Red Beards, who suggested, if jokingly, that they might have ties to Argon.

  Shut up in an attic taking lunatic lessons from a pack of cigarettes and the moon, she obviously got her lover’s smartass ideas all tangled up with some archaic Indian tales and her personal meeting with a couple of self-proclaimed extraterrestrials who smelled like the cedar chests where retired pompon girls stow the prom dresses they’re too old and fat to ever wear again. In her isolation and confusion, she’d decided she’d cracked a coded message from another dimension. But her hairs would have known, wouldn’t they, if she was actually picking up signals from beyond the mirror?