“After that night, the rest was easy. Every morning Dr. Stone came to her room, sat in the green, vinyl visitor’s chair, and Rose told him about her life. She’d just sit on the edge of her bed, eating the stale hospital croissants and drinking her sweet coffee, and talking—she loved to talk, have I mentioned that? And Dr. Stone scribbled his notes and pointed the tape recorder’s microphone at her, and he listened. “Even if there isn’t a God,” Rose asked him one day, “don’t you think it’s necessary to believe in something beyond yourself?”
“But no, in fact, ever since his intern year in the electro-convulsive ward, he hadn’t looked for meaning beyond the wall of his own suffering. “How should I believe in God,” he asked her, “when every day I have the power to destroy his creations?” And Rose looked at him with her sad eyes and said, “You don’t like yourself very much, do you?” And of course, that was the truth, Rose really knew how to find his weak spots and drive the nails right in. Early in his career he’d often thought of making himself the equal of God by injecting himself with a solution of sodium cyanide. Or driving his car off a cliff. Or risking death by AIDS with the prostitutes down on D-Street. You know, he had a gentle-looking face, everyone said that about him, but the thing is, he was secretly a wild man, a man who walked the brink, and every day he got to know Rose better, the closer the fall.
“After a while, it became clear that there was a kind of thing between them. Oh, I don’t mean that Rose actually loved him like he loved her, but I think she liked his mind. She liked to joke around with him. Once, she even asked if he would have wanted to marry her, if they’d met somewhere else, like down in the Gardens in Tenth Sector. And he didn’t hesitate for a second, he said, “Yes, I think I would have.” And she said, “Then it’s too bad I’ve been classified a schizophrenic. I’m still not sure how that happened.” And Dr. Stone violated his oath right then and there, he quoted the secret manual to her: ‘ “If someone asserts that he can see ‘God’ in another person or object, he is schizophrenic, since such assertations are by common assent untrue and anyone making then must be misapprehending the nature of reality.”’
“He confided that in his student days he had injected himself with brain drugs—and many times since. A few micrograms of a specifically designed drug and you could tune the serotonin concentration in the brain, experience a minute or hour of bliss. Or wild euphoria, or sexual exaltation. “Or God,” he told her, “God in a pill—what’s the point in calling it that? Yes, I’ve seen it, but if that’s God, well, it can’t be God, if you know what I mean.” And she provided a quotation of her own, or rather a misquotation: ‘The Tao you see while high on drugs is not the true Tao.’ “Then there is no true Tao,” Dr. Stone said. “The brain drugs activate the same natural neuroactive chemicals you’d find in the cortex of a meditating saint, or in a young girl staring at the roses in the park. Why do you think meditation and biofeedback are illegal? Drugs are drugs—there’s no difference.”
“When he said this, Rose shook her head back and forth so hard her hair snapped like a whip. “Are we nothing more than chemical machines, Doctor?” And he said, “We’re nothing but an interlocking set of subroutines; we’re programmed by the molecules in our brain. There’s nothing more.” ‘But,’ she said, ‘if we choose what molecules to put in our brains, by injection or meditation or faith, we’re still choosing, aren’t we? Isn’t there a spark of soul and free will in everyone?’ And Dr. Stone said, ‘No, certain neurotransmitters fire according to the laws of chemistry, and you call this “choice.” So if you believe in God, I suppose you can’t help it.’ And Rose, she smiled and laughed when he said this, and then she said, ‘Oh, no, Doctor, you’re so wrong!’”
The Napalm Man took a long, thoughtful pull from his bottle, then mumbled into the damp, foggy air, “Free will, Nick? In a way, I think Rose was right; occasionally people have their moments of free will. But it’s a delicate thing, isn’t it? Any moment they might harden up and turn into robots, haven’t I seen it happen? Why do you think I drink this stuff? I’ll tell you why: It’s to keep everyone from turning into machines, it’s the only way. If you’re not careful, the robots will kill real people like Rose or Doctor Stone.”
Story telling on damp, cold nights always made Sarge hungry, so he got up and picked his way across the trash and broken glass littering the alley. In back of the nearby Tenderloin Grill’s kitchen, noisy with shouting cooks and clanging pans, there was a big, blue dumpster spray-painted with the word SARGE. He stood on a couple of piled-up orange crates, rummaging through the dumpster. He must have found something edible, because he stuffed his hands exuberantly down into the pockets of his greatcoat. “Steaks, goddammit!” he announced. “Meat makes the soldier, ya mean?” He was fond of saying that one dumpster could feed at least two people, and one dumpster like this, outside a rich restaurant in the goddamned rich 101st Sector of the Blue Zone, could feed at least ten people in style, which is why he’d put his mark on it, to warn away any bums who stumbled into his alley. According to Sarge, the dumpster was their ration card for the rest of their goddamned lives, and he’d kick the living shit out of anyone who fucked with it. “Chow’s on—look what these assholes have thrown away!”
But no one else seemed to be in the mood that night for cold, half-eaten steaks. While Sarge gobbled his food like a starved dog, the Napalm Man poured more whiskey down his throat. One-Eyed Nick had never seen the old woman eat meat, and as for him, he had to finish his story. “Free will is a delicate thing,” he said, agreeing with what the Napalm Man had said earlier.
Sarge finished his meal, got up, and spat into the fire. The spit hissed, and he ran his finger across his stubbly lip. “Free will bullshit!” he said. He grimaced and spat again. He began picking his teeth. His teeth were in ruins, broken black spikes stinking of decay. “Look at my goddamned teeth!” he said. “Sure, I could get ‘em fixed, dentistry’s free in this zone, isn’t it? But listen up, the goddamned dentists require major bribes to provide anesthesia. You tell me who’s strong enough anymore to have his roots drilled without a little gas or novocaine to numb his fuckin’ nerves and then you can talk to me about free will.”
“The point I’m trying to make,” One-Eyed Nick said, “is that Rose didn’t feel sorry for herself, because she believed she’d freely chosen her life’s work.”
“You mean writing all those dirty poems?” Sarge asked.
The Napalm Man removed his pint of whiskey from his paper bag and held it up to the streetlight. A few dark, rolling ounces remained; he took a careful sip, as if he were nursing it until the story was over. He said, “With her dangerous thinking, I’m surprised Rose could have gotten any of her poems published.”
“You know, that was the problem,” One-Eyed Nick said. “Once—it was during her tenth week on the ward—Dr. Stone asked Rose about this. And she told him, ‘Just after I had graduated from college, the Information Department pushed through a law requiring what was jokingly called “peer review” of all published literature. Do you know what that meant, Doctor? It meant I’d never be published—oh, I could have slipped a few silly, romantic poems into the sector literary magazine, but the dangerous poems, the wild, visionary things I really wanted to write, they wouldn’t touch if I bribed them.’
“Yeah,” One-Eyed Nick continued, “the literary magazines were a joke. But the underground journals—that was different. In the Black Zone, a few dozen sheets of mimeographed paper circulated in secret— that was the real stuff, the lifeblood of the mind. When one of Rose’s boyfriends slipped her a collection containing ‘Howl’ and ‘Darkmother-scream’ and other great, subversive poems, a new world opened for her. She—-she had an arrogant side to her, have I told you?—she began to write for the underground journals. As her reputation grew, she became more daring. Not naively daring, though; Rose was never naive. She knew what she was doing.
“One morning, in her room, Dr. Stone was drinking tea instead of coffee because the Purple Z
one had been gassed and the shipments hadn’t arrived. He asked her why she had to publish ‘Plutonium Spring.’ That was her infamous poem that had gotten her into trouble in the first place. And she held his hand with her long, warm fingers and told him, ‘Oh, of course I knew it was dangerous, and the truth is, I held off publication for years after I wrote it. But when Bill and Johnny died in the bombing, I didn’t have to be afraid for them any longer, do you understand? And I was crazy with grief—I just didn’t care anymore, didn’t want to care about myself, about what might happen.’
“And so her poem appeared in the Free Zone Journal. It was an epic poem, and it created an epic sensation. It was all about love and war, reverence and pain. Light and dark, you know—the censors counted twenty-two times she used the word ‘black’ in the first canto alone. But it wasn’t the dark, ironic imagery, that got her into real trouble. Or even her intense affirmation of God. No, it was her pacifism, and her blatant revelation of classified information. And more, her vision.
“Classified information.—I think Rose really knew too much and saw things too deeply. You have to remember that her father had been a major in the Air Force. He hated war even more than Rose. Before he was shot down, he told her all about the nuclear war between the Yellow Zone and the Green Zone; he was stupid enough to tell her that during the present phase, Military Intelligence knew of at least a hundred and eight nuclear wars in various locations throughout the City. I think he hoped that she could run away to a Safe Zone, where they had banned hydrogen bombs if not the war. But even as a kid, Rose understood things that her father didn’t. She knew that it would be better to abolish the war altogether than to try to find one of a few hundred Safe Zones among the millions of zones. To abolish the war—this was her dream; she wanted to show that the war wasn’t inevitable. And that’s why she wrote ‘Plutonium Spring.’ The poem made use of a brilliant device: Imagine, if you can, that our Endless City wasn’t built across an infinite plain stretching to the ends of the universe. No, like Rose, imagine this: Imagine that our world was finite. Finite. A finite City built on top of a sphere floating in the black void. A simple sphere, like a baseball.”
At the end of the alley, where the hill dropped off over the City, One-Eyed Nick could see the straight lines of lights of the Twentieth Sector, from P-Street running all the way out, probably as far as the upper million avenues. Somewhere farther out, lost in the brilliant, striated haze, were the Silver Zone and Purple Zone, and beyond them, all the other zones, maybe even the mythical Gold Zone and Dead Zone. Long ago, the geographers had proved that the City went on forever, as anyone could see. Perhaps, somewhere, there were other universes, other cities stacked one atop the other in space like gleaming dinner plates in a dark cupboard, but to imagine the City as being anything other than an endless disc was almost impossible.
Sarge always seemed to know what One-Eyed Nick was thinking, and he said, “That’s crazy. If we lived on a goddamned baseball, what would keep us from flying off like pieces of spit?”
One-Eyed Nick nodded his head slowly. “Sure, the idea was crazy. But Rose was a little crazy, and she was sly and satirical, too. She wanted to demonstrate that war is as dependent on geometry and topology as it is on ‘human nature.’ Think about it. If we lived on a sphere, the City would be one, whole, complete thing. One edge would flow around the curve and grow into the other. The thing is, there wouldn’t even be any ‘edges’ to the City; there wouldn’t be any Safe Zones. Nuclear war would be impossible, because any army that exploded nuclear bombs in a neighboring zone would destroy themselves after the dust clouds circled the sphere, and everyone died from the radiation. And if you couldn’t have a nuclear war, then the war itself would become impossible, because what general would be insane enough to wage war, if he knew that at any time it might become nuclear? And if the generals stopped the war, what sense would it make to divide the City into separate zones? And all this in Rose’s poem, you know, there was a lot cold logic beneath the terrible beauty of her rhymes: If there were no zones, if the City were one whole thing, couldn’t we do away with martial law? Imagine the City without martial law—we’d be free, at peace, finally happy.”
“No one’s happy until he’s dead,” the Napalm Man broke in with uncharacteristic vehemence. “And haven’t I told you before? If I quit drinking this,” and here he snapped his fingernail against the whiskey bottle, “no one would be free.”
One-Eyed Nick tore up a damp, cardboard box and fed the pieces to the fire. Smoke instantly billowed up. Waving another piece of cardboard back and forth like a madman, he tried to keep the greasy cloud from blowing over the old woman and the others. “The thing is, you’ve never read Rose’s poem, and look, it’s made you think and feel a little. That’s all Rose wanted, you know. She wanted to wake people up; she thought that everyone was dazed and paralyzed by the bombs. By the war, the stupid war.”
Sarge dug a piece of rye bread out of his pocket, then handed it to the old woman. She held it between her open hands as if it were a prayer book. She smiled and said, “Thank you,” the first words she had spoken since One-Eyed Nick had begun his story.
“War is hell, ya mean?” Sarge said this to One-Eyed Nick. “But where the hell would I be without the goddamn war?” He put his hands over his ears and dug his dirty fingernails into the scars cutting his head. “Aw, Jesus, here it comes! What the hell would I have been like before the war? I’ll tell you what: I was probably too dumb to wonder about my own dumbness. Christ, what a thought!—where’d that goddamned thought come from?”
The Napalm Man took a huge swallow; he must have finished half of his remaining whiskey. He gasped and coughed for a while. “Rose must have known the consequences of writing the poem,” he said. “She wasn’t a robot, like the others, Nick.”
“No, that’s right, she wasn’t a robot.”
“Then you can’t blame Dr. Stone for what happened to her, can you?”
One-Eyed Nick sucked in a lungful of wet air. It had begun to drizzle, and he was cold. Off in the distance, somewhere in the night, a jet thundered closer. It drowned out half of his words: “Who am I to blame anyone? But Dr. Stone wasn’t a robot either, you know, so you have to blame him, don’t you?”
Sarge shook his head back and forth, then spat at a chewing gum wrapper stuck to the fender of the abandoned car where they slept sometimes. “Nah,” he said, “Where the hell would I be without Dr. Stone? When they repatriated me from prison camp, I was a mess, ya mean? I never told anyone, but right before I was captured, a mine blew up in my crotch. And then the Reds knocked out my teeth and tried to kick my fuckin’ brains out. Wham, wham, wham—I can still feel their boots slamming into my face. By the time they were done, I was spitting teeth, slurring and drooling like a moron. Bad brain damage, ya mean? But after they shipped me back to the Black Zone, Dr. Stone took care of me. Half of him went into me—why do you think an old son of a bitch like me would take care of a bunch of bums, huh? Dr. Stone programmed the biochips and helped me with the memories after they implanted the— what do ya call them?—the fetal brain cells. Jesus, ya ever wonder where they get fetal brain cells to cram into the skull of an old fart like me?”
One-Eyed Nick shrugged his shoulders as he broke up an orange crate and shoved the wood slats into the fire. The damp pine hissed and cracked. After a while, the wind shifted. Clumps of smoke wafted over them, but he saw that the old woman didn’t move to cover her eyes; she just stared at him as if she were waiting for something.
“The thing is,” he said, “I knew Dr. Stone, and I blame him.”
The Napalm Man clinked his whiskey bottle against a wet brick and said, “No, you shouldn’t do that, Nick. Dr. Stone was a good man. He put me back together when I fell apart. I remember when I worked for Orange Chemicals, we made things like napalm and a gas whose aerial dispersement by one part per million caused the skin to sicken and slough off like bubbling sheets of pink rubber. Nice, eh? One day, when I was riding home on the
bullet train, I was horrified to see that one of our gases had gotten loose and everyone was turning to metal. The businessmen with their padlocked hearts and attaché cases, the salesmen, secretaries, and other scientists—all metal. They made hard clanking sounds with their metal tongues and sounded like news machines: ‘Have a nice day; gold’s up, silver’s down; the Blues murdered the Greens 27 to 3’—that kind of thing. I hurried home in a panic only to find that my Lisa had; new metal eyes and metal lips that burned when she kissed me. And when she asked me, ‘Have a nice day? Have a nice day?…’ I had to get out of there, so I ran through the walls of my house, out into the streets, where metal dogs chased the passing cars. Then I turned around and everything was gone. I couldn’t remember who I was. All I knew was that my hands were turning to metal, too, gray and hard and smelling like lead. There was a sound like giant rats with metal jaws crunching apart buildings of steel and glass, and there I was, sitting in the park with a paper bag in my hand, moving it to my mouth, over and over, moving it to my metal mouth. And then I fell apart—there were pieces of me scattered all over the grass. Dr. Stone found me and put me back together.”
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 69
