How else do we occupy our time? Every day we must plan for the food of the day. This involves elaborate calculations: counting the fish, the number of moon-corn plants, the nettles, the moss. A miscalculation could mean starvation and the extinction of our line. We must believe that our line is precious, and that it must be maintained.
Often the word comes: "No food today." Or there may be just a meager allotment of boiled nettles. Fire is a problem, but we have the Burning Crystals. Occasionally there is a feast, perhaps two large snakes have been killed and one fish can be spared. On these rare occasions the Corners perform, and some of them die the following day. Their bodies must be hacked up and used to fertilize the moon-corn patches for future Corners.
Corners have the calling, like a priest. It is both an honor and a disgrace to have a Corner in the family. But at the age of puberty, the mark of the Corner can be perceived: a look of dreamy despair, the look of a hungry ghost in time of famine, but a noble resignation that transcends the hunger. At first the Corners are supple and strong. At this stage many attempt to climb out of the Valley. A few have been known to reach the overhangs.
Soon the rot sets in. They wake up spitting teeth and blood and pus. It is time for them to learn the ancient songs and music, time to start making their instruments. They also make a moon-corn beer to be used at the festivals. The Death Brew is lethal. One cup will kill in three days . . . three days of agonizing bone aches and hemorrhaging through the skin, literally sweating blood. To avoid this horrible death the Corner chooses someone to kill him at dawn. This is done by thrusting an obsidian knife under the rib cage and into the heart.
Escape from the Valley occupies our life. We could tunnel out, perhaps. Such a tunnel was undertaken, but after five years of work there was no way to supply air and the tunnel workers suffocated. The tunnel has long since fallen in, but you can still see the entrance. It's a good place to catch snakes and lizards.
Some devote themselves to exercises to escape from the body and soar out of the Valley. The Soarers receive extra rations of grifa, but many feel that they are simply lazy parasites.
"Well, man, I gotta get it together, you understand?" And they go on getting it together, as the light comes and goes, babies are born, old men die.
There is no possibility of sending messages out of the Valley. Tied to the leg of a bird? We don't even know what that is. And we have tried smoke signals, but we must ration our meager supply of fuel.
The Soarers are into mind-to-mind sending. One of them rigged up a contraption with a piece of quartz crystal and some wire he had made by putting certain rocks in a fire and some bright nodules melted and ran out. These he pounded into thin strands, and he formed fish gills into caps for his ears and ran the wires from the crystal and wire unit to the ear caps. With the ear caps you could hear crackling sounds and snatches of music and human voices. We could hear them . . . they could not hear us. But we knew they were there.
It was occasion for a festival. Everybody was drunk. The rations of moon-corn beer were brought out, and extra grifa. We didn't go overboard, but this was something to celebrate. We are not alone! Others live outside the Valley. They will find us. They will lower ropes. They will take us out of the Valley, to where the sun shines all day. We will have enough to eat. We will be in Heaven.
One day it happened. We heard a roaring noise overhead and looked up to see what looked like the legendary Dragonfly, hovering there in the sky. We waved and shouted. The craft hung there and then turned and headed away. Next day it was back over the Valley, with several more just like it.
Now one came down past the overhangs and landed by the stream. Immediately the Soarers rushed forward as two men got out of the craft.
"Mucho gusto . . . buenos diás . . . muchos años aquí."
The men explained that we would all be evacuated, but that they could only take five at the moment. And five Soarers got into the craft, which lifted off.
Now another settled, but the pilots started back at sight of the advanced Corners.
"These gooks will have to be quarantined."
"They don't go in my chopper."
"We'll contact Atlanta."
Gingerly they tossed out some food packages.
A strict quarantine was imposed . . . soldiers were stationed around the Valley. Armed helicopters stood by to turn away any attempt to approach the Valley by air. A helicopter chartered by the Press was turned back, having been warned that there were orders to shoot down any aircraft that violated the quarantine.
The entire population of the Valley, forty men and thirty-five women, was transported to Atlanta by technicians in protective clothing, and placed in isolation. The Valley itself was in Colombia, but the local authorities were glad to turn matters over to the gringos rather than risk responsibility for some horrendous epidemic.
The Corners were found to be suffering from some form of radiation sickness. However, neither the corn itself nor the lesions responded to the most sensitive and advanced radiation detectors. The investigators concluded, "If radiation is the etiological factor we must conclude that it is some form of radiation unknown at the present time."
The Press, of course, wallowed in speculation and clamored to be allowed to interview the Valley people and take pictures. They were firmly admonished that the possibility of a virgin soil epidemic imposed emergency conditions. No one but scientists and doctors from the CDC would be allowed access to the Valley people, unless or until there was no danger of an unknown disease agent getting loose in the world's population.
The Press grumbled and prowled around the Center, thrusting their microphones at anyone who came in or out. Exhaustive tests determined that the Corn Disease was not directly contagious, but resulted from some substance in the corn or in the soil upon which it was grown. But this substance defied isolation.
Finally the Valley people were released, and a press conference was held. The Soarers took over the conference, recounting the legend of the Dragonfly, Esperanza. The question as to how they got into the Valley was a subject for endless conjecture and speculation: the Valley had been sealed off by an earthquake and a landslide—the Valley people were survivors of a wrecked spacecraft—they or their ancestors had entered the Valley by rope ladders, which pulled loose from their moorings.
The Corners formed a rock group called "Glowing Corn" and became fabulously wealthy. When they stopped eating the contaminated corn, the disease was arrested. They resorted to plastic surgery. The other Valley people scattered, gravitating to the Hispanic barrios of Los Angeles and New Mexico. A few went to New York.
In a few years the Valley was forgotten.
Relative Einstein, known as Uncle in the family, wrote matter into energy and some of us think he should have been murdered in the bulrushes. He also wrote the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second. The earth is losing light at that speed. Any factor that can be measured is quantitative, and any quantitative factor runs out in a time universe. The process has been greatly accelerated by photography. A photo has no light of its own, but it takes light to be seen. Every time anyone takes a picture, there is that much less light in circulation. Slowly at first, the gathering darkness on the margin of vision . . . the mutters of voices at the edge of hearing.
Daring light holdup . . . escaped with a million kilowatts, easily worth a hundred million on the black light market. The Light Units, or LUs, are small rectangular sections, rather like a thick credit card which you can insert in your Converter to produce so many units of light.
You want to keep your house and garden lighted during the day? (You have to, according to the zoning regulations.) And you got a little hunka sky over your trap like an umbrella? Solid middle class, just a jump ahead of the Big Blackout . . . precarious trades . . . one day lit up like a Christmas tree, next day fading into total eclipse.
Black market light dealers . . . Joe's Lunch Room, the sign went out years ago. A ten-watt bulb lights the bar, the booths are in shadow. A boy slides into a
booth.
"Got some light here. Want to trade it for shit."
The boy's eyes are going from the continual darkness. You don't know what darkness is until there isn't any light. No light from anywhere. He blinks in the dim light with heavy shades. All he cares about is light enough to shoot by. He'll be blind soon and need a Light Boy to lead him around.
You can make a certain amount of light from your own substance, if you have any left, and light transfusions can be had for a price. Politicians is trying to convince the public they got a system for eating votes and shitting out light. But the light is running out and everybody knows it. It's leaving this planet at 186,000 miles a second and nothing can bring it back. The time is coming when no amount of light units will buy any light.
Day is done
Gone the sun
From the lake
From the hills
From the sky.
Joe's first encounter with the Land of the Dead: the first thing he notices is oil patches in the dim streets, or perhaps just patches of greasy darkness, but the feel of oil is there, and the smell of coal gas. The sky is black and dark green.
He comes to the house at Pershing Avenue. His mother is there and a long reptilian neck rises up out of him, curls over his mother's head and starts eating from her back with great, ravenous bites, some evil predatory reptile from an ancient tar pit. His mother rushes in from her bedroom screaming, "I had a terrible dream! I dreamed you were eating my back!"
Smoker, the gray cat, is an ally in this dim, oily area. The night Ruski got lost and I was thinking I shouldn't have brought him out here, Smoker found him and brought him out, just as Fletch brought the Russian Blue kitten down from the tree.
There are many other places ... a restaurant/hotel/station area, where one is always in doubt about his room reservation and rarely able to find his way back to his room if he leaves it in search of breakfast, which is always difficult to locate.
Le Grand Hôtel des Morts: escalators, stairways, a multilevel complex of rooms and restaurants and shops. I glimpse Ian Sommerville several times on an escalator, or passing in the corridors and waiting rooms. There is a long line of people at a reception desk waiting to get rooms. I have a reservation for room 317, but can't be sure of it with all these souls pouring in. Many of them look American, with crew cuts and rucksacks, undoubtedly servicemen from Vietnam. I hear there was a terrible pile-up.
This area is a vast airport, seaport, train station, hotels, restaurants, films, shops. I find Ian on a mezzanine in front of a boutique. He is vague and wispy and cool. . . excuses himself and goes inside. He is a curious combination of a mathematician (he really understands things like quantum theory) and a cold, bitchy woman. Being older and wiser, he is willing to leave it there. But I follow after a moment and ask the girl for Ian Sommerville.
"Oh, yes," she says and he comes out. We exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what.
"Is Brion here?"
"No. He's not coming."
"I wonder if my room is still reserved?" I moan plaintively. Ian does not have an opinion.
"Last night I slept on a couch in a room with four or five other people."
"Well, that's pretty frank," he says flatly, and turns away.
The boutique is an arrangement of booths according to some cryptic design. Several black girls enter, and Ian is talking shop with them but it is a shop I don't know . . . wrong turnings, tracks lost, bring us to this boutique on an alien planet where he is at home and I am not and nothing can ever bridge the gap. He has business here of which I can have no conception.
The name of the hotel is La Farmacía, but I can't find a farmacía to buy codeine. Seems to be a European city. . . . Looking for a place to eat breakfast. This always poses a problem. Wander around out to the end of a subway line, then back to the hotel. It must have a restaurant. Go into one, fairly full, and the waiter tells us, "This is not really a suitable place. Not very distinguished." I am somehow reminded of the Madame Rubenstein anecdote:
"Ah, Richard, so sorry you weren't at my party last night."
He walks right into it. "But, Princess, I wasn't invited."
"It was a very distinguished party."
A neat little fillip of insolence from the waiter, who is an ugly, angular Italian with bony knees and sunken chest and rank chest hair sprouting out between the shirt buttons, long scruffy hair, a filthy black suit.
Find my way back to the hotel room. Two little dogs in the corridor follow me into my room. One is brown and one is gray. Obviously these are Door Dogs, but since I am in the Land of the Dead I don't have to worry.
The Land of the Dead: a long street with trees on both sides that almost meet overhead. He walks to the end of the street, where there is an iron stairway going down. On the stairs he finds money, which he dutifully deposits in a trash receptacle as he intones, "Littering is selfish and dirty. Don't do it."
In the Land of the Dead quantitative coinage is worthless, and anyone proffering such tender would reveal himself as totally unchic. But at the bottom of the stairway, which leads to a stone promenade by a river, I spot a coin about the size of a silver dollar. The coin is of silver or some bright metal. Two shoulder blades in bas-relief almost meet in the middle of the coin, just as the shoulder blades of a Russian Blue cat almost meet if the cat is a star. This is a Cat Coin, more specifically a Russian Blue Coin, for in the Land of the Dead coinage is qualitative, reflecting the qualities the pilgrim has displayed during his lifetime. A Cat Coin will only be found by a cat lover.
There are Kindness Coins: the bearer has helped someone without consideration of payment, like the hotel clerk who warned me the fuzz is on the way, or the cop who laid a joint on me to smoke in the wagon. There are Child Coins. I remember a dream child with eyes on stalks like a snail, who said, "Don't you want me?"—"Yes!"
There are Tear Coins, Courage Coins, Johnson Coins, Integrity Coins.
Are there things you would not do for any amount of money? For any consideration? For a young body? The Integrity Coin attests to the bearer's inaccessibility to any quantitative bribe. The coin certifies that the bearer has definitely refused the Devil's Bargain.
A coin cannot be stolen or transferred to anyone who has not earned the right to use it. They cannot be counterfeited. A stolen coin will often tarnish and blacken. It will always ring false on the fork. Every shop and innkeeper has a tuning fork to test the coins proffered in payment. A true Cat Coin will ring out harmonious purrs. A false or stolen coin will hiss and spit. So each coin rings with its special quality.
The Coin of Truth, on which is inscribed the Chinese character of a man standing by his word, rings with truth. You don't need a receipt. If false, it rings hollow and false as Jerry Fàlwell. The lies slither out.
"Receipt please."
"I'll put it under your door."
"Excellent. I will give you the money at that time."
Certain coins are prerequisite for obtaining certain other coins. Only the coinage of cowardice, humiliation and shame can buy the Coin of True Courage. Child and Cat and Kindness Coins can only be bought with Tear Coins, and Cat and Child Coins can, in turn, buy the very rare Contact Coin. This coin attests that the bearer has contacted other beings. There are coins attesting to Cat Contact, prerequisite for the Animal Contact Coin.
Coins of the Long Chance, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up at the count of nine to win by a knockout, Samson pulling the pillars of the temple down. The expendables, the last desperate gamble, the Coin of Last Resort. It's a one-time coin.
So many coins, and none that can be bought with money or any quantitative factor. The Devil deals only in quantitative merchandise.
"Anything you wouldn't do for money? For a young body? For Immortality?"
"Yes—dig out a cat's eye . . . and a lot of other things."
Immediately the deal is off. "Well, if you are going to be like that."
I am. I'd rather slug it out in my seventy-year-old body than agree to some shabby fool's bargain.
Another store is there. Kiki, what house? Half-club interruptions. Renew an alliance which does not amuse?
Aquaintance circumstances a police informer.
(Pause for word from me.)
The dreampensions whisper out from Mexico to Paris . . . dust of nights without sleep.
(The Indian is out.)
Lymphatic gray winter walk in the season of pause.
I go in for rat thick boy.
"Hisss." Animal slob planet.
Hummingbird spirit, you have made no fruit.
(A little cold snigger.)
They are gone away, leaving a shutter clattering in the wind.
Tire tracks in freezing mud.
A bandana stiff with jissom in a dry drawer of the empty hotel with the desiccated corpse of a cockroach.
Rain in cobwebs, empty lavatories of summer schools.
Eggshells, wet bread crusts, hair combings.
A large empty loft: a dust of plaster falls on my shoulder like the first stirring of a sail in a storm gathering out of dead sick calm. Plaster is falling all over the room now. Get out quick!
With a boy from the magazine making it in a ditch. Summer night breathes through salt-encrusted gills, the porous taste on his tongue in the rubble of wing sheaths and shells, rose-patterned stone under the archways, blue shadow cool on the silken bed, the scent of hyacinths. Mother and Dad will drive me to Liberty, Ohio, a student town. Kiki doesn't like it.
The Western Lands Page 24