CHAPTER 26
The campus was uncharacteristically quiet.
Frank could see the quiet. Drives into the parking ramp. Notes the bodies fuming—giving off vapors, detectable trails in a bubble chamber—Bubble Chamber: the philosophical image for the day, he chuckles and chuckles at himself chuckling and at the chuckling chuckle—Aw, shit! as he, himself, ejects from the carbuncular technology of his vehicular exo-body, sucking a last warmth from the beast’s symbiotic lungs: Carbon beings, all just tidbits of dinosaurs…the presence of dinosaurs he sees plopping their plodding way across the mall on their trek to study metaphysics!
The quiet meant “no demonstrators.”
As if the war had ended or something.
Had he slept through it? I mean, the End of the War?
As he doodles he is doodling them, The Enemy: War of the Sexes—Bertha and Dalores…Jack?
“Nam, Man, it’s just America, Man, just the bedroom fuck, just the gooks, Man, just the gooks’ve changed.”
Wasn’t Jack. But a black peg-legged jewish part-native-american veteran raving how he had to change into a female to “Fully grasp the contradictions, Man!” A bit more of Mao’s Red Book than Frank could digest.
Just a daydream fantasy—but somehow real for Frank.
Something had changed, no, someone: Dalores. And it wasn’t necessarily a good change, not felt like that in his gut.
He doodles Dalores. Enjoys the circularity of her: whirl-winding small circles on top of smaller ones inside of larger ones...a face which was as round and full as the moon, creamy, with bonking brown eyes, like precious stones—a glint deeper than amber but What?
He was drawing with a Number 2 so color didn’t matter…copious breasts: ones that swayed when she set herself across the sky: “Like the goddess Nut!” she’d tease, chasing down his mythological images from his numerous books—which in her role as Good Wife she routinely perused and kept at least conversationally in tune with...hands which were soft, they felt like rollers, somehow her fingers conveyed a rolling softness...Dalores’ massages were a strong glue to their intimacy, something Frank knew he could not, possibly just genetically couldn’t, return in full pleasure, though he made the effort—ass: practically leapt off the page as ASS! an almost audible act...just printing the three letters and the world, this room, teacher and students, all come to an abrupt stop, halt—listening to his imagining, his delightful erotic gamboling inside his world of archaic scratchings.
Frank scolds—laughs at himself, realizing that he has heard nothing of what Professor Carroll is saying…Dalores’ ass is the resting place for the sun as it settles down to sleep—Me. Frank whispers but only to his inner ear...it is an imagining which makes him real, this he has admitted to himself, admits in self-confession, a secret he has not had a way to communicate to her, never saying, “Dalores, I’m real when resting on your ass.” Doesn’t know why he can’t or even feel that he couldn’t…they’ve discussed everything sexual, erotic, but…?
“How real are dreams?”
The question snagged him, like a fish being speared.
“Are they simply to be reduced? Trivial chaos? Unresolved matters of the non-dreaming state—of consciousness, whatever that is!” she sardonically smiles but doesn’t pause...“Mythic detritus. Psychic garbage. Or, less. Biochemical accidents? Come, come,” taunting, “there has to be a faithful reductionistic behavioral biochemist among you? Some academic dopehead? No?!” Then the bell rang. Titters and book-bag scratchings and feet scuffing and shuffling, muffled sounds of heavy winter garb...only Frank remains seated.
She had to leave, the next class was already entering, so Professor Carroll tugged Frank’s astral leash and walked him to her office.
Once inside she motions for him to shut the door, then sets herself down into a high backed swivel, settling in such a way and with such minor but meaningful movements: a quick flip of her long skirt up off the floor, hem hanging onto an edge of her lap, this with her hands folded, a slight declination in her chair...she was ready: holding court—Frank had seen it before: “Drugs can induce every kind of dream state,” he took her bait, then concluded with what he thought was his strong point, “I’ve run the test, myself.”
“Run them on rats?”
“Yeah.” A nervous admission, knowing that his “Yeah” was not unambiguous to her.
“On myself. Too.” Frank uncomfortably one-thirty-second-smile at the professor.
When Frank left her office several hours later, he felt wearied and drained. Not from intellectual discussion—one which rose and fell with convictions and declarations and the throwing of footnotes: nails, pebbles, bricks, atomic blasts, such they had done but, no, rather, Frank felt tired as if he had just been through a long wrenching interview.
“Why?” had been her opening probe. He thought it an easy answer. “Why not?” mirthfully snickered with the best sober imitation of a zoned pothead.
But she was not easily answered. “That’s you, isn’t Frank, a Why not?”
She got him talking about “Why not?”
About himself as a risk taker. Not one who called himself such, “But one who does, who acts. Acts boldly.”
He was novice enough at therapy to grasp that she had catalyzed him—how he didn’t know...why? his mind didn’t pause to consider...it was like falling off the dock into the lake; like slipping.
When he got home his whole body was buzzing, rushing—he felt intoxicated, giddily intoxicated. He wanted to rush up to Dalores, sit her down, tell her everything: Everything.
But she wasn’t home. “Dalores!” he calls up and down stairs. Wednesday, she should be home, as he checks the calendar—quick deflation, she penciled in “Corn”...he knew he’d eat alone, tonight—Again.
Acts boldly. The echoes of Professor Carroll’s characterization were dying through dimness and… Not true.” Frank spoke it out loud between bites of pizza.
I’m anything but that. Rapidly seeing the short history of his quarter century flit by with death scenes, gravesite maws, his shaky fear of the water, the locking of the house “against the outer world”…his women: flights to them—now, with enough self-analysis to realize that he sought security in them: “Bertha. She drew you out. Broke down all your barriers. Turned you inside out. Didn’t she?!”…True, Frank wanted to counter, but…he, himself, couldn’t complete this “but” for it meant dealing with the house in a way he was not yet ready to deal with the house—which itself was an affirmation of his own insight and gave the lie to hers, but such was not of this moment…“Dalores. She’s everything in the outside world. Right? Both radical and hippie. Right?” But that’s not it—something, again, which he didn’t say...just nodded, like a good student taking notes.
During their conversation Frank had accepted everything the professor said...let it seep in as if it were real—for something inside himself wanted it to be real. He wanted his life to be this simple.
“Thank you,” as he rose to leave.
Feverish with the poison of her own self-inflation, Professor Carroll—in a move so quick that she was upon Frank in what to him was a flash-bulb pop—she gives him a big hug: “Dream on. Dream boldly” she whispered...Frank felt he was a co-conspirator...but what crime was afoot?
So, without Dalores, Frank decides to get drunk. Naw, inside himself, I’m not drunk. They are. They: here being Professor Carroll and her like.
Drunk. How else to figure? All their theories. Policies. Bold acts! Shit, this’s how they “think” and so the world is as it “is”—all messed up, wars, wars, wars! Fucking-A wars: indians and slaves and atomic bombing gooks, slant-eyes and fucking the mick, whacking himself upside his drunk ass face...wops and rooskies…aw, shit! This is real? This, truth? Dicks and cunts and pussies: fags, queers, homos? This is nothing but a bad dream!
Dalores found Frank snoring away in bed, more deeply snorting and grinding his teeth than usual, but she took these
as signs, good signs, that he was getting “solid sleep”...“Sweet dreams,” she kiss-blows to him, unspoken, as she slips under the covers: her toes half-frozen.
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