The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

by Guy Davenport

  63

  Pallets, said Tom. Ak jo, pallets. Aren’t they neat? Yes, said Hugo, but where did they come from? Well, said Tom, you know Asgar Thomsen, third year thickshock cornblond gymnast type? And you know Elsa, works in the kitchen, fifteen or sixteen, with the stickup breasts and sliding eyes? Well, those two fuck their brains out in the laundry room, never miss a day. Elsa knows where all sorts of things are, like a stash of gear from when NFS Grundtvig ran a nursery, and these pallets are from that, nippers’ naptime pallets. They fold up Japanese tidy. Elsa, eh? Jo, Tom said. Asgar says she’s great. She loves giving wee boys their first pussy, and is a good teacher, and likes five or six at a go, but her soft spot is for big Asgar. God knows what goes on at this school, Hugo said. Let’s hang the Otto Meyer here, with the Hajo Ortil, what say? North and South. Swiss Boy Scouts in a summer meadow all daisies, lots of skinny brown legs, three bare butts, two thumb-sized dicks. Norwegian Scouts in Sicily, one of Ortil’s expeditions of teutonsk youngsters big and little. Greek boy with hoop and rooster in the middle. Posters coming from Düsseldorf, Tom said. Anders’s doing, that. Radical Left rights-of-kids’ stuff. Wide-eyed German idealism.

  64

  Tjajkovskij, said Mariana, pulling off a tall sock. I can listen to him. Teach me English. And French. What’s the good of getting laid by a teacher, never mind one with shoulders like the Stock Exchange and a peter like a pony, if I don’t learn something. Kiss, he said, and demonstrated. Kiss on the tit. Plural, tits. You’re slurpy wet, Hugo observed. Because, she said, I was playing with myself waiting for you. Passed out twice. It depraves Franklin, who wiggles out his grub and whisks it to a blur, great egg-beating technique.

  65

  He was, the Bicycle Rider, trying to feel. That’s what makes your hair stand up on your head. Trying to feel. What began with some jaded old fools, Aldous Huxley, a giggling British neurotic, moral idiots like Burroughs and the poet Ginsberg, and the shit-for-brains Timothy Leary, what began for them as a desperate attempt to feel something, anything at all I suppose, became an initiation of the young into feeling. Young who had not yet felt love or wonder or surprise or the use of their minds learning math or Greek or history took their little trips on acid. Death, of course, is something that happens to other people. To talk crazy and act crazy is chic.

  66

  Nose like a buck hare, said Hugo. Square toes. Eyes slyly sweet and sweetly sly. Hugo, liking the world, was an accurate draughtsman. Franklin sat on a chair, elf naked. You see? said Mariana, there’s nothing to it. If you get the giggles, you get the giggles. Hugo can wait. You can kick your heels when he’s drawing your face, and roll your head like a moron when he’s drawing your feet. I’ll tell you what to keep still. What you going to do with the picture? Franklin asked. Look at it when I need to throw up, Hugo said. O Gud! Mariana said, the giggles. It’s going to be a good painting.

  67

  This. He told me. One day in class, listening to me lecture on Greek myth, his mind was following but it was also anticipating jacking off while stoned later that afternoon. LSD, you know, binds with the brain and is a permanent chemical activity of it. It volunteers hits weeks after you’ve had any of it. It rarely volunteers the euphoria of good trips, preferring nightmares. So the satyr’s leer in his gray eyes changed suddenly to cold fear. He was, while still hearing me on the bow of Herakles, facing a classmate who has hit him, cutting his lip, unsocketing a tooth that bleeds salty and hot. He must swallow the blood and try to focus his courage and twining eyesight, neither cooperating, and then a surge of desire drenches his balls and tingles in his lifting glans. He holds back a wave of nausea. The loose tooth bleeds freely. The taste of blood sickens him. He must jack off. He can’t trust himself to stand and leave the classroom. His bowels seem to have a knife through them, cutting. He’ll walk into the wall. The bully who hit him stands nose to nose whispering insults. Fairy, cocksucker, flit. His throat is full of blood. Sissy, morphadite, jerker off. If he could get to the hall, he could puke there, green phlegm that the acid makes. He could jack off in the hall, fuck who’d see him. With acid time is elastic. Class would last another four hours. Or two seconds. And all I saw was a handsome Scandinavian face with a charming vagueness in the eyes.

  68

  Something’s in there hurting, Mariana said, pushing into Hugo’s chest with both hands. Something that needs to be healed. You’re doing it, Hugo said, holding her close. Let me tell you this, and we won’t mention the Bicycle Rider again, jo? I made the one last attempt to make friends with him, to show him a world he could see and feel and live in once he’d got his head out of his ass. I found out where he lived, even went there twice, and I wrote him a letter offering to take him along on a visit I’d planned to Paris, my favorite city. I’d pay for everything. All he had to do was come along. No answer to my letter. I ran into him (he had no phone, naturally) one day a week later and asked him, with some annoyance, if he’d got my letter. O yeah, man, he said, airily. That’s great. Paris, France! You’re a good man, you know. Denmark was such a backward hole of a country. He’d always longed to see Paris. He would go with me, and split when we got there, and he’d meet me for coming back. I didn’t believe my ears.

  69

  In our time Apollo is sound asleep.

  70

  You have been my best teacher, he said. I’d love to take your inhibitions away from you. My inhibitions! You’re not free, man. We had a wild talk. He had made me mad, confused me. So I’m a shithead, he said. What’s that got to do with anything? A good exchange of name-calling cleared the air. Generosity, I can see looking back, was simply not in him. He’d put the worst construction on all my friendliness, and now that I knew he was on dope I felt a kind of mission to save him. I insisted that he come to Paris. We would look, walk, see all the beautiful city. I would get him out of himself, his head out of his ass. He would see. I showed him slides, books. He agreed to go. I gave him a big hug, and he froze, saying that he wasn’t used to affection. So what happened? Mariana asked. Nothing, said Hugo. We met a few times, always by accident, as he would never turn up when he would say he would, made plans. I was to meet him here and we’d go together to the train station. He never came.

  71

  I went over to his place after going to the train station to see if the white-trash slut might have decided to meet me there. These neosixties young imagine that you know what they’re thinking, and can’t be bothered to tell you. I found him eating cold mashed potatoes and rice in a dirty bowl. He was naked except for a hospital gown, the kind they put on you for surgery. Hi, he said. He was eating with his fingers. Where the hell were you! I shouted at him. Man, I feel good, he said. Don’t shout at me. I had this cold clot in my brain but I’m melting it out, you know? All I know, I said, is that you were to meet me at nine. Why didn’t you, where were you, what the fuck do you mean by all this? I’m unstructured, man, he said. I’ll go to your crazy Paris with you, but not today. I’ve got to decide for myself when I want to go. I’ll let you know. Do that, I said sweetly, and left.

  72

  Magnus, one of my Scouts, said Hugo of a boy whose hair, blond as a lamb, curled in swashes and scrolls over his forehead. Pectorals in robust definition, he was otherwise as lean as a whippet. Hi, Mariana said, you’re pretty. Don’t dress on my account. Micro undies are more than I usually see on Grundtviggers. Look, Magnus, Hugo said, even though you’re blushing already and going miserable again, I’m going to lay your problem out for my Mariana, sweetest of women. It’ll do you wonders. All ears, said Mariana, if there’s a stray orange juice, coffee, and roll about. Greengage jam and fresh butter too, Hugo said. We’ve just been glupping it. Magnus here, stout chap, turned up last night in the grips of a crisis. Beat around the bush, he did, for the longest, and then scared me witless by pitching right out of his chair in a roll, onto the floor, where he bawled like a baby. Wow, said Mariana. Puberty, Hugo said strolling about and stretching, good old puberty. And, as more than likely,
our balls charged with manly juices and our unruly cock made our heart tick allegro and hanker to hug somebody and be hugged. Oof! and sweet Magnus had tied himself into knots because it’s his own gender he likes. I’m horrified, Mariana said, and think I’ll faint. You see? Hugo said. She’s going to barf.

  73

  So Magnus and I talked for hours. I called his folks and said it was too late for him to walk home and that I’d put him up for the night. Heard that one, Mariana said. Please, Hugo said. And ho! here’s Tom. Mariana Sweety Pie, Tom said, giving her a kiss. What’s all this about, Hugo? I got your note. Magnus Pennystykke, said Hugo, Tom Agernkop: be friends. Magnus is a Spartan, and a little confused. You and Lemuel might, good fellows that you are, show him how friendship works. Don’t you have a buddy? Tom asked. We have a club. It’s in pairs. What’s fun, Mariana said, is two big rascals like Tom and Lemuel hugging like bears and kissing like puppies. Imprinting, it’s called. Sex, said Tom. Love, said Hugo. All of the above, Mariana said.

  74

  For the clubhouse, two large photographs, gift of Hugo: Brancusi’s L’Embrace, which Tom named “The Kissing Boxes,” and Picasso’s Tête d’une Femme in the churchyard of St. Germain des Prés, his tribute to Guillaume Apollinaire. He had bought them to flank his Héraklès archer but thought they belonged on the walls of the clubhouse, offering a prize for the best paper on why they were appropriate.

  75

  Tom’s beautiful, said Lemuel. See how his neck fits into the muscles of the collarbone and shoulder triangle, and those dogleg lines from hip to dick, they’re neat. What if Tvemunding likes boys? He’s always talking about ancient Greek sentimental loyalties, as he calls them, and then there’re his Scouts, but next he’s off on Jesus and Sankt Paul, and he has that dark-haired girl he’s most certainly fucking. So? said Anders, why can’t he like both, love both? I like girls, but right now don’t love one. I love hr. Kim here. If you don’t love somebody, you end up loving yourself, or hating yourself because you’re afraid to love, or because you’re scared to. People are hysterical about sex, anyway.

  76

  This, O Bicycle Rider. That the acid, which binds itself with the fatty tissues of the brain, may have displaced you altogether. When you showed no interest in taking our trip to France, I was up the good part of a night trying to answer why a young man would prefer the roach kingdoms of Nordkalksten to the bright avenues and parks of Paris. What I arrived at is that you can no longer feel anything without this damnable LSD, and that what you’ve been reinforcing with it (cowardly evading God knows what)—sex, I suppose, as that’s all you’ve told me about—has been wholly replaced by chemically induced neural hallucinations, so that what you think is sex (or reflection, or thought) is only LSD, or marijuana, or the cocaine you say you want to come by if only you can. That is, you limply decline so rich an experience as France because you know that you cannot feel it, cannot observe it: you can only take this diabolic acid along, and feel that. You have built a wall of concrete shit between yourself and reality. This you call sensory enhancement: it is sensory deprivation. You call it mind-expanding: it shrivels the mind to a pinpoint. The mind, Sartre said, is not what it is, it is what it is not. With LSD you ask the mind to be itself only, not the world it can observe. You have your head up your ass, deep in shit. It hurts me to say these things, but I can’t live with myself if I don’t. When I see you I don’t any longer know if it’s you or the acid I’m talking to. You are coquettish about visits and conversations and meals and walks, the things we began with when I thought your problems were only loneliness and a proud poverty. Your time, I now know, is the acid’s, not yours to share. What frightens and disgusts me is the sudden turn to a limp and feminine unresponsiveness. I’m concerned that you’ve lost all self-respect: a sane person would be ashamed of such lazy, characterless passivity. I scarcely have any hope anymore that I might be your friend, with exchanges of ideas, walks, trips abroad, letters, meals: all those things that sociable and happy people have always valued. A psychiatrist with whom I’ve talked about you says that you won’t seek help, or respond to it, until much later, when this addiction becomes intolerable. By then you will have no feeling of experience to remember when you’re detoxicated, and very likely no mind, either. I can forgive all your shitty, erratic behavior now that I know it was the acid and not you. It was you and not the acid who drew The Apple that Ate the Serpant on my terrace, and came and talked afterwards. The theme of your drawing was, of course, temptation, and you were trying to tell me (why me is something I can’t answer) that temptation had got you into a bind where all is perverse (turned around the wrong way, is what that word means). Snakes offer apples in the myth, apples cannot eat serpents. There’s a wonderful passage in the Bible, in Acts, where a devil speaks from inside a possessed person. For devil read Perverse Personality, if you want. It says, Paul I know, and Jesus I know, but who are you? Let’s, if only as a figure of speech, say that the displacement of person that happens when you drop acid is a devil. It wasn’t even in your voice that you said to me the morning we were to leave for Paris and you didn’t show up, I don’t know you. I’m glad the acid doesn’t know me. But you know me. I have a strong suspicion that the acid won’t allow you to know me, for it is jealous of its power to steal your capacity to feel. It doesn’t want me to give you a friendly hug, for that implies comradeship and tenderness and understanding, and these human things it hates as furiously as the Devil hates all love and friendship and kindness and responsiveness. Your beloved acid is a master of seduction, and will have no rivals however innocent. It does not want you to feel French country roads. It wants you zonked out of your mind in that graveyard you say you like to go to when you’ve taken a hit. It wants you to be lonely and friendless. It is all the friend you need. Why sit in a Parisian café, with all the fun of talking and learning and seeing, when you can be puking frogspawn all of a night in a filthy toilet on Nordkalksten, and endure three days of unrelenting cramps from strychnine poisoning? Why respond to anybody’s love when you have your acid for a friend? It understands you, doesn’t it? You don’t have to try to communicate with it all those tedious things friends like to talk about. You don’t have to keep appointments, or have manners, or be generous, and most of all you don’t have to respond. The acid is quite happy with your limp, feminine, lazy, self-indulgent unresponsiveness. It knows how to possess.

  77

  Oh but we had some lovely walks, Hugo said, when I thought we were beginning to be friends. I liked his company, his handsome presence, and the more I learned about him, the more a kind of paternal, or big brother’s solicitude grew in me. He’d been expelled twice from schools, for fighting, though I now wonder if fighting is the truth. More like pushing, Mariana said. What you won’t admit, big Hugo, is that this kid was white trash. I don’t mean that he started that way. I mean that he chose to be white trash. It’s important to them, the student riffraff crowd, to be hateful. That’s why they take dope. But, Hugo said, he was wonderfully sweet and sensitive. After our walks, he’d say Thanks for the comradeship. I’d say Tomorrow afternoon, around three? And of course he wouldn’t turn up.

  78

  Emanzipation, to Anders in the mail. He thought it would never come. Düsseldorf postmark. Federal Republic stamp with house on it, blue envelope. Printed Matter: Educational. Two boys on cover, 10 and 12 mayhap, arms over each other’s shoulders, 10 beaver-toothed, naked, full head of hair, foreskin down and puckered to a point, 12 in red billcap and undershirt, pubic hair beginning, foreskin back, smiling. Emma für Kinder. Inside, two teeners at summer camp holding each other’s dicks, tents and naked boys in background, forest trees, green sunlight. Pinewoods, canoes, swallow-tailed flags on short poles. Norwegian boy with great suntan and lank blond hair having his big erect dick admired by a fetching nipper all taffy curls deer’s eyes long legs and thumb’s up of a peter sticking out of blue briefs’ fly. What, said Kim when it was shown him, does all this German say? Friendship and af
fection, bonded loyalties. Fun. I’m glad it says fun, Kim said. Full-page close-up penis, meaty head as big and smooth as an egg, olive gray pink. Something about a brother. Dieter and Axel, 13 and 15, looking as innocent as dogs in their jeans and University of Northwestern T-shirts. Good stuff, Kim said. Who’s this old man in the silver-rimmed specs and Nazi crewcut? And this supergerman fourth-former with a grub for a peter.

  79

  Which what’s that? Mariana crossed her eyes and gave at the knees. Soccer shorts for little Franklin. Can he get in them? Chalk blue. Are you, she said, trying to curl up with the adorable monster, his dimples and dink, and kiss him all over? He’d like that, Hugo said, unbuttoning her blouse.

  80

  Friends, unlike your acid, do not possess. They possess things together, books, films, experiences, moments, fellowship, joys, triumphs, fun, talk, places. You cannot share the experience of the acid. Higher consciousness, you call it. Jesus! What could it add to a work of art, to a place of importance? I have, O Bicycle Rider, wept at the monument to the Deportation, a Kafka-like and grim and pitiful place in Paris where some sixty thousand Jews were loaded onto boats to be taken to their death at Drancy. There’s a small light in a long crypt for every Jew deported. I’ve sunk to my knees there and wept. What would you feel in this place? Would the stupid acid feel sympathy, terror, pity? Charity, as best I can guess, is not one of the acid’s specialties. It can fake neural events like sex and euphoria, but of solicitude for others it knows nothing. It doesn’t tolerate others. It would not have allowed you to weep for a hideous injustice. This is, shall we say, obscene. Higher consciousness, from McTaggart’s phony Buddhism and transcendental meditation to hallucinatory drugs, is trendy Drug Culture Doublespeak for no consciousness at all. My psychiatrist friend says that an addiction as longstanding and ingrown as yours cannot be reached by persuasion or treatment. He says that when this preference for deadness rather than responsive liveliness has become a boring terror and aching intolerable misery to you, only then will you try to free yourself of its jealous possession. I know, and admit, that I’m talking from the outside, but it may be useful to you, if the acid will let you hear these words, to know what you look like. The acid has already made you schizoid: all science agrees that this is what it does. This word means split. I have no doubt that the acid allows you to feel that being schizoid is romantic, free-spirited, and privileged beyond dull clunks like me. I have only my Mariana, that delightful girl, and my classical scholarship, and my Boy Scouts, and my sober round of reading, gymnastics, my thesis for the Theological Faculty at the university, my painting, teaching, learning. I can share what I feel. Not always well, but the possibility is there. I believe what the Boy Scout Manual says: Forget Yourself. The important thing to me is to know, so that I can respond, how others experience being, love, lust, food, a film, a summer afternoon. I try to paint because I want to show others what I think is beautiful. I know by now that the acid won’t let you respond. I liked you, saw you as interesting and in need of a friend. I took the trouble to reach out. I still don’t want to believe that these fucking hellish vegetable acids delta-9-tetrahydrocannibinol and lysergic acid diethylamide have made you so stupid that you can’t get your head out of your ass long enough to talk to another human being, and perhaps even to respond.