Izzy and the Father of Terror

by Eliot Fintushel

  The people who wrote down the Bible understood this kind of thing. Look and see: Genesis, XIX:3, for example. Lot bakes matzohs?Passover bread?in his house in Sodom. But this was before Moses, before the exodus from Egypt, before Passover started, with the unleavened bread the Children of Israel baked in the sun while the current Pharaoh was saddling horses. Israel (i.e., Jacob) hadn’t even been born yet. So what was Lot doing baking matzohs back in Sodom?

  If Izzy has taught me anything at all, it’s that clock time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes five p.m. comes a week or two before six, and sometimes they’re simultaneous. The so-called excluded middle is positively a jungle, teeming with unenumerated possibilities. And causality, so far from being the one-dimensional line that Kant and even Hume talked about, is as wild as linguini on a rolling boil.

  Where I now live, for example, on Sanduleak, the surface temperature is three or four hundred times what it is on Earth or Mars. Since Sandy went supernova and contracted to a neutron star, it’s a thousand degrees Kelvin?in the shade! That makes things go pretty fast. By Earth scale, a decent life span for a citizen on Sandy is maybe a quadrillionth of a second. It feels like a long time here. You’d think a bridge like that could never be gapped, that Earthers and Sanduleans could never communicate, and you’d be right except that, in this man’s universe, there is no absolute standard. We have a sliding scale. And I mean sliding!

  The Earther Protagoras had it right:

  Man is the measure of all things.

  Well, not Man, but Mind really, not to be anthropocentric. All those scales and numbers and laws of science are just hypostatizations of something that actually belongs to the realm of Mind. Mind made them. Mind measures them. Mind compares, adjusts, interprets, changes. That’s what the epoche is all about, for example. That’s why Shaman was such an imminent threat even from a couple hundred million miles away, even if it had been light-years away?c is not the top speed in this man’s universe, not when you can do an epoche. Nature is a lot less rigid than that, believe me.

  Look at linguini.

  27. Dualism

  "Mel, is that you, Mel? Abu al-Hawl?" Sarvaduhka was whispering into my hindquarters, the pyramid of Chephren at his back, and in between, Lila Kodzi and two camels tethered to a rock. "I can’t believe I drove you in my VW Squareback on Route 40. Is this you? Izzy says you are the Father of Terrors from before the pharaohs and that you have shepherded the dynonucleic acid ancestors out of the primal soup down to modern Homo sapiens such as I myself, Sarvaduhka, that you are the progenitor of all life on Earth. Izzovision. Is this the truth? You did not appear this way to me in New Mexico or Texas. I hope I did not offend you, Great One, by anything I may have said or done at that time, Om Shantih."

  Lila said, "Sir, you’re talking to a big stone."

  Sarvaduhka ignored her. "Izzy couldn’t make it, oh Terrible One. He is being held by the authorities here. They think maybe he is a terrorist, but Izzy says not to worry. He asked me to give you this message, Ineffable Ancient Great One.

  "Number One, he apologizes that his gambit did not work exactly as planned…"

  "Number One, Number Two!" Lila Kodzi slapped Sarvaduhka on the shoulder. "He’s been rehearsing this all the way from Cairo. Number One, Number Two! Bah! There is only Number One! Is this not so, Ancient Greatness? All is the divine holy Christ Nature, and the divine holy Christ Nature is one." Now she whispered into the clefts of my badly mortared posterior.

  The sound and light show had reached the reign of Cheops. People here seemed to consider that fairly ancient. They should have seen the first lungfish. They should have seen the nucleotides I netted from the asteroid belt, how I landed them and nursed them, turned them inside-out, left-to-right, and said to Myself, "Let us make Man." That, they could more justly have called "ancient."

  "Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka said. Lila grumbled. Sarvaduhka went on. "Number One, Izzy wanted the Sanduleans to save you from Shaman, but not to take you so far away from Earth. So, that didn’t work out so well, and he is sorry, Greatness."

  "He’s right here," Lila said. "What?far away? Obviously, you are a dualist."

  "I am not a dualist. I am your employer. You don’t know what you are talking about, Lila. The Mel Bellow person is in outer space somewhere."

  "I thought you said he was the Sphinx now."

  "Yes and no."

  "Dualism."

  "Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka honeyed his voice. "Number Two, Izzy requests that you employ your vast powers to bring Johnny Abilene to El Giza. This appears to be the only way that you can be saved from eternal slavehood to Shaman, who is also Tuthmosis IV."

  "Dualism."

  "Lord Abu al-Hawl, Great Beneficent One, please make the whore shut up."

  28. Who Am I?

  I bolted upright, like a stricken dreamer. "Who am I?" Gypsy sat across the table from me, a half-peeled banana, the dendritic bulb sprouting from his crumpled human thorax like fungus from the crotch of a dead oak. He wasn’t moving. Nora sat beside him, still and silent. Her mouth was slightly open; she stared dumbly past me. Nora was naked?still human?and her long hair was splayed all over her face, shoulders, breasts. I touched her arm. It was cold.

  From the kitchen: the whooshing and humming of the dishwashing machine, and sometimes a knock, as from badly vented plumbing; then the whole cafe shook. Each sound was accompanied by a change of scenery out the window. The streaks of starlight shifted angles, they grew dense or sparse, or danced in circles, or split into planes like layers of grenadine and liquor. We passed through glittering banks of sperm-like particles, auras of colored light, moments of darkness so profound they seemed to darkle the cafe pitch black, nullifying our fluorescents.

  Tools clanked. Shaman grunted.

  "Nora?" I said.

  The noise in the kitchen abruptly stopped. Shaman appeared at the door. His white pants were stained with grease. He held a box-end wrench in one hand. He looked tired. "I’m you, you little shit."

  I slumped back into the chair.

  He took a few steps in my direction, then barked, "You’re not here." I was gone. It was night on the Sahara. On the fringe of my mind, fast fading, was the image of Shaman coming closer, jabbing at Izzy’s bung with something like an ice pick, doing it without much spirit, as if he’d tried it a dozen times before to no effect and didn’t really expect it to work now. He slapped Gypsy and Nora to see if they would respond?they didn’t. Then he returned to the kitchen, to the dishwasher, in the same disgruntled, hopeless frame of mind.

  "I’ll have to do my own epoche," he muttered, "if this doesn’t work. God help us all then."

  Then nothing. Then sand, sound and light, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi shouting up my stone ass.

  29. Epoche

  " ‘Who am I?’ Did you hear that, Lila Kodzi? The Sphinx spoke." Sarvaduhka shivered.

  "It was one of the camels. Hamad snorted. He snorts, that’s all."

  Sarvaduhka persisted. "Oh Great One, I will convey your question to Izzy: ‘Who am I?’ I myself am but a poor, small person in the hospitality trade. I have two, three motels jointly with my cousins, although they hardly do anything but watch TV and drink alcoholic items. I will ask Izzy, who knows many things like that. But can you get Johnny Abilene, Wondrous One? Izzy wants to know, will you do it A.S.A. of P.? He would do this himself, but he is indisposed."

  "Maybe Abu can give us a sign." Lila nudged Sarvaduhka.

  "Exactly, but please be quiet, Lila. I am doing this… Great One, can you give us a sign?"

  My selfhood was significantly in disarray. I was being addressed by creatures whose formation I had initiated some seven hundred million years before in an attempt to disembark from the Milky Way, where I found myself stranded. On the other hand, I was being held in a Texas highway rest stop cafe a good ways out in space toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Besides which, I was some sort of tourist attraction.

  Shaman wanted to eat me. I wanted to go home. Yet I coul
dn’t find my center. To me was lost that Archimedean fulcrum from which the soul can act.

  "A sign, oh Great One! Please, a sign!"

  It was like trying to sit up when your back is out?Where are those muscles? My desperation drove me deeper and deeper away from my senses, deeper and deeper away from thoughts and feelings too. Sinking in, even the desperation dwindled above me like bubbles rising away from a skin diver.

  Through murk and roil, I squinted as an artist squints, bracketing the details to understand the whole. Fish and weed of mind tumbled by, denuded of names and relations, continually devouring one another, blurring boundaries. This wasn’t the swill of Shaman’s hole, for now I was the diver and the pearls I found would be mine.

  But then the word "I" grew goosefeet. It emptied. "I" was just a mark, a convenience of thought, vacuous outside the quote marks.

  The voices of Shaman?I’m you!?of Sarvaduhka, Lila Kodzi, the sound and light show?upbeat, mendacious?all merged in a current without source or destination. The moan of the wind, an atom bomb, nostalgia, the planet Mars, the number three, oneself, the South of France, all lines all gone!

  DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.

  Place went. Sequence went. Time was ungetatable. No thought to think and not a thing to think it. "I" kept diving. "I" allowed "myself" to be swallowed further until, dissolving, "I" melted into a dark, pliable mass one could only call the bottom. Sea creatures here, murky, inchoate, that altered as one’s gaze changed, inseparable from one’s gaze.

  A stirring here, continually! Not the blank void of the mystics! Call it an urge, call it Der Wille Zur Macht, call it Tao or Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, impelling the contractile world back out of its own navel:

  Terms may be used

  But are none of them absolute,

  says Lao Tze of this foetal state.

  "I" had unwittingly performed an epoche, and this was its crux. "I" had found the fulcrum. "I" was utterly free. "I" could do anything.

  I broke wind.

  All at once, the goosefeet fell away. Iwas there, little me and big me, as before: Mel and Abu al-Hawl, the one space-bound in a helpless stupor, the other grounded in a strange galaxy, both on account of Shaman. Yes, Shaman existed and Gypsy and Nora in the Magellanic Stream, Izzy in his lockup, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi holding their noses, the camels huffing and turning away, the tourists… oblivious.

  I had glimpsed my fulcrum. Used it even. I had witnessed the birth of a world ex nihilo, with me in the middle. Epoche. Incomprehensible! I would bide my time and wait to see what it meant.

  Some things were a bit different. I was aware somehow, as information, as something casually read or heard, that Gamal Abdel Nasser was dead. (He had been alive before the epoche.) Also, the Vietnam War was still going on, with American soldiers heavily invested.

  And Eugene McCarthy wasn’t president. My epoche had shifted a sweaty upper lip into the Oval Office. There it had been, for a hundredth of a second, hovering above a swivel chair, just the lip, a little damp skin above it, and the barest hint of nostril. Then, due to a principle the Magellanics call "Causal Recovery," in order to preserve the causal chain locally, a human being congealed around it, complete with his past, present and future, grade school teachers, mortician, the lot: a guy name of Richard Nixon. Some other things changed as well. The American flag was now red white and blue (and now, it always had been!).

  Nobody but me would know the difference, for my new universe came complete with history?retroactively?and memories in synch. Nobody, I suspected, but Izzy.

  There was one other change I was immediately aware of. A guy in cowboy boots with spurs, wearing a ten-gallon hat and carrying a guitar case under his arm, was striding into the Sphinx enclosure where Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi grimaced: "Feh! Feh! Feh!"

  "Mel?" he was saying. "Is that you, son? Is it really, truly you?"

  "Gone Joe! Dad!" I said?somehow.

  Somehow, he heard me. Effluvium despite, he galloped to my rock butt and embraced the cooling, rough stone, pressing into me with all his might, kissing me and weeping for joy.

  30. Passport Photo

  "Are you the authentic Johnny Abilene?" Lila Kodzi said. "I have all your records. I love your music."

  Sarvaduhka was trembling, hysterically trying to piece together how Johnny Abilene had appeared on the scene. Sarvaduhka’s Causal Recovery, apparently, had been incomplete. He pulled Lila violently away. "Take me back to Cairo. This is all Izzy said to do. The sound and light show is almost over, and I don’t want to be caught back here when they start cleaning up… It still stinks?what was that?"

  She pushed him back. "And what about Number Three?"

  Sarvaduhka slapped his head. "I forgot! The photograph. The passport photograph. Give me the Kodak."

  "It’s a Polaroid."

  "Give me the Kodak."

  It was a Polaroid. The epoche. Sarvaduhka blinked. He took the camera. "Wait." He sneaked around to the front of me, in among the tourists, and snapped a photo of my face and shoulders, pleated headdress and all. Then, shaking wildly, he managed to return to Lila and the horses?they were horses now, and not camels. Epoche.

  He tore Lila away from Johnny Abilene, who was oblivious to her advances as he hugged me and whispered and whispered. Sarvaduhka and Lila were still arguing as they mounted their horses and trotted away between the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren.

  31. Nora Wouldn’t Understand

  Johnny Abilene whispered: "Oh son, we finally made it! Guldang if you ain’t one with Abu al-Hawl! I knew we could do it! I knew it! You forgive me for leaving you and your poor little mama, don’t you, Mel? You must know by now that I’m no Earther. That makes you a half of what I am, son, you and Abu, half-Magellanic. I’m gonna take you back to the Clouds, where you belong. You’ll come now, won’t you?

  "I’m sorry we can’t take your mama there, boy, but she’s an Earther; believe me, Mel, Nora just wouldn’t understand."

  In the Magellanic Stream and in the Sahara, my mind brittled like frozen tofu. "Did you say ‘Nora’?"

  32. Earther, You Don’t Understand History

  I had thought she looked familiar.

  Johnny Abilene was astounded to discover that Nora was also a Sandulean agent. More accurately, she was an Earther recruited by Sanduleans for the purpose of returning Abu al-Hawl to the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Emperor, the same entity who, with his United Diet of the Small and Large Clouds, maneuvered the Magellanics into orbit around the Milky Way, the same who caused Sanduleak to go supernova in order to convey Johnny Abilene to Earth, this same Emperor also found Nora, via epoche, and installed her as a backup and secret watchdog over Abilene.

  "In this business, you can’t trust nobody," the Emperor told me much later. Only Izzy was in a position to know all the details at that time, but now, on Sandy, it’s immortalized in the song, "Marriage is Just Two Alien Agents Hiding from Each Other, Anyway," Number 423 on the list, last I heard, about a billionth of a second ago.

  By inseminating the Earther, effecting the commingling of the Magellanic and Milky Way branches of Abu’s great family, the Emperor and my father (and, unknown to him, Nora) had planned to produce the Sphinx’s Messiah. "Yeah, every time we tried to get through to Abu, it was ‘ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN,’ the Emperor told me once, over neutron latte. "It’s enough to make a guy agnostic. So we figured we’d try a little psychology."

  But then they didn’t know how to use me to get through to Abu. Undercover as "Johnny Abilene," world-traveling musical goodwill ambassador, my father left Nora and me to look for a clue. Everywhere Johnny gigged, he buttonholed Egyptologists, astrophysicists, and Edgar Cayce fans.

  Neither the Emperor, Nora, nor Johnny actually understood how to get to Abu via Mel until Shaman inadvertently showed them the way. Then it was a race to avert disaster; the Earther Shaman, after his own selfish ends, threatened to thwart the entire proceeding. The Magellanic Emperor sent Gypsy in the cafe ship, to help out Nora. The Emperor
had, of course, first prepared the way by lining the North American throughway system with rest stop cafes that resembled the Magellanic craft, so Gypsy’s cafe could land undetected.

  And if you think that any of this is less reliable information than the Battle of Hastings or the invention of the cotton gin?which may change any moment due to epoche or political revisionism?then, Earther, you don’t understand history.

  Johnny Abilene was astounded. Just imagine how I felt. And now she was pregnant again?my mother, with my child. Whatever in hell "my" had come to mean!

  33. After Nasser’s Death

  In the confusion following Nasser’s death, Izzy was sprung, and all tours of the Giza funerary complex were put on hold. Lila Kodzi led Izzy on horseback, with Sarvaduhka, Johnny Abilene and one of the Haymakers, just arrived from the other Memphis via Lufthansa. Nobody stopped them. I saw them from above and from below. I felt hooves echo against the roofs of underground chambers; I saw them, tiny, remote, from millions of miles above the sky. And from inside their skins, I felt them also, not chaotically as when Shaman had pierced me, but clearly, from a standpoint: Abu al-Hawl’s.

  Izzy waved a little navy-blue book. "I got it! I got it, Melly baby. I got you a passport. We’re gonna haul ass out of the Sahara." They cantered into the enclosure. "His Polaroid did it; the sun spoiled my Fuji’s. Sarvaduhka’s a hero. And you, you’re great too, boy. You got Johnny Abilene here, and he’s our main man." Izzy dismounted and held the passport photo up for the Sphinx to see.

  Lila jumped down beside him and twined herself around his arm. "You lovely one-brow, you are a crazy man everywhere, just like in bed. How will you get the Great Sphinx through customs?"

  My father clapped a husky arm around Sarvaduhka. Sarvaduhka was cadaverous and grim on the outside. Inside, he was set to explode. "He gets everything,"?I could hear him thinking? "female action included, and my squareback thrown in, free mileage, everything. And what do I get? Saddle sore."