Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

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  lost. It took a long time to give info to the baggage people, and when we finally got out of the airport there was surprise nobody there to meet us. So there I was, 36 hours after starting out from D.C. (where I'd made a stopover to visit my ailing Pop), with my suitcase gone, no clue what to do, and old Bob Wilson on my hands - he prefers "Bob" to "Robert." He was starting to really lose it, obsessively complaining about everything, like that he wouldn't have his medicine, and me falling unwillingly into the role of chirpy cheerer-upper that I'd just finished doing with Pop on the way out here. Wilson looks a bit like Pop, actually: he has white hair and beard. I told Wilson, ''Don't be so surprised they didn't manage to meet us. I mean these are people who invited Rucker, Wilson and McKenna to be in their movie. These people have got to be nuts! These people are fucked up! It's like . . . how long would you wait for Queen Mu to meet you at an airport?" We had a voice and fax phone numbers for Catarina Santos, but she wasn't answering her phone, nor did she have a message machine.

  So Bob Wilson and I asked the tourism counter to recommend a hotel, and we got a cab to their recommended Hotel Nacional, a depressingly anonymous place in the business district, new, soulless, with a lobby of stone polished to a fierce tombstone glare; it didn't seem as if anyone else at all was staying there. Wilson and I lay down for naps in our separate rooms. My heart was doing funny things lying there, palpitations you might call it, my poor overstressed heart fluttering at my chest. I got up in the early afternoon, and Wilson was still asleep. Fine.

  The sidewalks of Lisbon are mosaics made of miniature cobblestones, extremely slippery in the winter rain, mostly white, but with black swirly symmetric Belusov-Zhabotinsky patterns every so often. In the less traveled areas, grass grows verdant in the multiple mosaic cracks.

  I found a small funicular railway and rode it up to the Barrio Alto, a neighborhood of old houses with laundry hanging out. The walls were crumbly stucco washed over with colors. It must be glorious on a sunny day. And there are tiles everywhere. The Moorish influence. I missed having Audrey here to show it to. I saw a little park with a nice-smelling cedar that had been trained to grow out

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  over a circular overhead trellis - some beams up in the air making a hundred foot-diameter disk with the branches of the cedar sprawling atop them. Old men underneath playing cards at little tables. Very quaint. I could see out over the city from one spot in the Barrio Alto - these view spots are called miradouros - could see Teja River (called the Tagus in English, no doubt a British idea like using Leghorn for the city Livorno in Italy or, for that matter, Lisbon instead of Lisboa) and I could see the big landmark: the Castelo de São Jorge (the tilde over the letter a in São means to pronounce it like Saoung, cognate to Saint).

  As it was Sunday, most things were closed, but I did stop in at one hole-in-the-wall cafe for a 150$00 escudo glass of beer. (The Portuguese use the $ sign for a decimal point.) The exchange rate is about 160 escudos to a dollar, so that means the beer was about ninety cents. Not that it was a big one by any means, it was a strange crippled-looking little glass. This humble care is beautifully appointed - tiled walls and a real wrought-iron lamp high on the wall, it's the kind of place that would be full of yuppies in Germany or the U.S., but here it's full of Mediterranean men, short guys with lined faces and thin lips, guys whom in California you'd be more likely to see in the parking lot of 711 than in a cafe. Portugal is their country!

  I also stopped in at a cafe next to a movie theater and had a Pizza a Atum. Tuna in English is Atun in Spanish, and Atum in Portuguese. Because the care was next to a movie theater on a Sunday, it held two darling little groups of mother and children. How I love seeing women with their children, it is so wonderful to see the happy cute big-cheeked ice cream-eating kids, and the loving tender mothers, the mothers albeit a bit frayed and distraught due the pressures of raising said kids - as were Audrey and I during those three-kid-travelling-circus years of yore, raising Sorrel, Tom and Ida. The Holy Family, the divine and darling herd.

  When I got back to the Hotel Nacional it was nearly evening. The good news when I got back was that Catarina Santos was on the phone just then looking for me. I'd sent her a fax when I got up from my nap. Catarina had been assigned to meet us at the Lisbon airport, which has an exit and a traffic that looked (to me anyway) comparable in size and complexity to the airport of, say, Lynchburg,

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  Virginia. It's pretty hard to miss someone at that exit, but Catarina had missed us, and had even given a frantic "Your father is missing!" call to son Tom, back in Los Perros, at 2 AM California time, which made me want to kill her.

  Waiting for Catarina to come to the hotel, Wilson and I had a few drinks, then slept a couple more hours, and then she showed up looking much cuter than expected at about quarter of ten. And trailed by none other than Terence McKenna.

  Catarina is une jolie laide (a beautiful ugly), a woman with such lively complicated features that you love to watch her. She has large, highly animated lips which are often drawn twitchingly up to her nose for this or that badger/gopher face of mockery or emphasis. She has a cracking, charming voice because she smokes cigarettes all the time, like all of the people here. When she met us, she was dressed all in black with a miniskirt and a black leather coat. Terence was glued to her like a limpet, apparently they were having an affair. I didn't envy him, as she's a sulker and a manipulator. But she was always fun to watch; her face was like a circus.

  It turned out that Terence had gotten to Lisbon three days earlier than Wilson and me, and was angling to stay three days longer. He's divorced, unemployed, and was eager to stretch out the gig.

  Terence is a person who grows on you. He's a tall skinny guy, about six feet and 160 pounds, with kind of a gold-prospector face, meaning a chin up near his nose as if he didn't have teeth, and loads of whiskers in no particular pattern covering most of his phiz. His eyes are large, thoughtful and brown. His forehead is low; I'd say the guy's whole face is about half the height of a standard horse-faced soap-actor's visage. He has a head like a cheerfully scrunched fist. He looks a little like what you get when you put two dots of ink for eyes on your index finger's bottom knuckle and bounce the knuckle up and down over your thumb with a handkerchief wrapped around your hand to make a kind of puppet. (Sorry, Terence, I'm exaggerating!)

  So Bob Wilson and I went out for dinner with Terence and Catarina and Edgar Pera, the director of the movie, which is called The Manual of Evasion: LX94. LX stands for Lisbon, or an alternate Lisbon, and the production is funded by the city of Lisbon in honor of a year-long festival of the arts called Lisbon '94. We went to a place

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  near the water, near the Rio Teja, at ten o'clock at night, a typical or even early time for dinner in Lisboa, quite a shock for someone with my supper-at-six upbringing. I had some beautiful olives and salt cod seviche as appetizer, then grilled cod, cod cooked in milk, and cod with beans and shrimps.

  Edgar is a handsome man with short dark hair, a Mediterranean/Moorish face with full features and a lovely round chin with dark stubble. He often shrugs and makes self-deprecating gestures, like, "Who cares!" or "Don't ask me!" or "For God's sake relax!", blowing out air and shaking his head.

  The best part of the day was that we took our backpacks (no luggage yet, guys!) out of the cold, shiny Hotel Nacional after dinner and brought them to the four star York House.52 This is where our employers, the Companhia de Filmes Principe Real, had meant to put us up all along. And it is a terrific four star hotel, all in wood and tile and ceramic. Edgar said that during World War Two, the York House was a meeting-place and hang-out for spies. According to Wilson, who refers to the movie Casablanca, Lisbon was a big hangout for spies in WWII.

  I should mention that on the way to dinner, and on the way back to the hotel, we got high in the car smoking hash. (Not mine! I don't remember whose!) Walking up the three gardened flights from the street to the York House, the spy
house, high on hash in Lisbon, well it felt pretty cool.

  As we checked in, Wilson started a big fight because the clerk wanted to keep his passport overnight; I evaded, and went on to my bed.

  January 10, 1994. Filming on the River.

  I was awakened by a liveried man knocking on my door to bring a tray of breakfast at 7:30 AM. Rolls, butter, apricot jelly, and a pot of coffee and a pot of hot milk. It was delicious; the butter was like a different substance from the butter I get in the U.S. - it was so fragrant and healthy-tasting. Outside it was raining.

  I phoned TAP (Bob Wilson's interpretation of the Air Portugal

  52. York House Residencia, Rua das Janelas Verdes 321, 1200 Lisboa.

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  acronym was now "Take Another Plane"), and there was no news about my suitcase. It seemed that TAP's origination airport for the NYC/Lisbon flight alternates between JFK and Newark. So my bag was 48 hours out of phase. I put on the same clothes for the fourth (!!!!) day in a row.

  A woman showed up at the hotel to put make-up on me and Bob and Terence. Catarina and some film-crew people were there with a bunch of clothes, but they figured my overcoat and beret looked fine. They were fresh out of giant chicken suits, even though I did repeatedly ask for one. Bob was wearing a white T-shirt and a camel's hair coat, and they made him put on something black, which pissed him off.

  There was a yacht waiting for us by a monument to the Great Navigators (a big theme in Lisbon!). It belonged to the production company, or to one of the company's contacts. The rain cleared up and the sun came out. Seeing Edgar and all his lively hip crew, I began to realize just how serious a gig this was. I mean, these guys had big heavy-duty 35 mm cameras, not to mention any number of Hi-8 video cams.

  We got on the boat and motored around the wide Rio Teja for awhile, being filmed answering questions about time. The questions were posed by Carlos, a TV reporter who was playing a reporter. Bob, Terence, and I were cast as the Shaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Chaos. (They use X for CH in Portugal, so actually, we were the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Xaos.) I was kind of stiff and like jockeying for position, worried the others would talk more than me, but eventually I got a good rap or two on film, talking about my idea that we are like eyes which God grows to look at himself with - God being thus like a giant snail or mollusk that extrudes eyestalks.

  Later I actually got to see this shot onscreen in the rushes. The camera angle was low so that my head was like sticking up from behind the dome of the boat's binnacle (compass enclosure), and I was raising up my arms to simulate eyestalks, the arms at different heights and my hands cupped as if holding eye-spheres. Right above and behind me was the great suspension bridge over the Rio Teja. This bridge looks just like the Golden Gate bridge, and was built by

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  the long-term dictator Salazar, but is called the April 25 bridge in honor of the date of the 1974 revolution. In the shot, my hands stuck up above the lines of the bridge. Much as I liked this shot, it didn't make it into the finished film.

  The technology of the filming, which I didn't understand at first, was that the video cameras would be on most or all of the time, but the heavy-duty 35 mm cameras would only be on for occasional bursts of three minutes. A three-minute role of 35 mm film costs $300, and another $200 for processing. Given Edgar's finite budget for the film, he is sparing with the 35 mm, preferring to wait and wait around until finally there is a feeling that all is ripe and the key scene can be shot - almost always in one take with no repeat. The final film may include some footage from the videos to pad out or vary upon the 35 mm. For editing, everything is transferred first to video tape and then to a digital format called AVI. The edit is done by using the AVI files on a computer, much as if one were word-processing a bunch of documents. Once you have all the snips and splices figured out digitally, you print out a spec sheet, and the lab does the snipping and splicing for you.

  Eventually the boat docked on the other side of the Rio Teja. They filmed us arriving - the idea of the movie is that there are Saboteurs who are changing the speed of time in various parts of Lisbon, and that they are being helped by the Xaman, the NeuroMagician, and the Master of Xaos.

  We went up the hill to have lunch in a small town with a name something like Alameda. I waited with Carlos in a square, and noticed a woman filling up big plastic pitchers at a fountain. "I can't believe that woman has to haul water to her house," I said. Carlos answered, "You have to understand that Portugal is the end of Europe and the beginning of the third world."

  We went into an unprepossessing place for lunch, and sat at a long table. I sat next to Michael, a guy who seemed like a Frenchman with good English, but who turned out to be a longtime expatriate New Yorker who's acquired a French accent. He lives in Paris in an apartment above, of all places, the Procope, the brasserie where dear Audrey and I had dinner on our 25th anniversary in Paris in 1992! Voltaire used to hang there. Michael is a very talkative, dynamic guy,

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  typically wearing a jump-suit with a zillion zippers. He has a shock of black hair and a long nose. Michael is the cameraman for The Manual of Evasion. For lunch I was served a Portuguese mixed meat plate with part of a pig's leg, some blood sausage, some lard sausage, some beans, pot-roast, potatoes, cabbage and, lo and behold, a pig's ear. We had red, white, and "green" wine, this being a tart slightly effervescent white wine.

  After lunch we went to shoot film in a winery. The idea was that this is where the Xaman, the Neuro-Magician, and the Master of Xaos were meeting the Saboteurs. I got in a couple of good raps about transrealism and the Central Teachings of Mysticism. For a long time we sat at a huge picnic table covered with wine bottles, some open, sitting there, and pretending to be getting drunk. It was up to us how much we actually drank, and when they needed to reshoot a scene, they'd empty out our glasses into a pitcher so that the actresses could refill them. It was weird to have an infinite amount of wine in front of me - a moment I'll remember during thirsty times. I kind of held back on the drinking lest I do something stupid. The actresses were a fat lively blonde woman named Suzy, and a cute actress called Ana, who was also acting in a Pirandello play.

  Terence was quite funny, saying things like, "Gentlemen, the question on the floor is what is reality?," and then going into all sorts of raps about time-machines. He has this idea that logically we can't see a time-machine before one is invented (because as soon as we see a time-machine, then we can copy it and invent one). So as soon as the first time-machine is invented (which will happen, according to Terence, in 2012), then time-machines from all down the future will show up, and the arrival of all this novelty at once will cause some kind of information explosion. It's fun to hear him talk about time-machines with that same wild, unschooled excitement that I had about them as a teenager.

  The river had gotten rough, so we drove back to the hotel instead of taking the boat. When we got back, my suitcase was finally there! I took a shower and changed my shirt three times in a row. My four-day underwear could have been cut into squares and sold to dysmenorrheic women needing hormone therapy. I had dinner alone in the hotel dining room, sitting at a table near the kitchen. I had a great

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  fish soup, and feeling casual in the European ambience just said, "Can I have another?" and they brought me another, and then a shrimp and endive salad, and then a nutcake of ground hazelnuts. A perfect meal.

  In bed I turned on the TV, and saw a Portuguese news story about how six people on a yacht had drowned in the Rio Teje today!

  January 11, 1994. the Observatory. "Time Flies."

  The next morning Catarina drove Bob, Terence, and me to an astronomical observatory for the day's shooting. Bob was in a foul, sulky mood.

  The observatory was a lovely pastel yellow classic mansion sitting in a small botanical garden in the misty rain. The Portuguese used to have lots of colonies: Goa in India, Angola and Mozambique in Africa. Brazil in South
America, the Cape Verde islands in the Pacific, and the island of Timor near Indonesia. They have the same latitude as San Francisco, so exotic plants from the former colonies can flourish in their botanical gardens. Terence is something of a botanist due to his researches into psychedelic plants, and he told me that one of the big trees was a dragon's-blood tree from the MidEast. Its red sap is used for incense.

  Walking out alone into the rainy garden later in the day, I thought of the phrase from Sartre's La Nausée which I quote in my The Secret of Life: "I went into the garden and the garden smiled at me."