The Secret of Life

by Rudy Rucker

  Gross National Product. Do the Twist. Kids These Days. Hot Black Coffee. Is That a Girl or a Boy?

  They Call That Music?”

  “Look at my new shades.” Audrey got a pair of aviator mirror-shades out of her purse. With the sunglasses and her long, tangled hair, she looked real gone. “I’ve been saving them for you. Richard doesn’t like them.”

  “You lookbeat , Audrey.”

  “So do you. With those yellow glasses, you look stoned.”

  “We’re cool. We’ve made it. It’s time to groove.”

  Chapter 16:

  Friday, December 10, 1965 They decided to have supper in a dark-paneled tavern called the Gold Rail. The waiter helped them order food and a pitcher of beer. He didn’t card them.

  “It’s civilized here,” said Conrad, filling their glasses.

  “Just like in Paris.”

  “Just like.”

  They toasted each other and sipped the bitter, lip-tickling brew. Audrey took off her shades.

  “How are your courses going?” asked Conrad.

  “Philology is a lot of fun. Phonetics is awful. And we’ve been reading this great novel by Diderot. It’s all about men having sex with nuns. One man disguises himself as a nun to get into the convent—he’s a young shepherd named Valentin.”

  “Do they catch him?”

  “Well, one of the nuns gets pregnant, so they know there’s a man. The Mother Superior tells the nuns they have to line up naked and come into her room and be inspected one by one. So Valentin ties his ...

  ties his cock back between his legs ...”

  “What does he tie it to?”

  “Idon’t know.” Audrey giggled and sipped at her beer. “Anyway, when the Mother Superior leans down to look at Valentin, he gets so excited that he breaks the ribbon and knocks off her glasses!”

  “Sounds great.”

  Their food arrived. Sole and crabmeat for her, steak and fries for him. It was delicious. They were in a booth near the bar. There was a good jukebox. The place was dark and loud and warm and full of good things to eat and drink.

  After dinner they ordered another pitcher and started smoking Audrey’s Newports. Conrad felt looser and looser, more and more plugged into the Now.

  “I feel like I haven’t been thinking enough, Audrey. At college I’ve just been drinking and trying to act cool. When I should have been learning more about the secret of life. I used to always talk about it in high school.” There were some loud drunks at the bar. Fraternity guys from Columbia.

  “So what is the secret of life, Conrad? Drugs?”

  “Drugs ... I don’t know anything about drugs yet. All I’ve done is take peyote once and go crazy.

  Actually, I was already crazy, from missing you so much. But the secret ...” Conrad raised his glass, feeling for the just-right phrasing.

  Just then Hank Larsen appeared, walking into the Gold Rail as if he had been conjured up for the occasion. Fit and tired-looking, he wore a university jacket with a bigC on it. He and Conrad recognized each other the instant their eyes met.

  “Conrad Bunger! My God, it’sConrad .” Hank strode over and began thumping on his old friend.

  “Conrad, buddy. You look like John Lennon!”

  “I don’t believe this, Hank. I was just thinking about you. The pasture? The secret of life? This is Audrey Hayes. She goes to grad school here, and I came up to see her.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Hank squeezed into their booth and called for beer. “I’ve just been down at the pool doing laps.Five miles. Coach is all steamed up about some big-ass meet we got next week.”

  “Yeah ...” Hank laughed and shook his head. “They’ve made a jock out of me. A communications major. And I was planning to be a drunk artist. Remember that painting we made, Paunch?”

  “What painting?” asked Audrey.

  “It was when Conrad and I were twelve,” said Hank. “We got this huge piece of Masonite out of his dad’s garage and painted it with gesso. Then we took turns throwing black and red paint on it like Jackson Pollock. Conrad had this idea to make it like the Creation, so he read the Book of Genesis out loud while I was flinging paint. It looked damn good.”

  “You were better at painting than I was,” said Conrad. “We each did some small ones, too, remember, and you were trying to paint like Tanguy and Dali.”

  “I love those guys. That’s one of the great things about living here in the Big Noise. I can always cut over the MOMA and look at the paintings.”

  “I do that, too,” said Audrey. “I love New York.”

  “I first came up here when I was twelve,” said Hank. “My dad took me along on a business trip. We went to Radio City. God. They had all the dancers, and this great stage show—there was a kind of big wagon that kept zooming back and forth, with people jumping in and out of it.”

  “When you got home you tried to build a model of it with your Erector set,” put in Conrad.

  “Yeah. Another Larsen debacle.” He shook his head in a familiar self-deprecating way, and then looked at Audrey. “So you’re Conrad’s girlfriend? You’re making a noble sacrifice for mankind.”

  “Oh, he’s not so bad,” laughed Audrey. “If he’s not stoned or drunk.”

  “Stoned,” said Hank. “Tsk-tsk. I remember when Conrad read about Benzedrine inhalers in some beatnik anthology—I think it was an excerpt fromJunkie —and he ran out and bought all these inhalers and ate the shit in them. Despite the fact that they stopped putting Benzedrine in them about ten years ago.”

  “Well, it was worth a try,” said Conrad, a little embarrassed. “You shouldn’t let the sixties pass you by, Hank. Especially at Columbia. I keep reading about all the student activists and—”

  “Bunch of pears,” spat Hank. He sketched a pear shape in the air. “I refer to the body envelope. Don’t tell me you’re a student radical, Conrad?”

  “Well ... no, not actually. Not in any organized fashion.”

  “They won’t let you join the Party, eh?” Hank started laughing again and began imitating a pear.“We don’t want Bunger at our demonstration, he’s liable to show up drunk!”

  “Conrad wants to find the secret of life,” put in Audrey.

  “We were just talking about it when you showed up, Hank. Remember that time we were in Skelton’s pasture talking about the life-force?”

  “Sure. I remember thinking that stuff up. I even wrote a paper on it for my twelfth-grade humanities course.”

  “Youdidn’t think it up,” cried Conrad. “Idid.You’re the one who said pantheism is ‘a bunch of dumb shits kneeling in front of a rock.’ ” “That’s true too.” Hank grinned. “As soon as any philosophy gets turned into an organized religion, it’s for dumb shits.” “But everyone joins something,” protested Audrey.

  “Don’t I know it,” sighed Hank. “I’m even in a fraternity.” He refilled his beer glass from the pitcher. “So what are you majoring in, Conrad? You haven’t written me since freshman year.” “You were the one who stopped writing. I guess I’m in math.”

  “Math?” exclaimed Audrey. “I thought you were majoring in physics.”

  “Well, I didn’t get a chance to tell you yet. My physics teacher really hates me. And on the way up here, I realized that I’ll have enough math credits if I just take two math courses each semester next year.”

  “But what about antigravity?” clamored Audrey.

  Hank started to laugh, but Conrad cut him off. “I really was able to fly, man. Audrey saw me.”

  “That’s right. Conrad flew us both down from the Eiffel Tower. Didn’t you see the picture? It was in all the papers.” “Oh, yeah ...” said Hank, slowly smiling. “I remember seeing that picture on the news. It was supposed to be a hoax, but ...”

  “That was me and Audrey,” said Conrad. “It was a very special day.”

  “So you jumped off the Eiffel Tower!” exulted Hank. “Remember in high school, when I said you should jump off the Heyburn Building?”
/>   “Yeah, I was scared. I wasn’t quite sure it would work.”

  “But you say you can’t fly anymore? You’ve lost the knack?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why. Recently, I’ve beenshrinking instead. Right, Audrey?”

  Audrey blushed and giggled.

  Hank took a long pull from his beer. “I almost believe you, Conrad. Remember how your family used to have the TV down in that musty basement room?”

  “Caldwell’s apartment.”

  “Right. And in the summer, you and me’d watchTwilight Zone down there ... sometimes it would get kind of scary ... and after the show we’d go outside and lie in the grass, looking at the stars and making up our own stories.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you had this story about how a flying saucer had beamed you down and changed your family’s

  memories to think you’d been born in the normal way. You claimed you couldn’t remember anything before your tenth birthday. When your family moved to Louisville.”

  “Yeah.” Conrad shrugged. “For some reason that story’s always appealed to me.”

  “The year your family moved in was the year of all the big saucer scares,” Hank mused. “Nineteen fifty-six. I remember when old man Skelton saw a saucer and found that crystal in his hog pen. Just before you showed up, Conrad. You were supposed to be ten. Maybe the saucer set you down at Skelton’s the day theBungers moved to Louisville. Their memories got doctored, and old Conrad walked up from the pasture and joined the gang.”

  “And ever since,” said Conrad, “I’ve been trying to be a regular guy.”

  “Is he a regular guy, Audrey?”

  “Forget it! Is that true, Conrad, that you can’t remember anything from your early childhood?”

  “Oh, I have a few memories. There was this dream I used to always have. A kind of nightmare ... but a fun nightmare. I’d be at a circus, except all the people and all the acrobats were made of light. They were like flames, swinging around way up in the air. Neon lights. Eventually they’d come after me and push me down through a trapdoor.”

  “The aliens!” cried Hank. “Your original race. The door in the bottom of the saucer! Do you know why they sent you here?”

  “Isn’t this getting a little too ...” began Audrey.

  “No, no,” said Conrad, refilling his glass. “Hank and I always used to do this.Why the flame-people sent me here. To find out what humans are like. Our saucers have been monitoring Earth ever since the forties. We have amassed untold amounts of data. Yet a final understanding of the human condition has eluded us. What makes you people tick? Why do you behave as you do? What are your highest goals, and what can we learn from you?” Conrad was spieling all this out in a flat, robot voice. It was a science-fiction rap, a comedy routine. “It became evident that one of us would have to undergo incarnation as a fleshapoid. I was the one.”

  “ ‘I was the one,’ ”sang Audrey,“ ‘who taught her to kiss ...’ ”

  Hank joined in for the rest of the verse. It was the old Elvis song, “I Was the One.” Conrad joined in with off-key enthusiasm on the song’s refrain,“ ‘Well, I taught her how.’ ”

  “My mission,” said Conrad, resuming his rap, “is to sample what is noblest in the human intellect. I was, in short, sent here to learn what humans believe to be ...” He nodded encouragingly to Hank and Audrey.

  The three of them shouted out the catch phrase in unison: “THE SECRET OF LIFE!”

  It was a gas, making up such a crazy lie; it was a way to get past the dull, false consensus reality of the straights; it was a way of getting down into the fluid, archetypal flow of subconscious reality.

  That summer, Conrad would find out that most of his story was true.

  Part III

  The strangest thing is that I am not at all inclined to call myself insane, I clearly see that I am not: All these changes concern objects. At least, that is what I’d like to be sure of.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea

  Chapter 17:

  Sunday, July 31, 1966 Conrad’s big brother Caldwell came back from the army that summer. The parents had a basement apartment all set for Caldwell in the new Virginia house. He was a tall, lanky guy, with small eyes and a wide mouth. Everyone was excited the day Caldwell came back, but after a few minutes, he just went down to the basement and lay on his bed. Kid brother Conrad tagged along to ask questions.

  “What’s the matter, Caldwell? Aren’t you glad to be home?”

  Caldwell groaned softly. He was facing the wall. “I just want togo .”

  “Go where?”

  “Anywhere. I want to get a fast car and go.”

  “What kind of car are you going to get?”

  “I had a Porsche over there. I should have brought it back.”

  “Do you have a lot of money saved up?”

  “Get serious.” Caldwell rolled over and looked at Conrad. “How come your hair’s so long?”

  “That’s the new thing. It makes old people mad.”

  “Jesus. You’re going to be a senior this year?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend and everything. I even took peyote.”

  “It’s all changed out from under me.”

  “But you must have had fun in the army. You were lucky to be in Germany. If I get drafted, they’ll send me to Vietnam.”

  “You should get married.”

  “I probably will. But they’re getting rid of the marriage deferment. Graduate school still works, though.”

  “My baby brother in graduate school? Studying what?”

  “Math, I guess.”

  “You like math?” “It’s easier than physics or chemistry. There’s nothing to memorize. It all follows logically.” “I thought you wanted to major in philosophy. That’s what you and Larsen used to say. How is old Hank, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s the same as ever. I saw him up at Columbia this winter one time when I was visiting Audrey.”

  “Audrey.”Caldwell smiled wickedly. “Does she put out?”

  “How many girls did you fuck in Germany?”

  “Why aren’t you majoring in philosophy?”

  “Philosophy teachers don’t talk about anything interesting. It’s just words. Nothing’s true, nothing’s false, it’s all a matter of opinion. But math ... math is clean. Like a game of pool. Perfect spheres clicking and bouncing just so. Do you want to go to a bar and shoot some pool, Caldwell?”

  “You’re not old enough.” “The drinking age is eighteen in D.C.”

  “Ahhh, I don’t feel like it. I want to look through my old stuff. Did the movers just throw everything in a box?” “I think Mom went through your stuff first.”

  “God.” Caldwell groaned again and struggled to his feet.

  His room was equipped with a built-in bookcase, a dresser, a bed, a Danish armchair, and a battered old desk. Some of Caldwell’s stuff was in his desk and bookcase, the rest was in a big cardboard movers’ box.

  “I don’t suppose they saved myHot Rod magazines,” grumbled Caldwell, poking through the box.

  “Jesus. Here’s my old cuckoo clock. And the piston from my Model A. My NRA certificates, the bullwhip, Pop’s football jersey, the Alcatraz pennant, the whale’s tooth, my cowboy hat ... and the dueling pistols. Did you ever see these, Conrad?” “Yeah, I used to play with them senior year high school. I almost shot a guy when I was drunk once.”

  Caldwell frowned and shook his head. “Some people shouldn’t own guns, Conrad, and you’re one of them. Here’s some old pictures. I took these myself.” Caldwell began flipping through the stack of black-and-white photographs. “I took these the day we moved to Louisville. I was fifteen and you were ten. Pop took us out and bought a camera for your birthday. Remember?”

  “You know how I am, Caldwell. I’ve got a great memory now, but I can’t remember much before Louisville. I think it was those hay-fever pills Mom made me take every morning.”

  “That’s true, you used to be really out of it. We were alrea
dy in Louisville on your birthday. It was the day we moved in. Your tenth birthday.” Caldwell continued thumbing absently through the old photos.

  “Look atthis picture. It’s the flying wing!”

  Gray and black stipple of lawn, a stark tree ramifying up, faint cloud patterns, and there, floating in the sky, a sliver-black aircraft. It has no fuselage or tail-gear ... it is simply a wing, a stubby boomerang, a fat, warped pancake. Windows dot its leading edge ... scores of windows. “Do you remember, Conrad? You were with me. I tried to tell Pop about it, but he ... Damn! I’d forgotten I took a picture of it! Let me see that again!”

  “I’ve still never heard of a plane like that,” said Caldwell wonderingly. “I know they built somesmall flying wings, but never anything like ... You know, I bet I could sell this picture toAviation Magazine !”

  “Don’t do that,” said Conrad. His voice came out flat and strange.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “It’s my picture.”

  “Hell it is.”

  “Give it to me!” Conrad snatched the picture away from Caldwell and ran upstairs. Caldwell didn’t bother chasing him.

  Alone in his room, Conrad studied the flying-wing photo for a long time. It could easily be a flying saucer.

  The flying saucer that beamed me down. The day the Bungers moved to Louisville. The flame-people beamed me down in Skelton’s hog pen and hypnotized the Bungers, new in town, and with no living relatives. When I came “home,” the Bungers threw a tenth birthday party for me. The saucer hung around for a while, and Caldwell took its picture.

  Conrad’s mother was tapping on his door. He put the picture in his wallet.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  “Dinner’s ready! We’re having roast beef!”

  The three others were sitting at the dining table, exactly as they had been sitting the first time Conrad saw them, March 22, 1956.

  The saucer makes a terrible noise, a deep slow flutter. The whole house is shaking, but no one cries out. The mind-rays have frozen them in place. It is a Norman Rockwell tableau. Pop is at one end of the oval table. He is carving a roast beef. Light glares off his glasses. Mom is at the other end of the table. She is pouring coffee and smiling at Caldwell. She wears pearls. Caldwell holds his plate out for the red meat. He is gangly, with a wide, grinning mouth. The rumbling of the saucer-drive builds in frequency, and the little family begins to glow. Their minds are being reprogrammed. The door opens, and Conrad approaches the table, carrying a cake with ten lit candles... .