In the bathroom were graffiti. Not many.
NOTHING IS ALWAYS ABSOLUTELY SO.
“E=MC2 MAY AFTER ALL BE A LOCAL PHENOMENON.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
“ANY ANSWER IS NOT NECESSARILY THE ONLY ANSWER.”
—CHARLES FORT
—and, surprisingly
YOU BLOW MY MIND
AND
I’LL SUCK YOURS
“Joey broke his thumb,” I said, coming out of the bathroom.
“Broke? How? When? On what? Is it—”
I put out my hands placatingly. Stromberg can talk at you sometimes like over a gunsight. “Clean break, simple fracture, three weeks ago, no complications. Stuck his thumb through the spokes of the pulley on his gemstone tumbler.”
“Why isn’t there a guard on it?”
“There is a guard on it. He opened it up to show another kid why there was a guard on it.”
Tension flowed out of his shoulders and neck and tugged at the corners of his mouth as it went away. He held up his left hand, wiggled the little finger. Flexed, it was a little out of line at the second joint. Never noticed that before. “Did the exact same thing when I was his age,” he said. “How about that.… How’s Curie?”
“Perfect. Just beginning to find out that being a girl’s not the same as being a kid.”
He liked that. I’d known he would. He twinkled at me and gently gibed, “Incipient chauvinism?”
“Mine, not hers. Never hers.”
We went into the main lab where he picked up the ointment and tissues he had left on the floor by the stool. Tidy man. He asked it, finally; he had to:
“Mitty?”
“Just fine. Just fine. Took the kids to Arrowhead for a week. Got a new green cape.”
“Look, is she happy?”
I had to wait a bit to answer that. “Happier,” I said carefully. “That figures.” He nodded, and then nodded again. “No place to go but up. I—I’ll drop around soon, see them.”
“Good idea.”
He shot me a special look of his. It makes you blink when he does that. Lasers don’t need gunsights. “You see them a lot.”
“Mm.” Almost every day, a lot of nights, but there was no need to say it.
“That’s good.” He was still a moment, then made a characteristic gesture of his, raising his hands, letting them fall to slap his thighs. Change of subject. He went to the office doorway and hit the wall-switches. Hooded lights over the far benches winked on, and the aching cone from the ceiling went out. It was a lot pleasanter that way.
“Everything’s a part of everything anyway,” he said.
“Who said that?” For I knew it was a quote.
“The singer Donovan. Also the I Ching, the joss sticks, divination by sheep’s guts, and me.”
“Okay.” Then I waited.
“ ‘To measure a circle, begin anywhere.’ ”
I knew who that was. That was Charles Fort.
He finally found a place to begin. And he was right; he could have begun anywhere. I knew this man, I’d been with him in this mood before. It drove some people past all patience, the way he moved from one thing to another, however authoritatively; they wanted a neat title for it all, like the label on a jar of ointment, letting you know ahead of time what was inside what it was made of, what it was for. With Stromberg, you had to wait while he made a brick, set it aside, wait while he cut a beam, set it aside, wait while he forged nails and roofing tar and conduit and sash. When he was done it would be a structure; you could trust him for that.
“Some people,” he said, “are gifted—maybe it’s ‘afflicted’ with a different time scale from other people. They don’t think in biographical time—I mean, my era, things since I was born, or in historical time, the miserable tick of time—” he snapped his fingers “—since we began to write our adventures and our lies about our adventures. They think in geological time, in astronomical time, in cosmological time. I’m talking about the idiots who involve themselves in science fiction, reading it, writing it. Some scientists. Some philosophers.”
“Some mystics.” I shouldn’t have interrupted. I do know better. But he almost conceded the point.
“Maybe so. Maybe, though I tend to think that a lot of them, and a lot of composers and artists and the more broad-spectrum theologians, take off at right angles to what I see as the linearity of things, the progress from cause to effect. I dunno. Maybe that gives them a perspective as important as, cosmological-time thinking. I dunno. I dunno. They’re not mutually exclusive. Room for everyone. It’s a ‘big universe.’ ”
We sat down. Stromberg literally, one hunker at a time, sat on his hands. “Trying like hell not to scratch,” he explained. “Anyway, people with a mental set like that are regarded as something less than human. Cold. Uncaring, lacking in something … it isn’t like that. It isn’t. It’s just that marriage contracts and chivalry and whether or not you report to church or carry the clan bone through your nose, these things can’t weigh too heavily in the presence of continental drift and the birth and death of stars. You can love her and rub her feet and try to get tickets for the opening, to make her happy, but what do you do with the recognition that she, and you, and all your works and thoughts, are trivialities? Especially when you can’t say it to her. Never. Never.”
“Oh.”
He shot me a look. “I think I heard a light go on.”
“You did. I never really knew before. More—she never knew, doesn’t know. She thinks she failed you in some way. She takes it hard, the papers: NOBEL LAUREATE AT RACE TRACK. Dr. Stromberg seen in Hollywood in the company of. Dr. Stromberg in temporary custody after waterfront brawl. She thinks she did all that, some way.”
“Well, she didn’t.” He waved his hand at the computer wall. “That did. The big extrapolation. Hey, I held your head through something once. Your kid sister.”
I nodded. It still knotted my stomach. “Ran through a plate-glass door. Face, hands, arms, legs. Squirting twenty jets of blood.”
“Horrible,” he agreed. “But after the initial emergency was over and they had her put together again and on the way back, what was driving you right off the track?”
I remembered. “ ‘What did she do to deserve this?’ ”
“Right. And I was able to tell you that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘deserve’ belong to some other scale, some other country, language, some other set than the cause-and-effect sequentiality that resulted in all that virgin’s blood.”
“It helped.”
“Sure it did. Unfortunately, there’s no way to pour the same balm on my wife without insulting her.”
I said, very carefully, “It was very sudden. One day, a set-in-his ways family man. The next, lawyers’ and bankers’ letters, a huge settlement, and the day after, the headlines begin. It’s too easy to assign it to some middle-aged itch, the pursuit of vanishing youth. Something happened.”
He nodded, and rapped his head, replacing the hand under his right buttock. “The whole thing was there, had been for a long time. But on that day the lights went on for me.” Again he nodded at the computers.
I just waited until he came to some internal decision and began to speak. “Listen:
She wounds you, as a rose will wound, Not always, as expected, with its thorn. A rose will always wound you with its rose.
“Gooseflesh.”
“Gooseflesh. Right. Harry Martinson, a Swede wrote it. Gooseflesh for Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor,” for the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th, for a sailplane, for Nureyev, for Gagarin who, said, “I am an eagle.” Gooseflesh for the groining of a Gothic cathedral and for Ellington and for Dylan Thomas. Gooseflesh, if you like, for pons asinorum and the little fingernail of your first child. But by what towering arrogance do we attach any importance or permanence, to any of these things? Importance to us, whose things they are, of course naturally. But to a louse? What does human transcendence have to do with a louse, except that it m
ight make a single human sit a little stiller to be bitten?
“And by what towering conceit do we assume that a louse has not its own Shakespeares and Mozarts? No one ever thought of that—not ever. We will tolerate a louse by not thinking about it, sometimes by not believing it exists, but when we become aware, we smother it with blue butter, never dreaming or caring that all the lice might be sharing the equivalent, to lice, of ‘A rose-red city, half as old as time.’ ”
He leaned forward and spoke with a terrible intensity. “All right, I’ll tell you what I saw when the lights went on, when the computer read me out the final extrapolation. We are all lice on the earth, life living off life, down to the bacteria which live off the substance of the earth itself. And up to now the earth hasn’t known nor cared. Now it knows, now it cares. Not as a conscious entity, of course; I’m not giving you the When the Earth Screamed kind of poppycock. Linear causation: the rare accident of our atmosphere and its special orchestration of components produced life, and now life has made itself manifest enough to upset the balance.”
“Ecologically—” I began to say.
“Damn it, I’m not giving you more of that popular and fashionable drone about ecology and conservation. There is no conservation that will do any good; we’re on the slide. The death of the oceans and the loss of a breathable atmosphere are not the end of the world—the world, per se, is not going to end, not for billions of years more.
“Earth has always, in its numb passive way, fought us back. The struggle for existence, for life, has always been a struggle because by its nature earth didn’t want us. Like us with the lice, we can live with them until we itch. Well, we’ve itched the earth and when we didn’t respond to a scratch or two, to a plague or a quake, then time came for the blue butter.
“We’re going back now, all the way to methane and ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, water vapor and hydrogen for an atmosphere, back to the fifty-year rains and a land unprotected by an ozone layer. It won’t be exactly the primordial atmosphere, but something very like it, at least as far as terrestrial life is concerned. It won’t be a triviality like another Ice Age. It’ll be clear back to before-the-beginning.
“It will be. I am not fantasizing, I am not guessing. It will be so.
“So learning that, I looked at myself—fifty-one years old, faithful, reliable, a good credit risk. Never drank, fought, gambled, picked up a woman at a bar, never skated, skied, never ate haggis or kous-kous. So now I am going to live till I die, I am going to feel, I am going to be. I have money and so far, my health, and I am by God going to use them!”
For some time I couldn’t speak. When I could, I nodded at the computers and asked, “Then there’s really no hope?”
He laughed out loud. “Hope? Of course there’s hope! By its very nature, Earth is doomed to have parasites!” He freed one hand and patted his crotch. “During that deluge of mercurial ointment—an old-fashioned remedy but a good one—among the death-cries of the crab civilization I heard the voice of one old louse-philosopher, who said, ‘Have hope, my friends, have hope, he is but preparing the ground for another dose of crabs.’ I’m quite certain that he was right, and I do hope for the future of lousedom that the new clean environment produces a crab that does not itch.”
I got up then and left, and went to find Mrs. Stromberg and, if I could, tell her why.
The Singsong of Cecily Snow
“Mesmer-Eyes” he called her in the moonlight; in the meantime he was walking with her westerly to her inner wailing wall. A gross, uncaring bastard was this Bulbul Byo, blessed with silver speech and graceful gait and the manners of a tutor to the tutors of a household royal. His score so far was 66 successful satisfactory seductions, 37 shattered lives, six suicides, and fourteen thousand nights of bitter tears. His road ahead was paved with promises; behind him he left loneliness and puzzlement and greying disappointment—seldom anger, never vengeance. “Mesmer-Eyes,” he whispered, “you can drain me with a glance, I am weakened by your touch, I have no defense if you command me.” Watchfully, he spoke to her, proclaiming weakness as she weakened, acting melted as he touched her, humbled as he humbled her—his special trick, this artful knack of taking on himself the outward signs of this or that effect that he evoked in her. To make a woman want him he would want her with his words and hands; to make her cry, he cried; to make her yield, he said, “I yield.”
It worked. It always worked.
The target tonight was young Cecily—sunny and svelte and a cynosure, making the marketplace more than a mall for mere merchandise. Moonmarket Village (not really its name, but known so because of the region’s tradition of holding its market day, sun-up to midnight each full-of-the-moon) lay in the lake country east of the Wamberly Waters. Who is to say that the Moonmarket merriment, the sweet, mellow madness of Moonmarket Day, was caused by the magic of full-of-the-moon, or simply to celebrate its high soaring silver? Nobody questioned it, nobody wondered why rain never fell on the laughter and lanterns of Moonmarket, nor why the wind whispered then, sweeping sweet smoke from the barbecue stalls and fanning the flower carts, caring for colorful kites and delaying the dancing of dust till the following day. Likewise the matter of Cecily, golden and swift, her laughter a spatter of birdsong, her adroitness in helping with tent pegs or tea baskets, her instant and total attention to troubles and children; why no one wondered where Cecily went when the market was over, nor how many markets, for how many moons, was Cecily central to Moonmarket time. She was, that is all, that is it; and a far greater mystery, greater than moons or a biddable wind, was that nobody wondered, nobody questioned, nobody traced the incredible Cecily Snow.
Bulbul Byo in a dusty cloak, with a hunting set to his wide-spaced eyes and plumes to sweep from his glossy head and a twist of glands where his heart should be and a tidal voice which could drown girls’ doubts, swung down from the hills to the marketplace when the moon was full and the late sun paused on the wooded crests. The village, framed by its yielding fields with its outer border of wilderness and the distant lake with its green and blue and its scarf of orange from the setting sun, and the call of hucksters and the fiddles’ cry were enough to halt any normal soul for a draught of joy. Bulbul’s care was for none of this, for he saw the sun on long black hair and the swirl of skirts and slender arms, and the fit of bodices that curved his hands; and his glands beat strong and his pointed tongue flicked the pointed tip of his upper lip and he took a step and he froze.
For then he saw Cecily, Cecily Snow, flickering down and across the invisible lines that the dance-caller wove on the Moonmarket green, tilting to this man and whirling with that, and allemande left, and now-swing-your-own. Bulbul, a moment ago, had the choice of a hundred and looked to the pleasure of choosing; but one glimpse of Cecily settled the matter. One deep breath through wide flared nostrils, legs come alive again, eyes blurring slightly through a mist of lust, Bulbul strode to the village street and along to the green and around to the place with the music played. And he waited.
And the music bleated and bubbled and came to a halt, and Cecily spun gasping and smiling away from the dancers as the sets turned turmoil, and found herself caught by the elbow and speared by the gaze of the man in the cloak, who swept down his plumes and announced that he found her at last.
“I do not know you, sir,” she said, “and I am not lost.”
“I am Bulbul Byo.” His throaty voice seemed aimed at the pores rather than the ears; it soaked the skin entire, to its most intimate reaches. “I came over the mountains and across the moors, seeing the loom of a light like that of the unrisen moon, and thirsting to know its source; and it led me to you. Now you know me and how I came to be here.”
“But not why,” she responded.
“To give you gifts,” he answered immediately, and gave her a little gold locket he acquired two towns ago by saying to a woman that he did not want it. He had given it away one town ago, and had gotten it back by saying how he admired any lady who could treasure memory mo
re than a material thing. She took it and cupped it in one hand while the fingers of the other drifted over its small bright surface looking not at it, but at him. He felt a twinge of alarm, but kept it out of his voice. “What are you doing?” he asked, surprising himself.
“Looking at you,” she replied.
“I mean, with the locket.”
“Looking at you,” she said; and at that, he should have known, but he did not. She asked him then what other gifts he had in mind, which was what he wanted to hear. He bowed slightly and offered his arm, which she took, and they toured the market, where he bought her a sausage and a cider.
“And now I have a thing unique and precious for you,” he said, and he said it leaning forward, taking her shoulders, placing his mouth by her neck, warming it, putting his words up under the fall of her hair. “But I have it hidden yonder, and we shall have to walk.”
“Yonder? To the west? But there is nothing there but the wood, and Wamberly Waters.”
“But there is. Come. We have the moon to help us.”
“Yes,” she said. “Indeed the moon will help us.” Arm in arm they walked away westerly, whether or not to her wailing wall he could not care, and she simply did not. “Tell me: what are you?” And he answered her easily: traveler, trader, tutor, teller of tales; cavalier, courtier, captain of calvary, artist and artisan, poet-philosopher. “My,” she said. “My!”
And into the fringes, moon-flecked and bright, of Wamberly Wood, and into the thickening growth with more shadows than light, and into the heart of the dark of the woodland they walked, when he sighed and they stopped.
“What is it?”
“Forgive me; you’ve worked at the market all day, you were dancing for half of the night, you are weary. I know by my own weariness, pressing toward you day after day, and you must forgive me.” He opened the clasp of his cloak and spread it on the moss and sank down on it, holding out his hands. “I must rest, and so must you.”
Case and the Dreamer Page 13