by Jake Arnott
But he wasn’t allowed to get away with it for long. The imaginative competition was far too much for him. The conversation turned to the concept of parallel worlds and alternate futures, the notion of time being non-linear, the possibilities of precognition. The world was ripe for the speculative genre with all the uncertainties of war, the bewildering potential of new discoveries in science and technology. But amid all these great events I couldn’t help thinking that my personal life was on the brink of something, that this was a crucial night in my own history.
Heinlein began to hold forth on the curvature of space–time, of world-lines and points of divergence. Nemesio Carvajal intervened to speak of an Argentine writer who had just published a collection of stories. In one a character is described as attempting a novel that would describe a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously with each one leading to further proliferation.
‘It is titled “El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” ,’ he explained.
‘The garden of paths that bisect?’ Boucher offered a swift translation.
‘Yes. You see, in the story there is a novel and a labyrinth. It turns out that the novel is the labyrinth and the labyrinth is the novel.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ Boucher continued. ‘What’s this writer called?’
‘Borges,’ Nemesio replied. It was the first time any of us had heard that name.
‘So what’s his genre?’ Hubbard demanded. ‘Mystery or fantasy, or what?’
‘Those things, yes,’ said Nemesio with a smile. ‘And more. He is also an important poet.’
Hubbard huffed indignantly.
‘We’re definitely at a place where the paths are diverging,’ said Cleve Cartmill.
‘But surely,’ Leigh Brackett interjected, ‘in the world, in our world, whatever that is, there will be one reality if totalitarianism goes on unchecked and another if it is defeated.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Heinlein argued. ‘It could be that different worlds can co-exist. In the past as well as the future. That’s why this kid’s story is so important,’ he nodded over at me. ‘Lords of the Black Sun shows us the worst that will happen. By imagining it perhaps we can avoid it in our own reality.’
Feeling foolishly pleased with myself, I caught Mary-Lou’s eyes across the room. She smiled at me and in that moment I imagined our future together. Then Jack Parsons walked in.
There are many images that can attest to the dark and passionate features of the glamorous rocket scientist. Jack Parsons was undeniably photogenic so one can still appreciate those deep-set eyes, that quizzical mouth, the thick curls swept up into a crowning mane. But none of these portraits can ever do justice to his charisma, that delicately soulful presence one felt when he entered a room.
His voice was soft and slow, his manner hesitant. His gaze was open, searching. He looked romantically dishevelled in a fine flannel suit that needed pressing and an open-necked shirt naped with grime. There was a light sheen of sweat on his brow. With scant introduction and a gentle insistence, he joined in the conversation.
‘We’re certainly approaching a crucial moment,’ he said.
‘In your rocket experiments?’ asked Heinlein.
‘In that, yes,’ Parsons replied. ‘But in the Greater Work too.’
‘You mean this mystical stuff?’ Jack Williamson demanded.
‘Look, I know you think it’s all a bit far-fetched, but didn’t you say once that science is magic made real?’
‘I did, yes,’ Williamson conceded.
‘There must be any number of ways to break through the space–time continuum. We should experiment with them all. Soon there will be a chance to test some of this unseen wisdom. The Hierophant has ordered a special Mass that might just help change the course of the war.’
‘Wow,’ Mary-Lou murmured, her eyes wide and bright.
I realise now, of course, that he was talking about Aleister Crowley and that perhaps Jack had some knowledge of Operation Mistletoe. All I noticed then was the way Mary-Lou looked at him.
‘What’s a hierophant?’ asked Leigh Brackett.
‘It’s a fancy name for a high priest,’ Hubbard explained.
‘So, you’ve finally joined this Order,’ said Heinlein. ‘I hope you haven’t given up on the science.’
‘Oh no,’ Parsons replied with a smile. ‘I’m following both paths now.’
The fact that Jack Parsons was actually quite shy and nervous only seemed to add to his charm. He appeared to be channelling an enchantment from another dimension. And there was a reticence in how he described his experiments that was intriguing for all us fantasists. He had to be discreet, he explained. The US Military had become interested in missiles and jet propulsion, and was now funding the California Institute of Technology’s rocket group, which was testing secret prototypes out in the desert. He gave a vague account of the group’s activities that conjured visions of mystics raising fire demons in the wilderness. The desert as an empty stage beneath a theatre of stars, a limitless temple of research. He was equally obscure about this occult sect of his, the Ordo Templi Orientis. He was living a strange double life, one of wild asceticism and divine exhaustion, toiling beneath the harsh sun by day, enacting sacramental rites at the Agape Lodge of the OTO by night. He embodied a weird fusion of modern science and ancient wisdom, part hip technocrat, part Renaissance wizard.
He certainly cast some sort of spell over the room that night. It was an energy that seemed to split the discussion into waves and particles. No one voice could hold all the attention after that point. The party began to fracture and oscillate. Hubbard was in one corner detailing an improbable jungle adventure to Cleve Cartmill. Anthony Boucher was exchanging rapid Spanish with Nemesio. Heinlein and Williamson were circulating. Leslyn went into the kitchen for olives and more sherry. I had already noticed a buzz of attraction between Jack Parsons and Mary-Lou. I watched with dread as she slowly, inexorably, began to gravitate towards him.
They were in deep discussion about astronomy and astrology when Heinlein pulled me into his orbit. He announced that he was going up to his study to show Jack Willamson his ‘Timeline of Future History’ and insisted I join them. We went upstairs. Heinlein had on his wall a chart that mapped out a chronology of all the futuristic stories he had written and was planning to write. I stared at it blankly as Williamson made enthusiastic comments. When I think of it now I see the strange comment The Crazy Years — mass psychosis in the sixth decade next to the 1960s, but perhaps that’s because it was the one prediction Heinlein really did get right. At the time I’m sure I simply looked dumbfounded by the imagined course of the next two centuries as if searching for some clue as to what was going to happen that evening.
I excused myself and went back downstairs. I was beginning to feel the effects of the sherry. I took a wrong turning and found myself in a utility room. I felt as if I was trapped in the labyrinthine tesseract of Heinlein’s story. I eventually found my way back to the lounge and looked around like a lost child. Hubbard caught my eye.
‘She’s outside, kid,’ he drawled with a cruel smile.
I went to the door and spied Mary-Lou by the front porch standing close to Jack Parsons. He was pointing up at the sky, tracing a constellation as he talked in a low, intense drone. I felt as if I was losing my footing and I held onto the door for support. I went back inside, walking in an absurd crouching posture. Leslyn Heinlein frowned as she handed me another glass of sherry and asked Nemesio about Mexico. He said that he was actually from Cuba. I tried hard to concentrate as he told me his story. Like many young men he insisted on a pattern to his as yet unformed life. He was always late, he concluded. He had planned to go to Spain to fight with an anarchist militia. Two days before he was due to embark from Havana, Franco marched into Madrid. He then went to Mexico to study, with the intention of meeting Leon Trotsky. He finally obtained a letter of introduction only to arrive at Coyoacán four days after Trotsky was assassinated by Ramón Me
rcader.
‘I think this is why I started writing about the future, so as not to be late,’ he explained with a grin. ‘But I am also interested in technological utopianism.’
He had come to LA, making contact with a disparate group of American radicals: Trotskyists, members of the Technocracy Movement and libertarians like Heinlein, who had been involved in Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign back in the 1930s.
The party was beginning to break up. Mary-Lou came back into the lounge.
‘Larry,’ she said, somewhat breathlessly, ‘I’m getting a ride with Jack.’
‘But, but, Mary-Lou,’ I slurred. ‘I thought I was driving you home.’
‘It’s okay, Larry. You’ll want to talk some more.’ I remember the way her eyes sparkled as she said: ‘Hasn’t it been a wonderful evening?’
Then she was gone. My recollection of the evening after that begins to jump around. Leaps in time and space. I was in the kitchen helping myself to another drink. Joining in with a dirty limerick recitation (There once was a fellow McSweeney/Who spilt some gin on his weenie/Just to be couth/He added vermouth/And slipped his girlfriend the martini). Throwing up in a plant pot. Collapsing onto the couch in the lounge.
The following morning’s hangover was ghastly, augmented by wretched feelings of guilt and humiliation. I apologised to the Heinleins for my behaviour. Leslyn was certainly annoyed with me but Robert just laughed it off and plied me with strong black coffee. Nemesio had also stayed over, sleeping in the spare room in a more planned and civilised fashion. I gave him a ride downtown to where he was lodging with an elderly couple who worked for the League for Industrial Democracy.
When I confided to him about Mary-Lou he gave a long sigh.
‘Siempre,’ he declared. ‘With love it is always hard.’
Nemesio always seemed older than his years. He was actually a few months younger than me but from the start he assumed a sense of seniority in our friendship. I never minded this. He was, after all, far more mature than me in so many ways. He gave me a political awareness and something of a sentimental education. We had experiences in common that acted as a kind of emotional bond: we had both grown up without fathers. We agreed that we would see each other at the next LASFS meeting.
After dropping him off I went home and spent the rest of the day trying to ease a blinding headache and to placate my mother who, having waited up for me in vain, had spent the previous night phoning hospitals and police stations, certain that I had become the victim of some gruesome incident.
For the next few days I stayed indoors, struggling to write but mostly brooding about Mary-Lou and Jack Parsons. I found myself rereading an article on his rocket experiments that had appeared in Popular Mechanics the previous fall. His handsome face taunted me as it stared out of photographs between illustrations of test sites and diagrams of launch trajectories. Thursday came around and I went along to Clifton’s. I tried to clear my mind of it all but before long I was talking about Jack Parsons. And there was plenty of gossip about him. It was said that he was married, though he and his wife took other lovers; that he was actively recruiting for the Ordo Templi Orientis, hosting discussion groups on literature and mysticism at his home in Pasadena. There were stories too of parties at the OTO Lodge, tales of spiked punch, near orgies and invitations for all to join in the Gnostic Mass in the attic temple.
Luckily Nemesio turned up and managed to distract me from my wild imaginings. He had already acquired the nickname ‘Nemo’ from the LASFS crowd, which would become his name from then on.
‘It’s a good one,’ I told him. ‘Like Verne’s submariner in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’
‘It also means “no one”,’ he replied with a shrug.
He then went on to recount his theory of how Verne had based his Captain Nemo on the nineteenth-century submarine inventor from Barcelona, Narcís Monturiol.
‘Narcís?’ I retorted. ‘Hubbard’s right, you know, what is it with these Spanish names?’
‘Well, he was Catalan, actually. But, you know, Narcís Monturiol was a visionary, a true exponent of liberational technology. He had written many pamphlets on socialism, pacificism, feminism even. He supported the setting up of utopian communes in the New World. When that failed he became interested in science and technology. His was the first fully functional submarine.’
‘Well, a lot of guys on the Atlantic convoys won’t thank him for that.’
‘Yes, but his was a craft for exploration.’ Nemesio began to sketch the design of an underwater craft on a napkin. ‘A pilot ship for mankind’s journey into the unknown. And his ideas then were still in advance of what the Nazis have now. He developed an independent underwater propulsion system, with a chemical fuel that could generate enough energy to power the vessel and produce oxygen as a side product. It was truly remarkable.’
Nemo showed me his drawing. It was of a fish-shaped craft with a row of portholes along its side.
‘It looks like a spaceship,’ I remarked.
‘Yes,’ Nemo agreed. ‘Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that is the answer. If you can’t change the world, build a spaceship.’
When I walked out of Clifton’s that night Mary-Lou was waiting for me. She was wearing slacks and a windcheater with the collar turned up. She looked like a fugitive.
‘Hi, Larry,’ she said. ‘Can we talk?’
We found a bar on South Broadway. We ordered beer and I went to the payphone to call Mother.
‘She gets worried if I’m late home,’ I explained.
‘You’re such a good boy, Larry,’ she said.
I know now that this was meant tenderly but at the time it was like a jab in the gut. I made my call and then we found a quiet booth. Mary-Lou looked different, her face pale and ethereal, her eyes intense. All at once she began telling me of the strange new things she had learnt, about the Ordo Templi Orientis and its peculiar English Hierophant, Aleister Crowley. She spoke of the power of the will and the gaining of universal knowledge through symbolic ritual.
‘Remember that night when I said that I wanted to know everything?’ she said, her eyes burning beneath the neon light. ‘Well, now I think I can.’
‘But that’s crazy, Mary-Lou.’
‘You see, every man and every woman is a star. Everyone has to find their own destiny. The law of the strong is our law and the joy of the world.’
‘The law?’
‘Love is the law.’
‘Love? Is that how you feel about Jack Parsons?’
She sighed.
‘Oh, Larry—’
‘But he’s married, Mary-Lou.’
‘That’s just a superficial institution, Larry. We’re living in a new age. Monogamy is redundant. If we get rid of jealousy we can really set ourselves free. I mean, look at you.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You’re so goddamn buttoned-up and neurotic. You should come to the Lodge, you know. It would be so good for you.’
‘Er, I don’t think so, Mary-Lou.’
‘Well,’ she said with a curious smile. ‘Think about it.’
And then the conversation turned to more or less small talk. We asked each other about our writing, of course. She told me that she had outlined the whole of her space-opera ‘Zodiac Empire’ for Superlative Stories. She was working through the planets towards a final instalment that would centre on the sun. Nemo had told her about a Renaissance heretic and revolutionary called Tommaso Campanella who had written a utopian book titled The City of the Sun and she planned to base it on that. We finished our drinks and I dropped her off on my way home.
I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to my next appointment with Dr Furedi but even I could not have foreseen such a difficult session. I tried to explain what had happened in the previous week but such was my agitated state, I must have appeared manic and obsessive. And the details, well, I suppose that they did seem a little too much like the demented fantasy of someone who read too many pulp magazines.
It soon became clear that my analyst was treating it all as the delusional ravings of some paranoid condition. The good-looking, diabolical scientist was, of course, merely a symptom of my hysteria. Dr Furedi became particularly interested in my reference to ‘rockets’, obviously interpreting them as the phallic objects of my repressed imagination. I left his consulting room a gibbering wreck.
And the worst thing was that there was an element of truth in his distorted perception of my problem. I was irrationally obsessed with Parsons. And though I was jealous of him for having taken away the presumed object of my affections, I was also jealous of Mary-Lou, in that she had become the focus of his attentions. I was pretty sure that this was not sexual jealousy but with scant practical experience of these matters I felt in serious danger of having some kind of breakdown. It was with a sense of desperation that I decided to face my anxieties head-on.
The Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis was in a large wooden house on Winona Boulevard. I persuaded Nemo to come along to an open meeting with me. I was a little scared, to tell you the truth, but I wanted to find out what all this was about. The first part of the meeting was very informal. We were shown into an upstairs lounge buzzing with a bohemian crowd, a mix of young and old, some flamboyantly dressed, others theatrically solemn. I spotted an ancient silent-movie actress chatting to a man whose catlike face was dusted with powder and rouge. We were offered punch. I’d already decided that if this stuff was drugged, well, it would all be part of the experiment. I took a tentative sip. It tasted dark and sweet with a liquorice aftertaste. Suddenly Mary-Lou was next to me.
‘Glad you could come, Larry. Go easy with that stuff,’ she said, nodding at the cup in my hand. ‘It’s got a kick to it.’
I stared at her for a second and then drained the rest of the punch in one.