by Jake Arnott
The Hermit started to walk towards the cop so that he would be on the move by the time the cop reached him. Sirius trotted along beside him. He found a gait that would match the confident stroll of the beat officer, so that when they met they were travelling at the same pace. A little dance to the jaunty swing of the cop’s night-stick.
‘Hi, Pete,’ the officer called out with a smile.
‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ the Hermit replied. ‘For they shall be called the children of God.’
They passed each other to the count of three twirls of the baton. This was the rhythm of the upright and principled, thought the Hermit. This was the tick-tock in the minds of humans when they thought of the word justice. But he bowed graciously to the policeman. He did not despise the cops as some of the other Higher Ones did. At least they understood the burden of power that they carried. Sirius gave out a little yelp. She had spotted something.
‘What is it, girl?’ the Hermit asked.
Sirius yelped once more and the Hermit then understood what she was saying. She was calling the name ‘Duke’. Sirius had the capacity to recognise his fellow Higher Ones — this was another canine virtue the Hermit had noted during his time on earth. He looked in the direction of his companion’s call and there he was. The Duke of Sunset was on the other side of the boulevard. In his top hat and crimson-lined cape, he was the most famous bootblack in Hollywood. He spotted them both and crossed the road, shouldering his shoeshine box.
‘Hey, Serious!’ he said, crouching to stroke the dog. ‘How’s my best gal?’
The Hermit smiled. He tried to remain impartial but he couldn’t help seeing the Duke as the favourite of all his fellow Higher Ones on the boulevard. The light poured out of him. His work was so diligent, his lesson to the humans so clear and simple.
‘Gave Clark Gable a shine yesterday!’ the Duke announced.
The Hermit frowned. By the look on the Duke’s face he deduced that this ‘Clark Gable’ was one of the benighted wretches imprisoned in those high-walled mansions he often passed. Those who had had their spirits sucked out of them by the light machines and were turned into ghosts while they still lived. He patted the Duke on the shoulder, glad that he could have given this man some solace.
‘You may have saved his soul,’ said the Hermit softly.
‘Aww,’ the Duke replied, looking down at the Hermit’s bare feet. ‘I wish I could give you a shine, Pete.’
‘One day I’ll wear shoes just for you, Duke.’
The Duke laughed and began to move on.
‘Yes, sir!’ he called out to the Hermit. ‘Patent leather!’
Cato sat up and put the magazine down. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. He lit it and puffed away for a while, thinking. He blew a smoke ring and watched the pale blue vortex hover and disintegrate in the space above the bed. A strange story, he thought, as the ghostly O began to stretch out and distort. About the everyday but with a twist, like those TV shows The Twilight Zone or The Scanner, where something ordinary is revealed as belonging to another dimension. Cato thought that he had guessed the trick of the tale. It was that this hobo guy was really an alien. Then he made another guess. Maybe he just thinks he’s an alien.
He thought about the black character in the story. At least there was a black character. It was just a shame that he had to be a shoeshine. Then Cato remembered a guy in LA just like that. A shoeshine who wore a cape and a top hat. Perhaps this Duke guy was an alien too. Maybe that was the point of the story. That all the street people were Higher Ones and had come from another planet.
Cato glanced at the blue-skinned man on the cover of Incredible Stories. He suddenly thought of a joke. Brother, he mused, nodding at the illustration, you aliens can come blue-skin or green-skin, just make sure you don’t come black-skinned when you land on this here planet. He laughed and coughed. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.
Quit smoking, Jimmy had told him. Quit smoking and quit drinking. Quit eating pork. Lead a righteous life. Quit going with white women, Jimmy had said. Cato sighed. His mouth was dry and tasted bitter. Sharleen had just got more and more screwy. He didn’t even know whether to believe her when she said she was pregnant. Only that there was trouble ahead and it was time to go. She told him the FBI were listening in to their phone conversations. She believed that the Nazis were controlling the space programme. She saw UFOs all the time. She could give details of many species of extraterrestrial, their particular worldly influence and their secret ambitions. The one thing she didn’t understand, thought Cato as he cleared his throat, was that his people were the true aliens on this here earth.
He picked up the magazine once more and curled up on his side.
As he made his way through the day the Hermit met with some of the other Higher Ones of Hollywood. Doc Hegarty, who handed out pamphlets that warned against the eating of meat, fish and nuts, explaining that protein caused unnatural lusts; Preacher Bill, who could give clear advice on the coming apocalypse; and Madame Pompadour, an ancient ex-prostitute who walked the streets now out of habit and would often fetch coffee and doughnuts for the girls who still worked the boulevard. But mostly he tried to minister to the needs of the desperate souls who passed him by.
In all the time he had walked the earth, tramped its highways, hitched rides or jumped freight trains, he had never known such a forlorn place as Los Angeles. A city so ravaged by materialism and a people weighed down by so many possessions, deluded by ambition and the painful need for adulation. After his first report he was ordered to stay here. To continue to observe these extreme conditions. And maybe to help to bring some relief to this barbaric region.
It was not enough, his superiors had decided, simply to make contact with the most advanced and privileged classes of this strange planet. The Hermit had known the civilisation of the shanty towns, the refined society of mission halls and soup kitchens. And he had learnt much in the great university of Camarillo State Hospital, where white-gowned students came to learn wisdom from some of the greatest minds on the face of the globe. But he had to go beyond, to bear witness to the barren emptiness of this bright and gaudy wilderness.
There came a knock on the door. It was Jimmy.
‘You ready?’ he asked Cato.
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘But listen—’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Jimmy broke in. ‘Just give it a try, that’s all I’m saying. Islam is the natural religion for black folks.’
They went together to a meeting hall that called itself a temple. Jimmy tried to hustle them both to the front but Cato shook his head and took a chair at the back. Jimmy shrugged and sat next to him. A light-skinned black man in a leopard-skin fez started talking. Cato had heard some of it before. That the African had been deceived by the slave-masters, cut off from their true knowledge and true religion. The Original Man was black and his was the root of all ancient civilisation. Cato yawned quietly. He felt all the weariness of his life flood through his body and pool onto the floor of the meeting hall. He was overcome by a blessed sense of calm. He closed his eyes. God is not a spook, came the voice of the preacher. God is a man. The devil is a man also.
Cato let go and felt himself falling. Then the physical weight of his body seemed to drop away and his spirit began to soar. The voice spoke of the civilisations that existed on other worlds, of how the moon and the earth were once one planet before they were split apart in a huge explosion. Then it was dark in his head. No sound, no light. No space, no time. A moment that lingered eternally. Then Cato’s head nodded sharply and he woke up with a start. He kept his eyes closed and listened.
The preacher was talking of a great wheel in the sky. Like the vision Ezekiel had seen. The white man is planning for battle in the sky. Today he has left the surface for the air, to try to destroy his enemies by dropping and exploding bombs. But we too are ready for the battle in the sky. The great wheel is the Mother Plane and it can exist in outer space. Ezekiel saw it
long ago; it was built for the purpose of destroying the present earth. It carries fifteen hundred bombing planes. The small circular planes called flying saucers that are talked of these days are surely from the Mother Plane, the preacher declared.
Cato opened his eyes and found that they were filmed with tears. A single drop warmly traced his cheek. Yes, he thought, of course. All this madness made some kind of sense. Everything flipped over with a complete change of polarity. The world turned upside down in a geomagnetic reversal. He closed his eyes once more and felt that calm shadow cool his mind. He thought of what it was like to see the darkness. He saw the darkness. And he saw that it was good. Yes. Black people belonged on the earth. It was the white folks who were the aliens. The meeting was coming to its end in a cacophony of scraping chairs. Cato wiped his face with his handkerchief and stood up.
Even Jimmy noticed a change in him as they walked back to the boarding house.
‘You okay, man?’ he asked as they reached the front door.
‘Tired, is all,’ replied Cato.
‘Sure. Well, we’ll talk soon, yeah?’
Cato nodded and shook Jimmy’s hand.
Back in the room Cato switched on the light, stripped down to his underwear and got into bed. The bare bulb hurt his eyes but he wanted to finish the story.
Westward was the Hermit’s journey along Hollywood Boulevard. By four in the afternoon he would reach St Thomas the Apostle Episcopal church. The Temple of Doubt. After Judas, the Traitor, the Hanged Man, Thomas was the greatest disciple. The patron saint of uncertainty, this great principle that now even the scientists know governs our puny universe. The humans think that they want belief; Thomas preaches that what they need is incredulity. Enlightenment on a need-to-know basis. Stick your finger in the wound. Then you might feel the pain of another. Compassion, the Hermit remembered: it means ‘to suffer with’.
By sundown they had reached the far end of the boulevard, where it began to snake and twist its way up through Laurel Canyon. The city fell away as the Hermit and his dog Sirius climbed the Hollywood Hills. A grid of lights stretched out below, an illuminated cage. Above, the celestial mechanics were firing up. The constellations began to bloom as man and dog followed the winding path to their base camp in the foothills. Treasure in the heavens, thought the Hermit. The Dog-Star rose on the eastern horizon and he pointed it out to Sirius. She let out a howl of salutation.
‘Yes,’ agreed the Hermit. ‘Home.’
They lived together in a wooden shack at the end of a footpath that cut through the brushwood. The Hermit lit an oil lamp and gathered together his equipment. From a Higher One who ran a junk shop in Santa Monica as cover, he had been issued with a Philco model 40-74T four-tube battery-powered radio set. He switched it on and as it warmed up he turned the dial until he found that particular band of pulsating static that he recognised as the native language of his home planet. He then began his nightly broadcast.
Cato got up and went to switch off the light. A trace of neon throbbed against the wall outside his window. He sat on the bed and smoked another cigarette. His last, he told himself. He might write to Sharleen, he thought. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she did already, in her own way. He could sleep now and not fear his dreaming. He silently thanked God or Allah or whoever for untying that knot of guilt in his gut. He stubbed out his cigarette and got back into bed.
10
the wheel of fortune
Avenida 9 # 1580 esq. Calle 19
Miramar, Habana
Cuba
15 October 1958
Dear Larry,
Well, I finally met my father. Two days ago, at a party in Vedado for a man who had won the lottery. Such a frenzy of celebration around us that we scarcely had to worry whether or not the two of us had anything to congratulate each other about. This could have been a chance meeting, like everything else in life. The dancing and commotion granted us a sense of stillness, the loud music a moment of silence. For which I was thankful because I had no idea what to say to this man, nor him to me. He shook my hand and named himself as a trumpet blared behind us. People were spilling out onto the street, forming a procession down towards the sea wall, and we were swept along with it all.
Two cops on patrol near by were nervously fingering their holsters, ready to run if things got out of hand. One of the women approached them, explaining that this was a party, not a demonstration. Someone waved a 26 July Movement flag anyhow. The people are becoming bolder now, ready to take to the streets when the time comes. Civil unrest simmers beneath the surface, bubbling up in all sorts of peculiar ways. Last month there was an outcry when the fiesta for the Black Virgin of Regla was banned (her statue was stolen, and a rumour circulates that the authorities have substituted a fake one).
We found some space on the sidewalk, away from this improvised carnival, and as we struggled to converse we soon fell into a rhythm, with similar patterns of speech and diction. And it was as if we were mimicking each other’s gestures and affectations. We don’t look very much alike, my father and me, but it’s astonishing how much we share in mannerism. All the same tics and spasms of character: things one would think were socially learnt, habitual, are to be somehow found in the blood. And all at once I knew that it did not matter much what we really meant to each other. This simple familiarity suddenly made things easy between us.
It looked harder for the man who had won the lottery. He was greeting people with shouts of joy but I saw fear and panic in his eyes, an urgency in his loud insistence that he had known beforehand that his number was going to come up. This zealous belief in our own premonitions, as if we cannot bear for our will to be so diminished by such a random act. It is a disturbing notion that the most important moments of our lives, our greatest successes, are merely a matter of happenstance. As I turned to my newly found father I realised that I didn’t even owe the fact of my birth to him, just to the luck of the draw. The turn of the wheel. The odds of any particular individual’s existence are so narrow that it would be scarcely worth the gamble. It is enough merely to exist and to count our losses to the end. Perhaps that was what was troubling the man.
But I suspect he did not think like this at all. Nor did anyone else for that matter. Only myself, my head spinning like that helter-skelter helix of genetics. As we crossed the Malecón to the water’s edge, I slapped my father on the back and said: ‘Well, we won the lottery.’ He turned and frowned at me. Then smiled. Alien features forming reflective expressions of a curious remembrance. We went to sit on the sea wall and he told me a story.
Larry, I’m afraid this is going to be a long letter but I have much to tell (who was it who said, ‘I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time to write you a short one’?). But first let me congratulate you on your incredible novel. I finally got hold of a copy of American Gnostic when I got back from the sierra this year (there’s a bookstall just opened on the Plaza de Armas that stocks a good selection of American science fiction and usually has the latest edition of F&SF). This is the best thing you’ve ever done. You’ve restored my faith in the genre. To be honest, I’ve become bored with so much SF lately, or disappointed (whatever happened to Heinlein? — all this quasi-fascist nonsense he’s writing now; when we first met him he was a libertarian socialist). Maybe I don’t need much speculative fiction at the moment when here everything and everyone is concerned with the future. But not in fantasy, rather in the real possibilities for radical change.
I’ve been all over the island in the last two years. In Guantánamo, helping to organise the railway workers, co-ordinating strike action in support of the Rebel Army in the hills. I was even in the Sierra Maestra, smuggling supplies from Santiago. I came back to Havana in late spring to rejoin the urban underground. The general strike of 9 April proved a complete fiasco with the loss of much of the leadership of all participating oppositional groups. Now we have to completely regroup the mass movements in the city, establish solidarity with the armed struggle and
find a common strategy to defeat the dictatorship. At last the 26 July Movement is making constructive overtures to communists and the Marxist left. We’re re-establishing the Revolutionary Workers Party as a challenge to the Stalinists, forming workers’ committees and printing a newspaper once more.
There are many splits in the struggle: between sierra and llano (the Rebel Army in the hills; the working-class movements on the plains and in the towns); between nationalism and socialism; and, of course, among the left. But I fear the more profound schism, that universal dichotomy between the intimate vision and the shared ideal. Everybody has their own idea of what a perfect world is. For the moment we have a common enemy but that’s never enough. We need to find a united front in our imaginations. We are too convivial in our nightmares. We must find a way of dreaming collectively.
I have a job as a waiter (can you imagine?). The Sindicato de Obreras Gastronomico is actually one of the few unions that retains a radical leadership. So much of the labour movement here is in the hands of mujalista gangsters. A week ago a customer called me to his table and asked if I was Angel Carvajal’s son. I nodded, knowing not much more of my father than that he had been in jail when I was born. Then he told me about this party and said that my dad would be there, if I wanted to see him.
So that’s how I ended up on the Malecón, at the age of thirty-six, face to face with paternity for the first time. I have little recollection as to what we talked about at the beginning. I was cautious in my speech, as if waiting for an explanation from him. Then he started to tell me of something that had happened to him.
‘I hear that you’re some kind of a writer,’ he said. ‘Here’s a story for you.’