Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  After these first few hurdles, math came quite easily for me. I liked that there were so amazingly few brute facts to memorize. Given that everything followed logically from a few basic assumptions, there really wasn’t all that much you had to learn. But you did have to work through some practice problems—which I generally enjoyed.

  What else did I learn at college? A little about modern painting and architecture. And I took a German literature class where we read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the original German, which allowed me to understand that Kafka had meant for his stories to be in some sense funny. This insight would help me with my own writing. A story can be profound, creepy, lacerating, surreal—without being at all grim or stodgy.

  But most of what I learned at college was from my fellow-students: offbeat styles of speech, disruptive behaviors, and real-time wit. I liked talking to my friends, flirting with the girls, walking around the grassy campus, and exploring the nearby Crum woods.

  In grade school and high school I’d always been an outsider, but at Swarthmore I was in with the in-crowd. I reveled in that.

  With my steady stream of C grades being mailed home semester after semester, Pop sensed how little work I was doing.

  “It’s like you’re sitting at a great banquet, Rudy. And all you’re doing is eating a ham sandwich that you brought in your pocket.”

  Concerned as he was, Pop even paid me a surprise visit one day—appearing in my dorm room in 1966, during the fall of my senior year. It ended up being the best day together that we ever spent. He was accepting and non-judgmental. We walked around the campus talking about the meaning of life. I even took him down to the Crum woods and showed him the impressively high train trestle that crossed the creek.

  We boys liked to walk out to the middle of the trestle—it had two tracks so that, in principle, even if a train came by, you could go to the other side, and if, by some horrible fluke, two trains came at once, you could lie down flat between a pair of the rails and hold the ties, not that anyone I knew had ever executed this drastic maneuver, although we talked about it a lot, worrying that the train might have a dangling chain that hung to within millimeters of the ties.

  Pop was being such a sport on our big day together that he even walked onto the trestle with me. For those few hours, it was like we were fellow college boys. He really didn’t care much about proprieties or appearances. He just wanted me to be okay. He didn’t want me to fall off the edge.

  During my junior and senior years, Sylvia was off at grad school, so there were many days when I had nothing better to do than get into trouble.

  One of my closest Swarthmore friends was a boy named Gregory Gibson. Greg loved drinking and writing as much as I did. He was an English major, and by way of helping to complete my education, on one wonderful rainy morning, he read the whole of The Miller’s Tale to me in Old English, doing voices and adding glosses comparing the characters to our friends.

  In 1966, in our junior year, Greg and I wrote a story called “Confessions of a Stag,” using the style of the then-popular black humorist Terry Southern. Our piece was sophomoric, obscene, and very in-your-face. We wanted to transgress, to break free, to alarm the bourgeoisie. We mimeographed the story for a dozen of our friends. They liked it, and they even discussed it with each other.

  Due to our heavy drinking, Greg and I became notorious around the campus. We two ended up rooming together senior year. We were known as Dog and Pig or, more affectionately, as Woofie and Oinker. I was Pig.

  In part I took on this name in honor of the character Pig Bodine in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, V., which I was avidly studying at the time. You could also say that I think of the pig as my totem animal. The pinkness, the grunting, the comfortable curves, the easeful wallow in the mud, the floppy ears, the occasional frantic squeal, the wonderfully curly tail.

  Back in grade school, my friend Niles and I used to walk to a nearby pasture with pigs and stare at them, sometimes throwing a stick or a rock to get them to run around. And I’d been delighted when our neighbor Mr. Keith told me that pigs are the most difficult of animals to pen in—as they always tend to find a way out. As I often liked to tell my friends at Swarthmore, “The pig is the most intelligent of animals.”

  The Sixties juggernaut was cranking up, and we’d begun smoking pot when we could get it. Pot was so new that whenever we smoked it, we worried we might go crazy and never come back. Greg in particular tended to become unhappy when he was high.

  “I take to pot like a duck takes to Christmas dinner,” he’d say. Nevertheless he tended to glom as much of it off me as he could.

  There was one boy named Trevor who was one of the first to be able to score pot regularly—which was still incredibly hard in those days. Trevor would come over to our room and turn on a bunch of us. The downside was that then we’d have to listen to Trevor—and he was nuts.

  One time in 1966, after he’d gotten about five of us high, Trevor started pacing around like a ham actor playing Mephistopheles. He leaned down and stuck his face into mine.

  “Mr. Rucker! For lease—or altar?” His tones were stern and clipped, like a Grand Inquisitor’s.

  I had no idea what Trevor meant. In my disoriented state, I thought he was threatening to sacrifice me, or to take possession of my soul. Mutely I shook my head. Trevor posed the question to the next boy. Eventually one of us figured out that Trevor was simply inquiring about our sense of the pot’s effects. He was saying, “Release or alter?”

  The biggest freak-out of my life was the time I ate some big green hairy buds of peyote cactus. I wouldn’t want to undergo such an ordeal again, although the experience was memorable, and, over the years, I’ve used bits of it in my fiction. My SF mentor Robert Sheckley once remarked, “A writer is someone willing to descend to Hell and suffer the torments of the damned, just so they’re assured they can write about it.”

  I recall being menaced by the leering trees, falling into a Renoir painting, becoming a pinball in a flashing machine, and having a friend’s kitchen morph into a lecture hall with me a professor lecturing on relativity—which was, precognitively enough, something I’d actually be doing about ten years later. It’s odd how now and then you really do see into the future. The world is strange.

  The longer I stayed at Swarthmore, the worse my grades became. I had to suffer through a number of sit-down meetings with the deans. One of them was a spunky old woman with a Southern accent. Dean Cobbs.

  “Why don’t you go to your classes?” she asked me. “It hurts the professors’ feelings when their students don’t attend. Isn’t there anything we’re offering that you want to learn? Tell me, Rudy, what career would you choose if you could?”

  “I—I guess I’d like to be a science fiction writer.”

  “Then do that! Practice your writing. Follow your dream.”

  I did write a little bit, now and then, using the little portable Olivetti typewriter that my mother had given me. I was still making the beginning author’s mistake of writing when I was drinking—depending on the beer to lower my fear of the blank page. But drunk writing very often turns into posing or sentimentality

  Greg shared my interest in writing and in the Beats. He and I wrote a couple of things together—first of all that memorable porno pastiche which I mentioned earlier, and, after college, the start of an SF novel. Eventually Greg became a rare book dealer and a fellow author. His works include Gone Boy, a memoir revolving around his son’s tragic murder by a rampage shooter, and Hubert’s Freaks, a true account of a bookseller’s discovery of rare Diane Arbus photos.

  In college, Greg and I liked to quote passages from William Burroughs’s Junky and The Yage Letters to each other, and we spoke of Burroughs as Der Meister (The Master), affecting ourselves to be apprentices in some celestial academy of Beatdom.

  Part of the appeal of Burroughs was something I’d noticed back in high school: his work was like incredibly cool science fiction. I found that Kerouac himself was interested in SF
as well. The Beats regarded the genre as an avant-garde and uniquely American art form, a bit like jazz. For me, that’s still how I think of SF when I’m writing it—as mass-market surrealism, as experimental literature, as the fiction of our time.

  Although I wasn’t actively reading much SF in college, in my senior year, I came upon the paperback novel Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick, a writer new to me. It had trippy stuff like a lemonade stand turning into a slip of paper saying “LEMONADE STAND.” One time a stoned friend was visiting our room, and he kept picking up the book and grinning and pointing at the word “Joint” in the title. In an odd, random way this was actually a good comment about the book, which I found mind-expanding in a new way.

  Dick’s wonderfully colloquial work struck me as a definite step towards true beatnik science fiction, towards a literature that was ecstatic and countercultural, but with logic and rigor to its weirdness.

  Greg and I decorated our room to look like a disco. We found some long cardboard tubes behind a rug-store, and I trimmed them so that they fit between our floor and ceiling like the trunks of trees. Now I was the Magic Pig of the Enchanted Forest.

  I painted a watercolor mural on the inside of our room’s door, we taped up color comics of such sexy animals as Daisy Duck and Petunia Pig, and we erected a pyramid of bricks surmounted by a glaring Tensor reading lamp. We called this the Temple of the Barely Subhumans. When we were high, we’d turn on the Tensor lamp, and lurch around it, goofing on our caveman shadows on the ceiling.

  Such larks.

  Some weekends I’d take the bus to visit Sylvia at her grad school, or she would come to visit me. During my junior year she was at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and in my senior year she was at the University of Pennsylvania, right in Philadelphia.

  We were lovers by now, and very tender with each other.

  One spring night in 1966, we walked in a campus meadow dotted with blooming plum trees. We stood beneath a tree, kissing, and I shook the trunk. Sweet-smelling pastel petals drifted onto Sylvia’s upturned face, the petals like snow, or like confetti for a wedding.

  “I love this,” said Sylvia, warm and close. There seemed to be no end to the blossoms.

  Some nights she’d share my dorm room’s chaste single bed with me. She’d push my long, floppy hair off my face and admire me.

  “This is my darling Ru’s forehead. Nobody sees it but me.”

  I could hardly believe that a woman was being so tender with me. I wanted to treasure Sylvia and take care of her for the rest of my life.

  When I was home for the holidays with my parents at Christmas, 1966, my brother was finally back from the army, and looking to stir up some trouble.

  “I guess you’ll be needing one of these pretty soon, huh, Rudy?” said Embry, pointing at a full-page ad for diamond rings. Naturally he said this in front of my mother.

  Mom started vibrating with joy and approval. She and Pop were crazy about Sylvia. The next thing I knew, I’d gone to the bank to withdraw my leftover construction-work money, and had driven with Mom to Galt Jewelers to pick out an engagement ring.

  And while I was at it, I wrote a letter Sylvia’s father, asking for permission to marry her. Sylvia told him to say yes. Arpad appreciated this old-school approach. Sylvia says he made a point of using the best possible stationery to write me back.

  There was some business about the jeweler having to fabricate the engagement ring and to mail it to me at Swarthmore, so it wasn’t till early February, 1967, that I actually presented it to Sylvia. We were standing on a snowy hillside in the Crum woods by the Swarthmore campus, the sun sending flashes off colored light off the ice-crystals, and off our little diamond. A threshold moment.

  It was a snowy winter. I took to ice-skating up the Crum creek from my dorm to the campus—a roundabout route, but a rewarding one. And while I skated I thought about my uncertain future.

  The Vietnam War was ramping up, and they were drafting more boys my age all the time. I had a self-destructive, adventure-seeking, prove-my-manhood streak that made me want to join the combat. But at a more rational level, I knew full well that—not to mince words—I didn’t want to die for nothing in a phony war launched by ruling-class oppressors who despised me, my friends, and everything that we stood for.

  Although it was hard to get any iron-clad protection against the draft, being married helped a little, as did being a student. Deep down I’d begun expecting to end up as a professor—by now I wasn’t really fit for anything else. I certainly didn’t want to take some math-related office job as a statistician, analyst or accountant. And so I began applying to grad schools.

  I’d thought I might be able to slide in on the basis of my scores on standardized tests, which I still had the ability to ace. But, unlike when I’d been applying to colleges, I didn’t have any good grades or glowing reference letters to back me up. I had a straight C average in college, and my math professors hardly knew me, as I so rarely attended class.

  In the end, it was my impending union with Sylvia that got me into a Ph. D. program. She’d been accepted into the French graduate program at Rutgers University in New Jersey with a big scholarship, and the chairman of the French department prevailed upon the chairman of the Mathematics department to admit the bozo that this brilliant woman was about to marry.

  Senior week at college was strange. All the other students were gone, and the campus had the feeling of an empty stage set. A shooting war had broken out in the Middle East, and Uncle Sam was stalking our cohort like the Grim Reaper. We partied like mad. There was a lot of good fellow-feeling among my classmates. I realized that in my own oblique way, I’d made a memorable impression on some of them. But then Swarthmore sent us on our way.

  The next week I was in Geneva, getting married to Sylvia. The wedding was in June, 1967, at the American Episcopal Church, with none other than Pop officiating. And Embry was the best man. Right before the service, we three were waiting behind the altar, and we very nearly succumbed to a giggling fit. We were elated, excited, and anxious. But then Sylvia appeared, young and vibrant, lovely in her dress, and all was calm.

  “The best day’s work I ever did,” Pop would say in later years, beaming at us. And if Sylvia and I ever had a temporary falling out, my parents always took her side.

  After the wedding, Sylvia and I borrowed her parents’ car and we took off on a honeymoon trip to Spain. Red poppies bloomed by the roadsides, just like in an Impressionist painting. Children by the roadsides sold bunches of cherries with the stems woven together to make massive braids. Sylvia would hold two skeins of cherries up like earrings, and then she’d eat them all.

  At nights we’d stay in clean, inexpensive hotels, marveling that we were married. Sylvia was putting her hair into little pigtails, so she didn’t have to worry about fixing it every day. We had fun seeking out new pigtail holders, which were little sets of two glass balls connected by a rubber band. She was wearing silky miniskirts and she had a good tan. She looked wonderful.

  When we got back the US, my parents for some reason couldn’t pick us up, so Pop sent one his parishioners. When the old guy saw Sylvia in her pigtails and her minidress, he just about lost it.

  I’d married a babe.

  Summer of Love

  In the fall of 1967, Sylvia and I moved into a top-floor apartment in a brick building in Highland Park, New Jersey, not far from Rutgers University. The rent was a hundred dollars a month. The sunny, white-painted bedroom felt like the inside of an egg. We decorated the place with colored-paper collages and made hanging mobiles of sticks and shells and pieces of glass.

  Sometimes in bed, we’d put our mouths next to each other and sing very nearly the same soprano note: “Looooo.” The fun thing was that, if we made our voices ever so slightly out of pitch with each other, the overlapping notes would create an auditory moiré pattern, that is, a series of pulsing beats that grew more rapid as we brought our voices ever closer to perfect harmony. Two hearts beating as
one.

  My parents phoned us every single day. I’d been pretty much off their radar at college, but now they were really nosing in. If I’d been alone, I probably wouldn’t have answered the phone, or if I had, I wouldn’t have talked to them much. But Sylvia was always polite to them. They were banking on that. I think they were feeling lonely, or maybe not getting along with each other so well—so it was a nice break for them to talk to us, picking up the vibe of our happiness and our youth.

  But after a year or two the daily calls were getting to us. Phones didn’t come with jacks back then, or on/off switches, so I bought some parts and fashioned a jack for the single heavy black phone that sat by our dining-table. That way we could at least unplug it during meals.

  Every couple of weeks Sylvia and I would take the bus into Manhattan—the bus was a little cheaper than the train. The bus arrived at the memorably seedy Port Authority Bus Terminal. Walking through that lobby was like reading a page out of William Burroughs. And then you got to take the subway! New York was so great.

  We often ended up on upper Fifth Avenue, admiring the fancy stores and fashionable people, and we liked checking out the Museum of Modern Art. We saw Salvador Dali in that neighborhood a couple of times, and once we got up the courage to say hello to him in the lobby of the St. Regis hotel. He didn’t really want to talk, so he scribbled a signature on a postcard and handed it to me. Sylvia and I were proud of ourselves.

  Now and then we’d hit the Village, not that much was happening there in the daytime. And Greg had introduced us to a certain seafood house in Times Square, the McGinnis House of Clams. Sylvia and I would go there for cherrystones and littlenecks, toasting our absent friend. Greg was obsessed with the novel Moby Dick, but, unable to face the rigmarole of grad school, he’d enlisted in the Navy. Although they’d promised to make him a frogman, he ended up as a shipfitter, working in a shipboard metal shop, spending the better part of four years anchored in the San Diego Bay.