Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Nort and I went to a bar, and he phoned his wife. “They found a big hole in Rudy’s thesis,” he told her, grinning at me. “Poor guy didn’t take it very well. He broke down in front of everyone.”

  Life with Kids

  In May, 1972, shortly before our move to Geneseo, Sylvia and I had our second child, a son, Rudy Jr. This time we’d gone to natural childbirth classes, and I was in on the delivery.

  Rudy’s umbilical cord was an impressive connection cable—glistening, semi-transparent, with a vein and an artery inside. It was a helical coil, reminiscent of an old-time telephone cord. I had a flash of Rudy’s cord leading back through Sylvia’s spacetime body to her own umbilical cord, and thus back to Sylvia’s mother, to her mother, and so on, all the way to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

  But mainly I was looking at the baby. He was bluish for that second or two before he took his first breath, and then he was pink—although his boy-parts were bright from the start. Ornaments.

  “La!” he yelled. “Waaaah!”

  Later Sylvia would say that the gentle ambient music in the hospital hall sounded like the beautiful soundtrack of a Fellini film. We were movie stars that day, we three. When I left the hospital to see Georgia and my Mom, I shook hands with a young cop in the parking lot, me with my ratty bell-bottoms and my long hair.

  “My wife just had a son!”

  “Right on.”

  Up in Geneseo, New York, we rented a tiny little house, practically a dwarves’ cottage, with teensy doors and windows. In the afternoons I’d take my son for a ride in his carriage, a nice plush model that Sylvia’s brother, Henry, had gotten us for Georgia. This was really some carriage, covered in bright blue velour, with luxurious springs and chrome fenders. In later years it would pass on to family after family in Geneseo.

  Rudy was a very alert baby, prone to thinking things over. Inside the house, he’d often watch the tree shadows that angled in through the windows to dance on the floors and walls. And when I wheeled him around town, he’d stare up at the maples, oaks and elms arching overhead, his bright, interested eyes studying the branches and, above them, the clouds.

  Looking at him, I’d think of the Bible verse: “Behold! This is my son, with whom I am well-pleased!”

  Once Georgia got over her initial shock at having to share her parents, she was nice to little Rudy. Sometimes she’d lug him around like a cheerful doll. He liked watching her too. Sometimes we’d get him all cleaned up and call him Mr. Tidy. When we took Rudy to visit Sylvia’s parents in Geneva, she got a passport picture of him, and she claimed the picture looked like Cark Gable. She kept a large blow-up of this picture on her dressing table.

  On Rudy’s first birthday, in 1973, Georgia and one of her friends ate all the lemony icing off Rudy’s layer-cake, scooping the icing off bit by bit with their tiny fingers, standing on chairs to reach the cake where it was sitting on top of the china closet. We grown-ups didn’t notice the missing icing till serving time. Oh well. We stuck in a candle, sliced it up, and it tasted fine.

  I loved eating that particular kind of layer-cake; I’d had it for all my birthdays as a boy. Sylvia had learned the recipe from Mom, it was a von Bitter family recipe. The layers were like thin hard pancakes, individually baked, and the cook would pile them with alternating smears of red currant jelly and orange marmalade between the layers.

  In the summer of 1973, we managed, with our parents’ help, to buy a three-bedroom house in Geneseo. It was a great not to have a landlord. I painted nearly all of the rooms, and I replaced some twenty missing panes of glass. The family before us had featured distracted parents and rambunctious boys.

  It was said that in the past, our house had stood empty for a few years—some of the locals even said it was haunted. I got a little paranoid about this, and I went so far as to have my father read the exorcism service from the Book of Common Prayer. But eventually I figured out that the noises I’d been hearing in the attic were squirrels, not Lovecraftian four-dimensional monsters. I found some squirrel-gnawed holes in the eaves and covered them over with flattened tin cans.

  Before long we were expecting a baby again. Isabel would be born in Warsaw, New York, the nearest town to Geneseo with a hospital. It was a thirty or forty minute drive from out house.

  Sylvia and I made a number of practice runs to Warsaw before the birth; we were taking a natural childbirth class there. The road was a beautiful little two-lane highway through rolling cow pastures, set here and there with silos. Sylvia got interested in the patterns of these fields, and she began making large paintings of them, increasingly abstract. Eventually she reached the point of using masking tape to get sharp edges on her harmonious pastel triangles.

  It was the era of women’s lib, and a couple of women drove Sylvia wild with resentment by putting her down for having a third child instead of getting a job. But she stuck by her plan. Having this child was something that she and I both wanted to do. One factor was that, with both Sylvia and I coming from two-child families, we wanted to experience a different dynamic in our own family. A bigger factor was that Georgia and Rudy had turned out to be so wonderful that we couldn’t resist having one more.

  Isabel’s birth was scary. It started with that drive to Warsaw, but in the middle of the night. Near dawn, a thunderstorm began, and we moved into the delivery room. Surprisingly there was a window beside the delivery table. I could look out at the misty green pastures and plowed fields, with cars hissing past in the early morning rain. Lightning flickered in the low, dark clouds.

  Sylvia began pushing. There was something great, monumental, and noble in her masks of pain. Later she told me that each time she pushed, she saw a skull that came closer. Isabel was having trouble getting out.

  The doctor sent me out to the waiting room, and got to work helping with the birth. I was worried that Sylvia might die. In my fear and despair I had a Zen flash, remembering an obscure koan: “Once you’re born, the worst has already happened.”

  Grasping at straws, I took the koan to mean that, even if some horrible tragedy were about to occur, the sorrow would be, after all, a natural and inevitable part of the human life that I myself had been born into years before. Like it or not, I was inescapably immersed in whatever was going to come down.

  And quite soon, despite all worries, everything was fine. Little Isabel was like a yellow-pink rosebud—by far the largest and the most aware of our three newborns. Although she seemed a little discomfited by the difficult delivery, within half an hour, she was looking us over, sizing us up. Sylvia was joyful, relieved, exhausted.

  Sylvia’s mother, Pauline, was staying with us for the birth. When Sylvia and I brought Isabel home, Pauline had dressed the kids up in their best clothes, as if they were meeting a dignitary—and I’m sure Isabel would say that they were.

  It was a great occasion. First we set Isabel on a pillow in a straw basket on the living-room couch, and then we put her in a wicker bassinet in our bedroom. Little Rudy pulled up a chair next to the bassinet, and sat there watching the new baby.

  The costs of living were low enough that we could live off my meager teaching salary. Sylvia spent most of her time with the kids, and I put in a certain amount of time too. To some extent, it was exciting and fulfilling to be raising our two, and then three, children. But the reality was more grueling, as anyone who’s had children knows.

  The weather was often gray and rainy in Geneseo, and in the winters we were cooped up inside. Sylvia said there were times when she thought she’d go crazy. It got to me as well. At the same time, I was worried about keeping my job, about doing some publishable research, and about whether I’d ever find a way to something more personally meaningful than trying to prove difficult theorems in mathematics.

  Sylvia and I had a saying that we liked to intone when things got tough.

  “The filth. The stench. The din.”

  I’d always say this in a sepulchral, tragic tone, with long pauses between the sentences, like the narr
ator of a documentary film about the lower depths of society. It would cheer us up.

  Sylvia would make it clear when she’d reached the point where I had to stay home with the kids for a day so she could go out. We’d argue if I didn’t give her enough free time. Sometimes she went up to Rochester to take art classes, and sometimes she’d shop or hang around with friends.

  Of course, if I relaxed into it, the children were wonderful to be with—cuddly and fun to watch. I always felt very comfortable talking with them. I would joke about everything, and be frank about the world—more so than when I talk to adults. My parents—and particularly my mother—had that same way of being direct and frank with me.

  By way of keeping our sanity intact, Sylvia and I became quite creative in Geneseo. I started getting into writing. Sylvia sewed many outfits for the kids, often inventing the patterns. She took further art classes at the college and became ever more involved in painting, developing a special sharp-edged, cartoony style, colored in warm tones. She sold some pictures and had a show.

  But always there was the child care. The days started early, and ran full bore. Once when I was taking care of the kids alone, I picked out Isabel’s outfit on the basis of having everything be red: red shoes, socks, pants, turtleneck and sweater. Of course the reds didn’t match. Even though I, as a man, was unable to perceive this, Isabel already could, and she was frowning about it.

  “Red,” she complained, sitting on our front steps.

  Just then another mother from the neighborhood came by and burst out laughing. “Did your father dress you, honey?”

  Feeding the children wasn’t too hard, as they all liked to eat. Often we’d give them slices of salami with cream cheese on bagels. They liked biting out the middles of the salami slices and looking through the remains as if they were glasses.

  Frequently Rudy would forget what time of day it was. “Did I eat supper yet?” he might ask in mid-morning.

  In the evenings we’d bathe the three kids, read them books and then they’d call for their evening snack.

  “Full warm milk!”

  Around this time my brother Embry and his family left the islands and moved to a farm in Kentucky. He and Noreen had two children of their own by then.

  “Here comes Rudy and his traveling circus,” Embry would say when we’d show up for a holiday visit.

  Once our three kids and Embry’s two caught lice on his farm. Embry’s wife Noreen argued that the lice had not come from her barn, but rather from an elephant that the children had touched at a menagerie. Another time our kids had an infestation of pinworms. These plagues were exciting, providing a lot to talk and think about for days on end.

  The kids’ birthday parties were big events, with balloons and party hats and games. I’d flash back to the birthday parties of my own childhood—and to Mom’s layer-cakes. At one of my parties, Pop had filled a galvanized washing-tub with water, set a little cup under the water, and let us kids try and drop pennies so that they’d fall through the water into the cup. If your penny went in, you’d get a piece of bubble gum, and if it missed, you’d get a piece, too. Good old Pop.

  For Georgia’s fourth birthday party, I set up the same game, with the same rules. Georgia wore eager pigtails and a yellow dress with an exclamation point on it—a perfect outfit for her.

  Over the years, Isabel became known in our family for always taking the biggest possible first bite out of her slices of birthday cake—often I’d manage to photograph her in the act. She liked sweets a lot. Later, when we lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of the first sentences Isabel wrote out on her own was, “Say! I’m having candy!”

  By way of expressing how small a town Geneseo was, I used to lay three fingers of one hand across three fingers on the other hand and say, “That’s our street map.”

  It was like a factory town, with the college down the hill towards the flat bottomland along the Genesee River, and the little residential streets up top. The village-like quality meant that we had a full social life, with most of our new friends living only one or two blocks away. Lots of the professors and administrators had young children, and it was easy to find playmates for the kids.

  We hung out a lot with a film-oriented English professor called Lee Poague and his wife Susie. Susie was a warm, humorous woman with a cozy voice. Lee and I could while away hours in discussing our meager odds at getting tenure—but then we’d forget about all that and immerse ourselves in rock and roll.

  A nice elementary school abutted the college, and Georgia went there. She often talked about one of the workers at the school, a stout lady that she called Miss Ims. Georgia was impressed that Miss Ims would take two full trays of lunch every day.

  We had a hamster, and our little book about hamsters said that you could determine a hamster’s sex by finding the genitals, which were “located a quarter inch from the vent.” This euphemism reliably sent Georgia into paroxysms of laughter, and at school she made a point of asking her teacher if she could open the vent.

  Rudy Jr. was eager to start school—the yellow bus stopped right in front of our house, and he was impressed to see Georgia riding off to kindergarten every day. When Rudy’s turn finally rolled around in 1977, he’d be out at the bus stop a few minutes early every day, ready to go. He was a little absent-minded, a dreamer like me, and one time he forgot to get off the homebound bus, and rode it all the way to the bus barn. They brought him to our house in a car—naturally by then we were frantic.

  For a little while, Georgia liked to pretend she was a teacher, enlisting her brother and sister to be her pupils. She’d set up a blackboard under our chestnut tree, write D-O-G, and then rap her chalk against the board, making a show of being piqued by her class’s slowness to read what she’d written. Of course Rudy bridled at any discipline from his older sister. In retaliation, she’d call him an upstart barbarian.

  This particular chestnut tree that they played under was extremely fecund, and in the autumns, the kids would gather hundreds of lustrous brown buckeyes. They’d load their red wagon with the chestnuts and haul them around, they’d fill buckets, they’d arrange the chestnuts in patterns on the sidewalk, they’d throw them onto our roof, they’d barter them with the neighbor kids. I loved the gnarly variegated whorls of browns on the buckeyes’ gleaming skins.

  Halloweens were great in Geneseo. We’d have a children’s parade down Main Street, with the wet sidewalks papered by orange leaves. And then the children in their costumes would flit along the cozy streets—skeletons, cats, angels, devils. Sylvia and I enjoyed carving pumpkins, each year we’d try to outdo each other. I’d make mine scarier than the year before, and she’d make hers yet more stylized and elegant.

  As I’ve mentioned, the winters were brutally long. Taking the kids outside would become quite a production, as they needed some eight pieces of clothing apiece—hat, scarf, gloves, snow pants, coat, boots—and if you neglected so much as one item, they’d catch an earache or a cold. It was like gearing up for SCUBA diving or a trip into space. And of course as soon as the children were outside, one of them would want to come back inside to go to the bathroom.

  Around 1975, Sylvia and I took up cross-country skiing, and that made it easier to get through the winter. If you could ski right out of our door, the endless snow could be a source of entertainment. I myself liked skiing down the hill to the farmlands by the winding Genesee River. Unobserved in a flat, wintry field, I’d feel like a jellyfish in an endless sea, my legs beating in a mindless rhythm, finding my way towards infinity.

  We took the kids out into the woods in the winter as well. The streams would be frozen over, with scary ice-rimmed black holes at the bases of the waterfalls, silently beckoning, like doors to the underworld. The hills would be drifted deep in snow, and good for sledding.

  In the summers, eager for sun, we’d pile into our car and drive to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, renting a ratty, inexpensive cottage by the beach. Sylvia and the children would turn as brown as
coffee beans. When I waded into the water, I’d sometimes step onto the flesh mound of a dozing sea skate. It would twitch in a sudden spasm, I’d let out a juicy scream, and the children would squeal with joy.

  “Made a mistake, touched a skate!”

  Rudy liked making drip castles and gathering the busy, digging sand-crabs. Isabel ate as much sand as she could. I’d take Georgia for long walks along the water, and she’d cheerfully sing songs about the objects we’d find.

  “Dead bone of crab!”

  Pop had bought us a basic white Ford. One summer afternoon in 1973, I got the idea of painting flames onto it. I used regular paint brushes and a couple of quarts of enamel paint. I was rebelling against my fated career as a family-man and professor.

  I knew a little about car-flaming from brother Embry’s hot-rod magazines. I painted yellow background flame shapes first, with the flames billowing back along the car from the front wheel wells. I added sinuous black outlines around the edges of the yellow flames, and filled the flames with colored cores—red on the left side of the car, and a blue flame-core on the right. I made the flames funky with forks and curling tips.

  “This must be a real test for your marriage,” said a neighbor to Sylvia.

  “Oh, I’ve always wanted a car with flames,” said my insouciant wife. In high-school in DC, she’d dated some guys who were always customizing their cars.

  Generally we got respect for our flames—although they also meant that everyone in the little town always knew exactly where we were, and what we were up to, simply by tracking the location of our easily recognizable car. One time Sylvia was pulled over for speeding, and she was expecting to charm her way out of a fine, but the cop was staring at the flames on the side of the car. Wordlessly, he wrote out a ticket.