“RATHBONE: Joint hallucination is not unknown in our world, podner.
“SAKALL: Who sez it’s joint hallucination? Hoo, hoo! If it vas any kind of hallucination—I’m not saying it is, now—it vould be peyote. Or jimson veed, mebbe. . . .
“This interesting conversation goes on for an hour and a half. There are no cuts. The Midget is active the whole time, reacting to the many subtle and now and then dazzling points presented. Occasionally the horses will shit in the dust. It is not clear if the Midget knows that his reality is being discussed. Another of this film’s artful ambiguities. Finally, Rathbone and Sakall agree that the only way to settle the argument is to kill the Midget, who gathers their intention and runs off screaming down the street. Sakall laughs so hard he falls off his horse into the horse trough, and we get a final closeup of Rathbone smiling, in his uncertain way. Fade up song:
When you’re out there feelin’ fine,
It’ll turn you into swine,
If you ever get a taste of Doper’s Greed!”
There is a brief epilogue to this, with Osbie trying to point out that of course the element of Greed must be worked somehow into the plot line, in order to justify the title, but the film runs out in the middle of an “uh . . .”.
Katje by now is in a bewildered state, but she knows a message when she sees it. Someone, a hidden friend at “The White Visitation”—perhaps Silvernail himself, who’s been less than fanatically loyal to Pointsman and his lot—has planted Osbie Feel’s screen test deliberately here, where they knew she’d find it. She rewinds and runs the film again. Osbie is looking straight into the camera: straight at her, none of your idle doper’s foolery here, he’s acting. There’s no mistake. It is a message, in code, which after not too long she busts as follows. Say that Basil Rathbone stands for young Osbie himself. S. Z. Sakall may be Mr. Pointsman, and the Midget sheriff the whole dark grandiose Scheme, wrapped in one small package, diminished, a clear target. Pointsman argues that it’s real, but Osbie knows better. Pointsman ends up in the stagnant trough, and the plot/Midget vanishes, frightened, into the dust. A prophecy. A kindness. She returns to her open cell, gathers a few belongings in a bag, and walks out of “The White Visitation,” past the unclipped topiary hedges, growing back into reality, past peacetime’s returned madmen sitting gently in the sun. Once, outside Scheveningen, she walked the dunes, past the waterworks, past the blocks of new flats replacing the torn-down slums, concrete still wet inside its shuttering, with the same hope of escape in her heart—moved, a vulnerable shadow, so long ago, toward her rendezvous with Pirate by the windmill called “The Angel.” Where is he now? Is he still living in Chelsea? Is he even alive?
Osbie is at home, anyway, chewing spices, smoking reefers, and shooting cocaine. The last of his wartime stash. One grand eruption. He’s been up for three days. He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors spiking out from his head, waves the needle he’s just taken out of his vein, clamps between his teeth a pipe as big as a saxophone and puts on a deerstalker cap, which does not affect the sunburst a bit.
“Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathborne. I was right,” out of breath, letting her bag fall with a thump.
The aura pulses, bows modestly. He is also steel, he is rawhide and sweat. “Good, good. There’s the son of Frankenstein in it, too. I wish we could have been more direct, but—”
“Where’s Prentice?”
“Out scouting up some transportation.” He leads her to a back room fitted out with telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories, spools of recording wire. “Not very organized around here yet. But it’s coming along, love, it’s coming.”
Is this what she thinks it is? Wakened from how many times and pushed away because it won’t do to hope, not this much? Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise . . . she must not have been political enough: never enough to keep faith that it would . . . even with all the power on the other side, that it really would. . . .
Osbie has pulled up folding chairs: hands her now a mimeographed sheaf, rather fat it is, “One or two things, here, you should know. We hate to rush you. But the horse trough is waiting.”
And presently, his modulations having flowed through the rooms in splendid (and for a while distracting) displays of bougainvillea red and peach, it seems he has stabilized for the moment into the not-quite-worldly hero of a lost Victorian children’s book, for he answers, after her hundredth version of the same question, “In the Parliament of Life, the time comes, simply, for a division. We are now in the corridors we have chosen, moving toward the Floor. . . .”
• • • • • • •
Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today. . . .
—Fragment, thought to be from the Gospel of Thomas (Oxyrhynchus papyrus number classified)
Who would have thought so many would be here? They keep appearing, all through this disquieting structure, gathered in groups, pacing alone in meditation, or studying the paintings, the books, the exhibits. It seems to be some very extensive museum, a place of many levels, and new wings that generate like living tissue—though if it all does grow toward some end shape, those who are here inside can’t see it. Some of the halls are to be entered at one’s peril, and monitors are standing at all the approaches to make this clear. Movement among these passages is without friction, skimming and rapid, often headlong, as on perfect roller skates. Parts of the long galleries are open to the sea. There are cafés to sit in and watch the sunsets—or sunrises, depending on the hours of shifts and symposia. Fantastic pastry carts come by, big as pantechnicons: one has to go inside, search the numberless shelves, each revealing treats gooier and sweeter than the last . . . chefs stand by with ice-cream scoops at the ready, awaiting only a word from the saccharomaniac client to swiftly mold and rush baked Alaskas of any size and flavor to the ovens . . . there are boats of baklava stuffed with Bavarian cream, topped with curls of bittersweet chocolate, broken almonds, cherries as big as ping-pong balls, and popcorn in melted marshmallows and butter, and thousands of kinds of fudge, from liquorice to divinity, being slapped out on the flat stone tables, and taffy-pulling, all by hand, that sometimes extends around corners, out windows, back in another corridor—er, excuse me, sir, could you hold this for a moment? thank you—the joker is gone, leaving Pirate Prentice here, newly arrived and still a bit puzzled with it all, holding one end of a candy clew whose other end could be anywhere at all . . . well, he might as well follow it . . . prowling along looking quite wry, reeling in taffy by the yard, occasionally stuffing a bit in his mouth—mm, peanut butter and molasses—well, its labyrinthine path turns out, like Route One where it passes through the heart of Providence, to’ve been set up deliberately to give the stranger a tour of the city. This taffy trick is a standard orientation device here it seems, for Pirate now and then will cross the path of some other novice . . . often they’ll have a time getting their strands of taffy disentangled, which has also been planned as a good, spontaneous way for the newcomers to meet. The tour now takes Pirate out into an open courtyard, where a small crowd has formed around one of the Erdschweinhöhle delegates in a rip-roaring argument with some advertising executive over what else but the Heresy Question, already a pebble in the shoe of this Convention, and perhaps to be the rock on which it will founder. Street-entertainers go by: self-taught tumblers doing amazing handsprings on pavement that seems dangerously hard and slippery, choirs of kazoos playing Gilbert & Sullivan medleys, a boy and girl who dance not along the level street but up and down, usually at the major flights of steps, whenever there’s a queue to be waited through. . . .
Gathering up his ball of taffy, which by now is growing quite cumbersome, Pirate passes Beaverboard Row, as it is known: comprising the offices of all the Committees, with the name of each stenciled above t
he doorway—A4 . . . IG . . . OIL FIRMS . . . LOBOTOMY . . . SELF-DEFENSE . . . HERESY . . .
“Naturally you’re seeing this all through a soldier’s eyes,” she’s very young, insouciant, wearing a silly small young-woman’s hat of the period, her face clean and steady enough for the broad-shouldered, high-waisted, no-neck profile they’re all affecting these days. She moves along beside him taking long and graceful steps, swings her arms, tosses her head—reaches over to grab some of his taffy, and touching his hand as she does so.
“For you it’s all a garden,” he suggests.
“Yes. Perhaps you’re not such a stick after all.”
Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious,
I’ll tell you it’s just—out,—ray,—juss,
Spirit is so—con,—tay,—juss,
Nobody knows their a-ges . . .
Walkin’ through bees of hon—ney,
Throwin’ away—that—mon,—ney,
Laughin’ at things so—fun—ny,
Spirit’s comin’ through—to,—you!
Where did
the swing
band come
from?
She’s bouncing
up and down,
she wants
to be
jitterbugged,
he sees she
wants to
lose her
gravity—
Nev—ver,—mind, whatcha hear from your car,
Take a lookit just—how—keen—they are,
Nev—ver,—mind,—what, your calendar say,
Ev’rybody’s nine months old today! Hey,
Pages are turnin’ pages,
Nobody’s in—their,—ca,—ges,
Spirit’s just so—con,—ta,—gious—
Just let the Spirit—move,—for,—you!
The only office not physically touching the others on Beaverboard Row, intentionally set apart, is a little corrugated shack, stovepipe coming out the top, pieces of automobile lying around rusted solid in the yard, piles of wood under rain-colored and failing canvas, a house trailer with its tires and one wheel tilted forlorn in the spanging of the cold rain at its weathered outsides . . . DEVIL’S ADVOCATE’S what the shingle sez, yes inside is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to preach, like his colleague Teilhard de Chardin, against return. Here to say that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning. It’s a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not without great moments of eloquence, moments when he himself is clearly moved . . . no need even to be there, at the office, for visitors may tune in from anywhere in the Convention to his passionate demonstrations, which often come in the midst of celebrating what hep humorists here are already calling “Critical Mass” (get it? not too many did in 1945, the Cosmic Bomb was still trembling in its earliness, not yet revealed to the People, so you heard the term only in the very superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges). “I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever—though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us—well, why begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow . . . yes . . . yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?
“We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests. . . .
“It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant—faith in Death as the master of us all—is to ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot speak for others. . . . But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those for whom we die, our own immortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished—returned to where it all came from.
“To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return. . . .” It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid. Pirate and the girl have been listening to him as they linger outside a hall Pirate would enter. It isn’t clear if she will come in with him. No, he rather thinks not. It is exactly the sort of room he was afraid it would be. Jagged holes in the walls, evidently where fixtures have been removed, are roughly plastered over. The others, waiting for him it seems, have been passing the time with games in which pain is the overt commodity, such as Charley-Charley, Hits ’n’ Cuts, and Rock-Scissors-and-Paper. From next door comes a sound of splashing water and all-male giggling that echoes a bit off of the tiles. “And now,” a fluent wireless announcer can be heard, “it’s time for? Drop—The Soap!” Applause and shrieks of laughter, which go on for a disagreeably long time.
“Drop the Soap?” Sammy Hilbert-Spaess ambles over to the thin dividing wall, puts his nose around the end of it to have a look.
“Noisy neighbors,” remarks German film director Gerhardt von Göll. “Doesn’t this sort of thing ever stop?”
“Hullo, Prentice,” nods a black man Pirate doesn’t recognize, “we seem to be old school tie.” What is this, who are all these— His name is St.-Just Grossout. “For most of the Duration, the Firm had me trying to infiltrate the Schwarzkommando. I never saw anyone else trying to. It sounds a bit paranoiac, but I think I was the only one. . . .” This forthright breach of security, if that’s what it is, takes Pirate a little aback.
“Do you think you could—well, give me a sort of sitrep on all this?”
“Oh, Geoffrey. Oh, my.” Here comes Sammy Hilbert-Spaess back from watching the shower-room frolic, shaking his head, pouched and Levantine eyes continuing to stare straight down his nose, “Geoffrey, by the time you get any summary, the whole thing will have changed. We could shorten them for you as much as you like, but you’d be losing so much resolution it wouldn’t be worth it, really it wouldn’t. Just look around you, Geoffrey. Have a nice look, and see who’s here.”
Pirate is surprised to find Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck more fit than he ever looked in his life. The man is actively at peace, in the way of a good samurai—each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without apprehension or remorse. It is an amazing change. Pirate begins to feel hope for himself. “When did you turn?” He knows Sir Stephen won’t be offended at his asking. “How did it happen?”
“Oh, no, don’t let this one fool you?” who in the world is this, with this greasy pompadour combed nearly as high again as his face, through which shows the peened, the tenderized soul of a fighter who’s not only taken dives, but also thought heavily about them all the way down. It is Jeremiah (“Merciful”) Evans, the well-known political informer from Pembroke. “No, our little Stevie’s not ready for s
ainthood quite yet, are we my fine chap?” Slapping him, playful, clubbing slaps on the cheek: “Eh? eh? eh?”
“Not if they’ve thrown me in wiv v’ likes o’ you,” replies the knight, churlishly. But it’s hard to say really who’s provoking whom, for Merciful Evans now bursts into song, and a terrible singer he is, a discredit to his people, in fact—
Say a prayer for the common informer,
He came out of a quim, just like yoooou—
Yes be kind what you chortle,
For narks are as mortal
As any, Kilkenny to Kew . . .
And the next time you sigh in your comfort,
Ask yourself how he’s doing, today—
Is it worse being sold,
For those handfuls of gold,
Than to sigh all your real-life, away?
“I don’t know that I’m going to like it in here,” Pirate, an unpleasant suspicion growing on him, looking about nervously.
“The worst part’s the shame,” Sir Stephen tells him. “Getting through that. Then your next step—well, I talk like an old hand, but that’s really only as far as I’ve come, up through the shame. At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do . . . regardless of what I believe, you see . . . I’ve been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose. It’s driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that’s the whole point of it. And who knows what comes next? Good God. I don’t find out, of course, till I break through this one. . . . I don’t mean to discourage you so soon—”
“No, no, I’ve been wondering something else—are all you lot my Group or something? Have I been assigned here?”
“Yes. Are you beginning to see why?”
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