The plane was still bobbing. Theo worked feverishly at the controls.
“Currents!” he yelled. “Did you see—gone! It’s gone!”
Martine was pressing his hands with all his might against the ceiling of the Plexiglas bubble, trying to protect his head. “Maybe the whole Slot collapsed by itself!” he yelled back. “Or maybe—Vishinu’s men might have moved up to their Plan D. . . .”
Another moment and they were beyond the turbulence. Martine fell back in his seat, gasping.
“I just thought of something,” Theo said. “Now nobody’ll ever know what happened to Helder. Or me either. They’ll just assume we were swallowed up with the city.”
“That’s how martyrs are born,” Martine said. He looked closely at Theo. “They’ll never know the real story—unless you come back and tell them.”
“That’s true,” Theo said quietly. “I would never have known about you if you hadn’t come back.”
Martine turned and looked down. The slit-trench was a tiny scratch in the barren sands now; great columns of dust and smoke fanning up into the skies from the little vent.
“You see,” he said. “You needn’t ever have bothered erasing cities. Cities sometimes fall of their own weight.” He shook his head. “As Brother Lenin said to Brother Trotsky the night Moscow fell to the Bolsheviks—Es schwindelt.”
He pointed his finger at Theo.
“Never mind what I did”, he said. “To hell with the precedents. If you decide to pull a Lazarus and want it to have some human meaning, better find the precedents in yourself. Under that tantalum plate are the only precedents that count.”
Miami, no giraffes now. He would see no more giraffes.
“Suppose we do get there first” Martine said. “Suppose we have enough time to find the hidden arms—what then? You’re the only one who can use them.”
“Anybody can use them. They’ve got special controls for manual operation. That’s so monos and duos can work them.”
“Good.” A little later: “You don’t have any regrets about taking off this way? Didn’t you have a wife or a girl somewhere?”
“Nobody in particular.”
“You’re—not castrated?”
“No, it’s not that. I thought a lot about it, sometimes I thought the more extreme Anti-Pros had some pretty convincing arguments for it, but the idea made me sick too. No—I’ve had girls now and then, but I just never got too involved. I was always too much on the go, I guess. I’m a little uncomfortable with women.”
“The shy charismaticist. . . . What about Helder?”
“Oh, he wasn’t the shy type. He had lots of women. Never got married, though—funny, lots of amps never got married, come to think of it. . . . He never seemed to get along with his women, he was pretty brutal with them. It used to bother me.”
“Not half as much as it bothered him, I’ll bet. Strange thing about professional humanists, the ones I’ve known anyway—they manage to stir up mighty little brotherly love, or any other kind of love, in the bedroom,”
Martine began to whistle, then broke off, sickened, when he realized what the song was: “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket.” He studied the glassy view below. The Bahamas were floating by, puny patches of white against a background of undulant blue-black mica. Sun just beginning to heave up ahead, red as shame, granddaddy of all electonic tubes; strands of cloud twisting here and there, scribblings of an illiterate skywriter. . . . When he turned again to Theo he was surprised to see that there were tears in his eyes: he sat stiffly in his seat, looking straight ahead, trying to blink away the tears.
“Oh, Theo,” Martine said. “In any case, don’t cry.”
Don Thurman had roared with laughter: Theo was crying, audibly now: the sounds were disconcertingly alike.
“I don’t know if this’ll help,” Martine said, “but listen. I’ve just made a discovery: those whom the gods would destroy they first make solemn. . . . Look, Immob aimed to raise man from the animal to the truly human; the great humanist project. But what distinguishes man from animal? Not hands, not superego, not logic, not the ability to abstract and make instruments, not his myths and dreams and nightmares—the beginnings of all these things are there in the higher animals, it’s just a matter of man having more of the same. There’s only one thing man can do that’s beyond all other animals on earth: he can laugh. . . .”
Theo’s whimpering was louder now, his whole body was beginning to shake.
“Listen to me, Theo. Don’t you see? Laughter, nothing but laughter, is the final answer to the steamroller. Yesterday I met a man who laughed. Even yesterday. . . . Don’t cry, Theo. . . .”
“Why,” Theo said chokingly, “why did he laugh?”
“Oh—because there’s something else that distinguishes man from animal: he’s secretly in cahoots with the steamroller and secretly knows it—it’s from the cave of this secret knowledge, maybe, that most anxiously anticipatory human laughter comes. Laughter is a sort of short-circuited sob—maybe that’s why it brings tears to the eyes.”
“Is that—is that the way you were laughing in your notebook?”
“Yes,” Martine said. “I guess I was.”
He felt in his pocket, took out his notebook. He opened it to the last entry and added some lines:
OCTOBER 21, 1990
Somewhere southeast of Bermuda
Correction. Two things that distinguish man from the animal. He laughs—uses throat and vocal cords in a most unfunctional manner. Also cries—first time in the animal kingdom the tear ducts were ever put to such fantastic unfunctional use. And performs both unfunctional activities as one function, when he’s fully human. Homo Dei, the weepy titterer: laughs till the tears come.
Both Immob and Mandunga are subtractions, when what’s called for is a radical addition.
The addition? Merely a Hyphen—between Dog and God.
Vow: never to contemplate my divinity without seeing its hilarious canine underside.
But there’s no peace to be found at either extreme, at the pole of godhead or the pole of doghead: only spuriously neat incognitos.
My sin? It was to make those jokes about the steamroller and immobilization. Because to joke about such things is a way of thrusting them aside—and you wouldn’t thrust so hard if they weren’t so close to you—if you weren’t already “one of them” in your heart. The laughter hides the tears.
Neen was right, under my hyper-amble was the basket case. I refused to recognize it, dropped it like a hot potato after my analysis—dropped my analysis so I could drop the potato. But it was there, in all its mewling glory. . . .
Spent a good part of my life in a mythic world stuffed with fists. I was an overly cerebrotone, hunched-up, in-dwelling sort of guy, suspicious, sensing—while I secretly sponsored—unfriendly plots against me. Stand-offish; with women too. Even Ooda. The Dark Lady, Ominous Mom, Mominous Om, everywhere. . . .
Said no to all that once, October 19, 1972, immediately thereafter let myself be overcome by the pressure of Mandunga, a new EMSIAC. All because I shied away from the insights I began to get in my analysis: that at the core of my characterological onion were two festering seeds, a myth of victimization and a need for such victimization. From which came my “jokes.”
But the immobilization joke gave away the steamroller joke. If I ironically proposed that in future the mutilation be voluntary, it was a furtive admission that with everybody, me included, it always is, in the deepest sense, voluntary. Masochism: an inner need to objectivize and dramatize and perpetuate the myth of the steamroller, under the pretense that one has had nothing whatever to do with planting it in the environment and can therefore feel innocently abused and righteously indignant over its presence. Man: only animal that can convert pain into pleasure—and not even know he’s doing it!
That kind of humor is gallows humor, under the shadow of a self-constructed gallows. Very sour, very wilted.
I will take responsbility for my jokes to
o. . . .
Some notebook: turns out to be the record of the Dog-God, whose name is legion. As in the old English ballad Turpin Hero—as in Stephen Hero—the thing “begins in the first person and ends in the third person.” Which is one way to achieve the oceanic.
Everybody has his own built-in steamroller. Not everybody has an idea of the steamroller, a blueprint of it, a genealogy of it. The man who could photograph it and dissect it would be really unique. If he simply wanted to photograph and dissect it, he would be unique. That way, maybe, lies a new kind of identity. . . .
There is something I can accept. The picture of man—me—as the incipiently introspective Dog-God. Curious to distinguish between the 1 per cent of aggressiveness in him which is a response to reality and the 99 per cent which is phony, designed to make the God look like the Dog and cheek-turning like tooth-for-toothing. Who begins to see, dimly, that the real target for most of his vicious blows is himself, via others. That most of his blows are all boomerang and backfire. And therefore begins to investigate the steamroller behind the eyeballs, sadly and merrily. In order that his story, which began in the third person, can turn, belatedly, into the first. O pioneer!
To this hyphenated Wunderkind I can say yes. To his caceptance of the Hyphen, and his curiosity about it. And his hyphenated tearful-laughing reaction to it. And his awakening thirst for first-personality.
To this I say yes.
I say yes.
YES.
I say
Funny. Wrote a big NO in my notebook eighteen years ago. Now, at last, a big YES. Another hyphen, I’m the original no-yesman. Name should have been NOYES. . . .
Good Christ. Been staring at that last entry for five minutes, stupefied. Noyes is my name, in a way. It’s my mother’s maiden name, haven’t thought of it in years. Oh, blessed mother of myth, fount of multiness, source of all twos! . . .
This notebook, too, is now ended. My messianic addiction to notebooks is now ended. I want no more to make a mark: those who set out to make their mark usually wind up leaving mutilations. From now on I want to have an impact on myself. If I now set out to create an opposition on the island of coma, it is not for my third-person incognito, my “race”—it is for myself. I need this opposition in order to live as something other than a cripple. Messiah’s in the cold cold ground!
Once you go into the cave, you’ve got to grope along to the bitter end: no exit. And no end. Each man his own speliologist. We’re in for an indefinite turbulence in human affairs: Man’s not only the animal who makes words, he’s the animal who’s eternally obliged to eat his own words.
Now and forever it’s a tough transitional period for all of us anxious c-and-c systems, for all our d-and-d’s.
Old myth-mother, old artificialer, stand me now and forever in not too bad stead!
Signed (without incognito)
Dr. Lazarus (his own best parasite)
Theo was biting his lower lip, tears were streaming down his face. Martine looked away. Below, the Atlantic, lapping, rippling, like molten plastic.
“What’s that thing back in the belly of the plane?” Martine said. “Some sort of bomb bay?”
“No. It’s for dropping supplies to men doing their M.E.’s in inaccessible places—at the South Pole, in forests and jungles.”
“Are there controls for the inner doors?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Well, open them, will you? I’ll tell you why in a minute.”
Theo leaned forward and made some adjustments on the instrument panel.
“I’ll be right back,” Martine said.
He slipped out of the cockpit and made his way back to the boxlike installation set into the plane’s underside. The inside doors were pulled back. He dropped his notebook into the hollow, returned to his seat.
“All right,” he said. “You’re the world’s greatest bombardier—this is your last bombing run! When I give you the signal, open the outer doors. . . . Ready! Set! Go! Om-bomb away!”
Theo squeezed another button. Martine craned his neck: there was the notebook, leaves flapping, dropping end over end through the vapid blue like a lackadaisical tern—it plummeted and was gone.
“There are all sorts of ways to achieve the oceanic,” Martine said. “Helder did it one way, very meltingly. I think I prefer my way. Om! Enough of notebooks. My God, I hope I didn’t leave any more of the damned things around.”
Theo was silent, his cheeks still wet. Martine felt the tears welling up in his own eyes.
. . . . Maybe the bruise to the infant ego is irreparable: once it’s pounded home to the budding “I“ that it’s not kingpin of the whole cosmic shebang, it’s saddled permanently with a sickening sense of an indifferent, even hostile Outside, an overriding and ego-humiliating “It.” Myth of the steamroller begins there. Forever after, a yearning for reunion with the Other—as in hypnosis, politics—an aching need to recapture the uterine warmth, the nursery’s sense of lush intimate catering surround. Forever after, a sense of alienation, fostered by the machine and machined living, the man-made juggernauts. But for all the lure of the One, the romantic-poetic cry for the oceanic is only a thirst for oblivion: when a grown man yearns for the megalomaniacal grandeur of the nursery, for the delusions of omnipotence of the breast-feeding infant, it can have only one meaning—he wants to truncate himself, whittle down his humanness, die. Call his mirage the ecstasy of sainthood, Brahman, Yoga, Vedanta, Tao, Immob, what you will: it’s still the same old wearisome death instinct. And so is the communist yearning for the oblivion of the proletarian herd or the American yearning for the oblivion of the Jonesian herd, and for the same reasons. All ways of evading the alienating sheath of skin by signing the “I’s” death warrant. People afraid of standing on their own two feet, of living with the impossible anguished tension of humanness.
“Of course,” Martine said. “A grown man simply won’t fit into a perambulator. Of course he has to cut off his arms and legs.”
. . . . But there was a way to pierce one’s personal iron curtains—fleetingly, through heartbreakingly tiny, all too self-sealing rents: to love another person, genuinely to feel love, with its full burden of ambiguities and ironies. Slim Hyphen, but the only one.
“I must get back to Ooda. ‘I’ll be better to her.”
. . . . He saw them clearly, his mother and Irene, bending over the carriage. Distraught, harried, faces etched with pain. Oh, they had their crosses, these women, no doubt about it: a lot of them self-created. But not all. One thing they couldn’t be blamed for—they hadn’t delimbed and desexed the man lying in the basket. Yet, from the beginning of things, men had acted toward them as though they were attacking the whole male world with scalpels, or wanted to, anyhow. That had certainly been the premise of all his, Martine’s, dealings with these two niggling, hopeless women. And what if, in a revolutionary moment, he had reared up on his own two feet, flung aside the whole petulant male myth of amputeeism and threats of amputeeism, and approached these two without fear and therefore without anxious, anticipatory rage? Had, for once, stopped amputating himself in order to blame them for it? Well, if it was suffering they had needed most, they would still have had to get it—but somewhere else. Not from him any more. Between him and them, the air would at least have been cleared. He would probably, in that case, never have looked twice at Irene—there would have been no Bitch in his mother that he needed to reincarnate in his wife—but between him and both these women there might at least have been room for something other than tension. A bit of warmth. Even a certain tenderness. They were human beings too, maimed in human ways. He might even have brought some good things into their lives, and into his own. . . . He was weeping now, thinking of their lined, hopeless faces. So many things he would like to make up to them, so little he could do about it now.
He remembered Ooda’s words: “With you it is very low one moment, very high the next.” That was something he could do something about. There were more plateaus possible than he
had allowed for: meandering stretches of placidity, ease. Maybe he could do something to cushion the drops—if he could cut down his need to punish her, and through her, himself. Maybe she would still need her quota of hurts; no doubt she was that normal, that much like himself. But they need not come from him so lavishly: he need not be such a good provider of hurts. Love did not have to be a continuation of politics by other means. For him, that game had been about played out. He would try. . . . If he stopped going away from her a bit at a time. Was the best you could hope for a merger across barricades? Maybe. But there were barricades and barricades: some stout as fortress walls, others that could be stormed at an easy saunter. They could be whittled down, the mergement could be encouraged. If the worst tonus-making devils in the head were brought under control a little. . . .
The sun was dazzling, ferocious, all pure unperspectived light. Smashing through a skylight in his skull, to dispel the fetid fumes of the temple-cave and illuminate at last its cocooned secret—the ultimate joke: the cave was empty! No cackling dug-dragging witches there, tearing the helpless infant limb from limb, feasting on its mauled dripping flesh: the cave was empty! Pandora’s box meticulously looted before the grand opening. Except—in the reechy corner there, over where the petulant whine was coming from, in the basket—a man-baby, pouting. Delimbed: by himself. Desexed: by himself. Fuming forever about the cannibalistic hags, mapping humanistic campaigns against the steamroller. And outside, in the sun, the dancers with their soured smiles and wilted glidings—nobody guessed. Who is empiric about myths, who checks up on nightmares? What Jo-Jo clears his own clogged feedbacks? The temple-cave was empty. It existed, this Limbo with its foul blood-dripping dankness, its souring and wilting hermeticism, only in the echo chamber behind the apprehensive eyeballs, the Hallucinator under the skull. This was not the City of God. It was the City of the Dog-God not yet turned introspective, no skylight in the skull. . . .
“Goddamn that sun,” Theo said, squinting. “Can’t see a thing.”
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