Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (8 page)

“Infidel. Know ye not the fury of the Lord profaned?”

“I do, man, but it sure looks like you don’t. C’mon, get out of the sack. You want another drink?”

“Only sacramental wine. Oh, listen to that Miles. I’m cured, right?” Creeping off the couch, hobbling to the speaker on all fours. “Dig how pure, how clean. Dig the control.” His hangover still tapping.

“Dig it later,” said Heff, turning off the turntable. “It’s the middle of the goddamned afternoon. You’ve got to register and I’ve got to see if my appeal did any good—”

“What appeal, man?”

“They busted me out at midterm, I already told you, but I appealed.”

“They can’t bust you, Heff.” Gnossos rolling over on his back. “That puts you out in the world.”

“Cuba.”

“Yeah, I heard you once. It’s the wrong generation, baby, you’ll be purged. Anyway, your spade blood is where it’s at.”

His face flushing. “Bullshit.”

“Don’t put it down. Twenty-five parts out of a hundred itching for the white-man’s scalp. You’ve got problems.”

“They ain’t your problems, gumbook. And moving out is one hell of a lot better than chewing cud at Guido’s Grill.” He picked up an envelope of forms and appeal material, then wheeled around, pointing a finger. “If I stayed, I’d end up like G. Alonso Oeuf, ten
years
on the academic scene.”

Gnossos blinked at the name and sat up. “Oeuf? You’ve seen him?”

“In the infirmary is all. Scheming to take over the university, from the look of his little headquarters. Talk about short-sighted vision!”

“Anyway,” from Gnossos, finally pulling on a pair of crumpled corduroys, “you don’t have enough bread to make New York, let alone Havana. Did you show anything on the wheel last night?”

“Your buddy Aquavitus will set me up, don’t worry.”

“Who?”

“Aquavitus, man, you heard me.”

“Giacomo? From the Mafia?”

“I used your name; he’s operating out of Miami now. And let’s not make a big thing out of it, I’m not exactly free to talk.”

“Oh intrigue, Heffalump, beautiful. I saw your picture in some photographer’s last night. Very dramatic. And what about that little dyke chic with the Joan of Arc look?”

“Goddammit, I’m in love with her.”

“No.”

“Oh shit, I’ll see you later,” and he stomped out the door for Anagram Hall. Has it bad, all right. Conjures up cafes with back rooms full of anarchists, smoke thick over crowded tables. Dens for impregnating rebel minds, conceiving attitudes, ferment, brush-fire wars.
Heff
, he hears his khaki commander telling him, an arm clasped to his own,
this is no longer a time of waiting. Take this zircon to Foppa and tell him we move tonight
. One fourth of his blood French. Corpuscles of his reason. Needs some Greek
plasma. Feed him dolma, more goat cheese. Biochemical transfer. Alter his mind. Must find a hothouse, plant pot seeds.

Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semiprecious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.

But they forget me.

“Yes sir, mister,” Dean Magnolia was saying, “that is correct. Five dollars.”

“Extraordinary amount of money. You realize that being trapped on this ice floe I was telling you about, it was difficult, to say the least, to get back to Athené on time.”

“I understan’ your situation, naturally. But nevertheless the administration has its regulations, an’ we must abide by them.”

“I’ll have to give you silver dollars.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“United States silver dollars. Good at any Federal reserve bank.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Where they can be given in exchange for silver.”

“Ah yes, of course.”

“I trust you’ll take them?”

“Don’t you have any paper money, Mr.—”

“My last employer never used it. Germs.”

“Is that right?”

“You’d be surprised the amount of parasitic corruption gets spread through the handling of dollar bills. Osmosis. Still a theory, of course.”

“You seem to have a great interest in medicine, Mr.—uh—”

“I am going to be a cancer surgeon.”

“Ah.”

“Dig down, find a little disease, cut it out.”

“I’m pleased to see you’ve come to a decision so soon. Many of your fellow students, they—”

“Oh, I understand. They take so long making up their uncertain minds.”

“Precisely.”

“Drifting aimlessly down the many separate trails of youth, irresponsible, failing to choose the Proper Path in time. It must be frustrating to men such as yourself, having to put up guideposts, show the way, and all that.”

Dean Magnolia swiveling in his chair, fondling a piece of petrified Saratoga Springs, “It is refreshing to have someone understand my position. Why, you’d be surprised, truly surprised, the number of unsympathetic young boys pass through this office year after year.”

“I am not surprised, sir.” Distract the cat, cool the five bucks. “It is the symptom of the times. Unrest. Indecision. Waiting for Things To Happen. What the first Dr. Pappadopoulis called the Largesse Syndrome.”

“First Dr., um—” rimless spectacles slipping down on the potato nose, leather chair creaking with shifted weight.

“My father, sir. Died in the steaming jungles of Rangoon. UNESCO experiment. You read about it, perhaps, in the special
Times
supplement dedicated to his memory.”

“I remember it well. Must have been a blow to you and your mother.”

“She died with him, sir.” Look at the floor. Blink.

“Ah. I’m certainly sorry to hear that.”

“Quite all right, I was prepared. May I go now? Ought to be hitting the books, really. Time is money.”

“Course, my boy. You drop by sometime. Whenever you want to talk about your future again. That’s why I’m here.”

It sure as hell is. “Thank you, sir.” Walking across the room, rucksack slapping against his shoulder, almost to the door.

“Oh, unh, Mr. Pappadopoulass . . . ”

“Yes sir?”

“We, unh, forgot the matter of your fee. The one fo’ late registration.”

Be cool, you’ll get revenge. “Of course. Terribly sorry, must have been distracted.”

Look at him. Benevolent smile. White hair of the sage. Actually looks the part. Playing with pebbles. Wonder will his penie calcify, break off?

But at quite another level, marking an entirely different breed of university time, right there on the listing top floor of Polygon Hall, he found the lean, ever-esoteric figure of Calvin Blacknesse. Gnossos discovered him where perhaps he’d been waiting all the while, posing beneath
a grand mansard skylight in his lambent whitewashed studio, the very walls of which were impregnated by the odors of linseed oil, turpentine, paint, sizing, incense, and rosewater. Old Blacknesse, the only advising buddy who had paused, then failed to give his teacherly blessing on the voyage out across the asphalt seas; who had cautioned against the plotting friendship of G. Alonso Oeuf; who alone had warned him to beware the paradoxical snares of Exemption. In failing to subscribe or bear approving witness, he had become Gnossos’ only ear, the single object of introspective phrase. To him alone could the wanderer speak secrets.

Now he stood with serene but ambiguous late-afternoon patience, wearing his linen mandarin jacket, sketching an eye in the hand of the dark goddess. Out of many thousand lines of light and gloom emerged small heads and skulls absent of some otherwise requisite feature: a mouth, or a nose. Here and there fanged monkey-demons hovered, the Eastern brethren of the gargoyles, who had been driven screaming, holding their horns, from all the celestial majesty of the Christian West. Around him were his stacked canvas, never static, always in flux, sections being painted out and annihilated with the same pitch and rhythm as the ones taking on substance. The demolition of self. A sucking vortex, Gnossos always reasoned, the diameter of which narrowed over the years, pulled closer to the pinpoint when creation and destruction were one. Then, with any luck, he’d die.

“You’re all right?” came the easy question.

“Hung, man. And constipated. How come you didn’t answer any letters?” Gnossos taking a seat on a fish-shaped stone. Its pocked surface was dappled with dyes.

“They were more epistles than letters, yes? And we knew we’d see you again.”

“Come on, you didn’t think I was dead? Along with the rest of Mentor?”

Blacknesse laying the delicate graphite sticks on a piece of dried cobraskin: “No, Gnossos, not really. Your end could hardly have come in the rumored manner. A little at a time perhaps. By your own hand?”

Sucking the barrel of a double twelve. Slugs or birdshot? “Thirty below when I got lost, man, can you imagine?”

“No. By fire perhaps, but never by ice. I don’t need references for that one.” Blacknesse smiling the smile he had learned in India, setting a saucepan on his mauve hotplate for tea. Mauve, of course. No object so totally defined that it should elude decoration. One day, no doubt, the hotplate
would shudder, shake off its stasis, stand up, stumble out the door, and flop into Maeander with a violent, sputtering sizzle.

“I’ve got some cinnamon sticks, if you want.” Feeling around through the hodgepodge of contents in his rucksack, coming against the jar of pot seeds, “Oh hey, you don’t have a greenhouse, Calvin? I’ve got something to plant.”

“David Grün has one, I think. Some kind of cactus?”

“Just Mexican grass. How’s old David doing, anyway?”

“Coming out with more disturbing music than you’ll remember. But potent and red-faced.”

“He was always a pretty lyrical cat.” Pamela calling me that. Not altogether correct.

“More atonal now.” Pouring the tea over the cinnamon sticks. “You’ll have to hear for yourself. He had his fortieth birthday last week, you know; a sixth daughter born when you were looking for Motherball.”

“Sixth?”

“Robin, they call her. A bird’s name like the other five.”

And me a spiritual virgin. How many unborn children flushed in rubber balloons. Name them after insects, even if I had them: how do you do, like you to meet the twins, Locust and Centipede.

Jesus, that eye in the hand. Wink at it. No don’t, it might wink back.

They drove into the country, along frozen Harpy Creek. A faint gurgling under metallic ice. The painter’s black Saab, its two-cycle engine puttering with a hypnotic whine, Pappadopoulis slouched down in the seat, his eyes on the padded lining of the roof, remembering his quest in Taos, looking for the Connection who might tie all the loose ends of vicarious experience into a woven sign or pattern, some familiar rebus. A triangle, perhaps. A fish. The symbol for infinity.

But now he sat with Blacknesse, whose slender dye-stained fingers were closed gently around the wheel. Their vision was focused arbitrarily on the rippling white hyphens that danced back under the car whenever they passed a melting stretch of road; both of them taking pleasure in this sensation of shifting surface, having to deal with different mediums, different textures in the same plane.

“You were starting to tell me something. In the studio.”

Gnossos collecting various thoughts, his attention having drifted to the sound of the tires. “New Mexico, man, I finally found him, right where every hophead in the country figured he’d be. But no sun god or anything, just tacos and shakes. It’s enough to bring you down.”

“We figured.”

“We?”

“Beth and myself.”

A lazy sigh, a sound of marrow-bone weariness, hoarded, stored for precisely this moment. “If I’d been into the Middle Ages, man, you
know
I would’ve gone looking for the grail or whatever it was got them hung up. And so would you, so don’t come on cocky. Everybody’s got his little search and yours happens to be internal, but I’m just not cut out for meditation, right? Don’t have the time, for one thing; this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly nothing. And come to think of it, you were among the first people to mention the cat, apart from Aquavitus.”

“My error, and I apologize. I’d heard he was a mushroom-warlock from Mexico, not part of some narcotics syndicate. You were looking for visionary enlightenment, if I recall, not just a chance to get high.”

“Well, you take what comes along. Maybe next time I’ll cross the border and avoid hangups. Let me tell you, man, you can’t move in this country without catching your heel in a hangup. Mousetails in your root beer, grubs in your Hershey bar, always some kind of worm in the image, munching away.” Shifting his glance to a drop of water that had worked its way through the sealed glass and begun breaking apart from the vibration of the frame. “Even the desert. Maybe I’m naïve or something, but I
did
expect a little dune here and there,
some
thing besides the Arapaho Motor Inn, ninety-two units, all Polar Bear Cool. And the lights! Pink, chartreuse, Congo ruby, magenta, baby blue, you’ve got to pack a mule to get away from the glare, man, believe me. Even the sand is full of hump-trash. The only thing you get to know about is hot wind and dry, see, you really get involved with dry.” The broken drops on the windshield lurched together, formed a single stream, and ran back up into a shivering ball. “Old Pluto’s got his dirty claws in the landscape, all right. Try to groove behind the daytime cosmos and you get a faceful of whipped cream and Betty Crocker pastry. They
could
hit you with a lightning bolt but that wouldn’t be comic enough. I mean, somebody’d have to send the little pile of ash and hair back to your mother and who’d get the joke?” He crossed his fingers to guard against any possible hex.

“I was ready to throw in the towel when I tried taos, let me tell you. It just didn’t seem the likely place to find him, little town full of getups, serapes, silver talismans, jade rings, all like that. But sure enough, this Indian comes out of the shadows, wrapped up in a flannel blanket, everything hidden, even his face, nothing showing but the eyes. And stitched across the back of the blanket, Calvin, one word. One word, right?”