Keep The Giraffe Burning (26 page)

In the Doody world it was always Saturday afternoon in a small Midwestern town of 1900. Science was represented by Tom Edison, poetry by Ed Guest, painting by Norm Rockwell and Grandma Moses, literature by Booth Tarkington and Horatio Alger, culture by the ice cream parlour and politics by the barbershop. And all was interpreted by cuddly robots.

Currently Chug was arranging the linkages of a duck to enable it to duckspeak of Thomas Paine:

Yup, yup! He was a firebrand

And his brand of fire

Was more than old King George could stand.

The song omitted mention of how Paine had died: old, lonely and so despised by the Americans whose freedom he’d laboured for that they could not suffer him to sit in a stagecoach with decent folk. In spare moments at work, Chug drew sketches for impossibly elaborate singing bombs.

Ras became the third steadfast member of the group. He was an unemployed high school teacher who apparently drifted to them and stuck. Running the press, minding the store, handing out pamphlets – nothing was too much trouble for him. That’s because he was, as everyone
knew perfectly well, a police spy.

Ras found it hard to infiltrate them, not because they were secretive, but because they seemed to have no secrets at all. They were careless about publicity, and indeed, the group had never been given a name. Baffled by their openness, Ras kept digging. He never doubted for a moment that they had concealed a sinister purpose, like Chesterton’s anarchists, under a cloak of jolly anarchy.

‘Where do we keep the bombs?’ he would ask.

‘Up here,’ Ayn would say, tapping her head with solemn significance. ‘Truth be our dynamite.’

‘And Justice our permanganate,’ Chug would add. ‘And our blasting caps be Freedom, Honour and –’

‘No, really. The real bombs.’

They hated to disappoint him. ‘You’ll know soon enough, Ras. It’s just that we hate to tell you too soon, in case you fell into the hands of the police or anything.’

Then Chug and Ayn would go off somewhere and laugh, while Ras went to report. It never occurred to them to ‘deal with’ him in any way, or even to withdraw their friendship. He was, after all, a needed romantic figure, an Informer. Without him the group would have been dull indeed.

The Circuit Breaker

Ras was supposed to be giving old Mr Eric von Jones tuition in mathematics. Shortly after each lesson, Mr von Jones would take a piano lesson from an FBI agent. In this way Ras and the agent communicated without knowing each other’s name or face.

‘Have you completed the problems I assigned?’

Somehow asking Mr von Jones the simplest question set off in him an elaborate cycle of clockwork twitches and tics: hand to mouth, roll of eye, lift of brow and shrug of shoulder. The cycle took a full minute to complete.

‘Yes … here.’ The old man slid across the dining table a dozen sheets of carefully written equations. On the last page were Ras’s orders.

‘Fine. Now here’s your corrected work from last time.’ Ras slid back to him a report on the OK’s Bookstore group. ‘Now, shall we go over some trigonometric ratios?’

The twitches unwound once more. ‘Yes … I’d like that.’ Squaring his notebook with the corners of the table, he selected one of a dozen pencils all sharpened to the same length and headed the page ‘Notes’.

‘You don’t need to really take notes,’ Ras whispered.

‘I’m very … interested in ratios.’

Ras looked at him: a corpse at attention. No doubt Mr von Jones made the FBI man teach him scales too. That parsnip-coloured face seemed to glow only at the prospect of some tiresome duty. Probably he would go on from one chore to another, carrying himself through routine motions for a few more years, until at last he was called to the great treadmill in the sky.

Dr Lane’s Secret Journal (II)

I can’t understand how Hank knew they were going to build a wall along the border. One with a ‘white line … fifteen hundred miles long’, which is a highway! It all seemed just babbling at the time, but now even the ‘good-bye Mexico’ makes sense. I have also just learned that a Will Doody Funville is to be built somewhere in the area, against the wall. No doubt ‘Up against the wall, robot!’ refers to Doody’s robot animals!

This seems to be a genuine case of clairvoyance. There is just no other rational explanation!

Harry Boggs on Life

Harry gave an after-dinner lecture on the subject ‘Is There Life on Other Planets?’ to a dozen other residents of Donald O’Connor bunkhouse. He concluded that there certainly was, and that it was of the utmost importance to get in contact with the Uranians.

‘That’s the real reason they’re building this wall,’ he said. ‘With powerful telescopes, the Uranians will be able to see it.’

Another important means of communication could be telepathy, he went on, but most of us had our telepathic equipment damaged by a lack of vital sea kelp in our diet. When he’d finished, four or five white heads in the audience nodded, as if in agreement. Brad Dexter’s was among them; Harry bad seen bundles of
Unvarnished Truth
on a cart, bound for the incinerator. And draped over the top bundle, what looked like a deflated rubber dolly …

No time for such thoughts now, of course. Time for Harry’s important government work. Red-faced and breathless with vision, he hurried to his room and tuned in on Listening Post.

‘Number 764882. Number 764882,’ said an announcer slowly, so he could copy it down. Two women’s voices came on the air.

‘ … a slipped disk. But all in all, it wasn’t bad.’

‘Haven’t they got any forjias? No? OK, bring me the roast sud. What did you say his name was?’

Harry was happier talking about his important government work than actually doing it, but he soldiered along. The FBI expected him to listen to an hour a day of this:

‘Impinging upon my career. The great chain of buying, that’s what it is. Impinging and impugning … impugn sort … Sri Mantovani … Einstein and people like Einstein said that the world was flat … reliance … bargain jay or meep …’

Harry vowed that he would never again say anything dull or unimportant in a public place.

MEMO: From the desk of A. Lincoln

I generally find that a man slow to get a joke is slow to win a battle. That is why I like to see my generals piss-eyed with laughter at all times. General Ned Allison tells me he knows of three soldiers, who had been imbibing, and were sent to a certain address in Gettysburg – but I expect
that this is just one of Ned’s ‘leg-pullers’. Hope you and Martha are well. I and the missus are tolerable.

The Séance

Chug and Ayn had wanted to go, so much so that Ras suspected a secret meeting. Perhaps this ‘séance’ was really the place where they received their orders, from the Central Council of Anarchists. He’d volunteered to go with them, and they’d insisted he go in their place. There was his dilemma: Were they getting him out of the way while they went elsewhere, or were they trying to bluff him out of the séance?

He went, still vaguely expecting the Central Council, men in beards and dark glasses, calling themselves Breakfast, Coffee Break, Lunch, Tea, Dinner, Supper and Midnight Snack …

The medium was an anaemic old lady with knotty flesh hanging from her arms, Mrs Ross. The others were Hank James (an old man with mad eyes), Dr Lane (looked like a young optician), Mrs Paris (a plump old lady with an asthmatic Pekingese and a hat of similar material) and Steiner, a young man with erupting skin.

As soon as the lights went out, Ras felt another presence, an enormous fat man who almost filled the room. In the deep blind blackness it was terrifying, for Ras dared not move for fear of touching the fat man.

The medium did not speak. After a moment, Ras said, ‘I thought it wasn’t supposed to work with a skeptic in the room.’

A deep, fat voice came back at once: ‘Don’t be an ass. That’s what these fraud mediums tell you, but don’t listen to them. Actually it only works when there is at least one skeptic in the room.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Some call me God, Allah, Jaweh, the All, the Other, the Great Imponderable, Bingo, Mammon, the Light, names like that. Call me what you like, but call me in time for dinner.’

Ras shuddered at the use of that particular noun. ‘Are you the chief of the anarchists, then?’

‘Why must there be a chief? Maybe we all walk shoulder to shoulder, shank to shank. No leaders.’

‘Not your kind. You need kings to kill, at least. And presidents and bishops and gods – all targets for your bombs.’

‘Go on. I find it fascinating the way reactionaries assume all the bombs and guns are turned against them. Who raises the armies, builds the rockets, buys the bombs, draws the border and declares war, if not your kings and presidents?’

‘I should warn you,’ Ras said through gritted teeth, ‘I am an agent of the FBI.’ The time for caution was past.

‘That is obvious, and needs no warning. But you’d better warn me if you feel a change of heart coming on.’

‘No danger of that, my fat friend!’

‘Ah! But if you say that, you are on the very brink of conversion to anarchy!’

‘But you are the forces of anarchy. You are they who hate and fear the light, they who hate order because it is orderly, life because it is alive.’

‘Am I?’

Suddenly it was all wrong. Ras felt as if he had betrayed himself, to himself. He was the anarchist, and this voice the spirit of Law and Order, of J. Edgar Hoover, of –

‘Damn you!’ he shrieked. ‘Damn you, Chesterton!’

‘Chesterton?’ said the voice as the lights came up. ‘But my dear chap, Chesterton is simply other people.’

Mrs Ross opened her eyes and beamed. ‘My, how successful we have been!’ she said. ‘Two strong emanations! I think I liked the one called Chesterton best, though the late FBI agent was nice too.’

Dr Lane’s Secret Journal (III)

Dr Veck has refused to accept my parapsychological explanation of Hank’s predictions. He’s refused to even discuss them. But I tried Hank out at a séance and also with ESP cards, with interesting results. At the séance I actually spoke with the spirit of Chesterton, and heard him curse himself! This may not be Hank’s influence, of course. Still, there are the ESP scores. His psychosis seems to have brought him near to some crack in the fabric of futurity so that his inner eye
sees through
! If Dr Veck continues trying to suppress this discovery of national importance, I may have to unleash Hank’s terrible power upon him.

Hank’s terrible power is that he knows the future – which means the future is in some way here already! We need only ask him what to do, and receive the awful impress of his ESPing reply.

PS. I find my concentration on receiving ESP messages is much keener when I restrict my diet to brown foods – brown eggs, bread, sugar and rice – and to iron-rich foods such as molasses. Perhaps the iron sets up induction currents. But I must retain control. Hysteresis is the path to hysteria.

Ratio

‘I haven’t got any “corrected problems” for you this time. In fact I feel like giving all this up. Why don’t you just tell your piano teacher that I can’t find out any more about their bombs. About anything. And I’m not sure I care.’

‘I … see. Well, then, how about the lesson?’

‘The lesson?’

‘I’ve already learned some of it.’ To Ras’s horror, the old man closed his eyes and began reciting from memory the tables of sines and cosines.

Maybe I am an anarchist.
The
anarchist. But is this law and order? Sitting here listening to a mad old man?

At 4º 15’, Ras lurched from the table.

‘I … haven’t finished.’

‘I know, excuse me, I feel a little sick.’ He stumbled into the dark hallway and snatched at a doorknob at random.

‘No, wait! Don’t open that!’

Ras crashed into a closet full of glass gallon jugs. As he recoiled, one jug tipped and fell, splattering its contents. The smell of stale piss rose about him. ‘My God!’

‘I’m sorry. I’m … very retentive, you see.’

When Ras had slammed out of the house, Mr von Jones shrugged, cleared his throat, curled his right foot around a table leg, lifted an eyebrow, coughed. A terrible scene. A terrible young man. Damage had been done and repairs were needed. Mr von Jones counted to ten thousand, to the metronome.

Resist, A Plot Is Brought Home; The Tour

Ras cornered Chug in a café. ‘Listen, I have a –’ He meant ‘confession to make’, but finished ‘plan’. His voice shook, and his eyes reflected the peculiar disagreeable yellow of the Formica tables. ‘We’ll blow up the White House and kill the President.’

Keeping his face straight, Chug nodded. ‘OK. I’ve got an idea for the bomb to do it with.’ On the yellow Formica he sketched his design for an enormous steam-driven duck that could sing ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ while delivering an explosive egg.

Harry Boggs could hardly believe his good luck. But by jingo, there was no doubt about it. This ‘Ras’ and his pal ‘Chug’ were plotting assassination. This was the real thing!

Countdown

The piano teacher had brought along a piano tuner. ‘Listen, Mr von Jones, we’re making the raid today. We have to know the name of our contact man on the inside. I mean, is he still working for us? We haven’t had a report for weeks.’