Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read online

  “Awards,” said Kristin.

  “So. You have a field of study?”

  “Who knows? Little Consciousness Expansion. Not enough work being done on hallucinogens, for instance. And the mechanics of probability, man, they haven’t dented it yet.”

  “No, I imagine they haven’t.”

  “Some more strudel?” asked Catbird, touching her hair.

  “Why, man? What’s the pitch?” talking to David.

  “It gives a living, that? Hallucinations?”

  “A what? I don’t follow.”

  “His grades,” said Kristin. “They’re better than you’d think.”

  “A living. Enough for a family to eat.”

  “Man, nobody makes a living. Are you serious?” He looked at the ceiling for effect but found his mobile instead. Robin began to cry. “It’s safe here, right?” he went on, “nice little microcosm.”

  “Cozy and warm,” added Kristin, quoting. The baby wailed again and looked for her mother, who leaned over and took her. But she wouldn’t stop and Catbird had to take her out, muttering “Excuse me” through a forced smile.

  Kiwi and Towhee ran behind to change costumes, Sparrow going with them. There was an uncomfortable silence, at the end of which Tern sighed, imitating an adult, and began gathering plates and cups. “Let me help,” said Kristin, and together they went to the kitchen, carrying trays. Gnossos tried offering a wink, but she failed to see it as she disappeared.

  He was left alone with David. He stretched back on the fluffy rug and watched his mackerel dangling in the gentle convections of late-spring air. Absently he counted strings on the autoharps, dulcimers, banjos, and guitars. Cleanup sounds came from the kitchen, little-girl noises from upstairs. The sun was beginning to set, and only silence reached them through the open windows.

  “What’s the old poop, David? You’ve been hinting.”

  “Oh, we shouldn’t be too serious here, yes? Pedantic talk could alter my function.” Grün put his glasses on and talked over the rims. “This Immunity business. We worry how you mean to co-ordinate Marriage and Immunity.”

  “Hey listen, it’s just the next thing for me to do, take it in stride, why don’t you?”

  “Perhaps you could live together?”

  “They’d throw us out, man, they’ve got rules and I want to stay. Don’t give me hurt looks either, I know it’s a little paradoxical, but nothing is ever simple.”

  “But in such a place you choose to live? From five years old, except for summers, you’ve been in institutions. This is life? Here, in the microcosm, with what you know, you are a waste. Lost, but truly lost.”

  “Exempt.”

  “We share a dissipating current, Gnossos. Like transformer coils, you see, we mistake induction for generation. Vicarious sampling is all that remains; the sour evening game of the academies.”

  “Man, I’ve been to where the legions go. They go to Las Vegas and I’ve been there. I watched it all happening one morning and, man, it was bigger than the fucking sun and I don’t want any part of it.”

  “No. No, you’re talking about the bomb you saw and no, it was not bigger than the fucking sun. Believe me, it was most certainly not bigger than the fucking sun!”

  Coming from David, the language surprised him. “In my head it was bigger.”

  “So, the inside again, always the inside.” Grün eased his grip, looked around the room for something to identify with, and found the mobile still again. He pointed, shaking his finger. “To ease suffering, the method is easy. Simply weaken the bond with reality.” He put the finger down and swallowed the remaining brandy in his cup. “What is sin but an attack upon the third dimension?”

  “Sin? What sin? What are you talking about all of a sudden?”

  “It’s getting late,” murmured Catbird, strolling into the room with jackets. “We’d better get going, David.”

  “Sin, man? Like guilt and expiation?”

  “Or perhaps not,” he told him, rising with a heavy grunt, taking one of the jackets. “As the case may be.” He picked up the remaining tray and waved it in the air like a fan. The disturbance caused the wooden fish to clatter and collide.

  When he left the room Catbird was still standing against the doorjamb, arms folded, staring at Gnossos. After a moment she added:

  “How do you know? Perhaps we love you. Should we be silent?”

  Two hours later, when the Grüns were gone off to their local Shakespeare reading with the farmers, and the girls were safely asleep under quilts, and the house was humming with its own breed of comforting silence, the lovers again lay naked. This time they had snuck into David and Catbird’s four-poster bed. The sheets had a faint scent of lavender and freshly cut grass.

  But it was impossible for Gnossos to have an erection.

  Instead, Kristin offered comfort.

  Holding his woolly head against her pale breast, she read;

  “‘Bump, bump, bump,

  here comes Weary Bear . . . ’”

  14

  In the cobalt night he dreamed of disaster to come and cursed her sweetly into the sulfur cauldrons of hell. Intimations of imminent loss, the cruising monkey-demon biding time, ammoniac odors threatening doom. Sometimes Grün’s idyllic landscapes, loamy hillsides sown with seeds of doubt; sometimes his Taos sleeping bag, surrounded by masked pachucos. Subconscious symptoms of festering disease in the core of a country’s opulent flesh. Come on, kids, be the first in your neighborhood to crash-dive in your own atomic submarine. Twenty-five cents and the top from your mother’s convertible. Wheee.

  But always he woke in a sweat of mortal fear. One morning there came the usual gentle rapping at the door. The Mentor Daily Sun should have slid across the threshold, the rapping should have ceased, yet this time there was no mystery. He listened as the noise came again and still again. It seemed that the silent messenger of some months was about to make himself known. But Gnossos was only half surprised. The weeks before spring vacation were an anxious season, and even without portentous dreams, the mornings promised uncertainty and revelation. He mopped his body with a pillowcase and said, “Come on in, man.”

  But no one came, and again the rapping: delicate, importunate.

  “Come in, goddammit, I’m in the sack. Who is it?”

  He threw back the covers with a moan and shuffled naked across the room, unable to find Fitzgore’s bathrobe. When he unlocked the door, Irma Rajamuttu, in gauze, smiled back through red teeth. In one hand she held the usual glass of gin and grenadine, in the other the Daily Sun.

  “My particular congratulations,” she said.

  Gnossos covered his groin and blinked spasmodically.

  She handed him the paper, raised her drink in a mock toast, and glided off silently on bare feet, one two three.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he called, but she was gone. Only the sound of tinkling icecubes.

  His nearly forgotten letter was on the front page, and he had to steady his head before sitting down to read with a nervous twitch.

  April 1958

  Our Dear Miss B. Pankhurst:

  To the issue, yes?

  The presence of women in Lairville apartments is not to your taste. You suggest registration and chaperons. A coed would be denied access to gentlemen’s quarters unless accompanied by another coed and two protective couples. One over thirty, the other married, right? Me, for instance, if I wanted a coed over for dinner, I’d have to ask her roommate, a graduate student couple, and someone like you and your husband, if you were married, which I believe you are not.

  A dinner party of eight. All of whom would have to be out before 10:30 on weeknights, weekends at 11. But surely enough time to eat, you’ll agree. The hassle, Miss B. Pankhurst, is like so. We don’t entirely believe you’re worried about dinner conversation. Again to the point, you want to prevent the occupation of a Lairville apartment by a coed and a, well, man.

  Why?

  We assume you’re worried something will happen.
Handholding, kissing? Fondling perhaps? Something more critical. Plainly, we’d like to know precisely what you object to. We would like this objection made public. If in fact you object to the possibility of sexual intercourse, be good enough to say so. The implications of such an objection may well transcend the breed of action you are considering.

  It is spring. See the forsythia; Athené is blessed with its abundance. Smell the pollen in the air. Observe the birds and beasts of the realm.

  Love,

  Gnossos Pappadopoulis

  The phone rang immediately, and it was Heffalump.

  “Holy shit, Paps, are you serious?”

  “Ain’t never serious, Horralump, just do things to pass the time. An’ why are you up so early?”

  “Packing for Cuba, man. But how come? I mean, what—”

  “Kristin.”

  “The knee-sock chic?”

  “I’m involved.”

  “Wow, I know you’re involved, but this is like politics or something. She talked you into it?”

  “We discussed it, man. Anyway, Oeuf did most of the final draft. I only really wrote the last paragraph.”

  “But you signed it, baby, I told you you’d get dosed. Jesus.”

  “Keep your cool, it’s all right. Oh, and make it over here about three. There’s a meeting.”

  “A meeting? You serious, or what?”

  “Bring Jack, the rest of the crew, little Red Cap.”

  “Man, you know what this means.”

  The phone rang again and it was Juan Carlos Rosenbloom.

  “You are my general,” he told Gnossos, voice shaking emotionally.

  “Crap. Just make it at three.”

  “I die for you.”

  “Bring potato chips, some Fritos.”

  “You want a Sten gun? Air-cooled job? Special from my country.”

  The third call was from the infirmary.

  “Verbum sapienti,” said Oeuf. “We’re home-free.”

  “Don’t put me on, man, I did it for Kristin.”

  “Keep your sang-froid. The word has proceeded ex cathedra, sport, we’re under way.”

  Gnossos hung up uncomfortably, brushed his teeth with hair cream, screamed oaths, and in order to dissipate a fraction of his culpable energy, padded next door about the paper. He could hear them murmuring secrets, yet no one answered his heavy knocking. Goofy Benares maniacs. He stormed back and waited for Kristin to call, but the next voice belonged to Judy Lumpers.

  “It’s fabulous, Paps, my God, the dorms are going wild.”

  “Is Kristin in her room, baby?”

  “Really, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s just too great to be true, can you hear them?”

  “Kristin is all, man. She there?”

  “Golly no, I don’t think so. She signed out last night and didn’t come back.”

  His heart sank. “What?”

  “I mean, isn’t she at your place? Can you hear them? They’re all jumping around in their underwear. Oh, I wonder if there’ll be a panty raid?”

  This time he sought diversion in the cosmos. Hours went by in the drab Quonset astronomy building as he considered the relative motion of the stars and became hideously depressed. Two separate methods of calculation told him that if the universe had been expanding at a given rate, it had had its beginnings in a coagulated mass of—call it crap—some ten thousand million years before. So much for that. But after one thousand million years of expansion the crap had settled into clusters, all of which had been moving away from one another ever since. The separate answers were the same, so the universe seemed to be exploding, but Gnossos was hardly in a mood to worry about it. Just the same, to set concerned minds at ease, the weasel of a lab assistant drew sine waves on the blackboard and argued for another theory.

  “The expansion of the universe is slowing down,” he pronounced in a sexless monotone, one hand grasping his technician’s lapel. His teeth were bad. “Eventually it will cease and be followed by contraction. Assuming that even though one kind of matter changes into another and produces or destroys energy in the process, the total amount of energy and/or matter in the universe does not change. Enough energy is thus left at max contraction to start the clusters moving together again under the force of their own attraction. Gravity, as it were. Your calculations ought to show that a whole expansion-contraction cycle takes about thirty thousand million years and that at present we’re two thirds of the way through an expansion phase. How about it?”

  A positive murmur from most of the class. Gnossos checked his figures desultorily. If they were correct, it meant the universe had a center and an edge and that with the right instruments he might even get a look at this edge. But again, it didn’t seem worth the effort. He had a craving for pickled watermelon rind.

  He tried to forget it in the mechanics of a steady-state theory. Clusters of crap expanding outward, new crap being born at a rate providing for constant density in space. Individual crap clusters changing shape, evolving, but the whole crappy system (viewed objectively) not changing at all. No beginning, no end. Every individual piece of crap, yes, but the system, no. The assumption being that permanence of matter and energy was also a lot of crap. Gnossos, sitting miserable on his stool, reconsidered the Las Vegas fission, the drunken movie star, the two strawberry blondes, the Oklahoma oil-cowboy and his Radcliffe muse—all in the relative luminosity of the new information. Subjectively, then (viewed even as an integral piece of crap), his own end was assured. I mean, why the hell bother to burn the candle at both ends when you can use an oxyacetylene torch on the middle. Less aesthetic, but more people see the flame.

  Armed with this suicidal confidence, he made his way back down the hill after lunch and rolled a needle-thin Black Elks hipster joint. He wore it over his ear to tempt the secular fates, but his stomach still churned at the meaning of Kristin’s all-night absence from the dorm. Something distant, irreverent in her attitude ever since he’d penned the letter, bowing to her coy insistence, the promise of lewd, extraordinary pleasures. An improbable whisper of betrayal, came the thought, but Love was said to conquer all.

  Jumping up the freshly painted steps to his pad, he reflected that it ought not to. Hope you’ve been stewing, baby, Daddy’s home from school.

  Nonetheless, at the three-o’clock meeting she was missing.

  “Panghurts,” said Rosenbloom, in his cowboy hat. “We break her.”

  “She’ll answer the letter,” from Youngblood, “that much is certain. Jack, can you take care of posters?”

  “Where the hell is my woman?” asked Gnossos.

  “I think so,” said Jack, staring at the angora Lumpers breasts. “There’s all that paint in Polygon Hall. As long as we know what to say.”

  “There’s a whole lot of stuff written down somewhere,” from Heff, working to distract her, handing over an unopened Red Cap.

  “In three weeks, a revolutiong. Esmash.”

  “God, can you imagine? I mean, do you really think it will work?”

  “The guys at the house are already writing chants,” from Agneau, in a crewneck sweater. “Some of them are incredibly good.”

  “Hey, Jack, you seen Kristin?”

  “Got to keep momentum over spring vacation,” from Youngblood, with his sleeves rolled up. “Can’t let it slide. Students go home, change roles, come back and have to readjust.”

  “Maybe some kind of mailing list,” suggested Jack to Lumpers, sliding a hand over her thigh.

  “No mercy,” tried Rosenbloom, pulling his finger like a straight razor across the jugular vein. “We eslit them oping.”

  The phone rang every two or three minutes, Youngblood always first to answer, hushing the rest of the room with a gesture, sometimes laughing with excited satisfaction. Agneau sent cables, Judy Lumpers took shorthand, Juan Carlos Rosenbloom studied Gnossos with unbridled admiration, and Heffalump tried without success to keep Jack’s attention from the Lumpers anatomy. “Make some corn bread, baby,” he
said.

  When Kristin finally arrived, she was out of breath, accompanied by two renegade officers from the women’s undergraduate judiciary board. She was wearing her knee-socks, and she touched the lobe of Gnossos’ left ear as she passed him, knocking the joint to the floor. “Any progress?” she asked officially.

  “Where you been?” from Gnossos, on his hands and knees.

  “Tons,” said Youngblood. “Most of it since the letter this morning. You’ll be pleased to know, Oeuf reports a pink flag on most of Lairville.”

  “Red predicted by the weekend,” added Agneau, taking off his glasses for emphasis.

  “God, I wonder how they’re taking it over at the administration building?” from one of the debutantes in a denim skirt.

  “Really,” said the other, also in denim, ‘I’ll bet old Pankhurst is crawling up the proverbial wall.”

  “I called the dorm five times,” said Gnossos, “where the hell were you, baby?”

  The phone rang and Youngblood hushed them with an air of importance. While he talked, Kristin briefed the others: “There seems to be some question at headquarters about the optimum time for direct action. We need a morning dead hour, when everyone’s at the Ramrod for coffee, but statistics aren’t clear on the number of students free between ten and noon.”

  “I’d guess eleven,” said Agneau.

  “Kill them,” said Rosenbloom.

  “Will you answer my question, baby?”

  “Shh!” commanded Youngblood, listening to the phone.

  “What about instructors?” from Lumpers, lowering her voice.

  “Most of them,” said Kristin, her fingers in a clutter of lists, “have agreed to dismiss their classes if we get a crowd into the arts quad. The idea is to make noise.”

  One of the debutantes added: “God, it’s inspiring how the faculty are finally coming over. All their latent antagonism toward the administration is revealing itself.”

  “Really,” said the other one, “their hitherto-unspoken opinions are bubbling to the proverbial surface.”

  Unable to evoke response, Gnossos murmured, “Holy shit,” and made his way to the bathroom. He locked and bolted the door, took down the Anatomy of Melancholy from the commode bookshelf, and lit his joint. For fire he rolled up the letter on the front page of the Sun and started it with a match. There’s a time in the lives of men, came the thought, which taken at the tide you’re liable to fucking drown.