Universe 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Wine’s pretty good for lots of things,” Zoe said. “What I wanted to ask was, what are you up to when you get all antisocial on us and shut yourself up in that closet out there?” She nodded toward the door.

  “You’re a nice lady. You get a multiple-choice test. A) I’m concocting an eternal-youth elixir. B) I’m perfecting an antigravity device which will spindizzy all of Atlanta out into the stars. C) I’m performing unspeakable crimes of passion on old telescope housings and the jellies in Petri dishes. Or D) I’m . . . I’m . . . My wit fails me, dear lady. Please choose.”

  “D,” Zoe said.

  “What?”

  “I choose D. You said multiple-choice. That’s what I choose.”

  As if struck with an illuminating insight (for instance, the key to developing an antigravity device), Jerry clapped his hands together and chuckled. “Ah. Even at this late hour, your wit doesn’t fail you,” he said. “I am bested.”

  “Not yet. You haven’t given me a real answer yet, and I’ve been talking to you for almost two minutes.”

  “Oh ho! In that case, dear Zoe lady, come with me.” Jerry Zitelman-Phoenix circled about in his subsonically humming chair and went rolling through the common room door. Zoe followed.

  Down the corridor Jerry glided, Zoe now more conscious of the raw slapping of her feet than of his wheel chair’s pleasant purr. Which stopped when he reached the mysterious room. “I would have preferred to wait for tomorrow, you know. But over the years I have learned to honor the moods of insomniac ladies. And, besides, what I have been working on is finished. It won’t hurt for you to get a foreglimpse of the issue of my labors. It won’t hurt me, anyway. You, on the other hand, may merely aggravate your sleepless condition.”

  At two in the morning, if it wasn’t later than that, Jerry was a caution, a nonstop caution. Not much like Thursday night on the roof when he had talked about unseeable stars and his lifelong paralysis. Fiddle! Zoe knew better: he was just like he was Thursday night, if you were talking about the underneath part of him; the seeming change was only in his approach to the revelation of this sell. Then, candor. Now, a camouflage that he stripteased momentarily aside, then quickly restored. Oh, it wasn’t hard to undress this man’s soul. You just had to warn yourself not to destroy him by letting him know that you could see him naked. Nope. Keep those pasties in place, wrap up the emotional overflow in an old G-string. And smile, smile, smile.

  Because he was funny, Jerry was. In spite of his tricks.

  They went into the little room, and he hit the light button. Zoe, standing just inside the door, saw a counter with some sort of duplicating machine on it, reams of paper, an IBM margin-justifying typer (they had had those in the offices of the Journal/Constitution combine), and a stack of bright yellow-orange booklets. There were little inset docks in the counter (put there by Luther) so that Jerry could maneuver his wheel chair into comfortable working positions.

  Booklets. You didn’t see booklets very often. One good reason: The Retrenchment Edicts of ‘35 had outlawed private duplicating machines. Everyone had a visicom console and better be glad he did. The Phoenix had two such consoles in the rec center, though Zoe couldn’t recall seeing anyone use either of them. Why, since she’d been at the hostel, she hadn’t tapped into one at all. And now she was seeing booklets: booklets!

  “I always wondered where Atlanta’s pamphleteers holed up,” Zoe said. “You preachin’ the overthrow of our Urban Charter?”

  Jerry put a hand to his breast. “Zoe lady, the name is Zitelman, not Marx, and I am first—no, not first, but last and always—a Phoenix.” He took a copy of one of tha booklets from the counter and handed it to Zoe, who had moved deeper into his crowded little den of sedition, “This issue, which has been in preparation for three or four weeks now, nay, longer, is for you. Not just this copy, mind you, but the whole issue.”

  Zoe looked at the booklet’s cover, where on the yellow-orange ground a stylized, pen-and-ink phoenix was rising from its own ashes. The title of the publication was set in tall, closely printed letters on the bottom left: Jerry at His Tricks, Beneath that: Volume VI, No. 1. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s our famzine,” Jerry said. “All the septigamoklans have one. Family magazine, you see. Of which I am the editor and publisher. It is the True History and Record of the Phoenix Septigamoklan, along with various creative endeavors and pertinent remarks of our several spouses. One day, dear Zoe, you will be represented herein.”

  Leafing through the famzine, Zoe said, “Don’t count your chickens ...”

  “Well, as an egghead who has already hatched his personal fondnesses, I am now seriously counting.” He pointed a wicked, crooked finger at her. “One,” he said in a burlesque, Transylvanian accent. “One chicken.”

  She laughed, patting him on top of his wiry puffball. But it was not until the next day, before breakfast, that she had a chance to read through the booklet—the advance copy—that Jerry had given her. In it she found artwork signed by Parthena, Helen, and Paul, and articles or poems by everyone in the family. Several of these were tributes, brief eulogies, to the dead Yuichan Kurimoto. The issue concluded with a free verse poem welcoming Zoe Breedlove as a candidate for marriage with the Phoenix. It was a flattering but fairly tastefully done poem. It was signed J. Z-Ph., and at the bottom of this last page was the one-word motto of the clan:

  Dignity.

  It was all too ridiculously corny. How did they have the nerve to put that word there? Zoe had to wipe her eyes dry before going into the dining room for breakfast.

  * * * *

  11 in the sun that is young once only

  Of all of them Paul was the hardest to get to know. Parthena had spoken rightly when she said that part of the difficulty was that his mind was going, had been going for a long time. He seemed to have a spiritual umbilicus linking him to the previous century and the time before the domes. He had been nine years old at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing, thirteen at the time of the final Apollo mission, and he remembered both of them.

  “Watched ‘em on TV,” he said. “Every minute I could of the first one. Just enough of the last one to say I saw it.”

  And he talked considerably more lucidly about his boyhood in California than he did about everyday matters in the hostel. His other favorite subject was the prospect of attaining, not in a dubious and certainly vitiated afterlife, but in the flesh, immortality. His only real grounding in the present, in fact, was the unalloyed joy he took in Sunday afternoons, at which time he performed creditably and behaved like a mature human being. The leers and the winks, it seemed, were almost involuntary carry-overs from a misspent youth.

  “He gone sklotik up here”—Parthena tapped her head—”from the life he led as much as from jes’ gettin’ ole.” (Sklotik, Zoe figured out, was sclerotic.) “Drugs, likker, womens, card playin’. Brag on how he never had a real job, jes’ gamble for his keep-me-up. Now Mr. Leland ‘fraid to use on him them new medicines what might stop his brain cells a-dyin’. Easy to see, he done los’ a bunch.”

  And with his washed-out, Weimaraner eyes and raw, long lips Paul sometimes seemed like his own ghost instead of a living man. But he could still move around pretty good; he drifted about as effortlessly as a ghost might. And one day, three weeks after Zoe’s arrival, he drifted up to her after dinner in the rec center (she was making a photo-display board) and pulled a chair up next to hers. She turned her head to see his raw lips beginning to move.

  “It’s time for one of my services,” he said. “You don’t go to the Ortho-Urbanist ones with Helen and Parthena, so I expect you’re a fit body for one of mine. This Sunday morning, right in here.”

  “What sort of services?”

  “My sort.” A wink, maybe involuntary. “The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.”

  “The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.”

  “On how not to die, woman. The basis of ev
ery religion.”

  “No,” Zoe said. “Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.”

  His long lips closed, his eyes dilated. She might just as well have slapped him. In eighty years no one had told him that an ontological system didn’t have to direct its every tenet toward the question of “how not to die.” Or if someone had, Paul had forgotten. Even so, he fought his way back from stupefaction. “The basis,” he said archly, “of every decent religion.”

  Jerry, who had overheard, powered himself up to the work table. “Rubbish, Paul. And besides, if tomorrow we were all granted everlasting life, no better than struldbrugs would we be, anyhow.”

  Zoe raised her eyebrows: struldbrugs? Paul kept silent.

  “That’s someone,” Jerry explained, “who can’t die but who nevertheless continues to get older and more infirm. Two hundred years from now we’d all be hopelessly senile immortals. Spare me such a blessing.”

  That ended the conversation. A ghost impersonating a man, Paul got up and drifted out of the room.

  On Sunday morning, though, Luther went down to the rec center and took a box of aluminum parts, the largest being a drumlike cylinder, out of the closet where they kept the dart boards, the croquet equipment, and the playing cards, and assembled these aluminum pieces into ... a rocking horse, one big enough for a man.

  It was a shiny rocking horse, and its head, between its painted eyes, bore the representation of a scarab beetle pushing the sun before it like a cosmic dung ball. Zoe, who was in the rec center with all the Phoenix but Paul, went up to the metal critter to examine it. The scarab emblem was so meticulously wrought that she had to lean over to see what this horse had crawling on its forehead. A blue bug. A red ball. Well, that was different: funny and mysterious at once. “What’s this?” she asked Luther, who, mumbling to himself, was trying to wedge the cardboard box back into the closet.

  “Pulpit,” he said. He thought she meant the whole thing. No sense in trying to clarify herself, he was still shoving at the box. But pulpit was a damn funny synonym for rocking horse.

  After wedging the parts box back into place, Luther dragged a tall metal bottle from the closet and carried it over to the biomonitor cabinet next to Toodles’ orpianoogla. Then he set it down and came back to the ring of chairs in front of the rocking horse. A silly business, every bit of it. Zoe put a single finger on the horse’s forehead, right on the blue bug, and pushed. The horse, so light that only its weighted rockers kept it from tipping, began to dip and rise, gently nodding. No one was talking. Zoe turned to the group and shrugged. It looked like you’d have to threaten them all with premature autopsy to get anyone to explain.

  “Don’t ask,” Jerry said finally. “But since you’re asking, it’s to humor him. He asked for the horse the second month after our covenant ceremony in ‘35, and Dr. Tanner said OK, give it to him. Now, four times a year, he plays octogenarian cowboy and rides into the sunset of his own dreams right in front of everybody. It’s not so much for us to listen to him, you know.”

  Zoe looked at the five of them sitting there afraid she wouldn’t understand: five uncertain, old faces. She was put off. They had been dreading this morning because they didn’t know how she would react to the living skeleton in their family closet: the de-ranged range-rider Paul Erik Ferrand-Phoenix. Well, she was put off. All somebody’d had to do was tell her, she was steamingly put off. “O ye of little faith,” she wanted to say, “go roast your shriveled hearts on Yuichan’s hibachi. All of it together wouldn’t make a meal.” But she didn’t say anything, she sat down with the group and waited. Maybe they didn’t think she had Yuichan’s compassion, maybe they didn’t think she was worthy to replace their dear departed Jap...

  Just then Paul came drifting in: an entrance. Except that he didn’t seem to be at all aware of the impression he was making; he was oblivious of his own etiolated magnificence. Dressed in spotless white from head to foot (currently fashionable attire among even the young, matched tunic and leggings), he wandered over to the metal horse without looking at them. Then, slowly, he climbed on and steadied the animal’s rocking with the toe tips of his white slippers.

  He was facing them. Behind him, as backdrop, one of the quilted wall banners: a navy-blue one with a crimson phoenix in its center, wings outspread. Zoe couldn’t help thinking that every detail of Paul’s entrance and positioning had been planned beforehand. Or maybe it was that this quarterly ritual had so powerfully suffused them all that the need for planning was long since past. Anyhow, knowing it all to be nonsense, Zoe had to acknowledge that little pulses of electricity were moving along her spine. Like the time she had first quilted with the group.

  Slowly, mesmerizingly slowly, Paul began to rock. And softly he began to preach the True Word. “When we were young,” he said, “there was fire, and sky, and grass, and air, and creatures that weren’t men. The human brain was plugged into this, the human brain was run on the batteries of fire and sky and all of it out there.”

  “Amen!” Luther interjected, without interrupting Paul’s rhythm, but all Zoe could think was, The city still has creatures that aren’t men: pigeons. But the rocking horse began to move faster, and as it picked up speed its rider’s voice also acquired momentum, a rhythmic impetus of its own. As Paul spoke on, preached on, an “Amen!” or a “Yessir, brother!” occasionally provided an audible asterisk to some especially strange or vehement assertion in his text. All of it part of the ritual. But then Zoe was caught up in it in a way that she could see herself being caught up. Very odd: she found herself seconding Paul’s insane remarks with “Amen!” or “All praises!” or some other curiously heartfelt interjection that she never used. This increased as the rocking horse’s careering grew more violent and as Paul’s eyes, the horse going up and down, flashed like eerie strobes.

  “Then before our lives was half over, they put us in our tombs. They said we was dead even though we could feel the juices flowin’ through us and electricity jumpin’ in our heads. Up went the tombs, though, up they went. It didn’t matter what we felt, it didn’t matter we was still plugged into the life outside our tombs, the air and fire and sky. Because with the tombs up, you really do start dyin’, you really do start losin’ tie voltage you have flowin’ back and forth between you and the outside. Just look at yourself, just look at all of us.”—Could anything be more ridiculous than this reasoning?—”It’s slippin’ away, that current, that precious, precious juice. It’s because our brains are plugged into the sun or the moon, one socket or the other, and now they’ve stuck us in a place where the current won’t flow.”

  Even as she said: “Yessir!” Zoe was thinking that he, Paul, must have been plugged into the moon: loony.

  But in another way, an upside-down way, it made a kind of loony sense, too. Even though everybody knew the world had been going to hell in a handcar before the domes went up, it still made a loony kind of sense. Maybe, at a certain time in your life (which was already past for her), you learned how to pass judgment on others, even unfavorable ones, without condemning. Zoe was doing that now. She beheld the madly rocking Paul from two utterly opposed perspectives and had no desire to reconcile them. In fact, the reconciliation happened, was happening, without her willing it to. As it always had for her, since Rabon’s death. It was the old binocular phenomenon at work on a philosophical rather than a physical plane. Long ago it had occurred in Helen, too, the Phoenix “mediator,” and just as Helen’s little black goggles brought the physical world into focus for her, this double vision Zoe was now experiencing brought the two galloping Pauls—the demoniac one and the human one—into the compass of her understanding and merged them. Since this had happened before for her, why was she surprised?

  “. . . And the key to not-dying, and preserving the body too, is the brain. That’s where we all are. We have to plug ourselves into the sun again, the sun and the moon. No one can do that unless he is resurrected from the tomb we were put in ev
en before our lives were half over...”

  The horse was rocking frenetically, and Paul’s voice was swooping into each repetitive sentence with a lean, measured hysteria. The bracelet on Zoe’s wrist seemed to be singing. She looked at the biomonitor cabinet beside the orpianoogla and saw the oscilloscope attuned both to Paul’s brain waves and his heartbeat sending a shower of pale comets back and forth, back and forth, across its screen. The other six windows were vividly pulsing, too, and she wondered if someone downstairs was taking note of this activity. Well, they were certainly all alive: very much alive.

  Now Paul’s eyes had rolled back in his head and the rocking horse had carried him into a country of either uninterrupted childhood or eternally stalled ripeness. He was alone in there, with just his brain and the concupiscent wavelets washing back from his body. Still preaching, too. Still ranting. Until, finally, the last word came out.

  Only then did Paul slump forward across the neck of his aluminum steed, spent. Or dead maybe.

  Zoe stood up—sprang up, rather. Amazingly, the other Phoenix—Toodles, Helen, Jerry, and Parthena—were applauding. Luther exempted himself from this demonstration in order to catch Paul before he slid off the still rocking horse and broke his head open.