Another Roadside Attraction (43 page)

Investigation of the theft is not in my province. I have been informed by the White House that I am to consider the case closed. In closing, however, I must confess to being particularly puzzled by one aspect of the event. In our control building we have quartered five baboons. They were not to be placed in the solar gondola until 0630 hours today. Indeed, they are in sight of me at this moment. All five of them. Yet, before our transmitters were disconnected this morning someone aboard the Icarus XC briefly switched on the TV monitor—and for about 60 seconds my colleagues and I gazed into the grinning face of a baboon. Gentlemen, make of it what you will, but there is an unauthorized baboon aboard that fated balloon.

In some superstitious mouse-gnawed wine-stained gold-braided inner sanctum of the Vatican, a half-dozen elegant and elderly cardinals are being addressed by a black-robed churchman of undetermined rank.

“Yes, your Eminences, the results are irreversible. No one could alter the balloon's flight now, even if he so desired.”

“Save for God himself,” a cardinal interjects.

“Really, Luigi,” says another, “we can rule out divine intervention, don't you think?”

A third prelate, the oldest and most elegant of the lot, has been kneading his puffy right fist in his puffy left palm. “Why?” he asks no one in particular. “Why, why, why, why, why, why, why? Why did such a peculiar thing happen?”

“God goes about his business in mysterious ways,” says one cardinal. The elder gives him a puffy glare that seems to say, “Don't hand me
that
old rubbish.”

“Maybe we have ourselves to blame,” ventures the youngest prelate present. “We have harbored a skeleton in our closet—so to speak—for far too long. Maybe we should inquire of ourselves if there are not other skeletons here—I speak figuratively, now—that might disturb the moods and philosophies of the world were they disclosed.”

“I am unsure of the implication of your remarks, Vasco,” says the elder, “but I trust you had no intention of leaving the range of allowable discussion. We cannot oblige ourselves to the secular world without harm.”

“Oh, I agree, Father. I only meant that for the Church's protection . . .”

“Yes, yes. Quite, quite. But my mind is absorbed now with the balloon ascent and not with the follies that preceded or the precautions that must follow.”

The figure in the black robe clears his throat. “Ahem. These people who were involved in this episode are beyond the power of human understanding, Father. They represent a fringe of modern liberalism that is wholly demented. But if you would like, I will file with you a complete report on the persona and their actions so that you might search for your own conclusions therein.”

By various methods, the cardinals indicate that they would indeed like a detailed report. The air in the chamber is like the sculptured exhaust of a marble Cadillac parked overtime in an invalid's bedroom.

“Meanwhile,” says the elder, “there is no chance that . . .”

“No chance at all, your Eminence,” the black-robed man assures. “By this time tomorrow there will be nothing left of the, er, body. Or of that magician and his monkey. They will literally have vanished into thin air.”

Kneading his puffy right fist in his puffy left palm, the elder cardinal goes to the window to look at the heavens, only there is no window in the chamber and he is faced with a tedious wall of ancient age. The marble Cadillac spins its wheels, grinding the invalid's bifocals into the rug.

Shortly thereafter, blue-and-white jersey No. 69 was retired by the Duke University football squad, and never again on a brassy autumn afternoon in Durham will you see that number flashing in the soft-cider bee-fuzz Carolina sunshine.

The Mexican Federation of Marijuana Growers would have sent a nice wreath had they known. Had they known that Plucky Purcell had fallen, three hoarse slugs in his champion physique, his vulgar grin outlined in blood; dead at age thirty without ever having decided whether life was sour or sweet.

This case could be made for Plucky Purcell: that he was another victim of Christ/Authority. The same could not be said of John Paul Ziller. Ziller's moves were calculated in full consciousness. He was nobody's victim, maybe not even his own.

Ziller had always operated at that junction where the archaic path of nature and necromancy crosses the superhighway of technology and culture. As he lived, so he died, as they say. A man in between Heaven and Earth.

In mastering the science of origins (excuse me, the science of Godward solutions), Ziller carried the quest to its most personal extreme. Clear-eyed and confident, he returned——literally—to energy, dissolving in the pure essence that spawned all life.

Even as I type these words, John Paul Ziller, the baboon with the firebug buttocks and Jesus the Christ of Nazareth are melting together into sunlight.

Part V

RAIN FELL ON
Skagit Valley.

It fell in sweeps and it fell in drones. It fell in unending cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. It fell on the dikes. It fell on the firs. It fell on the downcast necks of the mallards.

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

Rain drenched the chilly green tidelands. The river swelled. The sloughs fermented. Vapors rose from black stumps on the hillsides. Spirit canoes paddled in the mists of the islands. Legends were washed from desecrated burial grounds. (The Skagit Indians, too, have a tradition of a Great Flood. The flood, they say, caused a big change in the world. Another big change is yet to occur. The world will change again. The Skagit don't know when. “When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.") Water spilled off the roofs and the rain hats. It took on the colors of neon and head lamps. It glistened on the claws of nightime animals.

And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.

The rain erased the prints of the sasquatch. It beat the last withered fruit from the orchard trees. It soaked the knotted fans who gathered to watch high-school boys play football in the mud. It hammered the steamed-up windshields of lover's lane Chevvies, hammered the larger windshields of hunter's pickups, hammered, upriver, the still larger windshields of logging trucks. And it hammered the windowpane through which I gazed at the Freeway reflection of Ziller's huge innocent weenie, finding in its gentle repose precious few parallels with my own condition.

“You know,” I said to Amanda, “this whole awful business might be easier to endure if we were on a sunny Mexican beach instead of drowning under a Northwest waterfall.” I gestured in the direction of the weather.

“The last time I was on a Mexican beach, some guy stole my transistor radio,” sighed Amanda.

“Why, that's a dirty shame,” I sympathized.

“Oh, it was all right,” she said. “He took the radio but he left the music.”

The postman always rings twice, I think the expression goes. An FBI agent visited us yesterday in midafternoon; the dreadful circumstances of that visit I have dutifully reported. Just after dusk last night he appeared again at the head of the stairs.

“Hey, buddy,” he yelled at me, causing me to drop the orange I was peeling (via method no. 5). “You're gonna be leaving here tomorrow. Just thought I'd clue you in. We'll be staying downstairs tonight, so don't you try any funny stuff.”

When I attempted to assure him that I had no funny stuff in mind, his putting iron took a juicy whack at my orange—which had had the poor judgment to roll right up to his black shoes—and he growled, “Don't get smart with me, mac. You'd just better be thankful it was me who came up to tell you and not somebody else. Some of the boys are itching to get their hands on you.”

He turned to Amanda, who had walked over to wipe up the orange pulp, and said in a kinder tone, “I don't know when you and the kid will be leaving. But the government is taking over this property, so be prepared.” Having deposited those dollops of cheer, he returned downstairs.

I could have spent the night wondering what they are going to do with me. I could have fantasied all possible punishments and executions and then, as I tossed in my bed, I could have wondered what I would do even should they take me to Seattle and turn me loose with a warning. By neither reputation nor inclination am I still a scientist. And even if I were, what role will there be for scientists, for men of culture, in this new world that the Indians prophesied and the Zillers advertised? (For some centuries now we have been in charge of things and I had thought that we would cast the man of the future in our own image, but now I must ask myself: Is a day breaking when we will be at the bid and call of persons who scorn our progressive values, who nonchalantly commander our special skills, products and services in order to expedite a kind of pagan magic?) I could have spent long gruesome hours worrying about my future and worrying whether
I had
a future—but I didn't. For shortly after Baby Thor had been tucked in his sleeping skins, Amanda called to me from her sanctuary, and I was permitted behind the perfumed curtains at last.

Opulent Persian weavings smoldered on the floor, and there was a festoonery of incense burners and candelabra. Everything else, however, seemed to have come from the wild.

In one corner, a tabletop was laid out with seashells. There were purples and whelks, rice shells and harp shells, marsh snails and pond snails, periwinkles and egg ribbons, agate shells and ear shells, razor clams and sand clams, helicinas and wentletraps, turban shells and moon shells, keyhole limpets and abalones, staircase shells and fig shells, South Pacific mollusks known as “wine jars” because they are so capacious, and, of course, the famous giant conch shell valued as a long-playing record of the ocean. Beside these were the ornate armors of sea cucumbers, urchins, anemone and starfish from the gelid waters of Puget Sound. And beside these, tubes and castles of coral, some encrusted with polyps. And next to these, a snailery: bubbles of air rising in its water showed that all was well. Snails coiled like confectionery watch springs among the leaves and stems of floating plants; and clams, too, lived quietly in the aquarium, traveling about when they felt like it, plowing with extended foot through the gravel.

Arranged along the windowsills, where they could best satisfy their appetites for sunshine, were rows of cacti. There was a Christmas cactus and a prickly pear and a fishhook cactus and a purple hedgehog cactus and a night-blooming cereus, and several chollas with barbaric spikes and others whose spines I dreaded and whose names I did not know. They looked none too healthy, although that was to be expected in this cloudy climate. Amanda's cacti strained their rough ribs toward the very sun that was eating her husband. But, of course, I said nothing of that.

Hanging from the walls by various means were the vacant nests of countless birds. There was, among the many, a hammock-shaped nest of the golden oriole, and igloo-shaped nest of some jungle specimen, a grass-at-all-angles nest of the ouzel, an eagle's nest spacious enough for Thor to hide in, and yes, a cuckoo's nest, which is to say the nest of any other bird the cuckoo finds handy. If one goose had flown over it, he had dropped no leaflets nor any other explanation of why he did not fly east or west like his peers.

In among the nests were cones of the pine, the Douglas fir, the redwood, the sequoia, the spruce and the hemlock. There were limbs to which types of acorns were attached. There were pieces of driftwood, fossilized roots and dried leaves. Cattails protruded from a ceramic urn. The cattails looked like a promotional display for Ziller's sausages. I thought of the happy lunches when I would eat two “with everything.”

Ferns (as if there weren't enough outdoors) grew in earthen pots. Philodendrons also grew, and jade plants and carrots and soybeans and avocado saplings and plants of the notorious family
cannabis
(had she no speck of fear for the law?). Iron containers, some rusted and barnacled, were stuffed to overflowing with dried grasses and grains. Next to them were heavy rocks which served as hillsides and plateaus for miniature Gothic cities of lichen. Dried fungi were present in some abundance (a single wavering ray of candlelight saluted the still-red tops of the ominous
Amanita muscaria
), and between pages of clear glass were pressed wild flowers of these varieties and more: trillium, buttercup, violet, daisy, crocus, creeping Jennie, narcissus, foxglove, scarlet pimpernel (looking not a fraction as erotic as its name suggests), rhododendron, edelweiss and lily of the valley.

Scarabs lay about everywhere, as did the iridescent shells of Siamese beetles nearly five inches long. And, naturally, butterflies: butterflies and moths of so many kinds that it would take a more patient correspondent than I to attempt to list them all, let alone to describe the gentle colors with which their docile wings were powdered. Let me emphasize that Amanda never killed butterflies herself, nor did she encourage others to do so. But she was not so pure as to refuse the tropical collections that her father brought back from orchid-buying trips, or the mounted specimens sent to her by Al of Suez and her male admirers at the National Institute of Flying Creatures, Department of Fluttering and Frittering.

In the midst of this assemblage of flora and fauna (I did not even mention the tiny chests and carved boxes crammed with stones, seeds, teeth and pollens), Amanda had sat daily—meditating, chanting, caressing, performing rituals and otherwise laying hold on the primitive values that had once allowed man to view the world and his experience in it as a sacred whole. Here, her green eyes looked into the heart of the wild. And saw her Self looking back.

Last night she was crouched on the carpet, completely naked, her femininity agape. Apparently, she had quite recently given herself one of her homemade gooseberry douches, for her pubic hair was slick and damp, rising to a froth-edged peak like a stylized ocean wave in a Japanese woodblock print. I thought of Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Her lisp, as pink and nacrous as the inner part of any shell, called me closer. I went without hesitation, but stopped in my tracks when I was near enough to see what she was doing. Two finite black dots were moving on her body, just below her right breast. They were Rock and Natalie, her favorite fleas! Unknown to me, she had held this pair back, sparing them the rigors of exile. Visitors to the roadside zoo will remember Rock as the flea with the pasha mustache who refused to learn any of the regular circus routines, preferring to satirize or improvise upon the performances of his fellows. Natalie, well, she had a zest for roller skating and was a bit of a vamp. Funny, but in all my months at the zoo, I had neither seen the fleas dine nor questioned their gastronomical practices. I had assumed that they were fed a formula of some sort and that, perhaps, on high feast days they were allowed to entertain themselves at the veins of Mon Cul. Last evening, however, I learned that only fleas who gorge on human blood are hale and hearty enough for circus work. The Zillers had had the pleasure of flea company regularly at dinner.

(They never scratched. But, of course, with employer-employee relations what they are, they didn't dare to.)

“Marx,” said Amanda, “I entered a semi-trance a short while ago and received a telepathic communication from Nearly Normal Jimmy. He screens
Tarzan's Triumph
every night for the Chinese officers and is contemplating opening a chain of motion-picture theaters in Lhasa. Wants me to send him a print of
Yellow Submarine
with the Beatles. Says it will restore things to normal in Tibet. What do you think of that?”

What could I think?

I waited until the fleas were full of her. And then I took my turn.

In accordance with his theory that man is nothing but slowed-down light, John Paul Ziller had seen fit to accelerate. “I haven't lost him,” explained Amanda, “because each time I sit in the sunshine he will envelope me and tickle me with his warm reminders. He was the drumbeat in my past and he is the heat in my future."

Ah, but there was rain in her present. Rain and Marx Marvelous.

Sometime during the night of squish and bliss, however, I had the ill manners to think again of the morrow. And the morrow after. “Amanda,” I asked, “if the universe is ultimately meaningless, as you say—big and beautiful but meaningless—then why go on living? Why not commit suicide?”

“Suicide has no class,” she answered. “It's bad form.”

“Oh yeah, that's right. The most important thing is style.”

“Style, Marx.”

“Right. I forgot.”

“Don't forget.”

“I promise. But, seriously, if life has no meaning—”

“To say it has no meaning is not to say it has no value.”

“But to say it's all meaningless. Isn't that a cop-out?”

“Maybe. But it seems to me that the
real
cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning but that we 'mere mortals' are incapable of ever knowing that meaning. Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all. It's the Infinite Goof. It's meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is
beyond
meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. It still feels good when you touch me like that. Like
that!
”

Back to squish and bliss. (Amanda snuffing out the incense, for as someone once said, smell is 80 per cent.)

I had more questions later. I asked them in desperation and she turned them aside with charm. But the last thing I remembered hearing, except for the gurgling of the snailery and the rain on the roof, before I took a slippery slide into sleep was her whispered lisp in my ear, “Nothing to lose, Marx, and nothing to gain. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. A man can be as free and happy as he wants to be because there's nothing to lose and nothing to gain.”

It is dawn now. The perfumed curtains have been removed and from where I sit typing I can look directly into Amanda's sanctuary. She is packing. Her face is flushed with that passionate serenity that is evidently known only by those who live outside of man's laws and according to nature's.

In my own head an odd new joy is crowing.

Amanda has just informed me that she is pregnant again. At first I thought she meant by me. I realize that it has only been a few hours, but after all, she is clairvoyant. But, no, alas, it wasn't I. Presumably, it was the magician. Although it may have been Plucky Purcell. Or one of the wayfaring black men who stopped off at the roadside attraction. Who knows?

She is placing her belongings in an old wicker suitcase. Many possessions will be left behind. Without regret, I imagine. She has just laid in some folded panties. And some butterflies.