The Up-Down (2 page)

 

 

5

Pace found a one-bedroom apartment on the far north side on Balkanski Avenue just off Clark Street, a few blocks from the town of Evanston, Illinois. It was a third floor walk up with two families of Ukrainian immigrants occupying the floors below. He had very little to do with the immediate neighbors other than to greet them on the stairs; Pace never heard any of the Ukrainians speaking English and they kept to themselves. Pace did also. Though ordinarily gregarious, he needed this time alone, to be virtually anonymous in a city whose population took no heed of him nor had need of him. For the first time in his life, Pace felt like a wandering ghost. Nobody was waiting for him and neither, really, was he expecting anyone to come along and tell him what to do. He had not felt so cut off from the rest of the world since he had been kidnapped at the age of ten in N.O. by a crazy boy named Elmer Désespéré; this was different though, because now he was alone.

When he lived in Kathmandu, Pace had half-assedly studied Buddhist texts, but he was then too preoccupied with worldly things to give them proper attention. Sailor and Lula were not churchgoers except for Lula's short-lived infatuation with the Church of Reason, Redemption and Resistance to God's Detractors, which ended abruptly after the church's corrupt preacher, Reverend Goodin Plenty, was gunned down by an unhinged member of the flock in Rock Hill, South Carolina. This incident took place in front of Lula's eyes and she soon thereafter gave up on organized religion in any form. The assassination of Goodin Plenty occurred during Pace's forced incarceration by Elmer Désespéré, so he had not known much about it at the time, and Pace had no specific religious instruction thereafter. His subsequent readings of various theories regarding ontology failed to impress him, though he considered the Old Testament of the King James Bible to be the granddaddy of all
noir
novels, and the New Testament to be the model for what popularly came to be known as science fiction.

Sailor had his own oddball theory about reincarnation that he called “sprinkle bodies,” which Pace thought made about as much sense as anything else. Religion, Pace thought, either made people mean or kind, according to their interpretation of whichever book or teachings laid down the law by which they had decided to abide. He realized, however, that at this crucial point in his life he was in dire need of some kind of guidance, sign or revelation. If it were to come from within, the Up-Down, he had to figure out how to climb on that wave and ride until it or he gave out.

Pace took to taking long walks along the shore of Lake Michigan as well as through the simmering summertime streets. The people he encountered were mostly polite but not particularly outgoing, largely unwilling to engage or be engaged in the sometimes too-often overly friendly and confessional way people are in New Orleans. That was all right with Pace, though; his demands upon and expectations of the human race were rapidly diminishing. His happiest moments came when he sat on his back porch late at night looking out over the alleys and backyards listening to the sounds made by his neighbors in their kitchens, dogs barking and cats whining and wailing. Best of all was when it rained, especially if there was thunder and lightning, which was often spectacular. He loved smelling the rain in the wind and when the rain came Pace could almost forget about the terrible behavior going on all over the world. There had to be a reason to exist, he thought, other than only for the sake of existing. And how did death figure into the equation? Rhoda murdered by ape poachers, Sailor killed in a senseless car wreck, Lula passing at eighty of so-called natural causes. What was natural or unnatural about anyone's demise? Weren't all of them threads in an unfinished fabric? Here he was, most certainly in the final quarter of his earthly residence, sitting on a back porch in the midwest having a dialogue with the night and discovering that he was more curious than ever about the purpose of everything, and wondering why thinking about it made him feel so ridiculous.

 

 

6

Pace had kept the book Dr. Furbo had given him on the train, even though the pages were blank. Perhaps there was a point to the lack of content other than the French word for End. Pace removed the
Guide to Furbotics
from his suitcase and re-read the subtitle. Perhaps this bizarre creature Dr. Furbo meant to signify that people should just quit complaining; “the eradication of caterwauling” could be interpreted that way. Where was it that Furbo claimed to have established his clinic? Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Pace remembered. He decided to call information in Lake Geneva to find out if there really was such an institution.

“Hello, operator, do you have a listing in Lake Geneva for a Dr. Furbo, or a medical clinic, health farm or spa with that name? You do? Furbo Reinclination and Redefinition Projects. That must be it. Is there an address? Yes, please. Thank you.” Pace wrote down the telephone number and address the operator gave him. Perhaps Dr. Furbo wasn't just a nut. Pace decided to go to Lake Geneva and find out.

Pace rented a car and drove from Chicago into Wisconsin, a state he had never entered before. Unfortunately, whenever he thought about Wisconsin, he recalled reading about the gruesome murders committed by a farmer named Ed Gein, back in the early 1960's; and, more recently, the equally ghastly killings conducted in Milwaukee by Jeffrey Dahmer. Both men had apparently been guilty of cannibalism; and, in Gein's case, using human skin to make lampshades, as the Nazis had done after flaying the corpses of Jews and Gypsies. The other things Pace associated with Wisconsin were beer and cheese.

Lake Geneva was a resort town: swimming and hiking in summer, skiing in winter. Pace drove to the center of town and stopped into a convenience store where he bought a bottle of root beer—they didn't carry Barq's, so he settled for Dad's—and asked the clerk at the register for the best route to Warren Spahn Road. The clerk, who, Pace guessed, was in his late teens or very early twenties, told him to head east four and a half miles and he'd run into it.

“Do you know who Warren Spahn was?” Pace asked the clerk.

“No, sir.”

“The winningest left-handed pitcher in major league history. Won three hundred sixty three games. Pitched mostly for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1950's and '60s. He's in the Hall of Fame.”

“He must be an old man now.”

“He's dead.”

Pace gave the boy a dollar and told him to keep the change.

“Sorry, sir,” said the clerk, “but the root beer's a dollar and a half.”

Pace dug another dollar out of one of his pockets, put it down on the counter, said, “Forgot I'm up north,” and walked out of the store.

He found Warren Spahn Road and bent right, the only direction he could go. There were no houses on either side of the road, only birch trees, which Pace found quite beautiful. He thought about Spahn pitching against Juan Marichal in a famous game in which they each posted goose eggs until Willie Mays homered for the Giants in the bottom of the sixteenth inning to beat the Braves. Both pitchers used a high leg kick when they wound up to disguise the ball and throw off the hitter's timing. Pace could not think of a single pitcher in the major leagues who employed that technique in the present day.

The deeper Pace drove into the woods the darker it got. The sun was going down fast and Pace sped up. After several miles, he turned on the headlights. Just as the final sliver of daylight slipped away, Pace saw a sign at the entrance to a gravel driveway on the driver's side of the road. Hand-lettered in black on a white board were the words:
DR. BORIS FURBO, SCIENTIST-PHILOSOPHER-ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOLACE, ENTER HERE BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT
THERE IS ALWAYS A TRADE OFF.

Pace turned in and headed up the driveway. Lights were on in a two-story house. Parked in front of the house was a 1955 black Cadillac hearse. Pace pulled up next to it, cut his engine, got out of the car and slowly walked toward the house.

 

 

7

“By virtue of the fact that you sought me out and have understood the purpose of my book, if not the precise meaning, I invite you to remain and study with me. All intelligent seekers sooner or later realize that a teacher is necessary to their development. The most important part of knowing is knowing when
you will never know. No and Know are non-exclusive antitheses of both Virtual and Repugnant Paradox. Even Einstein and, later, the unfortunate Gödel, decided that there was indeed a Desirable Gap. The question this provokes, of course, is how to process regret without falling prey to the Jonah Compulsion, which Gödel called Informal Fallacy, or some such nonsense. Are you hungry?”

Pace had been listening to Dr. Furbo for two hours. What Furbo had to say about knowing and not knowing reminded Pace of something but he could not remember exactly what.

“Yes, Dr. Furbo. I'm both hungry and a little tired.”

Furbo jumped up from the large wicker rocking chair in which he had been sitting.

“I'll barbecue some spare ribs, then,” he said. “I'm in the fourth week of the Bromige-Rosen Diet. First week, potatoes and oatmeal; second week, collard greens and dandelion soup; third week, pasta and ice cream; fourth week, ribs and beer. Bromige-Rosen recommend beer be taken only twice a day, but since there are to be four feedings per day, I find it a tad difficult not to imbibe with each serving. I'm looking forward to next week's menu of sauerkraut and honeydew melon. No fish in Bromige-Rosen; absolutely
verboten.
I agree entirely. All fish carry the undetectable funambular cell, which causes vertigo.”

“If the cell is undetectable,” Pace said, “how do you know fish carry it?”

“Molecular deviation detected centuries ago by the Mesopotamians. They were the pioneers of ichthyology, did all their work in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Everyone credits the Egyptians but they were just the first to alter their diet by decree. No pharaoh ever expired due to funambular seizure, remember that.”

Pace fell asleep in Dr. Furbo's attic guest room following his having heartily partaken of a slab of beef ribs slathered with the doctor's original sauce, which recipe included a modest dash of Chiefland, Florida, boar urine.

“That's what gives it such a lively undertaste,” Furbo informed Pace.

Late the next morning Pace awoke feeling slightly sick to his stomach and thought immediately of the boar urine in the barbecue sauce. He dressed and went downstairs and found Dr. Furbo, all seventy-nine inches of him, still dressed as he had been the night before in a black suit with a black shirt and black tie, stretched out on the kitchen floor with his eyes closed and not moving.

“Dr. Furbo, are you all right?” Pace shouted into the doctor's right ear.

Furbo did not budge. Pace knelt down and felt the doctor's left hand. The fingers were cold and slightly stiff. His chest was not rising and falling. Pace stood up and looked at Furbo. He had not noticed until now a deep indentation on the far right side of Furbo's forehead. Pace used a wall telephone in the kitchen to dial O.

“Hello, operator, could you please connect me to the police? I want to report a death.”

While he waited for the police to arrive, Pace took a look around the livingroom. An open book lay on the coffee table. It was
The Confidence Man
by Herman Melville. At the top of page 88, underlined in red pencil, was the title of Chapter 17: “Towards the End of Which The Herb-Doctor Proves Himself a Forgiver of Injuries.”

 

 

 

8

As Pace pulled out of Dr. Furbo's driveway, it began to rain. He recalled the final sentence of Faulkner's novel,
Sanctuary
, or part of it: “it was the season of rain and death.” Dr. Furbo's sudden demise seemed to Pace a terrible portent of things to come, as if wherever he went death would insist on his keeping company. The rain increased. Pace could not remember ever having such a convincing feeling of foreboding. The most important part of knowing, Dr. Furbo instructed, is knowing when you'll never know. Sailor would have probably called Dr. Furbo a crank or a kook, Pace thought, but not Lula. His mother kept more of an open mind and would study on the vagaries of No and Know.

Another thing the deceased doctor said was that the term simple-minded had acquired an undeservedly onerous definition. When asked how he had been able to endure torture at the hands of the Turks, Dr. Furbo recounted, T.E. Lawrence had replied that the trick is simply to not mind.

Pace had overheard one of the attendants loading Dr. Furbo's body into an ambulance say to another attendant, “This guy used to teach biology at Tecumseh High. My sister, Estelle, was in his class when he got fired for telling them that the only way mankind could avoid extinction was if everyone was inoculated with a partial solution of Javanese violet viper venom and wild boar sperm.” For a moment Pace considered telling them about Dr. Furbo's barbecue sauce recipe but he let it go.

If this was indeed the season of rain and death, Pace decided, turning up the windshield wiper speed a notch, he would keep searching for an explanation until the very end. As the men pushed the stretcher bearing Furbo's corpse into the rear of the ambulance, Pace had noticed a small syringe sticking out from the doctor's right ankle. What had he injected into himself, Pace wondered, knowing he would never know. Suddenly, Pace realized that he did not mind.

 

 

9

Pace decided to leave Chicago, but before he did he went back to the Art Institute to see once more Seurat's great painting. He paid particular attention to the monkey in the foreground, and was reminded of something else Dr. Furbo said: If animals have the ability to reason, which they do, why is it that they do not believe in God?

Pace bought a 2003 midnight blue Ford F-150 truck and headed southwest. Twenty years before, when he had lived in Los Angeles and worked as an assistant to various film producers and directors, he'd always meant to take a vacation and explore the other western states but had never found the time. Now there was nothing to prevent him from doing so. Pace felt good driving so he kept at it, stopping only for gas and food and at cheap motels to sleep. He was not in need of conversation, so he kept exchanges with people to a polite minimum. His brief but intense encounter with Dr. Furbo had convinced Pace that the only path to the Up-Down would be of his own devising. Despite Furbo's oddball theories and strange antics, there was no doubt in Pace's mind that the man had been sincere in his quest for the answers to the fundamental questions that had puzzled and virtually stupefied man since the Big Three, as the doctor called them, had first sizzled in a human being's brain pan, those being What? How? and Why?

One morning in Gila Bend, Arizona, Pace woke up and remembered his dream of the night before. In the dream several women were sitting in a room around a table. Three or four of the women were smoking cigarettes, one of whom Pace recognized to be Lula as she was in her twenties. In the room, which was dimly lit by small lamps with red shades, was a dark shape that moved around as the women talked. The women seemed not to notice this dark shape, or at least paid it no attention. Pace could not understand what the women were saying but they all seemed quite contented and calm. One of the women stood up and was immediately absorbed by the dark shape, but the others went on with their conversation. When Pace awakened he realized that the woman who had disappeared was his mother.

The desert was too hot so Pace headed north. His destination was Wyoming, a state he had never visited but whose name had a mythical quality for him. As a child, Pace and Lula had used Wyoming as an imaginary idyll, a place where nothing bad could happen, a kind of magical land. His mother had never been in Wyoming, either; nor, to Pace's knowledge, had Sailor. Whenever Lula made up a story to tell Pace at bedtime she would end it by saying, “and they all lived happily ever after in Wyoming.” He no longer believed this, of course, but the closer he got to Wyoming, the cooler the air became.