The shrill fife of Josephine Malik, Case's editor, was heard: "Moon. They say he works for the Beast." She wore jeans, combat boots and a button saying in psychedelic colors, BRING BACK THE SIXTIES. Walking nostalgia.
"Floating you see," the tuba of Williams oompah-oompah-ed onward, "in the amniotic atmosphere at the bottom of a 4,000-mile gravity well. And taking the Euclidean parameters of that gestation as the norm. Totally fetal, if you follow me, and in a very real sense blind because unborn, knowing um the dimensions of the wombplanet but not knowing what lies beyond the gravitational vagina-the whole universe outside."
"A 4,000-mile cunt?" Carol was awed by the concept. Her blond head leaned forward in doubtful inquiry. "That's a very funny metaphor, Professor."
"The only difference between my publishers and the James gang," the drunk went on, monotonous as a bass drum, "is that the James boys had horses."
"… which explains the various rebirth experiences reported by astronauts like Aldrin and Mitchell and the others," Williams trumpeted (gassy old windbag). "Earth is our womb. Leaving Earth is literally rebirth. There's nothing metaphoric about it."
"The James boys hell, my last publisher was more like Attila the Hun," plonkty-plonked Frank Hemeroid in pianissimo.
Case began to feel that he had had perhaps too much hash.
"Right Wingers?" astronomer Bertha Van Ation was trilling. "We've got real Right Wingers out in Orange County. Let me tell you about the Committee to Nuke the Whales…"
But that impossible Williams person was murmuring privately now to Carol the Golden Goddess, and Case tried desperately to catch the words, dreading the thought that a sexual liaison was being formed.
"The mnemonic," Williams was crooning, "is quite easy. Just say, 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue.' See?"
Mnemonic for what, in God's name? But Moon was shrilling like a banshee now:
"Wet with garrison statements, oswilde shores, daily blazers, tochus culbook depositories, middlesexed villains and fumes. Fict! The most unkennedest carp of all. Fogt. Veiny? V. D.? Wacky? His bruttus gypper."
"I was walking on Lexington Avenue one morning around three a.m.," the drunk maundered on, "and I heard this URRRRRP, this horrible eldritch laughter just like in an H. P. Lovecraft story, and do you want to know what I think it was? A publisher and his lawyer had just figured out a new way to screw one of their writers."
"This the lewdest comedy nominator," Moon keened high on the G-string. "This de visions of spirals fur de lewdest comedy nominator. Eerie cries from the scalped nations! This the oval orefice sends the plumbers fur de spills. Lust of the walkregans. Think! White harse devoted. Thank! Wit ars devoided. Dunk!"
"I wish Moon would stop reading that drivel," Fred "Figs" Newton was clearly heard in solo. "I'd like to ask him how much the Beast really knows."
"Oh," the mournful oboe of Benny Benedict sang ominously, "the Beast knows everything. …"
"… by Loop Shore and Dellingersgangers," Moon keened over them, oblivious, "where yippies yip and doves duz nothing, to the hawkfullest convention ever."
At this point Case had to beat a hasty retreat to the John (one martini too many) and he never did get all the conversations sorted out in his memory, but the louses in the skidrow dimehaunts were firmly lodged in the Ambiguous Imagery files of his Myth-and-Metaphor Detector, right next to the Three Stooges and Chinatown.
And Cagliostro the Great.
TO HAVE LOCKS ON THESE DOORS
One of the causes of cancer is the harmfulness of cooked foods.
–furbish lousewart v, Unsafe Wherever You Go
Blake Williams had the great good fortune to suffer a bout of polio in infancy. Of course he did not realize it was good fortune at the time-nor did his parents or his doctors. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time (the early 1930s) when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members. He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in 1938. The real luck occurred twelve years later, in 1950, when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service. The next man drafted, in his place, had both testicles bloodily blown off in Korea.
Williams, of course, never knew about this patriotic gelding, but he was well aware that various boys his age were having various portions of their anatomy blown off in Korea; being somewhat philosophical, he often reflected on the paradox that the polio (which had been, when it occurred, a physical agony to him and a psychological agony to his parents) had preserved him from such mutilations. Considering that the only continuing effect of the polio was the slight limp, he had to admit that Nature or God or something-or-other had sneakily done him great good while appearing to do him great evil. This was a decided encouragement toward an optimistic attitude toward the seemingly evil and made him wonder if the universe were not benevolent after all. The guy who lost his balls in Williams's place, on the other hand, became a pronounced pessimist and cynic.
Between Korea and Vietnam, while Blake was acquiring first an M.S. and then a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology, another great good fortune, in the form of another seeming evil, came before his eyes. He was walking in lower Manhattan; he had started from Washington Square, where he and his current girl friend-they were both NYU students-had just had a particularly nasty quarrel right after a biology class. He had wandered far to the west in a mood of suicidal gloom, such as young male primates often think they should experience after losing a sexual partner. Somehow, he wandered onto Vandivoort Street and found himself at the Vandivoort Street incinerator. There he saw a most peculiar sight: a rather stout man, looking like he was about to cry, was watching while two younger, thinner men were pouring books out of a truck into the incinerator.
"What the hell?" Blake Williams asked nobody in particular. It was like an old movie of Nazi Germany. Nobody had told him that bookburning was now an American institution.
He approached the stout man, who was the only one of the three who seemed unhappy, and repeated his question. "What the hell?" he asked. "I mean, are you people burning books?"
"They are," the stout man said. He went on to explain that he was an executive of something called the Orgone Institute Press and that a court had ordered all their books destroyed. Williams was curious and looked at some of the titles: Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Cancer Biopathy and Contact with Space.
"I didn't know that book burning was legal in this country," he said.
"Neither did I," the stout man said bitterly.
Blake Williams walked on, dazed. He couldn't have been more astonished if he'd seen Storm Troopers rounding up Jews. He wondered if he'd fallen into a time warp.
Later, of course, he learned that the Orgone Institute, headed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, had been investigating human sexuality and had come to some highly unorthodox conclusions. Dr. Reich himself died in prison, Dr. Silvert (Reich's co-investigator) committed suicide, the books were burned, and the heresy was buried. But Williams had an entirely new attitude toward the country in which he lived, the scientific community which had looked on and made not a single gesture to support Dr. Reich and Dr. Silvert, and the omnipresent rhetoric which insisted that the Dark Ages had ended many centuries ago.