“You’ve made it with Mya,” I said, disengaging myself. “You’ve been showing Mya the handle of your big old brush.”
Hamid threw his arms around the elephantine air with his most diabolical grin, like saying: “Mya’s one big girl!”
“I thought you said you knew how to turn on the lights,” I went on, accusingly.
“I fix her generator! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Hamid collapsed on a cushion howling with glee and, then, suddenly shot into the air again to bumble around the dark domed room like an angry bee in his hive; pushing back panels, throwing in switches and punching buttons I was sure he knew nothing about. The Moroccan approach to machines is the same as that used for directing a djinn, and a good many Moroccans have a highly developed genius for this. Most Moroccans can stop a watch or, even, a can-opener simply by taking one penetrating look at it but other Moroccans can repair a carburetor in the Sahara with a few half-chewed dates. In any case, I clutched my UHER, looking around for some safe hiding place to keep it out of Hamid’s reach. From far away and below, someplace, came the hard hammering of the generator and, a few minutes later, the hum of a departing plane dwindling overhead. As Hamid hopped about like a mad monkey in the gloom, various machines sputtered, sparked and blinked into life. The entire electronic library began to light up.
I saw they had installed much the same sort of setup I was familiar with at Hampton Institute, or was it at Howard? I sat down in front of the screen and punched the letter H; waited for the signal to wink and dialed: HANSON. There in front of me, sure enough, was my birth certificate. I was pained to see that my parents’ papers were attached but I realized they were bound to go, too, if I was really going to succeed in what I had always thought of doing — changing my skin but from the inside out, as it were. I was, at last, going to become myself by becoming somebody else. As I was savoring this abstruse search for a self, Hamid broke in with the mention of food. Even food could not tear my eyes away from a page of magnified microfilm which had appeared on my screen.
It was a page from a copybook I’d owned at the age of eight, in which I once wrote in block letters what I thought at the time was my final farewell epistle to my mother. I ran away into the park for what turned out to be a long, boring afternoon and an evening until hunger drove me back home. Luckily, Mother was still out so I ate and went to bed, completely forgetting the letter which my mother found and refused to return to me, ever. She must have read it aloud one thousand times to everybody, anybody; white people, even. She declared it was one of her lifelong treasures and here this masterpiece was again, flickering in front of my eyes.
Dear Pig
I am run away for good.
Your son Ulys.
There was an annotation in my mother’s hand:
These first travels of Ulys did not take him far. His trek downtown was little more than a trick to get out of his homework, I reckon.
That gave me a chill; nearly turned me to stone for a second, as a matter of fact, but there was worse to come as I went on pushing the buttons. Their next item was a typed manuscript of my prize-winning essay which won me the I AM AN AMERICAN DAY CONTEST, in high school. It runs: “This is my own, my native land …” So help me, my mother wrote most of that and it won me a ten-dollar gold piece. Took that old gold piece and the letter that said the principal should present it to me in front of the assembled school and he looked at that letter and he looked at me and he handed me both of them back. I remember, that gold piece went on the rent and I thought my mother should have it made into a brooch for herself or a stickpin for me for my tie. I flipped on through the electronic record of my life with growing embarrassment.
Here was a paper of mine, written at Hampton for a course in Afro-American Lit. This thing was entitled: “Negro Renaissance Poets before Langston Hughes,” and included lots of excerpts of verse. Now, who the hell wrote what I quote? Oh boy!
“You are the gilded pride of Day
And I the sable pride of Night.”
Yeah! I was still stirring these faintly fruity lines around in my head when Hamid showed up with a cold lobster and some champagne but no glasses.
“What, Hamid!” I cried, “no keef? You know champagne gives me bubbles in the appendix. If I drink that stuff, I’ll die of peritonitis out here in the Sahara.”
“Thass all right,” Hamid said and sped off. I set to on the lobster with my hands. On the table beside me was the grubby notebook left me by Rolf Ritterolf. On the cover was written: “O. Pesonius: His Journal.” When I saw that the Little White Reindeer had written in English, I began flipping over the pages with greasy fingers and read:
11. WE
We are all so close in our Sleep & Dream Clinic here in Helsinki that when I told them, today, that I was going back to the Sahara to join my old friend Thay Himmer the Seventh in his castle called “Malamut,” on Cape Noon, all the other initiates in the office suddenly broke out singing:
Olav, you are crazy! Olav you are mad!
Why do you want to go back with that man
Who treated you so bad!
That may be because they have had to file so many of my dreams about the time Thay hit me over the head with a pail in a sauna: some of them still think I should have called the police. It was a big local scandal at the time because I am not altogether unknown in my little Finland as an artist and, certainly, Thay Himmer the Seventh, White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Isles, was the most exotic celebrity anyone in Finland had ever brought back from his travels. (Like a tourist trophy: was I still that naïve? Perhaps.) Only Ingating understood and she understood perfectly. Ingating is very intelligent for a Finnish girl because she has read special books. “Did you experience satori when Mr. Himmer hit you in the hot room,” Ingating asked me, “like the adepts of a Japanese master of Zen?” She is a very good girl but I was still under sedation or I would never have blabbed out to her that I am, now and forever, Himmer’s Little White Reindeer. I must say for her that she did not blink a blond eyelash. She kept comimg back to the clinic to see me and, when my head healed, offered to let me move in with her when I was released because, she said, we could all live very well on her state allowance as the unmarried mother of twins. That’s Finnish finesse, for you. She was informing me delicately that I had lost my state-studio over the Himmer scandal and had no place to live. Luckily, the clinic has a Sleep & Dream Research Lab. run by our great oneirologist, Doktor Erno Aalto. He became so interested in my Saharan desert dreams that he invited me to sleep-in at the clinic, five nights a week, and offered me a big bare white room facing north as a studio. Weekends all last year, I slept over at Ingating’s and, when she had twins again this last summer, I simply stayed on in the clinic but, on weekends, I treated myself to a slumber without attaching the old electroencephalograph or the loop for penis-erectile control which is wired to the videometer all other nights of the week. I am going to miss that.
Finland is a little country but in some ways we are well advanced. Actually, Finland is a country without too much excitement because the weather is no good for it. The arrival of someone like Thay Himmer in Helsinki can change the lives of many people in Finland. There were pictures of him in all the papers and magazines, waving at the camera. Only I in all of Finland knew that Thay was warding off image-spells with counter-spells from the Farout Islands. Wearing his funny cut fringe of red Arab beard and his big bright blue eyes, he became a popular figure in Finland. He always smiled at everybody with his more than American teeth and they loved him, at first. When I took him up north with me to see the herds, the whole Finnish nation followed him on television. Thay Himmer grinned out of the screen in every home in Finland like a jack-o’-lantern in a fur parka. While he was standing beside our Finnish President judging the reindeer races, a disgraceful technical accident occurred on the television but, as Thay always said: there are no accidents. Everyone knows who would do a filthy thing in Finland! A ghostly pair of antlers appeared behind Thay’s head for several minutes on all the screens in the land and pictures like that ran in the newspapers, too. I was terribly ashamed as a Finn. However, although it may have been meant as a joke in very poor taste, state television pollsters announced that many country people in outlying districts had identified Bishop Himmer as the Norse hunting god.