Approaching Oblivion

  schmuck (shmuck) Literally, a penis, but in common usage, a dope; a jerk; a boob; or, a son of a bitch, a real prick.

  Shabbes (shah’-biss) The Sabbath.

  Shema (sheh’-ma) The first word of the most common of Hebrew prayers: “Shema Yisrael,” Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One!

  shikker (shick’-er) A drunk or, as an adjective, drunkenness.

  shikseh (shik’-seh) A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

  shivah (shi’-vuh) The seven solemn days of mourning for the dead.

  shmateh (shmot’-tah) A rag, literally. But in common usage it means a cheap, shoddy, junky dress.

  shmootz (shmootz) Dirt.

  shpilkess (shpill’-kess) As my mother used it, to mean aggravation, an unsettlment of self, jumping stomach. But I’ve been advised it really means “ants in the pants.”

  shtumie (shtoom’-ie) Another word like schlemiel, but more offhand, less significant; the word you use to bat away a gnat.

  shtup (shtooooopp) Fuck.

  shtupping (shtooooopp’-ing) Fucking.

  shul (shool) Synagogue.

  tallis (tahll’-iss) Prayer shawl, worn by males at religious services.

  Talmud (tahl’-mud) A massive and monumental compendium of sixty-three books: the learned debates, dialogues, conclusions, commentaries, etc. of the scholars who, for over a thousand years, interpreted the Torah, the first five books in the Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses. The Talmud is not the Bible, nor the Old Testament. Not meant to be read, but to be studied.

  t’fillin’ (te-fill’-in) Phylacteries worn during morning prayers by Orthodox males past the age of Bar Mitzvah.

  Tisha B’ab (tish’-a-bawb) “The blackest day in the Jewish calendar.” Usually falls during August, climaxing nine days of mourning during which meat is not eaten and marriages are not performed. Commemorates both the First (586 B.C.) and Second (A.D. 70) destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. A deadly day of sorrow.

  tsuris (tsoo’-riss) Troubles.

  tuchis (tooh’-chhhss) The backside, the buttocks, your ass.

  tummel (tooh’-ml); tummeler (toohm’-eh-lrrr) Noise, commotion, noisy disorder. One who creates a lot of noise but accomplishes little; a funmaker, a live wire, a clown, the “life of the party.” You know when Jerry Lewis does a talk show and he starts eating the draperies and screaming and running so much you change the channel? He’s tummeling.

  varf (varf) To puke. Brechh.

  yarmulkah (yah’-mihl-keh) The skullcap worn by observing Jewish males.

  yeshiva (yeh-shee’-vah) A rabbinical college or seminary.

  yorzeit (yawr’-tzite) The anniversary of someone’s death, on which candles are lit and a prayer is said.

  zetz (zets) A strong blow or punch.

  Zsouchmoid (zoochhhhh’-moid) A native of Theta 996: VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici; like Evsise. (See illustration.)

  (NOTE: The author wishes to give credit where due. The Yiddish words are mine, they come out of my childhood and my heritage, but some of the definitions have been adapted and based on those in Leo Rosten’s marvelous and utterly indispensable sourcebook, The Joys of Yiddish, published by McGraw-Hill, which I urge you to rush out and buy, simply as good reading.)

  6.

  Silent in Gehenna

  Joe Bob Hickey had no astrological sign. Or rather more precisely, he had twelve. Every year he celebrated his birthday under a different Pisces, Gemini or Scorpio. Joe Bob Hickey was an orphan. He was also a bastard. He had been found on the front porch of the Sedgwick County, Kansas, Foundling Home. Wrapped in a stained army blanket, he had been deserted on one of the Home’s porch gliders. That was in 1992.

  Years later, the matron who discovered him on the porch remarked, looking into his eyes was like staring down a hall with empty mirrors.

  Joe Bob was an unruly child. In the Home he seemed to seek out trouble, in no matter what dark closet it hid, and sink his teeth into it; nor would he turn it loose, bloody and spent, till thunder crashed. Shunted from foster home to foster home, he finally took off at the age of thirteen, snarling. That was in 2005. Nobody even offered to pack him peanut butter sandwiches. But after a while he was fourteen, then sixteen, then eighteen, and by that time he had discovered what the world was really all about, he had built muscle, he had read books and tasted the rain, and on some road he had found his purpose in life, and that was all right, so he didn’t have to worry about going back. And fuck their peanut butter sandwiches.

  Joe Bob attached the jumper cable, making certain it was circled out far enough behind and around him to permit him sufficient crawl-space without snagging the bull. He pulled the heavy-wire snippers from his rucksack, cut the fence in the shape of a church window, returned the snips to the rucksack, slung it over one shoulder and shrugged into it—once again reminding himself to figure out a new system of harness so the bullhorn and the rucksack didn’t tangle.

  Then, down on his gut; he pulled himself on elbows tight to his sides, through the electrified fence, onto the grounds of the University of Southern California. The lights from the guard towers never quite connected at this far corner of the quad. An overlooked blind spot. But he could see the State Trooper in his tower, to the left, tracking the area with the mini-radar unit. Joe Bob grinned. His bollixer was feeding back pussycat shape.

  Digging his hands into the ground, frogging his legs, flatworm fellow, he did an Australian Crawl through the nomansland of the blind spot. Once, the Trooper held in his direction, but the mini-radar picked up only feline and, as curiosity paled and vanished, he moved on. Joe Bob slicked along smoothly. (Lignum vitae, owing to the diagonal and oblique arrangement of the successive layers of its fibres, cannot be split. Not only is it an incredibly tough wood—with a specific gravity of 1.333 it sinks in water—but, containing in its pores 26% resin, it is lustrous and self-oiling. For this reason it was used as bearings in the engines of early oceangoing steamships.) Joe Bob as lignum vitae. Slicking along oilily through the dark.

  The Earth Sciences building—Esso Hall, intaglio’d on a lintel—loomed up out of the light fog that wisped through the quadrangle, close to the ground. Joe Bob worked toward it, idly sucking at a cavity in a molar where a bit of stolen/fried/enjoyed chicken meat had lodged. There were trip-springs irregularly spaced around the building. Belly down, he did an elaborate flat-out slalom through them, performing a delicate calligraphy of passage. Then he was at the building, and he sat up, back to the wall and unVelcroing the flap of a bandolier pocket.

  Plastique.

  Outdated, in these times of sonic explosives and mist, but effective nonetheless. He planted his charges.

  Then he moved on to the Tactics Building, the Bacteriophage Labs, the Central Records Computer block and the Armory. Charged, all.

  Then he pullcrawled back to the fence, unshipped the bullhorn, settled himself low so he made no silhouette against the yawning dawn just tingeing itself lightly in the east, and tripped the charges.

  The Labs went up first, throwing walls and ceilings skyward in a series of explosions that ranged through the spectrum from blue to red and back again. Then the Computer Block shrieked and died, fizzing and sparking like a dust-circuit killing negative particles; then together the Earth Sciences and Tactics Buildings thundered like saurians and fell in on themselves, spuming dust and lath and plaster and extruded wall-dividers and shards of melting metal. And, at last, the Armory, in a series of moist poundings that locked one after the other in a stately yet irregular rhythm. And one enormous Olympian bang that blew the Armory to pieces filling the night with the starburst trails of tracer lightning.

  It was all burning, small explosions continuing to firecracker amid the rising sound of students and faculty and troops scurrying through the debacle. It was all burning as Joe Bob turned the gain full on the bull and put it to his mouth and began shouting his message.

  “You call this academic freedom, you bunch of earthworms! You call el
ectrified fences and armed guards in your classrooms the path to learning? Rise up, you toadstools! Strike a blow for freedom!”

  The bollixer was buzzing, reporting touches from radar probes. It was feeding back mass shape, indistinct lumps, ground swells, anything. Joe Bob kept shouting.

  “Grab their guns away from them!” His voice boomed like the day of judgment. It climbed over the sounds of men trying to save other buildings and it thundered against the rising dawn. “Throw the troops off campus! Jefferson said. ‘People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve!’ Is this what you deserve?!”

  The buzzing was getting louder, the pulses coming closer together. They were narrowing the field on him. Soon they would have him pinned; at least with high probability. Then the squirt squads would come looking for him.

  “Off the troops!

  “There’s still time! As long as one of you isn’t all the way brainwashed, there’s a chance. You are not alone! We are a large, organized resistance movement…come join us…trash their barracks…bomb their armories…off the Fascist varks! Freedom is now, grab it, while they’re chasing their tails! Off the varks…”

  The squirters had been positioned in likely sectors. When the mini-radar units triangulated, found a potential lurking place and locked, they were ready. His bollixer gave out one solid buzzing pulse, and he knew they’d locked on him. He slipped the bull back on its harness and fumbled for the flap of his holster. It came away with a Velcro fabric-sound and he wrenched the squirt gun out. The wire-stock was folded across the body of the weapon and he snapped it open, locking it in place.

  Get out of here, he told himself.

  Shut up, he answered. Off the varks!

  Hey, pass on that. I don’t want to get killed.

  Scared, mother chicken?

  Yeah I’m scared. You want to get your ass shot up, that’s your craziness, you silly wimp. But don’t take me with you!

  The interior monologue came to an abrupt end. Off to Joe Bob’s right three squirters came sliding through the crabgrass, firing as they came. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyhow. Where Joe Bob went, Joe Bob went with.

  The squirt charges hit the fence and popped, snicking, spattering, everywhere but the space Joe Bob had cut out in the shape of a church window. He yanked loose the jumper cable and jammed it into the rucksack, sliding backward on his stomach and firing over their heads.

  I thought you were the bigger killer?

  Shut up, damn you! I missed, that’s all.

  You missed, my tail! You just don’t want to see blood.

  Sliding, sliding, sculling backward, all arms and legs; and the squirts kept on coming. We are a large, organized resistance movement, he had bullhorned. He had lied. He was alone. He was the last. After him, there might not be another for a hundred years. Squirt charges tore raw gashes in the earth around him.

  Scared! I don’t want to get killed.

  The chopper rose from over his sight horizon, rose straight up and came on a dead line for his position. He heard a soft, whining sound and Scared! breezed through his mind again.

  Gully. Down into it. Lying on his back, the angle of the grassy bank obscuring him from the chopper, but putting him blindside to the squirt squad. He breathed deeply, washed his lips with his tongue, too dry to help, and he waited.

  The chopper came right over and quivered as it turned for a strafing run. He braced the squirt gun against the bank of the gully and pulled the trigger, held it back as a solid line of charges raced up the air. He tracked ahead of the chopper, leading it. The machine moved directly into the path of fire. The first charges washed over the nose of the chopper, smearing the surface like oxidized chrome plate. Electrical storms, tiny whirlpools of energy flickered over the chopper, crazing the ports, blotting out the scene below to the pilot and his gunner. The squirt charges drank from the electrical output of the ship and drilled through the hull, struck the power source and the chopper suddenly exploded. Gouts of twisted metal, still flickering with squirt life, rained down across the campus. The squirters went to ground, dug in, to escape the burning metal shrapnel.

  With the sound of death still echoing, Joe Bob Hickey ran down the length of the gully, into the woods, and gone.

  It has been said before, and will be said again, but never as simply or humanely as Thoreau said it: “He serves the state best, who opposes the state most.”

  (Aluminum acetate, a chemical compound which, in the form of its natural salt, Al(C2H3O2) 3, obtained as a white, water-soluble amorphous powder, is used chiefly in medicine as an astringent and as an antiseptic. In the form of its basic salt, obtained as a white, crystalline, water-insoluble powder, it is used chiefly in the textile industry as a waterproofing agent, as a fireproofing agent, and as a mordant. A mordant can be several things, two of the most important being an adhesive substance for binding gold or silver leaf to a surface; and an acid or other corrosive substance used in etching to eat out the lines.)

  Joe Bob Hickey as aluminum acetate. Mordant. Acid etching at a corroded surface.

  Deep night found him in terrible pain, far from the burning ruin of the University. Stumbling beneath the gargantuan Soleri pylons of the continental tramway. Falling, striking, tumbling over and over in his stumble. Down a gravel-bed into deep weeds and the smell of sour creek. Hands came to him in the dark, and turned him face-up. Light flickered and a voice said, “He’s bleeding,” and another voice, cracked and husky, said, “He’s sideing a squirter,” and a third voice said, “Don’t touch him, come on,” and the first voice said again, “He’s bleeding,” and the light was applied to the end of a cigar stub just as it burned down. And then there was deep darkness again.

  Joe Bob began to hurt. How long he had been hurting he didn’t know, but he realized it had been going on for some time. Then he opened his eyes, and saw firelight dancing dimpling dimly in front of him. He was propped up against the base of a sumac tree. A hand came out of the mist that surrounded him, seemed to come right out of the fire, and a voice he had heard once before said, “Here. Take a suck on this.” A plastic bottle of something hot was held to his lips, and another hand he could not see lifted his head slightly, and he drank. It was a kind of soupness that tasted of grass.

  But it made him feel better.

  “I used some of the shpritz from the can in your knapsack. Something got you pretty bad, fella. Right across the back. You was bleeding pretty bad. Seems to be mending okay. That shpritz.”

  Joe Bob went back to sleep. Easier this time.

  Later, in a softer, cooler time, he woke again. The campfire was out. He could see clearly what there was to see. Dawn was coming up. But how could that be…another dawn? Had he run all through the day, evading the varks sent to track him down? It had to be just that. Dawn, he had been crouched outside the fence, ready to trip the charges. He remembered that. And the explosions. And the squirt team, and the chopper, and—

  He didn’t want to think about things falling out of the sky, burning, sparking.

  Running, a full day and a night of running. There had been pain. Terrible pain. He moved his body slightly, and felt the raw throb across his back. A piece of the burning chopper must have caught him as he fled; but he had kept going. And now he was here, somewhere else. Where? Filtered light, down through cool waiting trees.

  He looked around the clearing. Shapes under blankets. Half a dozen, no, seven. And the campfire just smoldering embers now. He lay there, unable to move, and waited for the day.

  The first one to rise was an old man with a dirty stipple of beard, perhaps three days’ worth, and a poached egg for an eye. He limped over to Joe Bob—who had closed his eyes to slits—and stared at him. Then he reached down, adjusted the unraveling blanket, and turned to the cooling campfire.

  He was building up the fire for breakfast when two of the others rolled out of their wrappings. One was quite tall, wearing a hook for a hand, and the other was as old as the first man. He was naked inside his blankets, a
nd hairless from head to foot. He was pink, very pink, and his skin was soft. He looked incongruous; the head of an old man, with the wrinkled, pink body of a week-old baby.

  Of the other four, only one was normal, undamaged. Joe Bob thought that till he realized the normal one was incapable of speech. The remaining three were a hunchback with a plastic dome on his back that flickered and contained bands of color that shifted and changed hue with his moods; a black man with squirt burns down one entire side of his face, giving him the appearance of someone standing forever half in shadow; and a woman who might have been forty or seventy, it was impossible to tell, with one inch wide window strips in her wrists and ankles, whose joints seemed to bend in the directions opposite normal.

  As Joe Bob lay watching surreptitiously, they washed as best they could, using water from a Lister bag, avoiding the scum-coated and bubbling water of the foul creek that crawled like an enormous gray potato slug through the clearing. Then the old man with the odd eye came to him and knelt down and pressed his palm against Joe Bob’s cheek. Joe Bob opened his eyes.

  “No fever. Good morning.”

  “Thanks,” Joe Bob said. His mouth was dry.

  “How about a cup of pretty good coffee with chicory?” The old man smiled. There were teeth missing.

  Joe Bob nodded with difficulty. “Could you prop me up a little?”

  The old man called, “Walter…Marty…” and the one who could not speak came to him, followed by the black man with the half-ivory face. They gently lifted Joe Bob into a sitting position. His back hurt terribly and every muscle in his body was stiff from having slept on the cold ground. The old man handed Joe Bob a plastic milk bottle half-filled with coffee. “There’s no cream or sugar, I’m sorry,” he said. Joe Bob smiled thanks and drank. It was very hot, but it was good. He felt it running down inside him, thinning into his capillaries.