Approaching Oblivion

  The pain in my stomach was worse now. I took Gus back to Harmon Drive, and let him go home.

  My weight had dropped to just over a hundred and ten. My clothes didn’t fit. The acne and boils were worse. I smelled of witch hazel. Gus was getting more anti-social.

  I realized what was happening.

  I was alien in my own past. If I stayed much longer, God only knew what would happen to little Gus…but certainly I would waste away. Perhaps just vanish. Then…would Gus’s future cease to exist, too? I had no way of knowing; but my choice was obvious. I had to return.

  And couldn’t! I was happier here than I’d ever been before. The bigotry and violence Gus had known before I came to him had ceased. They knew he was being watched over. But Gus was becoming more erratic. He was shoplifting toy soldiers and comic books from the Kresge’s and constantly defying his parents. It was turning bad. I had to go back.

  I told him on a Saturday. We had gone to see a Lash Le Rue western and Val Lewton’s “The Cat People” at the Lake Theater. When we came back I parked the car on Mentor Avenue, and we went walking in the big, cool, dark woods that fronted Mentor where it met Harmon Drive.

  “Mr. Rosenthal,” Gus said. He looked upset.

  “Yes, Gus?”

  “I gotta problem, sir.”

  “What’s that, Gus?” My head ached. It was a steady needle of pressure above the right eye.

  “My mother’s gonna send me to a military school.”

  I remembered. Oh, God, I thought. It had been terrible. Precisely the thing not to do to a child like Gus.

  “They said it was ’cause I was rambunctious. They said they were gonna send me there for a year or two. Mr. Rosenthal…don’t let’m send me there. I din’t mean to be bad. I just wanted to be around you.”

  My heart slammed inside me. Again. Then again. “Gus, I have to go away.”

  He stared at me. I heard a soft whimper.

  “Take me with you, Mr. Rosenthal. Please. I want to see Galveston. We can drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina. We can go to Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada and work topping trees, we can sail on boats, Mr. Rosenthal!”

  “Gus…”

  “We can work the carny, Mr. Rosenthal. We can pick peanuts and oranges all across the country. We can hitchhike to San Francisco and ride the cable cars. We can ride the boxcars, Mr. Rosenthal…I promise I’ll keep my legs inside an’ not dangle ’em. I remember what you said about the doors slamming when they hook’m up. I’ll keep my legs inside, honest I will…”

  He was crying. My head ached hideously. But he was crying!

  “I’ll have to go, Gus!”

  “You don’t care!” He was shouting. “You don’t care about me, you don’t care what happens to me! You don’t care if I die…you don’t…”

  He didn’t have to say it: you don’t love me.

  “I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!”

  I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn’t. He was going to let them send me off to that military school.

  “I hope you die!”

  Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him run out of the woods.

  I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body; it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could feel myself withering away.

  I thought I’d left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first, and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn’t know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding. After I’d gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don’t tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.

  Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he’d struck the metal sign. He ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running…I had to catch him, to tell him, to make him understand why I had to go away.

  I came to the hurricane fence, and ran and ran till I found the place where I’d dug out under it, and I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got up and ran back behind the Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the condemned pond back there. Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.

  I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the fence than it had taken him to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond, he was sitting there with a long blade of saw-grass in his mouth, crying softly.

  I heard him coming, but I didn’t turn around.

  I came down to him, and crouched down behind him. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Hey, little Gus.”

  I wouldn’t turn around. I wouldn’t.

  I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling over and over, “Don’t go, please don’t go, please take me with you, please don’t leave me here alone…”

  And I was crying, too. I hugged little Gus, and touched his hair, and felt him holding onto me with all his might, stronger than a seven year old should be able to hold on, and I tried to tell him how it was, how it would be: “Gus…hey, hey, little Gus, listen to me…I want to stay, you know I want to stay…but I can’t.”

  I looked up at him; he was crying, too. It seemed so strange for a grownup to be crying like that, and I said, “If you leave me I’ll die. I will!”

  I knew it wouldn’t do any good to try explaining. He was too young. He wouldn’t be able to understand.

  He pulled my arms from around him, and he folded my hands in my lap, and he stood up, and I looked at him. He was gonna leave me. I knew he was. I stopped crying. I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

  I looked down at him. The moonlight held his face in a pale photograph. I wasn’t fooling myself. He’d understand. He’d know. Kids always know. I turned and started back up the path. Little Gus didn’t follow. He sat there looking back at me. I only turned once to look at him. He was still sitting there like that.

  He was watching me. Staring up at me from the pond side. And I knew what instant it had been that had formed me. It hadn’t been all the people who’d called me a wild kid, or a strange kid, or any of it. It wasn’t being poor, or being lonely.

  I watched him go away. He was my friend. But he didn’t have no guts. He didn’t. But I’d show him! I’d really show him! I was gonna get out of here, go away, be a big person and do a lot of things, and some day I’d run into him someplace and see him and he’d come up and shake my hand and I’d spit on him. Then I’d beat him up.

  He walked up the path and went away. I sat there for a long time, by the pond. Till it got real cold.

  I got back in the car, and went to find the way
back to the future; where I belonged. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I would find it…I still had the dragoon…and there were many stops I’d made on the way to becoming me. Perhaps Kansas City; perhaps Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada; perhaps Galveston; perhaps Shelby, North Carolina.

  And crying, I drove. Not for myself, but for myself, for little Gus, for what I’d done to him, forced him to become. Gus…Gus!

  But…oh, God…what if I came back again…and again? Suddenly, the road did not look familiar.

  Madeira Beach, Florida/1969

  9.

  Ecowareness

  Once upon a time—something between 1,800,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 years ago—after the Earth had partly liquefied through loss of heat by radiation from the outside and partly by adiabatic expansion, its Mommy said gaey schluffen, the Earth had a cookie, spit up, and went to bed. It slept soundly (save for a moment in 1755 when a Kraut named Kant made a whole lot of noise trying to figure out how the sun had been created) and didn’t wake up till a Tuesday in 1963 at which time—about four in the morning, a shitty hour of the night except for suicides—it realized it was having a hard time breathing.

  “Kaff, kaff,” it said, wiping out half the Trobriand Islands and whatever lay East of Java.

  Casting about to discover what had wakened it, the Earth realized it was the All-Night Movie on Channel 11, snippets of a Maria Montez film (Cobra Woman, 1944) interrupting an aging cruiser king hustling ’55 Mercs with pep pills in their gas tanks and lines of weariness in their grilles.

  The Earth waited till dawn and began to look around. Everywhere it looked the rivers smelled like the grease traps in Army kitchens, the hills had been sheared away to provide clinging space for American Plywood cages with indoor plumbing, the watershed had been scorched flat, valleys had been paved over causing a most uncomfortable constriction of the Earth’s breathing, the birds sang off-key and the bullfrogs sounded like Eddie Cantor, whom the Earth had never much cared for anyway. And overhead, the light hurt the Earth’s eyes.

  Everything looked gray and funky.

  “Boy,” the Earth said, in its rustic way, “I don’t like this a whole lot,” and so the Earth began taking counter-action.

  The first was against a shaggy sophomore from Michigan State University who, while parading around a Texaco station, carrying a placard that read STOP POLLUTION, ate a Power House bar and threw the wrapper in the gutter.

  The Earth opened and swallowed him.

  The next step was taken against fifty-six thousand Green Bay Packers fans as they crawled in imitation of a thousand-wheeled worm toward Lambeau Field, where their Cro-Magnon idols had waiting for them a sound trouncing at the hands and feet of the New Orleans Saints. The Earth, choking on the exhaust fumes of the automobiles, caused a lava flow to erupt from a nearby hillside, boiling down on the lines of traffic, solidifying instantly into a marvelous free-form sculpture of thirty thousand hot-rock-encased autos containing fifty-six thousand fried fans.

  The next step was taken against the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, gathered in the Hollywood Bowl before a single-throated horde of Jesus People. They were singing Laura Nyro’s “Save the Children” when the Earth re-channeled seven underground rivers and turned the amphitheater into the thirteenth largest natural lake in the United States.

  Then followed in madcap array, a series of forays against prominent individuals. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, speeding along the Lake Shore Drive, was inundated by seventy thousand tons of garbage from the burning dumps lining the scenic route; Ralph Nader’s office in Washington, D.C. was struck by bolts of lightning for twenty minutes. Barbra Streisand’s town house in Manhattan suddenly vanished into a bottomless pit that yawned in the middle of the fashionable East Fifties. Her C above high C was heard for hours. Diminishing.

  Volcanos destroyed the refineries, storage depots, administration buildings and Manhattan offices of Standard Oil of Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Texas and Rhode Island. The Earth took along Rhode Island in its entirety, possibly out of pique.

  Eventually, when the mene mene tekel was written across the Grand Tetons in letters of burning forest fire, people began to get the idea.

  The automobile was banned. All assembly lines shut down. Preservatives were eliminated from foods. Seals were left alone. A family of auk was discovered in New Zealand, doing rather nicely, thank you. And in Loch Ness, the serpent finally came up and took a deep breath.

  And from that day to this, there has never again been a blotch of climatic smegma on the horizon, the Earth has settled down knowing the human race has learned its lesson and would never again take a ka-ka in its own nest, and that is why today the National Emphysema Society declared itself out of business.

  Now isn’t that a nice story.

  And fuck you, too.

  Los Angeles, California/1972

  10.

  Catman

  The thief materialized in the shadow of a conversing waterfall. The air sparked like a dust circuit for a moment, and then he was there; back flat to the wall, a deeper black against the shadow, a stretch fabric suit and hood covering every inch of his body from feet to fingertips. Only his eyes were naked to the night. He stood there, motionless, as the waterfall talked to itself. It had been programmed to deter suicides, and it was reciting reassurances.

  “You don’t really think you’ll find peace in killing yourself, do you?” the waterfall bubbled. “Who knows what lies on the other side? Perhaps it’ll be just the same, and you’ll be aware of yourself as an entity, but you’ll be dead, and helpless to save yourself, and you’ll spend who-knows-how-long—perhaps an eternity—suffering the same anguish you knew when you were alive. But you’ll be trapped in death, and unable to get out. Wouldn’t that be awful? Instead, why don’t we talk about what’s troubling you—”

  The thief dematerialized; the waterfall splashed on to itself.

  He reappeared on the fiftieth level, in a frozen park. Standing beside a juniper encased in luminescent blue ice, he came into existence, checked the bag of electronic alarm-confounders, satisfied himself it was tied on securely, and started to wink-out again. He paused, half dematerialized, and stared across the park at the diorama of the Neanderthalers driving a herd of ibex off a cliff. The ice block was enormous, holding the cliff, the chasm, thirty of the graceful horned beasts, and half a hundred cavemen. It had been quarried from a site in Krapina, Yugoslavia by a timelock team that had frozen the moment 110,000 years before. It was an excellent display, art-directed by someone prestigious, perhaps Boltillon under a grant from Therox.

  For a moment longer he considered the great scene, thinking how trapped they were, thinking how free he was, not even walls of ice to contain him. Then he vanished.

  He came back to existence, brute matter, on the three-quarter-inch ledge outside a dreamcell apartment on the ninetieth level. He was flattened against the force screen that served as its outer wall. It was opaque, and he lay against it like a smear of rainbow oil. He could not be seen from inside, where the wealthy ones he intended to rob lay quietly, dreaming. But he could be seen by the scanning tower at the top of the Westminster Cathedral complex. Invisible beams blanketed London from the tower, watching. Registering intrusive action. He smiled and withdrew one of the confounders from the bag. It was a ladybug deranger; he palmed it onto the force screen wall and it tapped into the power source, and he felt the tension ease. Then he diffused himself, and reappeared inside the dreamcell.

  The family lay in their pods, the gel rippling ever so slightly at every muscle spasm. The inner walls were a dripping golden lustrousness, molten metal running endlessly down into bottomless depths where the floor should have been. He had no idea what they were dreaming, but the women were lying moistly locked together in soixante-neuf and the men were wearing reflective metal headache bands over their eyes. The men were humming in soprano tones.

  He vanished and reappeared in the lock room. The force screens were up, protec
ting the valuables, and the thief went down on his haunches, the bag of confounders dangling between his thighs. He whistled softly to himself, considering the proper tool, and finally withdrew a starfish passby. It scuttled across the floor and touched a screen with its dorsal cirri. The screens sputtered, changing hue, then winked out. The thief dematerialized and reappeared inside the vault.

  He ignored the jewelry and the credit cards and selected the three pressure-capped tubes of Antarean soul-radiant, worth, on the black market, all the jewels in the lock room.

  He disassembled himself and winked back into existence outside the force screen perimeter, retrieved the starfish, and vanished again, to appear on the ledge. The ladybug went into the bag, and he was gone once more.

  When he materialized on the fifty-first level, in the Fuller Geodex, the Catman was waiting, and before the thief could vanish again, the policeman had thrown up a series of barriers that would have required everything in the bag to counteract, plus a few the thief had not considered necessary on this job.

  The Catman had a panther, a peregrine falcon and two cheetahs with him. They were inside the barrier ring, and they were ready. The falcon sat on the Catman’s forearm, and the cats began padding smoothly toward the thief.

  “Don’t make me work them,” the Catman said.

  The thief smiled, though the policeman could not see it. The hood covered the thief’s face. Only the eyes were naked. He stared at the Catman in his skin cape and sunburst eagle’s helmet. They were old acquaintances.

  The cheetahs circled, narrowing in toward him. He teleported himself to the other side of the enclosed space. The Catman hissed at the falcon and it soared aloft, dove at the thief, and flew through empty space. The thief stood beside the Catman.

  “Earn your pay,” the thief said. His voice was muffled. It would make a voice-print, but not an accurate one; it would be insufficient in a court of law.