Things are livelier, of course, across the Bal in transpontine Viborra, where, every night at midnight, there is the celebrated Stampede of the Drunks, around and around the Plaza of Louts. It is not for everyone, this stumbling, boisterous race, but to say you have run with the international drunks on the River Bal—well, take it straight from Chick Jardine, few travel claims confer more prestige these days. Your application for the Stampede of the Drunks, with passport-grade photo and $200 entry fee, must be made to the Central Committee six months in advance.
All other events are open to the public. Everyone (with orange bracelet) can join in the frolic around the fountain and in the reflecting pool and along the narrow cobbled streets radiating out from the Nimmo Arch. Wear casual clothes. Beware the melon ambush. Take care when rounding corners or you are likely to have a watermelon or some rotten and unfamiliar vegetable smashed down on your head—with what seems to me unnecessary force. Stay well clear of those roving gangs of hooded urchins who call themselves the Red Ants; they will seize you and gag you and truss you up and scrawl Red Ant slogans across your belly and then toss you about on a stretched bull hide. Keep a sharp lookout for boulders and burning tires rolling down the hillside streets. There is a certain amount of capering around bonfires. After the first night the streets are littered with putrefying vegetable fragments. There are one or two deaths each night and a good deal of broken glass.
In recent years the season has been spoiled a bit by nightly typhoons, which are sometimes followed by predawn tsunamis. The poets claim that something has gone wrong with the prevailing winds, and they blame the unholy Arses and her practices in necromancy. Despite this, the merrymakers still come in swarms, and I must caution you that there is a lot of shameless overbooking in Viborra during Carnival. You may be forced to double up in your hotel room with unsavory strangers, and sleep in shifts. “Hot bunking,” as we call it in the trade. Three years ago, I am informed, the Morono Palace was so jam-packed with louts that the hotel itself subsided eight and a half inches into the mud.
* * *
Poor Mopsy was ready to drop. It was just after one in the morning and we were weary and stuffed. We were fairly waterlogged with oysters. But we still had a gratis supper coming, and the dining hall at the Pan-Lupus didn’t open until 2:00 A.M. (Note well: It is not fashionable to sup in Viborra before about 2:30 A.M. This by way of showing you do not have to rise early.)
What to do? Fighting off sleep, and determined not to be done out of any meal that was due us, we gave each other playful slaps and dashed cold water in our faces. We went to the bar to kill some time and found it filled with English travel writers in suede shoes and speckled green suits. What a scene! They were laughing and scribbling and asking how to spell “ogive” and brazenly cribbing long passages of architectural arcana from their John Ruskin handbooks, which are issued with their union cards.
“Look, that sod Jardine is here too!” one of them shouted. Then he and the others came crowding around, seething with bitter envy of me and my Chick’s Wheel of Adjectives, a handy rotating cardboard device, which, at $24.95, was such a super hit with the travel journalists at our winter conference in Macao. Mopsy feared for my safety as the chaps bumped up against me and heaped childish ridicule on my cluster of lapel pins, tokens of numerous professional honors. A serene and scornful smile soon sent them reeling back in confusion.
We left them there, stewing in resentment and muttering over their pink gins, and at two on the dot we were standing first in line outside the dining-hall doors. From campaniles all over town the bells of Viborra were striking the hour, with paired thuds and thumps of slightly different pitch. I was explaining how these strange dead bells are cast from a curious alloy of pumice and zinc when Mopsy silenced me with a raised hand.
“No—listen,” she said. “Those—bells. They seem somehow to know we’re off tomorrow on the morning Fokker. They seem to be—saying something.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Jason. “How do you mean, Mopsy? Just what is it they—seem to say?”
“Those—sounds on the wind. Can’t you hear? ‘Come back!’ they seem to say. ‘Come back, Mopsy! Come back, Jason! Come back, Chick! Come back to the sparkling shores of the Burning Sea! Come back in time to a more gracious and all but forgotten way of life in the enchanting old city of Viborra nestled snugly in a sapphire cove ’neath the vast rotunda of an indigo sky!’”
The Atlantic, December 1992
I Don’t Talk Service No More
Once you slip past that nurses’ station in the east wing of D-3, you can get into the library at night easy enough if you have the keys. They keep the phone locked up in a desk drawer there but if you have the keys you can get it out and make all the long-distance calls you want to for free, and smoke all the cigarettes you want to, as long as you open a window and don’t let the smoke pile up so thick inside that it sets off the smoke alarm. You don’t want to set that thing to chirping. The library is a small room. There are three walls of paperback westerns and one wall of windows and one desk.
I called up Neap down in Orange, Texas, and he said, “I live in a bog now.” I hadn’t seen him in forty-odd years and I woke him up in the middle of the night and that was the first thing out of his mouth. “My house is sinking. I live in a bog now.” I told him I had been thinking about the Fox Company Raid and thought I would give him a ring. We called it the Fox Company Raid, but it wasn’t a company raid or even a platoon raid, it was just a squad of us, with three or four extra guys carrying pump shotguns for trench work. Neap said he didn’t remember me. Then he said he did remember me, but not very well. He said, “I don’t talk service no more.”
We had been in reserve and had gone back up on the line to relieve some kind of pacifist division. Those boys had something like “Live and Let Live” on their shoulder patches. When they went out on patrol at night, they faked it. They would go out about a hundred yards and lie down in the paddies, and doze off, too, like some of the night nurses on D-3. When they came back, they would say they had been all the way over to the Chinese outposts but had failed to engage the enemy. They failed night after night. Right behind the line the mortar guys sat around in their mortar pits and played cards all day. I don’t believe they even had aiming stakes set up around their pits. They hated to fire those tubes because the Chinese would fire right back.
It was a different story when we took over. The first thing we did was go all the way over to the Chinese main line. On the first dark night we left our trenches and crossed the paddies and slipped past their outposts and went up the mountainside and crawled into their trench line before they knew what was up. We shot up the place pretty good and blew two bunkers, or tried to, and got out of there fast with three live prisoners. One was a young officer. Those trenches had a sour smell. There was a lot of noise. The Chinese fired off yellow flares and red flares, and they hollered and sprayed pistol bullets with their burp guns and threw those wooden potato-masher grenades with the cast-iron heads. The air was damp and some of them didn’t go off. Their fuses weren’t very good. Their grenade fuses would sputter and go out. We were in and out of there before they knew what had hit them. It could happen to anybody. They were good soldiers and just happened to get caught by surprise, by sixteen boys from Fox Company. You think of Chinese soldiers as boiling all around you like fire ants, but once you get into their trench line, not even the Chinese army can put up a front wider than one man.
Neap said, “I don’t talk service no more,” but he didn’t hang up on me. Sometimes they do, it being so late at night when I call. Mostly they’re glad to hear from me and we’ll sit in the dark and talk service for a long time. I sit here in the dark at the library desk smoking my Camels and I think they sit in the dark too, on the edges of their beds with their bare feet on the floor.
I told Neap service was the only thing I did talk, and that I had the keys now and was talking service coast to coast every night. He said his house was in bad sh
ape. His wife had something wrong with her too. I didn’t care about that stuff. His wife wasn’t on the Fox Company Raid. I didn’t care whether his house was level or not but you like to be polite and I asked him if his house was sinking even all around. He said no, it was settling bad at the back, to where they couldn’t get through the back door, and the front was all lifted up in the air, to where they had to use a little stepladder to get up on their front porch.
You were supposed to get a week of meritorious R and R in Hong Kong if you brought in a live prisoner. We dragged three live prisoners all the way back from the Chinese main line of resistance and one was an officer and I never got one day of R and R in Hong Kong. Sergeant Zim was the only one who ever did get it that I know of. On the regular kind of R and R you went to Kyoto, which was all right, but it wasn’t meritorious R and R. I asked Neap if he knew of anyone besides Zim who got meritorious R and R in Hong Kong. He said he didn’t even know Zim got it.
He asked me if I was in a nut ward. I asked him how many guys he could name who went on the Fox Company Raid, not counting him and me and Zim. All he could come up with was Dill, Vick, Bogue, Ball, and Sipe. I gave him eight more names real fast, and the towns and states they came from. “Now who’s the nut? Who’s soft in the head now, Neap? Who knows more about the Fox Company Raid, you or me?” I didn’t say that to him because you try to be polite when you can. I didn’t have to say it. You could tell I had rattled him pretty good, the way I whipped off all those names.
He asked me how much disability money I was drawing down. I told him and he said it was a hell of a note that guys in the nut ward were drawing down more money than he was on Social Security. I told him Dill was dead, and Gott. He said yeah, but Dill was on Okinawa in 1945, in the other war, and was older than us. He told me a little story about Dill. I had heard it before. Dill was talking to the captain outside the command-post bunker, telling him about the time on Okinawa he had guided a flamethrower tank across open ground, to burn a Jap field gun out of a cave. Dill said, “They was a whole bunch of far come out of that thang in a hurry, Skipper.” Neap laughed over the phone. He said, “I still laugh every time I think about that. ‘They was a whoooole bunch of far come out of that thang in a hurry, Skipper.’ The way he said it, you know, Dill.”
Neap thought I must be having a lot of trouble tracking people down. I haven’t had any trouble to speak of. Except for me and Foy and Rust, who are far from home, and Sipe, who is a fugitive from justice, everybody else went back home and stayed there. They left home just that one time. Neap was surprised to hear that Sipe was on the lam, at his age. How fast could Sipe be moving these days, at his age? Neap said it was Dill and Sipe who grabbed those prisoners and that Zim had nothing to do with it. I told him Zim had something to do with getting us over there and back. He said yeah, Zim was all right, but he didn’t do no more in that stinking trench line than we did, and so how come he got meritorious R and R in Hong Kong and we didn’t? I couldn’t answer that question. I can’t find anyone who knows the answer to that. I told him I hadn’t called up Zim yet, over in Niles, Michigan. I wanted to have the squad pretty much accounted for before I made my report to him. Neap said, “Tell Zim I’m living on a mud flat.” I told him he was the last one I had to call up before Zim. I put Neap at the bottom of my list because I couldn’t remember much about him.
I can still see the faces of those boys who went on the Fox Company Raid, except that Neap’s face is not very clear to me. It drifts just out of range. He said he could feel his house going down while we were talking there on the phone. He said his house was going down fast now, and with him and his wife in it. It sounded to me like the Neaps were going all the way down.
He asked me how it was here. He wanted to know how it was in this place and I told him it wasn’t so bad. It’s not so bad here if you have the keys. For a long time I didn’t have the keys.
The Atlantic, May 1996
The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth
The editors are spiking most of my copy now, unread. One has described it as “hopeless crap.” My master’s degree means nothing to this pack of half-wits at the Blade. My job is hanging by a thread. But Frankie, an assistant city editor, is not such a bad boss and it was she who, out of the blue, gave me this choice assignment. I was startled. A last chance to make good?
Frankie said, “Get some bright quotes for a change, okay? Or make some up. Not so much of your dreary exposition. Not so many clauses. Get to the point at once. And keep it short for a change, okay? Now, buzz on out to the new Pecking Center on Warehouse Road, near the Loopdale Cutoff. Scoot. Take the brown Gremlin. But check the water in the radiator!”
An introductory word or two on the subject at hand will not be out of place before we come to the exciting work now going forward inside the new Hazel Perkins Jenkins Pecking Center at 75002 Warehouse Road, near the Loopdale Cutoff.
Readers of the Blade will recall an old theory/prophecy that went as follows: a hundred monkeys pecking away at random on a hundred typewriters will eventually reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare. The terms may be a little dated, what with the typewriters, and that modest round number, meant to suggest something like “many,” or even “infinite.” And one monkey, of course, would suffice, given enough time and an immortal monkey. In any case, the chance duplication would require the monkeys—let us say a brigade of monkeys—to peck out 38 excellent plays and some 160 poems of one metrical beat or another.
Is the musty old prophecy at last being fulfilled? We now have millions of monkeys pecking away more or less at random, day and night, on millions of personal computer keyboards. We have “word processors,” the Internet, e-mail, and “the information explosion.” Futurists at our leading universities tell us the day is at hand when, out of this maelstrom of words, a glorious literature must emerge, and indeed flourish. So far, however, as of today, Tuesday, September 14, late afternoon, the tally still seems to be fixed at:
Shakespeare: 198, Monkeys: 0
They plead for more time, for just one more extension. And then another. We are all familiar with their public-service announcements on television in which they make these irritating appeals.
Perhaps the goal has been set too high. Let us then leave the Bard for a moment and look at some even more disturbing numbers, from UNESCO’s ten-year world survey (1994–2004) of not very good plays written in blank verse, and not very good sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, elegies, and odes. The result:
Not very good blank verse plays, sonnets, etc.: 219,656
That figure was widely reported and has not been seriously disputed. Less well known—hardly known at all—is this tidbit, which was buried deep in the appendix of the thick UNESCO volume:
Not very good odes, blank verse plays, etc., composed by monkeys: 0
* * *
So again, nothing, no blip of art from random pecking, good or bad, nor even of proto-art, unless one counts the humming, haunting, and hypnotic page of z’s which turned up last year in Paris. Never much taken with Shakespeare themselves, the French await the appearance and reappearance of their own Francophone glories. They wait for art to happen. Their central clearing house has been established in Marseilles, at the international headquarters of Peckers Without Borders.
As for the recent American commotion over the DeWitt Sheets affair, it has largely and mercifully subsided. Young Sheets, the Blade reader will recall, is the Memphis tyke, four years of age and illiterate, who was said to have pecked out with his tiny tapered fingers, uncoached, on a personal computer, this complete line from one of the three weird sisters in the tragedy of Macbeth: “And, like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”
* * *
It was complete even to Shakespeare’s rather excessive punctuation. The Sheets woman, mother of DeWitt, later made a full, weeping confession to the fraud. Later still, alleging coercion, she recanted. She insists once again that DeWitt alone hit on the rat line. The woman is cur
rently reported to be traveling about the country in a small car with young Sheets. She presents him on stage in his little professor’s rig—gown, mortarboard—at state fairs and rock concerts, where he recites selected passages from time-honored soliloquies.
Now, without more ado, we come to the amazing new enterprise out on Warehouse Road, near the Loopdale Cutoff, where organized apepecking has finally arrived in our town—with bells on! In a Blade exclusive, I can take Blade readers inside the strange writing factory, to which I gained immediate entry with a flourish of my Blade press card. The “line chief,” a sort of superintendent, was favorably impressed by the card, stupefied even, by the legal-looking scrollwork and the sunburst seal, which seems to radiate some terrifying powers of the state. He granted me full floor privileges.
I spoke there on Tuesday with some of the monkeys. Row upon row, they were ranged about at their pecking stands, in a high, open, oblong room, something like a gymnasium. The first one I approached, actually a surly mandrill, said, “Beat it. Can’t you see I’m pecking?” The line chief came scuttling over to suggest that I put off all interviews until the mid-morning break.