Of a Fire on the Moon

  CHAPTER 3

  A Burial by the Sea

  The strain of the summer did not abate. He went back to Houston in the middle of August to see the astronauts at a press conference when they came out of quarantine, and they looked astonishingly the same as they had in the last conference eleven days before they left for the moon. He had long held the theory that experts were men who had the least sensitivity to their subject and so experienced the smallest difficulty in memorizing a huge number of facts concerning their topic. He had only to think of some of the sports writers, literary critics and pornographers he had known, to be confirmed in his thesis. Now he wondered if that was why the astronauts were the first experts in walking on the moon.

  Back in New York next evening, he was again a student of TV as he watched the dinner party President Nixon gave for the crew of Apollo 11 and several thousand NASA men, contractors and guests.

  When Nixon got up to speak, Aquarius’ host switched on a projector loaded with a color film of a boy and girl making love. But the television set was made to serve as the screen. Soon a vagina fluttered butterfly wings over the nose and mouth of the speaker. The laughter that came up from the toils and locks of the company’s hard-hearted plumbing was close to apocalyptic. With astonishment Aquarius found himself laughing as hard as the rest. Jokes at the expense of Nixon usually bored him. If Aquarius thought Nixon’s most striking effect upon America was as a blood-letter who would reduce all passions, Aquarius was on the other hand not so certain that America had not needed a leech for its fever. From across a political divide, he admired what he had come to decide was Nixon’s grasp on political genius—to be so unpopular and yet successful—that was genius! So Aquarius was bored with liberals who thought politics was equal to loathing Nixon. But the sight of that young and wide-open pussy fluttering back and forth over the dish antenna of Richard Nixon’s endlessly inquiring face touched off some explosion of frustrations in all of them, battered, bewildered, dislocated New Yorkers roaring now like college kids doubly in love with themselves for the success of the prank.

  Back in Provincetown, however, marriages were breaking up as fast as tires blowing in a long race. The most astonishing couples—a man and woman, for example, who had been married unhappily and most tenaciously for twenty years—were breaking up. He counted at least five such surprising dissolutions where one, or at most two, might be par for a warm season. He didn’t know if all those marriages had ended because the principals felt ridiculous before the serious actions of men in other places this summer, or whether the marriages had smashed on the outraged waves of some unmeasurable radiation from the roiled invisible waters of Tranquility Base.

  As if answer to the moon landing, the Woodstock Music Festival came and went, and four hundred thousand children sat in the rain for two days and nights and listened to rock music, the electronic amplifications elevating the nerves beneath the fingernails of the musicians to the Holy of Holies; Sharon Tate, three friends, and an employee, plus her unborn baby seven months in the womb, were murdered in a guttering of blood all over the walls of her jewel-box of a dwelling in the whimpering Hollywood hills. He felt no shock in further weeks to come when Manson and his family were arrested, for like many novelists Aquarius had a few stray powers of divination, and had projected a novel two years before about a gang of illumined and drug-accelerated American guerrillas who lived in the wilds of a dune or a range and descended on Provincetown to kill. A year later, parts of four girls had been found in a common grave in Truro eight miles away. They would bring to trial a young man from the town who was steeped by report in no modest depths of witchcraft. Yes, drugs to expand consciousness were detonating the banks of fires burning beneath these hundreds of years, and Provincetown was country for witches: here the Pilgrims had landed, here first in the weeks before they moved to Plymouth, Provincetown was the beginning of America for Americans, an immense quadrangle of motel to prove it now on the ground where the Pilgrims first sailed around the point, anchored, and rowed an explorer’s boat to shore.

  II

  His friends, the Bankos, buried a car as Labor Day approached. They had purchased a heap for the summer, purchased it with a request of the salesman that he sell them a piece of well-used automobile which would manage to survive through August and into the first weeks of September, but it died before Labor Day was on them, bearings gone, valves gone, oil pan cracked, and broken crankshaft—it was gone. Something in the mood of the summer brought every neighbor in for the burial. The sculptor Jack Kearney became the master of the rites, and poets living near became sacramental officers of the day. Friends came with drinks, while Harold McGinn, local contractor with bulldozer and earth digger, was there to scoop a hole six feet by eight feet by eight feet deep. A rope was put up to hold the neighbors and children from cavorting too near the abyss. And the car, a two-tone sedan of apricot and cream of a long-gone year with mourns of chromium now pitted by salt air and eight years of sun, such faded vehicle, was pushed back by the pallbearers, Aquarius among them, to land with its rear bumper, trunk and differential in the hole and its hood to the sky. The bulldozer leaned it up to a near vertical, and the pallbearers shoveled in earth and tamped sand at the base of the hole. Children ate cake and candy. A boy dressed in the black robes of a Byzantine priest read somber verses from Virgil, the Latin passing like a wash of coagulants over the car still settling in its half-buried grave, and Heaton Vorse in a cape and long-brimmed loose-hinged hat read from the Song of Solomon, sounds of mirth going up as the lines fell like hoops on the promontories of the apricot and cream Ford.

  I compare you, my love, to a mare of Pharoah’s chariots.

  Your cheeks are comely with ornaments,

  Your neck with strings of jewels.

  Vorse was the son of Mary Heaton Vorse, a lady radical who had participated in such events as the Paterson strike now fifty years gone, and Heaton Vorse had a long Yankee nose which virtually touched his plank of a chin. He read to the Ford:

  Your navel is a rounded bowl,

  That never lacks mixed wine.

  Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies.

  Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.

  Your neck is like an ivory tower.

  Your eyes are pools in Heshbon.

  The crowd applauded, and Aquarius felt the proper warmth a funeral should evoke, a sorrow in the pit of merriment and the humor of the very sad—all these Provincetown neighbors out to applaud the burial of an old oil-soaked beast, and the Bankos circulated beer while children ran around the edge of the event, impatient for the ceremony to cease so that they might begin to paint the half of the auto protruding from earth. A child reached in through the open window and turned a switch. The windshield wipers went on in a flick. “My God, it’s not dead yet,” said a voice. But as if in a throe of its last effluents, the washers began to spurt a final lymph.

  Eddie Bonetti read his poem, “Duarte Motors giveth, and terminal craftsmanship taketh away.” Bonetti had worked all summer on a truck, finding the pieces he needed in the town dump, had worried over the Chevrolet manual for pickup trucks of the year of his buy the way a medical student in first-year anatomy goes through strings of flesh which might be nerves, Bonetti had lived with the mysteries of a working transmission through all of this summer, a dungeon of grease by evening to the groans of his pale blond Missouri wife, and Eddie read in his deep cockeyed booming voice, eloquent as the wind which announces a shift in the omens, played with his poetic humors, which moved ponderous phrases through turns of silver by the shift of weight, and his poem continued, honoring this buried friend, conceived in cynicism and sold in exhortation on the floor of Duarte Motors, agent of promises too huge for its fealty to the domains of work, too large for its embarkation back into the particulars of the soil. It was a heroic poem for the occasion (bound to have been printed if it had not been lost) and Aquarius, finding himself drunk unexpectedly on this afternoon of curious frolic,
unable for once to resist the noise and calls of the last of summer and the ferments of the town, had come wandering out of his studio to attend half aghast, half sympathetic, to the idiocies of his friends—they would chop up a lawn mower to serve a salad.

  The last of the poets, Walter Howard, was reading Numbers 16.

  But if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up, with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.

  The children were out with brushes and paints, drawing figures, figure-drippings, and inchoate totems on the vertical roof of the car, and Kearney was limning the exposed bottom of the crankcase and chassis with lights of green luminescent pigment in slashes through the grease, hints of war paint—slowly the radiant ribbings of an insert’s belly emerged from the dark and open works.

  And as he finished speaking all these words, the ground under them split asunder and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their households. And all the men that belonged to Korah and all their goods.

  Now the children were slinging paint through the open windows onto the vinyl of an old upholstery. Aquarius watched his wife at the other end of the lawn and knew again as he had known each day of this summer that their marriage was over. Something had touched the moon and she would be never the same. The sense of love as a balm for the vacuums of the day was departed from them—they were sealed from one another, a run of seven years was done, and his heart throbbed like a bruise in the thigh.

  So he mourned the hour as well as any man would when his pains were not small, even mourned for the beast who cried out in Banko’s half-burned Ford, mourned him like the skull of poor Yorick, and came back often in the next day and the next to watch Kearney the sculptor work with his torch and goggles to weld bumpers and angles of chromium into mandibles and legs while insect’s antennae reached up in a mute’s catalepsy to the sky. And they put floodlights at the base. The funeral had ended in an artifact for the summer of the moon in the East End of Provincetown not a hundred feet off the street which runs around the bay, not a half-mile in from the edge of town, Metamorphosis, titled by Kearney, a massive Yorick of half a Ford standing twelve feet high, first machine to die with burial in the land of the Pilgrims and the cod.

  III

  And in those days, men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die and death will fly from them.

  That was from Revelations 8:7 and gives a clue to Aquarius’ thoughts at the funeral. It was a day for more than a little to seek to die, for his work had him studying colonizations on the moon, conversion of oxygen from moon rocks, and cities of moon-based energy derived from radiations of the sun. Moon vegetables huge in size would grow in the reduced gravity of the field, the plants to thrive in hydroponic waters (also extracted from moon rocks) while algae proliferated in gardens of new-made atmosphere beneath a dome. The effort of these colonies would offer no less than the cheap manufacture on the moon vacuum of products of mass consciousness—electronics, communications, pharmaceuticals, yes, Sartre might be right and consciousness the conversion of Being to Nothingness, yes, the tools of the future mind seemed to be forged best in a vacuum—soon they would be orbiting rocket trains of cancer patients to take the cure in space, for the growth of malignancy was slowed apparently by radiation in weightless condition. Pain appeared at the thought of a new species of men born in lunar gravity, bodies grown in lunar gravity—what form would appear to their figures, pilot men of an electrical and interplanetary world which could speak across the ages of a failure of human potential, a smashing of mood, some loss of that other means of communication which once had lived in the carnal grasp of the roots of that earlier human so much closer to an animal in the ecological scheme, early human who had survived pregnancy, birth, first-year diseases, syphilis, loss of teeth—what a strength and substance to that earlier and lost human race Aquarius brooded as the dirt flew in on the dead Ford, what a nice balance of food consumed and material used, equilibrium of lives, and deaths, and wastes in fair balance, as opposed to the oncoming world of parallel colostomies draining into the same main line, and the air of earth cities become carbon monoxide and lead, sulphur dioxide and ash, nitrogen oxide and other particulates of the noxious, earth staggering with sewages which did not rot, synthetics, aluminums, oils and pesticides, fertilizers, detergents and nuclear spews, acids and plastics and salt in the soil, cakes of suffocation in the rivers, hazes of nitrogen effluent to cut off the light from the sky, a burgeoning of artificials to addict the crops, another year of pollutions to choke the planet. And the population ready to double in four decades, no, less. One knew with the worst sense of bottoms disgorging into bottomless bottoms that if the military-industrial establishment was beginning to accept the idea that funds might be taken eventually from them and given over to the solution (or the barest hope of a solution!) to the critical symptoms of ecology, the nauseas of pollution, then the statistics presented to their private councils must have been incredible indeed. Was the end of the world at hand? Was that the message they now received? 10, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto!—we might be safer far on the moons of Jupiter. What did we know of what we did? Why the very organs of disease which once would kill a man were now delivered by surgeons to the womb of the open day, organs of disease reborn for an instant in a half-life, yes, cancer organs removed probably became the cancer communicants of ether yet unglimpsed.

  Only a generation ago, they would have thought it was the essence of an insane heart to personify an organ, attribute a soul to the part, believe that a cancer of liver or cancer of lung was not extinguished so soon as its malignancy was removed. It would have been considered the core of psychosis to speak of the postoperative cancer communicants of the organ removed. Yet we were infants who tickled the navel of the moon while suffocating in the loop of our diaper. A line from a poem of Hemingway burned across the funeral festivities of the day.

  In the next war

  we shall bury the dead in cellophane

  The host shall come packaged

  in cellophane.

  He broke up with his wife on Labor Day night and knew they would not be together for many a month, many a year, maybe forever. In the morning, after a night of no sleep, he was on a plane to Houston and the sifting of haystacks of technological fact for the gleam of a needle or a clue. And no computer named HAYSTAQ to serve as horse.

  IV

  It was a long September. He went back and forth between Houston and the mournful memories of the land of the Pilgrims and the cod. Pisces was away, and traveling. In the mend of Indian summer with the crowds gone and the rose-hip bushes in bloom on the dunes, their flowers artful as violet in a pearl, he bought a Land Rover for consolation and took long rides through lands of sand back of town, a corner of Sahara. In the bay, the flats at low tide heard the singing of the clams—dreams of glory at the majesty of oceans emerged in a sigh, a whistle, one could not quite hear the buried song of the clam. And the light dazzled across mirrors of inch-deep water and luminosities of glistening sand—he could almost have packed the literary equipment in for one good year of oil and gesso ground.

  There were contracts however. Prose was never so much prose as when constructed with obligation. The more he visited Houston, the more he knew with what unhappiness is not automatic to tell that he might have blundered in accepting the hardest story of them all, for it was a sex-stripped mystery of machines which might have a mind, and mysterious men who managed to live like machines, and more than once in airplanes, high enough above the clouds to give a hint of other worlds in the gatherings and demarcations of airy attenuated farewell, he came to think again, as he had brooded again and again, on that simple conception of God as an embattled vision which had terrified him from the hour he first encountered the thought around one of the bends of marijuana fifteen years ago. Every other one of his notions had followed from that, for if God were a vision of existenc
e at war with other visions in the universe, and we were the instruments of His endeavor just so much as the conflicting cells of our body were the imperfect instrument of our own will, then what now was the condition of God? Was He trapped in the wound of nature, severed from our existence as completely as the once exquisite balances of the shattered ecology? had that vision He wished to carry across the universe depended altogether upon human mind and flesh in sensuous communication with nature? had radio-by-machine been the cancer of communication? had the savage lived in a set of communions with the invisible messages of nature which we had pulverized with our amplifiers? These days Aquarius carried Frazer’s Golden Bough on long trips by plane.