Strange Wine

  X is for XAPHAN

  Demon of the second order. At the time of the rebellion of the angels, he proposed that the heavens be set on fire. For his perfidy he has forevermore stoked the furnaces of Hell. It is never good to have dissatisfied help working in one’s company. Xaphan is steadily overloading the boilers. Pay attention to stories about the melting polar ice cap. Xaphan is programming for Armageddon, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

  Y is for YGGDRASIL

  The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes through that empty pasture with a freeway.

  Z is for ZOMBIE

  Howard Hughes did not die in 1976, no matter what they tell you. Howard Hughes died in 1968. It was not a spectacular death, down in flames in the Spruce Goose or assassinated by his next-in-command or frightened to death by an insect that found its way into his eyrie. He choked to death on a McDonald’s greaseburger during dinner one night in July of 1968. But wealth has its privileges. Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic and the Walter Reed in Maryland sent their teams. But he was dead. DOA, Las Vegas. And he was buried. Not in 1976, in 1968. And Mama Legba, with whom Hughes had made a deal twenty years earlier in Haiti, came to the grave, and she raised him. The corporate entity is mightier than death. But the end is near: at this very moment, training in the Sierra Maestra, is an attack squad of Fidel Castro’s finest guerrillas. They know where Hughes went when he evacuated Nicaragua one week before the earthquake. (Zombies have precognitive faculties, did you know that?) And they know the 1976 death story is merely misdirection like all the other death rumors throughout the preceding years. They will seek him out and put him to final rest by the only means ever discovered for deanimating the walking dead. They will pour sand in his eyes, stuff a dead chicken in his mouth, and sew up the mouth with sailcloth twine. It would take a mission this important to get the fierce Cuban fighters to suffer all the ridicule: bayonet practice with dead chickens is terribly demeaning.

  INTRODUCTION TO: Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time

  Had this really weird, essentially ugly evening at the University of Rochester (New York) last April. Several persons of a genetically female persuasion had maneuvered the otherwise sane and exemplary U. of Rochester Women’s Caucus into an attempt to ban the film version of my story “A Boy and His Dog” on the grounds that it was violently sexist and antifemale.

  I’m not going to go into all that. It was a night that only reaffirmed my conviction that the mass of humans, male and female alike, are what the late Bruce Elliott called “genetic garbage.” Ugly statement. I won’t argue the point. All I wish is that you had been there. Kee-rist! Madness.

  It’s mentioned here solely to keynote the point that for a writer in Our Time, trying to write as honestly and evenhandedly as he or she can, it is impossible to write anything that doesn’t infuriate one pressure group or another, large or small. Even if one cares passionately and believes in the validity of some Movement, one can be, at best, only a fellow traveler; and that smacks of sycophancy. So either the writer avoids writing any damned thing that might affront, or gets past a kind of universal knee-jerk Liberalism and cops to the truth that we are all pretty much alike, male and female, black and white, young and old, ugly and lovely. Pretty much alike in our ownership of human emotions, needs, drives, failings. And tries to write about the human heart in conflict with itself as truly as one can.

  And if that means stomping on the feet of men or women belonging to this ethnic or cultural group or that…well, I’ve never thought for a moment I was going to die with the reputation of being one of America’s most beloved figures. It ain’t in the cards. I’d rather be honest than chic, anyhow. (He said, looking over his shoulder.)

  Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time

  “The arts serve purposes beyond themselves; the purposes of what they dramatize or represent at that remove from the flux which gives them order and meaning and value; and to deny these purposes is like asserting that the function of a handsaw is to hang above a bench and that to cut wood is to belittle it.”

  Richard P. Blackmur, A Critic’s Job of Work

  After the funeral, Mitch went to Dynamite’s. It was a singles’ bar. Vernon, the day-shift bartender, had Mitch’s stool reserved, waiting for him. “I figured you’d be in,” he said, mixing up a Tia Maria Cooler and passing it across the bar. “Sorry about Anne.” Mitch nodded and sipped off the top of the drink. He looked around Dynamite’s; it was too early in the day, even for a Friday; there wasn’t much action. A few dudes getting the best corners at the inlaid-tile and stained-glass bar, couples in the plush back booths stealing a few minutes before going home to their wives and husbands. It was only three o’clock and the secretaries didn’t start coming in till five thirty. Later, Dynamite’s would be pulsing with the chatter and occasional shriek of laughter, the chatting-up and the smell of hot bodies circling each other for the kill. The traditional mating ritual of the singles’ bar scene.

  He saw one girl at a tiny deuce, way at the rear, beside the glass-fronted booth where the d.j. played his disco rock all night, every night. But she was swathed in shadow, and he wasn’t up to hustling anybody at the moment, anyhow. But he marked her in his mind for later.

  He sipped at the Cooler, just thinking about Anne, until a space salesman from the Enquirer, whom he knew by first name but not by last, plopped himself onto the next stool and started laying a commiseration trip on him about Anne. He wanted to turn to the guy and simply say, “Look, fuck off, will you; she was just a Friday night pickup who hung on a little longer than most of them; so stop busting my chops and get lost.” But he didn’t. He listened to the bullshit as long as he could, then he excused himself and took what was left of the Cooler, and a double Cutty-&-water, and trudged back to a booth. He sat there in the semidarkness trying to figure out why Anne had killed herself, and couldn’t get a handle on the question.

  He tried to remember exactly what she had looked like, but all he could bring into focus was the honey-colored hair and her height. The special smile was gone. The tilt of the head and the hand movement when she was annoyed…gone. The exact timbre of her voice…gone. All of it was gone, and he knew he should be upset about it, but he wasn’t.

  He hadn’t loved her; had, in fact, been ready to dump her for that BOAC hostess. But she had left a note pledging her undying love, and he knew he ought to feel some deep responsibility for her death.

  But he didn’t.

  What it was all about, dammit, was not being lonely. It was all about getting as much as one could, as best as one could, from as many different places as one could, without having to be alone, without having to be unhappy, without having them sink their fangs in too deeply.

  That, dammit, was what it was all about.

  He thought about the crap a libber had laid on him in this very bar only a week ago. He had been chatting-up a girl who worked for a surety underwriters firm, letting her bore him with a lot of crap about contract bonds, probate, temporary restraining orders and suchlike nonsense, but never dropping his gaze from those incredible green eyes, when Anne had gotten pissed-off and come over to suggest they leave.

  He had been abrupt with her. Rude, if he wanted to be honest with himself, and had told her to go back and sit down till he was ready. The libber on the next stool had laid into him, whipping endless jingoism on him, telling him what a shithead he was.

  “Lady, if you don’t like the way the system works, why not go find a good clinic where they’ll graft a dork on you, and then you won’t have to bother people who’re minding their own business.”

  The bar had given him a standing ovation.

  The Cutty tasted like sawdust. The air in the bar smelled like mildew. His body didn’t fit. He turned this way and that, trying to find a comfortable posi
tion. Why the hell did he feel lousy? Anne, that was why. But he wasn’t responsible. She’d known it was frolic, nothing more than frolic. She’d known that from the moment they’d met. She hadn’t been fresh to these bars, she was a swinger, what was all the sturm und drang about! But he felt like shit, and that was the bottom line.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” the girl said.

  Mitch looked up. It seemed to be the girl from the deuce in the rear.

  She was incredible. Cheekbones like cut crystal; a full lower lip. Honey hair…again. Tall, willowy, with a good chest and fine legs. “Sure. Sit down.”

  She sat and pushed a double Cutty-&-water at him. “The bartender told me what you were drinking.”

  Four hours later–and he still hadn’t learned her name–she got around to suggesting they go back to her place. He followed her out of the bar, and she hailed a cab. In the back seat he looked at her, lights flickering on and off in her blue eyes as the street lamps whizzed past, and he said, “It’s nice to meet a girl who doesn’t waste time.”

  “I gather you’ve been picked up before,” she replied. “But then, you’re a very nice-looking man.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  At her apartment in the East Fifties, they had a few more drinks; the usual preparatory ritual. Mitch was starting to feel it, getting a little wobbly. He refused a refill. He wanted to be able to perform. He knew the rules. Get it up or get the hell out.

  So they went into the bedroom.

  He stopped and stared at the set-up. She had it hung with white, sheer hangings, tulle perhaps, some kind of very fine netting. White walls, white ceiling, white carpet so thick and deep he lost his ankles in it. And an enormous circular bed, covered with white fur.

  “Polar bear,” he said, laughing a little drunkenly.

  “The color of loneliness,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, forget it,” she said, and began to undress him.

  She helped him lie down, and he stared at her as she took off her clothes. Her body was pale and filled with light; she was an ice maiden from a far magical land. He felt himself getting hard.

  Then she came to him.

  When he awoke, she was standing at the other side of the room, watching him. Her eyes were no longer a lovely blue. They were dark and filled with smoke. He felt…

  He felt…awful. Uncomfortable, filled with vague terrors and a limitless desperation. He felt…lonely.

  “You don’t hold nearly as much as I thought,” she said.

  He sat up, tried to get out of the bed, the sea of white, and could not. He lay back and watched her.

  Finally, after a time of silence, she said, “Get up and get dressed and get out of here.”

  He did it, with difficulty, and as he dressed, sluggishly and with the loneliness in him growing, choking his mind and physically causing him to tremble, she told him things he did not want to know.

  About the loneliness of people that makes them do things they hate the next day. About the sickness to which people are heir, the sickness of being without anyone who truly cares. About the predators who smell out such victims and use them and, when they go, leave them emptier than when they first picked up the scent. And about herself, the vessel that contained the loneliness like smoke, waiting only for empty containers such as Mitch to decant a little of the poison, waiting only to return some of the pain for pain given.

  What she was, where she came from, what dark land had given her birth, he did not know and would not ask. But when he stumbled to the door, and she opened it for him, the smile on her lips frightened him more than anything in his life.

  “Don’t feel neglected, baby,” she said. “There are others like you. You’ll run into them. Maybe you can start a club.”

  He didn’t know what to say; he wanted to run, but he knew she had spread fog across his soul and he knew if he walked out the door he was never going to reclaim his feeling of self-satisfaction. He had to make one last attempt…

  “Help me…please, I feel so–so–”

  “I know how you feel, baby,” she said, moving him through the door. “Now you know how they feel.”

  And she closed the door behind him. Very softly.

  Very firmly.

  INTRODUCTION TO: Emissary from Hamelin

  Like “Killing Bernstein,” earlier in this series of tiny fables, there is nothing deep or profound to say about it beyond what the story says for itself. As Mark Rothko put it: “Silence is so accurate.”

  Emissary from Hamelin

  “Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered. Proust in Venice, Matisse’s bird-cages overlooking the flower market of Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: that is civilization, and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of combining with the Past. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether. “The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.”

  Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

  July 22nd, 2076…

  Exclusive to the Going Nowhere News Service…

  Mike Strathearn reporting…

  My second wife once told me I’d write if I were strapped into a straitjacket in the deepest, moldiest dungeon cell of the most remote lunatic asylum in the world. She said I’d probably write news releases on the insides of my cheeks with my wet tongue-tip. She’s probably right, wherever she is. I’m a compulsive. Stranded on the most remote peak of K2 (Mt. Godwin-Austen or Dapsang, 8,611 meters, second highest mountain in the world: in the Himalayas, the Karakorams), I would fold the dispatches in the shape of a glider and skim them off the peak in hopes a Sherpa herdsman or a yeti or someone would find them. Marooned on a desert island, I would use notes in bottles. No one has ever figured out how someone marooned on a desert island came up with bottles to cast into the sea, but if there weren’t a convenient case of empty liquor bottles already there, I’d slip the dispatches into the mouths of dolphins, hoping they had a nice sense of direction. I was born in 2014, little more than a decade after the turn of the century, which makes me sixty-two now, and my mother once ventured that the difficulty she’d had giving birth to me was probably due to my having written all over the walls of her womb. I had a pretty happy childhood and by the time I was…

  I’m rambling.

  That’s lousy reportage.

  I’ve always despised personal journalism. I try to be dead-on factual. But there isn’t much to do here, and I have this damnable need to communicate!

  I’ll try to keep to the subject.

  The child. That kid. The emissary from Hamelin.

  I got the word he wanted to meet me from the night desk. They called me at home and said, “There’s a kid says he’s got the biggest story in the history of the world, says he’ll only give it to you.”

  I stared at the face of the guy in the phone. It was a new guy from the Bombay office, wearing a lot of pancake makeup and glitter on his eyelids. I didn’t know him except by sight, and I confess I didn’t like him. I guess I didn’t much like any of the new breed of reporters. Back when I was a kid, back around ’27 and ’28, I was greatly impressed by all the wacky film comedies of the nineteen thirties, the ones that took place in the old-style newspaper offices. Wisecracking guys and gals getting the beat on all the other papers, phoning in their leads on phones that just talked, didn’t have holo or even sight. Boy, what times those must have been! “Hello, Sharkey? This’s Smoke Farnum, hold the presses! I’ve got a doozy! Gimme rewrite. Hello, rewrite, take a lead for the dead dog final…”

  I’m rambling again.


  That kid. Yeah, I got to stick to telling about that kid.

  Well, I looked at this yo-yo from Bombay, and I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Glitterlids just stared at me like he wanted to buzz me off, and finally he said, “The cops’ve got a kid up on a power wand tower out in Westwood. They don’t know how he got up there, and they don’t much give a damn; but they can’t get him down.”

  “Why not?”

  “Says he wants to talk to Strathearn of the Newsservice.”

  “I asked you why not?”

  “Because every time they send up a cop with a flitterpak on, the unit bypasses fail-safe and the cop falls on his ass, that’s why not!”

  “And what’s all this about him having a story?”

  “Look, Strathearn,” he said, “what the hell am I supposed to be, your grapevine? I’ve got other things to do; stop annoying me; either take the call or don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can chew mud!” And he buzzed me off before I could ask him why the kid wanted to talk to me and nobody else.

  I floated there for a while, just revolving and thinking nothing in particular, just resting. I was half drunk to begin with, and not particularly interested in going out to cover some dumb kid up on a wand. But the more I thought about it, the more curious I got about him, and I must admit my ego was massaged thinking the kid wanted to talk to me and nobody else. It reminded me of the nineteen twenties, when Haldeman or Manson or Pretty Boy Floyd, one of those mobsters, gave himself up to Walter Winchell. Hold everything, Sharkey, I thought. Stop the presses! I got a five-star final for you. Banner headline! Eighty-point Railroad Gothic! Crazed killer kid on a wand with the biggest story in the world!