Well, the name’s Lightcap. Henry H. Lightcap.
Who are you?
What?
Who are you? He stared at me.
I get it. It’s a game. Okay, who am I?
Who are you?
I looked around: the other pairs were doing the same, one asking Who are you? over and over, the other responding in therapeutic manner. Only the session leader, a little hairy man from Topanga Canyon, California, was not taking direct part in the game. He lounged in a corner of the room supervising, a warm loving smile on his terribly sun-baked face. Too many years spent staring into the sun, I suppose, trying to dissolve the old subject-object dichotomy that Descartes (they say) imposed on us. It’s a “personal universe”; every window really a mirror. (They say.) We are a bunch of windowless monads—nomads?—groping for return to the womb of total nullity. But let’s be open-minded about this.
Near the leader, leaning on the wall, was a bundle of foam-rubber bats; later these people would pound one another with foam rubber, venting their frustrations in harmless futility. What good is that? Impotence breeds fury.
But the leader looked pleased. Since there were eighteen customers (patients? clients? acolytes?) in the group, he’d just pocketed eighteen times $25—$450 in legal tender. Not bad for one evening’s work. Enough to pay for his first skin-cancer treatment. Bald-headed bushy-bearded fat-bellied little guru, no wonder he looked upon us with such warm regard. WE ARE ALL ONE, his T-shirt said. That’s a filthy lie, I thought, an insult to human potential.
Who are you? my partner kept chanting.
Why? I said. (He was getting annoyed. My answers were wrong. I saw tension at the corners of his mouth.) Why who?
Who are you?
Who! I hooted like an owl. Who, who!
Who—(A tic in his left eyelid.)
Who who who!
Fisheyes hesitated. He blinked several times. Who, he began again—
The group leader interrupted. Okay people, time to switch. Now let your partner ask the Big Question. He checked his watch.
My opposite number relaxed. This part he liked. Hang loose, his manner said, keep cool and floppy-necked like a quiche eater in a Naropa fern bar.
Okay, I says, so who are you?
He sighed, closing his large moist eyes. Who am I, he began, announcing not a question but an overture. I am a mote in a sunlit pool, he said. I am a photon of conscious light waltzing with electrons in the blue of the ether. He smiled.
That’s a lie, I said. Who are you?
Eyes closed, head tilted back, smiling with euphoria, he went on. I am a neutron in a cloud chamber, twinkling from quantum to quantum. I am a dancing Wu Li master floating through the Universal Mind.
I waited. His mouth opened then closed as I said, You’re lying. You’re a fish-faced grouper faking his way through a group encounter ripoff. You’ve been robbed of twenty-five dollars.
The itchy little tic reappeared in his left eyelid. Who am I, he sighed again, working hard to keep his cool lukewarm. I am a molecule of organic energy on the ocean of eternity, finite but unbounded.
There’s a piece of shit on your lower lip.
He frowned, reaching toward his mouth. Then stopped. Who am I, he chanted. I’m an attorney named Willis Butz—I mean, no, I’m, I’m nothing and I am everything, I am you and you are we and we are all one.
One what?
What?
One what?
He stopped. He opened his eyes. He glared at me. Who the hell are you, you bastard, and how’d you get in here?
I left. But not before recovering Elaine’s twenty-five dollars from the Head Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Give me my money back, I muttered in his ear, while the others were flailing backsides with their soft limp bats, or I’ll make an ugly scene. The guru frowned, mumbling something about no refunds. I’ll tear this place apart, I said. He glanced around, smiling and nodding at the lambs who were watching us, then invited me to step outside. Expecting a karate attack, I followed cautiously. In the hallway he said, Now what’s your problem?
Just give me back my twenty-five dollars.
You’re a sick man, he said gently. You need help.
Give back that money, I said, or you’ll need help. I mean medical help. I was bluffing, of course, but stood eight inches taller and outweighed him by forty pounds. In the actual world, as opposed to the world of dancing Wu Li masters, bulk is important. You’re running a nasty little racket here, I added, and you better watch out. This is Tucson, Arizona. We got high ethical standards here.
I do a lot for these people, he said sweetly. That’s why they keep coming back.
If you really helped them they wouldn’t have to come back. They’re a bunch of aging adolescents and you’re keeping them that way.
He looked up at me with soft empathic eyes, that cooked-brown, fried and refried face. Do you realize that you are going through a midlife crisis?
The whole world is going through a midlife crisis. I held out my hand. The twenty-five.
The world is an illusion.
I know. But it’s the only one we got. The money, please.
He returned my money. You shit, he said over his shoulder as he walked away.
I didn’t argue. Let every man be his own guru, every lady her own gurette. Such is the latest holy word from Swami-Roshi-Yogi-Rambanana Bung.
Laughing all the way to the Dirty Shame Saloon where I found myself among friends—Lacey, Arriaga and Harrington. I want to buy a drink, I said, for every man in the house, if any. When Elaine’s twenty-five dollars was gone I drove home at a slow, safe, sedated pace, unnoticed by the “authorities,” parked under the carport, threw up in the driveway, crept into the house on hands and knees as a brain-retreaded pilgrim should and fumbled around for the light switch. I knew it was somewhere on the wall. But where was the wall?
The lights blazed on.
She glared at me. Her turn now. You bastard! she said. (That word again.) And started to cry. It took half an hour of my wormiest cajolery before I could wrap her in my lawful loving conjugal arms, thirty minutes more until we became one flesh.
But what sweet succulent soothing flesh.
Elaine.
III
Actually I’m thinking of Melanie again. And the monogamy problem. When I stepped from her shower, toweling my wet head, dripping over her bathroom rug, she was waiting for me on the toilet seat, head high to my groin. At once she took my flaccid tool in her mouth and sucked on it thoughtfully, like a child with lollipop. Melanie, wait a minute—But she knew what she was doing, she knew the way to a man’s heart. I did not love her, as such sentiments are commonly understood, but I sure was fond of her. And growing fonder by the moment. I’ve never met a nymphomaniac I didn’t like.
She drew back her head and gazed with pride at what she had done. Swollen, upright, proud. I stepped on the bathroom scale. We looked at the pointer. My God Melanie I just gained five pounds.
We will now have a brief intromission.
IV
I gnaw my crust, inhale the fumes from an empty bottle. She loved me, did she not? Elaine, I mean. Nearly three years together, through the better and the worse. It seemed much longer. And now, suddenly, she is gone. I feel her absence as a tangible, living, palpable presence. But when I look—she is not here. Where she was is nothing. The void. The intense inane. A psychic amputation.
Henry raises his dark head, sees himself reflected in the black night glass of the window. Deux Henris! A homely man with coarse black oily hair, buzzard’s beak, jaw like a two-by-four. He grins his evil wolfish grin. Nobody so wicked in appearance could feel such pain, right? Stands to reason. But the face fades out, obliterated by ennui, leaving the empty moronic grin which fades in turn.
He howls softly like a dog and beats his forepaws on the floor. That helps a little. Not really. There is no remedy. O Death thou comest when I had thee least in mind. Winter in the heart. Antarctica in my soul.
He senses within his head an aval
anche of whiskey-sodden brain cells losing their purchase on stability, sliding like a mudbank into the landfill of his cerebellum. Whole tiers and galleries of corrupted gray matter fall with a CRASH! into the sinkhole of his spirit.
He thinks of the cheap paneling above the urinal in a bikers’ bar on Speedway. On that wall where graffiti are inscribed with knife blades, some condemned soul in the fraternity of the damned had written
No chance
No hope
No escape
So what. What of it. Keep sliding, let it fall, somewhere down in here we’ll hit bottom, reach bedrock and bottom out. And then, like this honest loaf in my hand, we’ll rise again. Villon says,
Mort, j’appelle de ta rigueur…
Death, I challenge you to do your worst, you who ravished my mistress, stole her from me and will not be satisfied until you have me too in your clutches. I challenge you to do your worst. You’re called. Let’s see your hand.
According to the latest microbe biologists my body is really nothing but a megalopolis of unicellular organisms. According to the theories of the chief witch doctors of the new physics (now about eighty-five years old) we and our sweethearts, our women, our children, our friends, our pet dogs, are “really” nothing “but” a whirligig of swarming subatomic events, ephemeral as mayflies on a breezy day in spring.
Is that so. You don’t say.
Ignore them. They haven’t got Henry Lightcap in a circuitron or under their electron microscopes yet—and they never will. The world is bigger than those metaphysical black-hole sphincters will ever understand. One man—with a woman in his arms—outweighs their whole slimy universe of nuclear ectoplasm, graph-paper abstractions and Day-Glo polka-dot electric Kool-Aid scientific pointillism.
That’s what I think and my name is Henry Lightcap. Henry H. Lightcap. Henry Holyoak Lightcap, by Christ and by damn.
Jesus, this bottle is empty. My bread is cold. There is no woman in my arms. Take another piece of bread, Henry, and think of something. Of what? Of something. Think of—
Alicia. Melody. Gertrude. The prettiest girl I ever knew was named Gertrude Dieffendeffer. The second prettiest was Eleanor Barff. Or how about—Caroline? Lola? Birgit? Candace? Demerol? Percodan? One thinks of heavy sedation at a time like this. .357? A .44 Magnum? Should go gunning for Dr. and Mrs. Schmuck. Load the old twelve-gauge, one barrel for each. A crime of passion. No decent jury would convict. They’d be weeping throughout the public defender’s summation. Manslaughter, at worst. Maybe negligent homicide. Get my picture in the papers. Be a hero, swamped with hand-penned letters from lovesick females. Phone ringing like a burglar alarm with calls from ladies sick for love.
It’s no help. Think, Henry, think.
He grins the grin. Keels forward on his face, thinking: I’ve got to see Will. Got to get to Will’s. There just hain’t no alternative. But God—three fucking thousand five hundred fucking miles east of the Santa Cruz River. Too far. So late.
Will, why ain’t you here.
V
Where am I now? (Panic.)
Black in here as a witch’s womb.
He rises to hands and knees, feels along wall for light switch. Click. No light. (Terror.) Maybe I’m dead. Dark as a tomb in here. Try switch again. Still no light. That’s right, the bulb, never did change that bulb. My God for a minute I thought I’d gone blind. Or died. But where am I anyway? Which bulb? Last time I looked I was in the kitchen eating bread by the light of the oven, remembering Melanie, recalling Kathleen, missing Elaine.
He listens. The house seems strangely quiet. Then remembers—the Frigidaire is dead. Shot in the bowels and left for junk. He gropes forward, feels the picture-window draperies in his hands and pulls, hauling himself to his feet. The drapes come down and he falls with them, stumbling over one of Elaine’s footstools, end tables, table lamps, coffee tables, piano benches, some goddamned thing. On his knees again.
Good sweet Christ, he prays.
But has succeeded at least in admitting light to the room. Through the window he sees a multitude of lights—a city—and over the eastern mountains the eerie red glow of one more cloudless dawn. A false dawn? Perhaps. But where? What city? What world is this?
“Elaine,” I call. No answer. “Elaine?”
At once the sick despair rises in my veins like an injection of some lethal drug. Like an overdose of lithium. To hell with that. I’ll not yield this time. It’s a new day a-dawning. It’s the new Henry Lightcap here on hands and knees, tongue hanging out like a Technicolored necktie and we’re fighting it this time, boy, I tell you boy no little woman is a-gonna keep Henry Lightcap down for long. Not Henry H. Lightcap.
Lightcap rising with the morn. I hear a cactus wren chatter outside in the cholla thickets, the sharp clear whistle of a curvebill thrasher, the lonesome peep of a phainopepla, the true song of a cardinal or maybe it’s a mockingbird. And my name is Ivan Ilyich, by God, and I’m crawling up from the dead. Lazarus returns. This here is Lightcap speaking, men, and it takes more than a woman, more than half a quart of Wild Turkey, more than another routine marital disaster, more than one more standard moral catastrophe, to keep old Henry down.
I stand up on my two feet like a man.
Something cold hangs from my open fly, limp, long, lonely as a snake. I tuck it in and zip up. Let us have—music! Coffee! Sausage and eggs! Time for the quick emotional lift, then the caffeine, then the basic American grease fix.
A gray light fills the room, dim but good enough to see by. Music first. I sit on the shaky bench before our old-time cabinet grand and stare at the keys. Eighty-eight keys that open the door to a nicer world than this. I lift my hands, straighten my back, and hammer out—fortissimo—five great six-digit Lightcapian chords: C minor, F-sharp minor, G major, C major, E-flat major! Resurrection! Bare foot heavy on the pedal, I recapitulate, then launch into wild improvisation. A splendid massive cloud of sound rises from the piano. I learned this technique from Charles Ives, nobody else. Keep that right foot on the pedal and when the cacophony seems unendurable pour on more coal, more power, more glory.
Crashing up and down the keyboard like a lion crushing cane, like a stallion trampling Fritos, like an elephant in bamboo, like a bull stomping crockery, like a turkey through the corn—Dubarry done gone again!—I modulate suddenly, with wrenching force, into the finale of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, then Beethoven’s Fifth, then Bruckner’s Fifth, Mahler’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, the Sibelius Fifth, Carl Nielsen’s Fifth, the Prokofiev Fifth (a mad socialist industrial machine running amok), the Shostakovich Fifth and finally, naturally, old Johannes Brahms, his Fifth.
Leaving the ducal grand salon, his cigar smoking like a chimney, Brahms said in farewell to the assembled lords and ladies, “If there’s anyone here I’ve failed to insult—I apologize.” Good man. A bornagain atheist in more ways than one.
Brahms never wrote a fifth symphony, the nitpickers will object. Nor Schubert a finale to his Eighth. Well they have now. I wrote it for them and it may well be their finest work. It’s a fact, curious but true, that most symphonists reach apogee, produce their liveliest most vigorous most dramatic work (not necessarily their best), in their fifth effort.
Enough of this esoterica: time for the coffee and the grease. I put a Schütz motet and a Merle Haggard song cycle on the music machine and head for the kitchen, followed by the golden vapor of Schütz’s angelic choral harmonics. Set kettle on burner, stick filter in Pyrex jug, pat sausage into patties and put skillet on stove. Smell them nitrates sizzle—good!
I take four eggs from the silent, bullet-stricken refrigerator—warm and damp in there—and look about for a clean bowl. Sink crowded with dirty dishes, pots, pans, wineglasses, tumblers, bowls, garbage. But there’s Elaine’s wok—walk? woke?—hanging on the wall. That will do. I crack the eggs, dump in a can of El Pato’s diced green chilis, and stir the steaming mess with a wooden spoon, creating out of chaos a rational, systemic paradigm of order.
&nb
sp; The miracle of eggs. In the beginning was the egg. The chicken was an afterthought, a mere transmission mechanism for the production of further eggs. The world itself is egglike. Those astrophotos of galaxies, spiral nebulae—do they not resemble fresh eggs broken in the pan? The universe itself may be no more than one gigantic cosmic egg. And the function of mind? To fertilize that egg. Creating—who knows what grotesque and Godlike monster. Best not think about it.
Stirring my eggs in her wok, I recall Elaine’s artistic cooking period. She was a fad follower, like most of us, straining to keep up with the latest fashion, always a shade behind. Est and Arica, group encounter therapy, aerobic dancing, jogging, haute cuisine, cuisine minceur, primal screaming, Zen, John Anderson, Gloria Steinem, fat-tire bicycles, punk rock, acid rock, acid rain, Elton John, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Back to the Bible, soap opera, home computers, Bucky Fuller and geodesic domes, Whole Earth Catalogs and space colonies, whatever the thing of the week, the trend of the month, the rage of the season, she was onto it like a leech, into it like a chigger. And so for a time—maybe a month—early in our marriage, she turned her fine passion, insecure temperament and incoherent energies toward the high art of cuisine française.
How can I forget the day she served me oeuf poché en aspic. Surely one of the most repellent inventions in all of human history. Only a Frog could have thought of such a thing. Frogs and viscosity. France, said Henry de Montherlant (a good Frenchman), is the woman of Europe. That was when our troubles began, was it not?
What’s this?
Poached egg in aspic, she said. There was a blush of pride on her sweet rosy Saxon face. Her violet eyes glowed like sapphires.
Aspic? It looks like—like…Like something out of a horse’s hoof, I thought but did not say aloud.
It’s a tomato sauce gel, she said. A kind of gelatin. She was watching me closely, already nervous. It’s good, Henry. She ate a spoonful; I watched in horror. Please Henry. It’s very good. Really. She probed deeper with her silver spoon (a gift from her Grandmaw) and broke the soft egg inside. A yellowish fetus-amoeba spread within the menstrual-colored jelly. To me it resembled something out of a nightmare by Poe. The facts in the case of V. Waldemar.