At airport parties, Lance would stand at the revolving postcard rack, and arrange cards in some kind of sequence. “Do you think somebody will come along and read what I’ve done?” And the next time at the airport, he checked out whether he’d been answered. “Did anybody answer?” “Nope.” “You mean those cards are in the same order that you left them in?” “Oh, no, people have been shuffling through them to buy.” Just so, Wittman looked for some kind of a meaning to the order of the slides.
Then there was talk about f-stops, camera numbers, apertures, etc., and he went into the next room.
Where the tube was on. He sat himself down and was intercepted by a joint, which he passed on, eschewing the taking of a hit. Contact high already all over the house. The picture wasn’t coming in, but the viewers were entranced, chuckling, commenting. “Wow.” “Oh, wow.” “Do you see what I see?” “Beautiful, yeah.” Wittman had not tried the snow show straight before. What you do is turn the knob to a channel that’s not broadcasting, and you stare at the snow. Try it. Pretty soon, because the mind and eye cannot take chaos, they will pull the dots into pictures of things—in color even on a black-and-white set—confetti jumping and dancing to music. Snow is not white. Regular t.v. programs are for zombies who allow N.B.C., A.B.C., and C.B.S. to take over the sacred organizing of their brain impulses into segments, sitcoms, the news, commercials. Look, where it comes again! It works both stoned and straight. There, across the bottom of the screen, rolls a line of new cars like off an assembly line in an auto plant. But each car a different make and color. And there are drivers behind the wheels. Nobody tailgating or passing anybody else. They’re on an eight-lane freeway. Some people drive with their elbows out the window, and they make hand signals in another language. Girls are poking their heads out of the sunroofs, drying their hair. Can you control what you see by thinking? Wittman sped up his mind, and, sure enough, the cars speed up. A Volkswagen flips over, spins on its back, and slides along among the onrushing race. You can sort of control the pictures, but they are not strict mirrors of your thoughts. They’ll do things you don’t know what they’ll do next. Look. A row of cars has come to a corner. Where are they going, zipping around the corner? People too, running round this edge. Wittman tried hard to see the other side, but was distracted by the girls with long hair, who fly out of the sunroofs, and become a row of feathery angels at the top of the screen. Oh, more space up there. He had been concentrating on a few rows of dots down at the bottom. There are more stars in the universe. Every jumping dot can be one of the billions of people on this planet, each one of whom you will not have time to meet, and everybody up to something. And, furthermore, there are animals. Elephants. Wild elephants. And elephants with fringe and leis and sounding bells and other adornments. A fire truck. A float with a queen and princesses. You cannot make something stop running to study its details. Majorettes. A marching band passing a garage band. An Indian band riding a flatbed truck. The sitar music was coming from the phonograph. It felt like Ravi Shankar was playing one’s spine bones—the note off the top vertebra shoots into outer space forever. Bicycles and tandems with silver spokes spinning, Gandhi wheels. Clowns gyrating on unicycles. It’s a parade. No tanks, please. No drill teams presenting arms. No nationalistic flags. Every single thing different and not repeating. Cars speeding up, black-and-whites behind. Car chase. Here comes the Highway Patrol. A row of pink piggies with patent-leather hoofs roll all the way across the screen. Yibiddy. Yibiddy. Some of them are wearing police hats. One of them is hodding bricks. Then the piggies are driving black-and-whites with stars on their doors. Ouch. The horizontal bar rolled up through the screen. Straight Wittman felt it smack him in the brain. That same hit as when riding the glass elevator at the Fairmont or the Space Needle in Seattle—while you’re looking at the view, a crossbeam comes up, and whomps you in your sightline. “Ow,” said the other people too. “Ouch. Oh, my head.” The stars shoot off from the police cars and the Highway Patrol cars and the pig hats. Ah, a line of shooting stars, each with a golden tail. Cycle wheels of many sizes are spinning silver mandalas in the heavenly skies. The stars are making formations and constellations—flag stars, wing stars, sheriff’s stars. Stars and stripes, and flags of other nations, stars on wings and epaulets, kung fu stars. There goes a badge with a bullet ding in it where it saved a lawman’s life. The sitar plinks, reverberating on and on and on, forever spacious. Wittman pinned his mind power on one star, made it move to the center of the screen. It grows magnificently. Is this satori? Am I going to reach it this time? And it doesn’t go away? The star blows up—smithereens of stars. Explosions massage the brain. Here we observers sit, detached as Buddhas, as the universe blows up. What was that? Just before the bang, did you see Captain America with a star on his forehead and one on his shield, and Doctor Zhivago/Omar Sharif attach jets to Planet Earth and blast it crazy off its axis? Wittman picked up (with his mind) one of these iota stars, and pushed it to the middle of the galaxy, where it pulsates intensely, and bursts again, a dizzy of birds—tweet tweet—wun wun day—and stars orbiting around a cat’s head with X’d eyes. The pink pigs in top hats and patent-leather hoofs roll by. Yibbidy. Yibbidy. That’s all, folks.
“Wow.” “Oh, wow.” “Wotta trip that was.” People got up; some went out; some changed seats. Did all of us get to the same place at the same time? Did we really see the same things? “Did you see the pigs roll away?” “Yeah. Yeah.” “Pigs? What pigs?” Somebody has got to be scientific about all this; lock everybody up independently in separate lead-lined rooms to draw what he or she sees, and then compare.
“Look. There’s more.” Mushroom clouds. It was the last scene in Dr. Strangelove—the graceful puffing of H-bombs. Poof. Poof. Poof. “We’ll meet again. Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny da-a-ay.” Electricity was shimmering between the thunderheads and the ground. A row of human brains on stems. The End. The End. The End. The End means the end of the world.
The monkey brains had tuned themselves in to an open channel to a possible future. If this many bombs were to fall, light would flash through time, backwards and forwards and sideways. Images would fly with the speed of light-years onto this screen and onto receptive minds. Future bombs are dropping into the present, an outermost arrondissement of the Bomb.
A second row of mushroom clouds bloomed, and the two rows of them boiled and smoked. Their viewers tried to shape them into other things, but the winds were dead. The Bomb, the brain, and magic mushrooms—fused. How to unlock them? Give us some peace. Some peas rolled across the screen. Helplessly, the heads watched: A parade of freaks gimped and hob-blefooted across the screen—nuke mutants. See that baby attached to its mother’s back? She’s been running with it, carrying it piggyback along the Civil Defense route mapped out in the phone book, and it got stuck to her permanently. Werecoyotes—Los Angelenos are going to bond with the coyotes that come down from the hills and cross Ventura Boulevard into the suburbs of Studio City. Those minotaurs used to be dairy farmers and cows, or rodeo riders and toros. We’re going to have a mutating generation. Nature will sport at an accelerated rate. The reason we make bombs is we want to play with Nature, so we throw bombs at her to make her do evolution faster. Nature panics. She throws handfuls of eyes at babies, and some sports will catch three or four, and some none. See that baby with sealed eyes? Before it was born, radioactivity zapped through its mother and lit up her insides. Blind calves have already been born in Nevada. Furry eyes protect them from too much light. Bees and flies will especially suffer when the light hits their many eyes and lenses. Nothing left but insects buzzing crazily. Those may be our own electrified ashes we’re looking at. We won’t be able to bear the touch of one another’s fingertips on our faces. We’ll walk blindly through the streets of unrecognizable cities. We’ll be able to hear, though. Those who can see must keep talking and reading to the others, and playing music and ball games for them on the radio. After the bombs, there will
be beautiful music, like the pod-picking scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We won’t have orchestras and bands; the music will be on tape. Fingers will melt together. Spadehands. Spadefeet walked across the screen. Languages will have a lot of vowels like “Aaaaaaah!”
“Remember in the days before the Comic Code Authority,” said Wittman, “there was an E.C. comic book about this mad scientist who invented a potion that he gave to his big girlfriend, and she split in two. I don’t mean like sides of beef. She became identical twins with red lips and long blue-black hair. Each woman was half the size she used to be, shorter but in proportion, still a normal enough height for a woman. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. And clothes don’t tear when anybody changes identities, according to comic books. Both of her had on a tight red dress and black high-heel shoes, just as before. The mad scientist takes one of her aside, and kills her. No tort case because there’s still the other one alive. But that one wants to get even with him for killing her, see? She steals into the laboratory and downs some more of the drug. She’s two again. Her plan is to kill him, and only one of her would have to pay for the crime. The two women gang up on the mad scientist, and he’s fighting them off, when, because she o.d.ed on the chemicals, and because the two little women need reinforcements, they divide into four. No sooner does he kill one or knock one down than more form. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Geometric fucking progression. But, don’t forget, every time the women multiply, they become smaller, each one half her former size. Pretty soon, there are hundreds and thousands—sixteen hundred—thirty-two hundred—of these little women in red dresses swarming at him from all over the room. They’re attacking from the shelves and tables and curtains and floor. He’s tromping on them and swatting them, but they come at him again and again with these little bitty screams, ‘Eeeeek. Eeeeek.’ ” Thousands upon thousands of tiny teeming black-heeled women—a natural for the snow show—engrossed the heads, stoned beyond speech.
Wittman, one of those who talks himself through fear, talked on: “The artists drawing the E.C.s were skin freaks. They loved to draw viscous flesh dripping. Remember the one about the guy who asks a witch to destroy his evil half? ‘I want to be good,’ he says. She warns him, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ He can’t see how you can go wrong getting rid of your evil self. The last panel took up a full page: He staggers into a mortician’s office with his right side healthy, and his left side decaying and dropping worms. His word balloon says, ‘Do something. I can’t stand the smell.’ And remember the funnybook with this girl who had blue doughnuts erupting almost out of her skin? Something at the amusement park had gotten her. I don’t remember the story to that one. Only this picture of her in a bathing suit, lying in the sawdust, while in the background, the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round and the hammer turn and turn.” Blue rings—ringworms—the Worm Ouroboros—rolled across the screen.
“You’re better than the storybook lady at the library,” said Lance’s voice. Some viewers laughed. We’re regressing, all right. Those who’d learned to read with—because of—comic books pieced together this common past—“Do you remember—?” “I remember—”: There were these parents who punish their kid by locking him in the closet. The kid screams repeatedly that there’s a thing in there, but they shove him in. Pretty soon he makes friends with it. They hear the kid talking to somebody. “Were you talking to yourself in there?” they ask. No, the kid says, he has a friend named Herman, and they better not be bad to him anymore, or Herman will get them. Just for that, his parents throw him in the closet again. The kid’s saying, “No! No! Herman’s going to hurt you.” And, in the second-to-last panel—oh, yeah, the dad’s a butcher, and they live above the butchery—there’s this meat grinder with its long handle up in the air, and ground human meat is pouring out of the blades, all over the table and down the legs to the floor. And the Keeper of the Crypt, the narrator-witch who gives the moral of the story, cackles, “Hee hee hee, kiddies, the next time you eat hamburger, don’t look too carefully. You might find a gold tooth. Hee hee hee.”
Those comic books were brainwashing us for atomic warfare that causes skin cancer and hamburger guts. They were getting us inured so we could entertain the possibility of more nuclear fallout. Chain reactions aren’t that bad; that lady in the red dress doesn’t go extinct. They tried to make us despair of ridding ourselves of evil. We ought to keep heightening our squeamishness and horror.
Snow jumped and stormed on the screen. Minds were exhausted of images. Most people stood up and left. Those remaining selected a regular channel and talked back to the commercials. Wittman left too.
On his move to the main room, pouring himself another wine, past his limit already—he was one of those Chinese who turn red on a few sips—looked drunker than he felt—Wittman gave his fellow guests the once-over. Strange, there are people you’ve never met to talk to but they keep showing up on your rounds. See that girl in maroon? She had had to go to the Student Health Center to have a lost Tampax retrieved. That was the revenge tale against her for being a coffee girl, bringing the professors coffee, black or with cream and sugar, and sitting in the front seat and crossing her legs back and forth. You get things on people with whom you go to the same school for four years. And that one over there came back from winter break with a Jackie nose, which probably changed her looks, he didn’t know, he didn’t know her that well. Her friends said, “Nose job.” Over there was a mathematician he had met in Chem 1A lab. Remember the smell of the wooden shed? The first experiment was about sulfur, which you cooked, then went out to the screened porch and washed it down the drains. Year round, the place smelled of sulfur and eucalyptus trees. Charley Shaw had never turned him down when Wittman asked to borrow his notes to dry lab. Where are the Pan Am stewardesses? Lance often promised career girls; he tried to make new girls prettier and possible to talk to by rumoring that they were executive secretaries from Price Waterhouse, or receptionists from the P.G.&E.—“What do you think of the rate increase?”—or Clerk Typist II’s from the Bank of California. Girls won’t play along with being Playboy bunnies of the San Francisco club. “What?! Me? A bunny? I go to Merritt College.” All they had to do was play along being Pan Am stewardesses, and even the weather conversation would get interesting. “How’s the weather in Paris this autumn?” Wittman was awaiting that woman who could make up for herself a life of world travel, Oakland only a layover. Wait, the next stew to blow in over the Pole, he had ready for her ears his life-of-crime plan: Does her airline have a job opening for baggage handler? After luggage has cleared agricultural inspection and gone down the chute, he, as baggage handler, could put contraband into the suitcases, and at the other end of the flight, before customs, another baggage handler takes the stuff off. Would she care to work in cahoots with him? What is it he wants to smuggle? A few years ago, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Howl. She didn’t happen to know, did she, the titles that the customs officers are currently on the lookout for? You prepare scripts with lines for yourself and lines for her, but you have to try them on somebody brand new you never saw before, and he semi-knew everybody here. And girls won’t co-operate. Actually, girls don’t care to play stewardess-and-passenger, nurse-and-patient, narc-and-head. “What languages do you speak? Don’t you have to be fluent in three languages to fly America’s flagship carrier?” And she says, “Who, me? You must be thinking of somebody else. I’m waitressing tables part-time, Jack London Square.” You give them one more chance, “You look Pan Am, but you fly P.S.A., right? They’re saying you’re pit-stopping between the L.A. airport and Seattle. Is it true that air crews pirate movies, take the film cans off the planes from Hollywood, copy them, and send them on on the next flight?”
That information had come from Charley, with the degrees in math, who was moonlighting as a higher mathematician and an actor, brilliant enough to have time left over to go to parties and movies. His full American and stage name was Charles Bogard Shaw, C. B. Shaw o
kay on the marquee. Wittman was just thinking of him and here he was. “Seen any good movies lately?” he asked.
“No, man,” said Wittman. “The movies have been bumming me out. I’m losing it. I can’t take West Side Story. It’s a bad movie, right? I mean, am I crazy, or is it like dog shit? I was losing it at The Longest Day too. I’m boycotting Cleopatra. Why don’t you boycott Cleopatra too?”
The way a Buddhist life works is that when you need to learn something bad enough, the right teacher comes along. Charley was so good at seeing movies, he liked anything; he could “see the film behind the film.” “I know the movie that will cure you,” he told Wittman. “Have you heard of The Saragossa Manuscript? Each time I saw it, I broke through another layer of hoodwink. I am a changed person. It’s been two years, and I continue changing. I’ll try my best to tell you the movie. At the entrance into The Saragossa Manuscript, a French soldier is lost from his regiment. Explosions, cannon fire, music that sounds like Don Giovanni. He’s running, falls, and slides down a hillside. He takes refuge in a Spanish Moorish villa; it may have once been used as an inn or a chapel but its people have fled, and dust lies everywhere. A leatherbound book, a tome, is sitting on a stand. Though this is a black-and-white movie, ask anybody who’s seen it, and they’ll tell you that the binding is red leather. The soldier blows off the dust, and, in the middle of war, begins to read. It is not the Bible. The camera goes inside the book: Once upon a time, there was a young soldier lost from his regiment. Cannon fire blasts the air, and cannonballs fall near him. The soldier is horrified—he is reading about himself. He runs from the villa, falls downhill, and loses consciousness. He awakes at the foot of a gibbet, and he is face-to-face with the upside-down faces of two hanged men, hung by the feet. Their heads swing on either side of his head. He escapes to a castle, where he meets a princess with long blonde hair. She gives him dinner at a table lit by candelabras of jeweled tapers and set with divining instruments. Across from her is her brother, a magician of the Cabala in a pointed hat and a dream robe that fills half the screen with crescent moons, stars, and alchemical symbols. The cabalist tells the soldier the mathematics of life and death and time. ‘We are as blind men walking the streets of unknown cities.’ The cabalist’s beautiful sister tells a fairy tale about a dark princess—the camera goes inside her story: The dark princess, her sleeve rolled back on her beautiful arm lifting a heavy, branching candlestick, is leading a young soldier into a cave under a castle. She’s somebody’s sister, maybe his sister, and he falls in love with her.”