MONITORED DREAMS
AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS
By Bernard Wolfe

1: Bisquit Position

Napalm aside, he took to the idea of a month in California: he could rent a house. In a valley the size of Tom Thumb’s nostril, east of Coldwater, close to Mulholland, he found a good enough cottage, redwood ceilings, rock-coped pool, sauna, terraced hillside. Place for the nerves to go loose. After a day of interviews and setting up sequences with the camera crew he could swim, take softening steam, get in a terrycloth robe to barbeque an aged T-bone or oversize lamb chops in the patio, on the hibachi. He was in holiday mood. It was a holiday when he could stay clear of restaurants and hotels, and nearby shooting wars.

Then this night he turned into his rippled tarmac lane to find the cul-de-sac overrun. Cars crowded the street on both sides to the turnabout. Attendants in red jackets, the usual college students, flashed up and down, playing musical chairs with the cars, musical cars. Hard-rock guitars jigged the air: the valley’s bowl was a loudspeaker. Burble of energized voices.

There was one property of estate grandness around here, a gabled English Country structure seen in patches through stands of white birch, looking over lawns, balustraded walks, tennis courts. This place, no big thing by Beverly Hills standards but notable on an unshowy street, was diagonally across from Blake’s; the party going on there was well-attended by somebodies. An indicative number of the cars bumper to bumper along the road were Cads, Lincolns, Rollses, Bentleys.

Taking the steps to his hillside perch, not especially interested in the thought he was entertaining about the fourth estate’s dearth of estates, Blake was having nonadhesive feelings about coming home to the buzzing insides of a verdant loudspeaker. He felt invaded. But the invasion was so spilling, so area-wide, it sucked up his own house and head, recruiting him into the commotion, adding him to the guest list.

The sense of simultaneous violation and almost welcome suction got stronger when he reached the porch and found a woman sitting there in one of the wicker chairs. She was in a floor-length velvet gown of royal purple rifted up both sides to the upper thighs. Her face had a tennis pleasantness, her tall body was thin, not bony, so thin in the bone as to require only token fleshing to soften the skeleton’s edges. This was his first impression, that she was fine of face, under a fat spiral of red-blond hair, over an elongated body whose memorable dimension was the vertical. The mesh-held thigh exposed in one of the gown’s slits looked lank enough to be circled by two unexerting hands but worth a taking hold. Her green eyes were prowlers, dodged to both sides even as they looked with green insistence at and over you. She could not be much past 30.

“Hello, I’m trespassing,” she said. Her voice, pitched low, had reverberances which lengthened the words. Was somewhat fogged aside from that.

“Long as you don’t lie. I hate a trespasser who says he’s a telephone lineman.”

“I’ll line all your phones, with zebra skin, if you let me stay a minute.”

“Two, if you want.” He took the other chair. “Don’t you like parties?”

“Hate them. Especially ones I give. As hostess I get to feeling more the hostage. Over 200 people across the street drinking our champagne.”

“You don’t like people.”

“I don’t know what to do with just two or three. Hundreds make me a sprinter.”

“There’s a thing you can do with people in any numbers, say goodbye. Or don’t invite them in the first place.”

“My husband invites them. He’s got a bigger supply of hellos than goodbyes. I mean, he’s gregarious. Family joke. That’s his name, Greg. Another family joke is, I call our place Greg Areas.”

She was probably a little drunk, containing it with styled humor.

“Why don’t you and your husband have a division of labor? He greets, you send them on their way.”

“My trouble is,” she said unresponsively, “I’m capable of just so many smiles per day. With a crowd, my quota of smiles gets used up the first 10 minutes, then I’m left with an unfunctional face.”

“I’d say your face was functional.”

“Oh, keeps teeth from hanging out, provides setting for the eyes, yes. But it’s not going to smile any more tonight. Your face is very functional.”

“Keeps siroccos out. My ears from merging.”

“I see it on the news. You report wars from various places. Vietnam. Chasing Che in Bolivia.”

“Yes, we’re not short on wars.”

“Those are the big parties, crowds invited, nobody sends them on their way. Last time I saw you you were covering, let’s see, the Sinai campaign.”

“When it wasn’t covering me. That’s a joke. They have sandstorms in the desert, not all of Jewish origin.”

“You covering a war in Los Angeles?”

“The war against war, most of its general staffs out here. Doing a special report, documentary, on anti-Vietnam moves, on campuses especially.”

“Some fight war while the rest fight wars. We can use that division of labor. I’d better be getting back to my own wars. Hear the enemy popping more champagne corks. Good documenting, Mr. Arborow. Many thanks for the privileged sanctuary of your porch.”

Two days later he saw her again. Low-gearing to his driveway, he discovered her putting something in his mailbox. There was an eerily beautiful dog erupting around her feet, a female Siberian husky with medieval mummer’s mask, eyes of glacial blue in the slant of the world’s first dynasties, total grin.

“Hello there,” the woman said. “I wasn’t stealing your mail, I was adding to it.” She retrieved her envelope and handed it to Blake. “It’s an invitation to come over and drink some booze those people forgot to drink the other day.”

The blatantly gorgeous dog kept jumping at her hands as at lovely bones, she kept saying, “Down, Bisk,” and bucking the animal away.

“For somebody who doesn’t like parties you give a lot,” Blake said as he got out of his car.

“This isn’t a party, just some people for drinks. When Greg heard who our distinguished neighbor was he said you had to come over and have a snort, down, Bisk. You may not be aware the word snort is still used in some circles, down, Bisk.”

“Wives don’t altogether approve of their husbands in some circles.”

“In some circles wives get the feeling they’re not engaged in a marriage but covering a war. When’s the last time you approved of a war you covered? Not Vietnam, you never quite kept your lips from curling all the time you reported from there. Bisk, damn you, down, I said.”

“Why’s the dog named Bisk?”

“Short for b, i, s, q, u, i, t. You want to see something whorish and altogether delightful? Call her by name, then ask if she wants one of those things I spelled.”

Blake leaned close to the dog, now sitting as on a throne, smiling as at a circus, and said, “Good girl, Bisk, want a bisquit?”

Bisk went out of her mind. Mouth exploded with sounds of highest romp. Tail beat a tattoo of paternosters on the tar, the pup form of rosary. Tongue came out to lavish love up the full length of Blake’s jaw. Then she whipped over on her back and lay still, front paws bent and held together in the beg position, back legs similarly crooked but spread, face a panorama of flooded happiness. Her Arctic blue eyes were full on Blake as she made deep, prolonged throat vowels of agony and expectancy into his face. Blake rubbed her teat-lined belly, her soft, soft neck, feeling the surge of urgent vowels inside.

“Isn’t she the neighborhood tart, isn’t she unbelievable,” Lady of the Manor said.

Blake thought of the woman this way. The only other designation he could think of was, Master Greg’s Mistress, Mum of Greg Areas.

“Is it the neighborhood style?” he said, stroking the fable-faced animal’s tumulted chest above the spread legs.

“Oh, it’s a mixed neighborhood, Mr. Arborow, some tarts, some cream-puffs. Try to make it on Friday, won’t you? The Gibsons will be dry and I can promise the small talk’ll be practically microscopic. A war correspondent should be made aware that there are more wars to cover than are dreamed of in his network’s philosophy. Come on, Bisk, quit plying your trade, we’re going home.”

The note said simply, We’re having some people for drinks this Friday at five. Is it possible you can come? We would be delighted. I give you my categorical guarantee that nobody will ask if you’ve seen any interesting wars lately. Do come.

Blake was feeling broken into, potently sucked at. Mum of the Manse, Greg’s Lady Lean, was named Mari Selander.

It was a manse, all right. Bucking for the apprentice-castle rating. Walls of the roomy vestibule and king-size salon were inundated with hunt and turf prints, engravings honoring marlin on the leap, woodcuts of the better known whaling ships, oils of Nantucket weltering under a nor’easter, antique wooden eagles in emblematic profile, crossed dueling pistols and sabers.

The men talking in corners over vermouthed Bombay gins had the wind-toned faces of sportsmen, the aroma of leather chairs and massages. Their wives, looking worked-over by expensive hands, in clothes built around their specifics, chatted about Acapulco and Mrs. Reagan’s decorating tastes.

Greg Selander was doggedly, programmatically, the boy, under a crew-cut of iron filings. His halfback face was essentially what it had been in its third year at Princeton except for signs of going fluid at the jowls, the drinker’s drip of flesh.

Mari Selander, again in velvet, cinched this time to a miraculous gaunting at the waist and falling inches short of the knee, again seemed somewhat vagued. Blake took the measure of those yearling legs that seemed to go on forever. He considered how they might be in full, urging use.

Greg Selander immediately had Blake in a gaming alcove, explaining that in spite of his appearance of the varsity athlete he’d played no football at Princeton, preferring squash and for a time shot-putting. He might have gone out for lacrosse but it took too much time, besides, lacrosse players had collisions and bad spills.

“Secret’s out,” Mari Selander came close to say. “You’ve let Mr. Arborow know he’s in a den of nonconformists.”

“I don’t care what you look like, your looks can’t dictate your action and direction,” Greg Selander said. “That’s the blight today, outer direction, government taking over your breathing and chewing.”

Blake considered what a big man going in for football might have to do with excessive government, went back to Mari Selander’s legs.

“Greg reads Reisman after his Dow and before his Jones,” Mari Selander said. “Whatever takes dim view of the outside, he’s for. Ask him why he takes a dim view of everything on the far side of his skin.”

“Dark out there,” Greg Selander said. “Dim’s the one view you can take.”

“That’s where the masses are, out there somewhere,” Mari Selander said. “They sense how many of your dark looks are meant for them. They don’t elect dim viewers to office, as Barry found out.”

“I was explaining why I never went in for body-contact sports, Mari,” Greg Selander said. “Goldwater’s a different subject.”

“What’s your objection to contact sports?” Blake said, looking at the wife’s legs.

“Taking the dimmest view of the human race, you’d want as little contact with its units as possible,” Mari Selander said. “That’s why the right-of-rights play so much squash, put so many shots.”

“Mari talks lefty to shake me up,” Greg Selander said. “Likes to play devil’s advocate.”

“God and Barry have all the high-priced attorneys they need,” Mari Selander said. “The devil could use a few more legal minds.”

“It wasn’t God incited the riots out to UCLA today,” Greg Selander said. “Goldwater wasn’t anywhere on the scene.”

“It’s because God wasn’t on the scene, just the recruiter for Taybott Chemicals trying to recruit students to make napalm, that’s why they had the riot,” Mari Selander said. “The recruiter might as well have been Barry, Barry’s a friend of napalm. Were you at UCLA this afternoon, Mr. Arborow?”

“Yes, with our cameramen,” Blake said.

“What did you think of those kids chasing the Taybott man up on the roof and throwing stinkbombs at him?” Greg Selander said.

“My job’s not to assess facts so much as get them.”

“But you must have had some thoughts. Impressions, let’s say.”

“Well, I thought the students’ running was good and their aim fair, though spotty. I got the impression they’re not opposed to body-contact games. If they’d gotten their hands on the man they might have welcomed the contact, and tried to widen it.”

“I approve of you, I’d like to widen the contact, Mr. Arborow,” Mari Selander said, linking her arm with Blake’s. “How would it be if we sat?”

They took places with the other guests in the conversational arc before the vaulting fireplace. A fire big enough to roast a family of pigs whole was blooming in the baronial pit. When Greg Selander positioned himself to the left, Mari Selander made for the right, to balance on an ottoman no distance at all from Blake’s knees. Greg Selander’s reaction to his wife’s scrupulous avoidance, as to her earlier baiting, seemed to be, as nearly as Blake could give it a name, scrupulous nonreaction.

Blake looked for a conversational move toward the husband which would be, by implication, away from the wife.

“Your theory that football players are Democrats to New Lefts,” he said. “I wonder if a Harris or Gallup Poll would back you up.”

“You’ll remember the Kennedy gang played a lot of touch football,” Mari Selander said.

“Touch isn’t tackle,” Blake said.

“Barry people are least of all touching,” Mari Selander said. “Of course, Kennedy people can be all over you.”

“I didn’t put that forth as a thesis,” Greg Selander said. “I was saying, because you’ve got the football build, and people expect you to play football, is no reason to do the thing, it’s just a personal feeling of mine.”

He helped himself to another Martini offered on a tray by a maid mostly starch. He had to be aware that the others had stopped their localized talk and were listening.

“If you don’t like being manipulated, you don’t let yourself be manipulated by eyes, either,” he added as he sipped from his new drink and made a quick survey of the visiting eyes turned manipulative.

“Leaving aside the question of whether you can be handled, which is what manipulated means, by eyes,” Mari Selander said, “can you in all honesty claim you were never the least bit manipulated by Barry’s eyes, Greg?”

“By his ideas, policies, Mari. Which are against manipulation. By agencies, bureaus, eyes, all the outside structures. Well. War correspondent. You have one of the more interesting jobs, Mr. Arborow.”

“Some people in my business say, see one war, you’ve seen them all,” Blake said.

“Don’t get that feeling from Hemingway,” Greg Selander said. “He went to wars as though they were different.”

“His last was different,” Blake said. “Himself and himself the combatants. Toss-up as to who won.”

“Lonely crowdsmanship,” Mari Selander said. “Lonely crowdsmen read Hemingway for the drama of their plight, Reisman for the ideology. When not giving parties.”

Blake felt his knees touching his hostess’s with no initiative from his side. He moved them, crossed his legs.

“I spent an afternoon with Hemingway arguing this point,” he said. “I said wars are so alike they get monotonous, so if you write a lot of books about war they can get monotonous. He said people die differently in different times and places, it was my thought they die more or less the same, from rocks, or arrows, or napalm.”

“Or boredom,” Mari Selander said. Her words were becoming runny, her green eyes, diffused.

“Hemingway died like his father,” Blake said. “Tradition meant something to him.”

“That’s the point I can’t buy,” Greg Selander said, scrupulously to Blake. “Our boys in Vietnam don’t die like Communists, it’s for something positive and what’s more, they know it.”

“It’s hard to tell from the body counts,” Blake said. “Maybe I’ve been to too many.”

“I’ve been in Vietnam myself,” Greg Selander said. “I was there just last August, for the Defense Department, saw them in the hospitals, some dying. I can speak to a certain extent firsthand here.”

“Eyes will handle before anybody speaks with a hand of any number,” Mari Selander said. “Allowing for the deaf who use sign language. Many deaf and dumb speak firsthand.”

“What were you doing in Vietnam?” Blake said.

“I’m in defense production, Mr. Arborow,” Greg Selander said. “A-V-A Components, the letters are short for Aviation, we subcontract parts for planes and choppers, mostly military right now. I went over to help assess how the choppers are carrying out their missions. Naturally, I looked around.”

“Greg reports the choppers are chopping fine,” Mari Selander said. “Chopping some and burning some, with the help of napalm. Naturally, VC’s burn differently from freedom fighters. Burn up, our fellows burn down.”

“There are better things to joke about than napalm, Mari,” Greg Selander said, with the air of pointing out a detail that might otherwise be overlooked.

Mari Selander looked lengthily at her husband. Her lips thinned, followed by her eyes. She pulled in a long, careful breath.

“Napalm’s so unjocular,” she said. “I was out at UCLA myself this afternoon. Probably in half the footage Mr. Arborow got. Hope they shot my good profile. I was one of the people chased the Taybott man up to the roof of Kerkhoff. Didn’t throw stinkbombs but that was mainly because I didn’t have any.”

The guests were carefully listening, though not surprised. Expecting rough games, they got rough games. It remained to be seen which passes would be completed, who would come out first in yards gained.

“You were going to the Balenciaga showing at 1. Magnin’s,” Greg Selander said.

“Nobody throws stinkbombs at Magnin’s,” Mari Selander said.

“I won’t go into the politics of it, Mari. Let’s leave politics out. Let’s just say, it’s inconsistent to demonstrate against napalm in Paris and Rome clothes paid for by the manufacture of helicopters that deliver napalm.”

“I could stop yelling my head off against napalm, you’re right, Greg. Or you could stop being involved one way or another with napalm.”

“I could. But you’re fond of Rome and Paris clothes, if I didn’t make the money to buy them you wouldn’t like it. You don’t approve of napalm but you’re dressed with, in, and by, napalm.” By way of footnotes, to record the minutiae that can get overlooked.

“And it burns,” Mari Selander said.

“And it’s self-applied, you dress yourself in the morning,” Greg Selander said, still in the spirit of marginalia. “Mr. Arborow, wouldn’t you say napalm in Vietnam’s about the same situation as the bomb with Hiroshima? Saves more lives than it takes?”

“I’m told that,” Blake said.

“I didn’t ask what others tell you.”

“It’s tricky. I see the lives it takes and cripples, I don’t see the ones it’s said to save.”

“But you allow for the possibility?”

“I listen to information officers’ releases, and official briefings, and report what I hear. Along with what I see. Even when there’s a gap between what’s audible and what’s visible. If you go along with McLuhan, the sights in our world are winning out over the sounds. That could mean we’re being manipulated by eyes, our own.”

“Not answering my question, Mr. Arborow.”

“No, and I don’t think I said it was.”

“You could pass things along without necessarily believing or allowing for them yourself.”

“I was more or less implying that.”

“Mr. Arborow, are we using napalm to win a just war with the least human cost, or aren’t we? You’re a guest in my house and I’m trying to nail you down, for that I apologize, but with some matters we can drop amenities.”

“As quick as we drop napalm,” Mari Selander said.

“As quick as some throw stinkbombs,” Greg Selander said.

The guests were absorbed. You can’t know in advance what plays will be tried and what the final score will be. It could be speculated that collision games were nothing new in this apprentice castle, and did not always concern politics.

“I’m a reporter,” Blake said. “That means my best trained parts are my eyes. I’m paid not for the opinions in my head but the pictures on my trained, 20-20 eyes. I’ve got a surplus. Many pictures piled up on my trained eyes my employers don’t want. An assortment of my firsthand sights they don’t care to see, and have other people see. Very manipulative sights.”

Blake was just now collecting another sight. The outrageously beautiful Bisk had wandered in and taken a seat alongside her mistress, all dripping grin under the hard-edged, archaic mask, ready to pull sleds for any who cared to travel out of gin disharmonies through whatever snowdrifts of rough games. Lady Lean had bent to whisper something in her ear Blake had heard, “Girl, sweet thing, want a bisquit?” The animal had collapsed insanely on the carpet, front paws urging, back paws validating, mouth at maximum curl to announce that anything offered was all right because catering love was the wide world’s one stuff. Mari Selander was now leaning low over the dog, moving her incredibly elongated fingers up and down Bisk’s two lines of nipples, whispering, “Oh, you tart, spread for all comers.” Blake was trying not to see those furred legs abandoned to the air, Mari Selander’s stalky legs exposed to the lap and flamboyantly parted too.

“You’re still hinting rather than saying, Mr. Arborow,” Greg Selander said.

“I’m saying, in stages. Five correspondents ducked this napalm assignment before the network brought me back from Sinai. I wanted to duck it, too. We all know we’ve stored up more sights than the network cares to distribute. Not opinions about napalm, sights of napalm. In action. Carrying out its missions. On bodies. Bodies shouting and running. Eighty-year-olds and two-year-olds shout and run the same. Napalm is the answer to the generation gap. I’ve been in helicopters 100 feet from the burning, shouting bodies. Helicopters you probably made parts for. You make good parts, bring a man with trained eyes to within 100 feet of the napalmed, after dropping the napalm. I feel how jellied petroleum works on bodies, how they crisp up, speeding back and forth, their sound effects, is a vital part of the napalm story, which my eyes are equipped to tell, no opinions, just pictures. I was on the phone for an hour after I got back from UCLA this afternoon, telling my home office I have to go back to Vietnam to get close-up footage on the burning, running, loud bodies. They don’t see it. They think that to show these diminishing, toasting bodies right now would be playing into the hands of the enemy, as footage of the 70,000 bodies in Hiroshima would have in 1945. You asked for my opinion. My opinion is, I’ve got informative information on the subject of napalm on my eyes, and it burns, and I want to shout, and I’m being ordered to withhold this information, which is against my training. My first opinion is that this information all over my eyeballs isn’t my private property. Your opinion and my opinion as to the privacy of some types of property may differ.”

Bisk was still stretched out in total invitation, Mari Selander was still stroking her military columns of nipples.

“That’s clear enough,” Greg Selander said. “You claim you’re a mindless transmitting belt, want to transmit everything unselectively. Meaning, you’re with the rioters, ready to make things harder still for our boys dying overseas.”

“You’re a transmitting belt, you transmit helicopter parts mindlessly, unselectively.”

“To save our boys, not kill them.”

“You transmit slogans like a mindless belt, too.”

“That’s not slogan, that’s fact.”

“Not fact, press release. Look, if you defend your right to be an automaton, don’t take a dim view of other automatons trying to do their job.”

“Covers are off, Mr. Arborow. What’s in sight is a man wants to give aid and comfort to his country’s enemies.”

Blake stood, feeling his drinks.

“Try stripping yourself,” he said. “You know what might come in sight, to eyes trained by two minutes of history? One of the country’s worst enemies, maybe. What aids and abets enemies like you is keeping back our rich footage on strategic cremating.”

At this, Mari Selander did something peculiar. She’d been lost to the conversation, patting the dog as she went through two more Martinis. Now she jumped up to all her leggy, fragile height, long feet spread in challenge of everything and all.

“No more lies!” she said fever fast. “All automatons! So be it! Out from under the Balenciaga napalms! Everybody! I’ll start!” She reached inside her dress with both hands, fumbled, brought the hands out again, each holding a rubber cup. “Cards on the table! All varieties of falsies! Strip, everybody! Out from under the covers! Automatons, right! All à la mode lies on the transmitting belt!” She tossed the rubber cups high in the air, a flower girl strewing modern formfast flowers. They were well aimed, they fell into the fireplace, into the fire big enough for pigs, and instantly were sprouting consequential blue flames. “Not a minute too soon! See! Blobs of lies on everybody! About to burn! Now who else’s going to peel off his napalm!”

Greg Selander walked to her and said, “What are you suffering from, Mari? For once, can you say?”

Mari Selander said, “Body contact. From those I view dimly. Burns.”

Blake set his glass down.

“You were right about one thing,” he said to Greg Selander. “Not all wars are the same. Bodies can burn and run in ways I haven’t seen. After this, attack your attackers, not strangers. And don’t dress it up with politics. Thanks for the drinks and slogans.”

The last picture on his eyes, breaking into him, pulling at him, was of Mistress Meager standing in the middle of the room, hands cradling sham-shorn breasts, legs planted wide in taunt more than invitation, and Bisk still on her back, legs still lax, staggered that when her dear one finally threw something it would not be tasty things to her.

Far from sleepy, Blake took a long drive, to Malibu and then on to Trancas. Twice he stopped at waterfront places for a drink, a third time to eat a hamburger. When he got back home it was well after midnight.

The light in the living room showed him objects on the floor that didn’t belong there. A pair of flowered, belled slacks, woman’s. Jacket, woman’s. A blouse. A bra. Panties.

He heard a sound in the bedroom, more assault, beckoning.

He went there and flicked on the light to find Mari Selander stretched out on his bed, naked. No, not precisely stretched out, though precisely naked. When the light cracked on her hands elevated floppily to touch in the air over small, valiant breasts, legs bent as knees separated to the pelvis’ limit of give. She waggled asking hands, stretched her mouth to make a dog’s chugging sound.

“How’s this for a body count.”

“More casualties around here than meet the eye.”

“Let’s have a meeting of more than eyes, Mr. Arborow.”

“Mine are meeting each other. You’re an unexpected eagle
in my bed.”

“Know a better spread for it?”

“Spread any more and there’ll be two of you.”

“Animal kingdom’s all botched. How come dogs are the ones to spreadeagle.”

“How do other men’s wives come to be doing it on my bed?”

“Easy, you’ve got a window in the back not nailed down.”

It was a body not to be believed. Such a long, satiny stretch, no massy bulges but, oh, yes, slimmed shadowings, subtler concavities, the potential of a greyhound speediness, the promise of twine in the never-ending legs. Such a gangly want and over-readiness.

“You’ve got a husband across the street not nailed down.”

“Don’t you worry about husbands. Don’t you worry. Nights I go for drives, Greg goes to bed. I parked the car two streets over and sneaked back on foot over the firebreak. Know something? There’s a firebreak ends in your backyard. I take that to mean we can bring our bodies together for as long as we want and not worry about danger of brush fires. Fires we don’t make by our own brushing. You come here and give me all the best bisquits. I’ve been long without.”

“What gave you the idea of breaking in here?”

“I was looking at Greg after the people went home, which was fast. When he’s boiling he doesn’t say anything, just sits with a red face. I was looking at that fat football face and a thought came, I wanted somebody inside me but not him, never him, you, decidedly you. Not because politics makes bedfellows. Because fucking makes bedfellows. Come inside me, you.”

“I don’t think this will get Greg Selander out of the helicopter business. I think, further, you don’t give a shit what business he’s in.”

“Who wants your opinions? You’re no opinion man. You’re the reporter. Report to your brain what’s craving all over your eyes from all over your bed. Be my lavish bisquit man.”

“Your war I haven’t been to before. All in it casualties and all casualties wearing the same dogtag.”

“Don’t analyze it, you correspondent, cover it.”

Which, feeling somewhat tampered with, somewhat hauled, he did. Those endless legs closed, on him, all urge, going like the legs of the napalmed.

She left he didn’t know when. He thought for one minute about her climbing back up the firebreak, sleek legs, product of some strong generational taffy pull, cracking the dead spines of chaparral, then he was in the sleep of the drugged. When he opened his eyes it was after ten and he was in trouble. He shaved-showered fast, dressed without the morning swim, skipped breakfast except for a can of Snap-E-Tom Bloody Mary Mix for the tang of the tomato.

Backing down his drive, he heard sounds of running and barking. In a moment Mari developed from the crowded birches across the way, Bisk all over her heels. She made a comic hitchhiker’s sign, he pulled over.

“Sleep all right?” she said.

“You’ll have to ask somebody who was there.”

“See how good I am for you? I slept, too, oh, did I. Like a sack of sawdust. That’s better than a log. Logs sleep better when they’re pulverized. Oh, how you pulverized me—”

“I can’t discuss insomnia and the lumber industry, I’m late—”

“Where you going, Blake?”

“Mojave, up past Palmdale. They’re putting on a napalm show.”

“Take me with you, Blake? Please?”

“You’d throw stinkbombs.”

“Won’t, honest, Blake. Please. I get migraines when I’m alone all day and Greg’s gone to Vandenburg Base for three days. To talk with the brass about chopper parts. The man of helicopter parts. Let me come, Blake. One more in your crew won’t be noticed.”

“There’ll be some Taybott men.”

“They won’t know me or I them. Greg’s kept me away from Taybott people for fear I’d break out picket signs. Take me and I’ll tell you all about your non-helicopter parts.”

“You won’t get on a soapbox?”

“Or my high horse, or a low horse, or even Bisk. Bisk? Where are you girl?”

Bisk came prancing back from the driveway. She’d retrieved Blake’s morning paper and was carrying it proudly in her grin. Mari accepted the paper from her.

“Can Bisk come, Blake? Please? She gets migraines when I leave her alone all day.”

He waved them in.

They talked not at all on the San Diego Freeway cutting across San Fernando Valley. At moments Mari even read the paper. This was all right with Blake. He didn’t want to hear about what was, or wasn’t, between this woman and her husband. As for what might or might not be between her and himself, he didn’t want to get into that, either, it would be a tiny pendant from what was, or wasn’t, with the husband. As his brushes with women generally were.

On the run you ran into married women who were attracted to the image of man with itinerary, man just passing through, then felt martyred by the first signs of travel preparations.

As they cornered east out of Newhall, for Antelope Valley, Mari said from her paper, “VC’s out to win with least human cost, too. Here’s an item about their finishing off a village called Dakson, with flamethrowers.”

“Cost accounting can’t be the monopoly of one side.”

“Double entry bookkeeping’s the game on both sides. Listen. The simple Montagnards of Dakson had only recently learned how to use matches, and flamethrowers were beyond their imagination. Then, in one horrifying hour, flame throwers wielded by Communist troops wreaked death and destruction . . . ‘They threw fire at us’ was how survivors described the attack . . . 60 thatched-roof houses razed . . . Ashes blew across carcasses of water buffalo . . . Rows of bodies of women and children . . . Tiny brother and sister, still clinging to each other . . . 63 bodies dragged from bunkers—”

“You save lives any way you can. Don’t read any more.”

They were well into the desert when Mari left off scratching Bisk’s unreservedly available neck to say thoughtfully, “They’re not going to let you tell it like it is, not a chance.”

“The Vietnam footage, you mean?”

“They won’t let you put those shots in, will they, Blake?”

“How many close-ups of the skin and bone aftermath of Hiroshima have you seen, 23 years after?”

“If they hold you back, what’ll you do?”

“Tell it as it isn’t, or is only in propagandistically safe part, the bloodless, faceless, skinless part.”

“That good enough?”

“No.”

“Isn’t there an alternative?”

“No.”

“There’s got to be.”

“There’s one, get a staff job on Hanoi Radio. I’d run into the same problems there, maybe worse. There’s no place where they want the whole footage.”

“Don’t you want to hit somebody?”

“You did it for me. Your husband. More ways than one. I’m not sure he’s the one to hit, but as long as you enjoy it.”

“He’s the one enjoys it, Blake. A good wife doesn’t deprive her mate of his intensest pleasures.”

“I thought you were enjoying yourself somewhat.”

“In your bed I was.”

“Long before.”

“Don’t make a big thing of how I took off after Greg, Blake, I was drunk, that’s all.”

“Think about this, drunk comes in four parts, jocose, morose, bellicose, comatose. You start on bellicose and end on bellicose. You’re fixated on fight even when much less than drunk. Your private war is peculiar, each shooting the other to make him happy.”

“Public wars may involve some of that altruism, too. Was I bellicose with you?”

“You’re a smart enough strategist not to start offensives on two fronts at once. Remember Hitler.”

“Tomorrow the world. Today there’s you.”

“Today there’s the Taybott people, don’t try to make them happy, all right?”

This was a proving ground for some types of field and air ordnance. Deep in the desert a Mekong Delta jungle hamlet had been reproduced, a cluster of huts, camouflaged underground hideouts, ammunition dumps, snipers’ perches under thatched roofs and in trees. Taybott technicians and Marine Corps officers, Air Cavalry men, were on hand to explain how the insurgents’ installations had to be got at, to cut their deadly fire, when our troops moved into such hostile areas.

Technicians and officers explained that no hostile personnel would be indicated here, not by mannequins, not by dummies, not by cutouts. The reason for this was, today’s mission was to show things being destroyed, not, primarily, people, so our troops could move in without bitter casualties. The emphasis, for purposes of this demonstration, was on things, not people. The implications, though, had much to do with people, ours. If things designated as military targets could be knocked out, caves, dumps, perches, many American lives would be saved, Asian ones, too, in the longer view. The point was that traditional weapons were of little use against the guerrilla refuges, since they couldn’t be seen and located. Therefore the invention and use of napalm. Today’s show would point up how vital to our overall goal of saving lives the new anti-guerrilla weapon, napalm, was. The technicians and officers hoped Blake, as anchorman of this news team, would see the logic in this emphasis on things, with the overtone of vastly lowered casualty lists, meaning, people.

Blake said he saw the logic. He wondered, all the same, if such a show was entirely realistic without a hint, through the use of dummies, or cutouts, that a hamlet of this type was inhabited by people, noncombatants who might be in the line of fire.

The officer in charge, Colonel Halbors, said there were no villagers shown precisely because the targets of napalm missions were things, along, of course, with whatever hostile troops might be manning the things, and to show villagers would shift the emphasis from things to people. He hoped Blake appreciated the logic behind featuring the military mission and not dwelling on incidental casualties among civilians, which had been wildly exaggerated, especially by the enemy and those naïve about military exigencies. This being, it should be kept in mind, war.

Blake said he appreciated it, yes. He just felt that as a reporter he ought always to be looking for the whole picture.

As he spoke he was watching Mari, who stood to one side holding Bisk tight by the leash. She was chewing on her lips, her eyes were fixed, but she kept her mouth shut.

The cameramen left for shielded blinds from which they could shoot at a variety of angles. Blake, Mari, and the rest of the crew were led to the concrete bunker a distance from the mock-up village, a structure mostly underground but with a viewing slot some two-feet wide, protected by a wide concrete overhang. Colonel Halbors came with them, to explain the operation step by step. There was the rouping of unseen helicopters from some part of the sky.

After some minutes Colonel Halbors signaled through an intercom that stage one, the approach, could start. At the same time he pressed a button on his control panel. Instantly large glare-orange arrow markers swung into sight in and around the village, pointing to the hidden installations which were the targets in this mission, rather than people.

Certain things, not people, had to be sought out and destroyed, Colonel Halbors said. Artillery and air-to-ground missiles could not do the job. The idea was to watch how napalm got in there and did the job, to save lives, as well as rout the enemy and deal him a costly blow.

The thrum from the sky had been getting louder, now three helicopters came into sight, approaching from the black, broken-spined mountains. Mari was still biting on her lips. Suddenly, she stood.

“Colonel,” she said, “did you happen to read the paper today?”

“Yes, yes, I did,” Colonel Halbors said, surprised. “Why do you ask?”

“Did you happen to read the item about VC’s knocking out the whole village of Dakson with flamethrowers, people along with things?”

Blake was waving to her to sit down, she remained standing.

“I did. What is your point?”

“My point is, the VC doesn’t attack mock-up villages, it attacks real villages, as we do. In these attacks they don’t pretend to separate people from things, they say people are things, that’s what war is, and that’s how we act in war too, when we go into villages not mock-up but inhabited. The VC’s honest, at least, they say there are no people in war, can’t be, there’re only things, except a lot of them walk around on two legs—”

Colonel Halbors’ face was hard. He said, “Are you trying to say we annihilate whole local populations as the enemy does, purely and simply for the sake—”

“Colonel, when you drop napalm on a whole village, and the village is full of people, not mannequins, not mock-ups—”

“Hold it right there, Miss,” Colonel Halbors said in command voice. The helicopters were now circling over the village. He spoke into the intercom, saying the drop could begin, as Mari fought off Blake’s efforts to get her back in her seat. “Now. Did I hear you right? You were actually saying—”

“Colonel, the survivors at Dakson said, they threw fire at us. Colonel, in the real hamlets, not pretend ones, we throw fire at them. Can you tell me how from their point of view one thrown fire is different from—”

The words were still coming from her mouth when a small, energetic body, a jackrabbit, went arcing fast across the desert on the near side of the village. Heading for the village, with mathematical, measured bounces.

At this moment Mari stopped talking and screamed. Screamed again. Shrilled, “My God! Here! Bisk! Back, Bisk!”

There was Bisk on the desert, going fast toward the village. The rabbit was streaking across the sands, Bisk was streaking after it.

Blake saw what had happened. In her outburst, Mari had been gesturing strongly at Colonel Halbors, with her hold on the leash relaxed. Bisk, seeing the rabbit, had simply pulled the loop off her fingers and dived out through the viewing slot. The leash was trailing after Bisk as she flashed along, the happy hunter.

“Happened so fast!” Mari bubbled. “She goes crazy when something on four legs moves fast! Bisk! Please! Bisk, girl!”

“Colonel,” Blake said fast, “can you possibly, is there any chance—”

“Started,” Colonel Halbors said, pointing. “Can’t call back what’s dropping.”

He was right, objects were descending from all three helicopters.

The rabbit, Bisk hot after him, was tearing around the bamboo huts, Mari, face come apart, was halfway through the bunker opening, trying to climb out. Blake took her by the hips, slender, boyish roundings, well remembered, pulled her back.

“Nothing to do,” he said, holding her down on the bench. “Easy now. You’d get yourself killed and that’s all.”

Mari was shaking, looking around wild-eyed.

“You couldn’t give up your war,” Blake said, holding her. “If there’s a casualty, it’ll at least have a different dogtag.”

Black objects from the helicopters were dropping on things, not people. One by one, things belched up, and out, in flame.

An ammunition dump gushed flame. A sniper’s platform in a tree spewed orange. A machine-gunner’s blind, hidden with piled brush, erupted in an all-directional lick. Huts kept popping flashes of flame, here, there, everywhere. Bisk kept dogging the rabbit between the igniting huts, full speed.

“Bisk—you—come—back—here!” Mari screamed from the deeps of her lungs.

The rabbit shot into view around the corner of a hut, Bisk inches from his heels. At this moment the hut metamorphosed, as by the push of a button, from structure to flame, and at that moment, Bisk metamorphosed. One second, running dog, next, standing flame.

She’d skidded to a halt, frozen as in a stop-action movie. Through his binoculars Blake saw how she stood still, puzzled, how she turned to bite the attacker all over her body to find her jaws closing on flame.

She looked everywhere overhead, as at sneaky birds, as she burned. She found no explanations, the big birds in the sky only burred, in a language that to her was only loudness. Burning, she turned her eyes at last toward the bunker, to the one source of all correctives, to all impedings and harassments, Mari.

Mari moaned, pushed again toward the opening. Blake pressed hard on her shoulders.

“Don’t look,” he said, forcing his body in front of her to block her vision.

Bisk stood motionless, looking to Mari, a fire with four legs. Now she did the only thing she knew to do, when the ultimately wanted was not forthcoming, flopped over on her back in the bisquit position. Paws flabbed over chest, barely in touch, were burning, paws stretched wide were burning.

She begged, she burned, mouth totally open for the ultimate bisquit, a cessation of heat, of being eaten by enemy with no bulk or outlines. Eyes still looking to Mari.

“Put your mind on something else,” Blake said mechanically, blocking Mari’s eyes.

The choppers rattled away. It was two or three minutes before Colonel Halbors judged it safe for Blake to go out, provided he was careful. The other members of Blake’s crew took Mari’s arms to hold her back.

When Blake got to Bisk, the colonel right behind, the dog was still alive, still burning in places, still on her back in position of ask, still asking.

Flames flicked from her belly, forehead, one foreleg. Black smoke came from these points, as from other points where the flames had subsided. Bisk was diminished. In places, instead of fur, dark smoking patches. In others, no flesh, bone bared within the charring.

All fur and flesh were gone from the soft, soft neck. Lower jaw gone, except for the armature of surprisingly frail bones.

Left eye gone. What had been eye was black hole, smoking. Above this hole, where the fuzzed brow had been, small flames fighting to live.

Bisk’s right eye, intact, looked straight to Blake, with all its uncomprehending blue. Asking all the questions.

The asking front paws were charred, bones showing, flames eating vaguely, afterthoughts, about the remnants of paws. An end to heat, this haphazardly cremated animal from a vanished dynasty of the icecaps, displaced monarch of remote snowlands, was saying, as the cremation continued.

Remnant of mouth, ringed with small flames, leftover mouth was in total crazed grin to total crazed environment, which must in the end relent and produce the bisquit of bisquits, a taking back of cannibal heat. The inch by inch cremation continued.

“Need a gun,” Blake said. “One around?”

Colonel Halbors shook his head. Much napalm here, no guns. “Terrible thing to happen. You’ll turn this footage over, I assume.”

“Network decision, I don’t make policy. There’s got to be a gun somewhere.”

Colonel Halbors shook his head. “Would you rather I confiscated all your reels?”

“What’re you afraid of?” Blake was looking everywhere. “Shots of one dog burning’ll give you another Dien Bien Phu?”

“You can’t leave this area with that footage, Mr. Arborow.”

“All right, you get it.”

The nearest hut had just caved in, its understructure was creeping with spent flame and smoking. The supports on which the hut had rested were four-by-fours, good. Blake ran over and pulled a charred beam free, a four-foot length. He ran back, holding the beam by one end.

“Couldn’t even save the film. Be cool again,” he said to the dog, and brought the beam down as hard as he could, on the head.

Bisk jerked, her head shook, then her good eye settled on Blake again, asking. Manipulating him full force with the eye.

“Go home to snow, Bisk. What’s so worth seeing out here. You’ve got the whole picture.”

He swung again, with all his strength.

Bisk’s body shook, the eye rolled away, came back, gelled again, held steady on Blake, asking.

“Leave us to our leashes, Bisk,” Blake said, and swung again.

The magnificently blue eye quivered, began to take the dim view, then dimmer, then closed altogether, and Bisk was cool again, as finally, Blake thought, with luck, with luck, we’ll all, the invaded and the sucked, all bisquit wanters, be free from burning.

2: The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements

On the night of April 22, when I got back from lecturing to FANNUS (For A New Novel Undergraduate Society) on Hemingway (“A Psycho-Statistical Survey of the Broken Bones in Papa”), my answering service gave me a cryptic message. From Kid Nemesis, pronounced Quentin. Call no matter what the hour. There was no way to call at any hour, the number he left was wrong. The harpie at the other end said in Placidyl tones that she didn’t know any Quentin, and if she did she’d turn him in for what, considering he was a friend of mine, must be his main activity, child molesting. I said she had no grounds for assuming I was in a child molesting ring since the people I molested on the phone sounded 300 years old, and senile. She said she wasn’t too senile to know that molestation professionals will practice on anybody when there’s no child around, to keep their hand in, in what she wouldn’t say, being a lady. I said if she was a lady any one of the Gabor sisters was Miss Twinkletoes, and asked if anything she kept her hand in was mentionable, a question I hinted was in order about any member of her sex, lady or not, who went to sleep before nine. She said if she could get within reaching distance of me she’d show me what she’d dearly love to put her hand in, my mouth, and rip out my filthy degenerate’s tongue to use for a pincushion.

Enough of this conversation. I reproduce its high points mainly to show how frayed nerves everywhere are getting, maybe due to Vietnam. What made me boil was not the old hellhag’s tone but Quentin’s typical sloppiness in leaving a wrong number, urgently.

I didn’t call him the next morning. I gave him until noon to feel urgent enough to call me. When my curiosity peaked and threatened to zenith, I dialed his home number. The phone rang a dozen times before he answered; his voice seemed to have its origins at the bottom of a barrel, out of a mouth brimming with molasses. More simply put, out of a mouth in a molasses barrel.

“Gordon, zow, I’m desperate for sleep. Can I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Your call last night. Its reference.”

Time went by.

“You’re crazy. I didn’t call you.”

“You mean my answering service is hallucinating?”

“They probably make up calls so you won’t feel nobody cares. No kidding, they really said I called?”

“And gave the impression lives were at stake. And left a number to call back. A wrong number, as a result of which I was treated to a long string of insults from somebody I don’t even know.”

More time passed.

“That nibbles, Gordon. Dhzz. I remember calling Cedars of Lebanon, zhmm, yes, and the L.A. Times Information Desk, right. But you, uh, uh.”

“Reconstruct the circumstances. Where were you?”

“Some friends’ house off Laurel Canyon, I’ve told you about them, The Omen. May be pertinent that we were stoned to a tilt, the third time down, and I have the impression I still am. We were really stretched out on this grass.”

“I take it you’re not talking about a lawn.”

“Maybe Forest Lawn. Where I believe I still am, hear embalmers coming, hypo needles jingle. Gordon, I’d be greatly in your debt, which I’d be willing to settle for money, a sizable amount, if you’d stop cross-examining me and let me get back to sleep. You get so goddamn cross when you examine.”

I don’t let people go back to sleep after it’s established that in the course of a social evening they’ve placed calls to Cedars and Times Information. Especially when I learn that in their thinking I was on a par with a great hospital and a foremost metropolitan daily.

“I’ll see you’re stoned, Quentin, out of town, if you don’t clear this up. Why did you call the hospital and the paper?”

“See, now. Oh. There you go. It was about cracking knuckles.”

“Sure.”

“See, we were sitting around, listening to records, and we got to cracking our knuckles, first I did, then everybody. First in time with the music, then not. Then somebody said, what makes a knuckle crack. We got to discussing it. That’s a scary thing to discuss, Gordon. The more we got into it, the more we realized we’re not so brainy. Your knuckles are more a part of you than Jean-Paul Sartre, say. We know all there is to know about Sartre, not the first thing about our own knuckles that we’ve been hearing all our lives. If I don’t get some sleep my teeth’ll fall out. What makes knuckles crack, Gordon?”

“Bending your fingers backward is the usual cause, Quentin.”

“I know what you do to bring it about, what I’m asking is the why. See, we got into it, and we were absolutely in the dark as to the mechanisms. We started to get panicky. It’s like first hearing your heart without any prior warning you’ve got such a loud organ. You feel you’ve been invaded by enemy aliens. That was when somebody said, call Cedars, get some staff doctor who could give the professional view. Nobody there would talk, and that’s supposed to be a hospital serving the public. If an institution looks out for the public, wouldn’t you think it would have some interest in preventing panic? You know what runaway panic can lead to in these times, once it spreads.”

“So you tried Times Information.”

“Gordon, it’s the right of the public to be informed, and the duty of a newspaper to give information. The Times people got very wiseass. Said sleep it off and when we woke we wouldn’t be stampeding about knuckles or any joints. That kind of sneery talk is a cover for ignorance.”

“So then you called me.”

“Did I?”

“You’d better remember before I make liverwurst out of your knuckles.” It occurred to me that I should have said Knucklewurst, but this was no time for anatomical niceties. “Think, now.”

“Let’s see. Hnng. Don’t threaten my knuckles, Gordon, I resent it. About that time there was something else. See, now. Fmmp, it’s coming, I was scared stiff, I was sweating. Somebody said, Gnothi seauton. I said, that’s Greek. Somebody said, yes, Greek for, Know thyself. Somebody said, the essence of the Greek philosophers’ wisdom was, Know thyself, and if you don’t even know what makes the sounds in your knuckles how much can you claim to know about thyself. Somebody said, well, if doctors and newspapermen can’t help, and if philosophers try to study thyselves, call some philosopher. Somebody said, Sartre’s a philosopher and he’s never written a line with any insights about knuckles. Somebody said, Sartre’s no test, existentialists study alienation, so naturally he’d be more interested in fractures than in joints. Somebody said, they don’t list philosophers in the Yellow Pages, even under Thyselfhelp. Sure, course, that’s how it went. Ah, right. I said, I know a philosopher, older man thinks about everything and has looked into all human phases quite deep. Somebody said, well, Christ, give him a call, and I guess that’s when I called, Gordon. It’s not so important now. It can wait, now that I look it over. What’s important is that you stop shaking your fist at my knuckles and I get back to sleep before I have a heart attack, Gordon.”

“Not just yet. The answer, in case you’re interested, is, synovial fluid.”

“What, Gordon? Synovia? The flamenco guitarist? He flew what?”

“That’s Segovia, not Synovia, besides, we’re discussing fluids, not musicians. The cracking has to do with synovial fluid.”

“I’m not going to sit here and have an hour discussion about fluids, Gordon, laying the groundwork for a coronary, my God. I don’t care how gorgeous a philosopher you are, when I bring up bones, don’t change the subject to fluids, Jesus. I’m begging, Gordon, I’ve got to get me some sleep before I turn blue.”

“You were in a panic last night. The panic could come back, you’d better know about this. Synovial fluid is a colorless, viscid lubricating juice. It has in it a mucinlike substance. It’s secreted by the synovial membranes of articulations, bursae, and tendon sheaths. Its purpose is to prevent a lot of scraping in the sockets when you move their parts. This fluid is found in knuckles, as well as knees, elbows, hips, and so on—”

“Gordon, what, for Christ’s sake, would this or any fluid have to do with the cracking sound I’ve been referring to?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Quentin.”

“Ah. Znnk. Huh?”

“I haven’t looked into that end of the thing yet, I’ve had other matters on my mind. I’m just saying that if you’re really serious about Gnothi seauton, you have to know about the synovial fluid in thyself, your most intimate greases, that’s a starting point—”

“You dirty, rotten, miserable, miasma-jawed, thumbsucking—”

All things considered, including the evenness of the score, plus my dazzling outburst on the workings of the skeletal hinges, which told me I didn’t Gnothi much about my own seauton because I never guessed I had such information in my head—all things considered, this seemed the logical time to hang up.

I’d known Quentin Seckley for what is usually called the better part of a year, but I won’t call it that. The part of a year in which you know Quentin, whatever number of months it embraces, is not the better part.

Beware of wellwishers. Often they are people wishing themselves wells, oil or gas, to be obtained through your good offices, in extreme cases over your dead body, so they can flash a lot of money in your face. It was wellwishers of this type, I think, who suggested that after 20 years of writing I should have the profit of teaching writing to the youths. Everybody thought I should be put in touch with the electric new generation. Nobody stopped to look into the matter of my insulation.

I listened. When I was offered a lectureship in creative writing at Santana State, close by Los Angeles, I took it. My subject, it turned out, was recreative rather than creative writing. Some students took the course for refreshment, as they’d take gymnastics or folk dancing, or a butterscotch float. Others were hard at work composing meticulous recreations of Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, J. P. Donleavy, Dylan Thomas, not to mention, though I’m obliged to, O. Henry and Albert Payson Terhune.

Quentin, a New Yorker who’d arrived at Santana after being expelled from four eastern universities, sometimes for unplanned pregnancies, sometimes for plans to synthesize STP in undergraduate chemistry laboratories, was the exception. He had no interest in writing for diversion, he was concerned with one thing only, writing for money. Neither was he moved to write imitations of well-known prose, he didn’t care to write prose at all. What he began to inundate me with were rock-and-roll lyrics.

An intimate of psychedelic musicians, Quentin was composing lyrics for one of their groups, for, if it worked out, money. Two of his songs had already been recorded, with results closer to a thud than a splash. He was taking my course, he explained, to learn how to write better rock lyrics. He accused me of deliberately perpetuating the generation gap when I pointed out that, even if “better rock lyrics” was not a contradiction in terms, lyricism of any order, very definitely of this electronic order, was not within my expertise. Quentin had concluded that I was a philosopher of cosmic scope, an authority on you name it, and as such the best guide for rock-lyricism. Lyrics are made of words, aren’t they? I was a word expert, wasn’t I? Well, then? Why, except out of orneriness, plain and simple withholding, wouldn’t I instruct him in bettering his lyrics so he could better his income?

To show the magnitude of the problem he posed to me and to literature, not to mention the English language, I will give here one of his efforts. Its title was, After You Get Your Troubles Packed, Don’t Send Dat Old Kit Bag to Me. It went this way:

Fire come down the mountaing
Burn up all yo house an goods

Fire come adown the mountaing
Burn away yo house an goods

Yeh, dat fire roll down fom de high country
Smoke up all yo tangible assets

But you kin give us a smile, a smile, a smile

Iffn ye’ll curl up yo lips t’other way

After you git all yo troubles awrapped in datole kit bag

What’s the idee mailin em to me?

Wouldn’t send dat greasy load to Care Packages, now

Whaffo you parcelpost dat mess to me? Huh?

Connin man took all yo money
Meddlin man took off yo wife

Connin man abscond wid yo money
Meddlin man hep hissef to yo missus

O fasttalk man walk away wid yo savings
Meddlesome man partake of yo better half

Now you kin give us a grin, a grin, a grin

Jess culr up yo mouf t’other way

“See some way I can improve it?” Quentin said the night he showed me this work.

“Yes, burn it in the first fire that comes down the mountaing. If the fire doesn’t come down, go up after it.”

“Come on, I’m really finding my own voice here.”

“Losing, I’d say. Mountaings. I take that to be your best rendering of Ozark hillbilly. The deses, doses, and dems could be Old South Uncle Remus, or Brooklynese, I’m not sure which.”

“Little of both.”

“A little of either would go a long way, Quentin. Kentucky mountaineer, Dekalb Avenue, blackface patois, backed with sitars, that’s not a voice, that’s glossolalia. They call this the gift of tongues but with you it’s a curse. Many of your tongues should be tied.”

“Jesus, these are sounds I maybe didn’t hear around my family’s dining table in the Silkstocking District, but I’ve heard them on records, and records are part of my environment, and my environment’s part of me. Am I supposed to be a snob and assume only my Junior League and stockbroker family talks right?”

“Quentin, right now you’re talking more like a Silkstocking than a combination stevedore-cottonpicker-moonshiner. Silkstockings should have some place in the linguistic sun along with Leatherstockings.”

“Mr. Rengs, think about this, when I’m talking to just one person I don’t have to sound like more than one person. In song lyrics you’re talking to a whole lot of different people so the trick is to be democratic and sound like all of them.”

“All who never went beyond third grade? Why not address a few college graduates, too? Or does your kind of democracy ban the literates?”

“Look, there’s a theory behind this. Most things never melted like they were supposed to in this alleged melting pot. It’s time we at least let the different languages and styles of talk melt down a little.”

“Melt is one thing, fracture’s another.”

“I know, things liquefy when they melt, have to be hard to fracture. You’re confusing fluids and bones, I wish you’d stop that, Mr. Rengs.”

“If you don’t stop pestering me with schizoid lyrics, Quentin, you’ll see some real confusing of fluids and bones, this minestrone will be confused with your skull.”

We were at that point sitting in the House of Gnocchi, a ghastly Italian gag-and-vomit on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. It was so far from being a restaurant, or any food dispensary for humans, the gnocchi should have been used to plug leaky faucets and the linguini served in a trough. Quentin had insisted on taking me to his favorite eating place to discuss his writing problems, which he felt were inadequately covered in class.

“Mr. Rengs, you’re pretending to be above this language mix that’s happening today. That’s hiding behind the generation gap.”

“You’re not mixing words, Quentin, you’re dismembering them. Let’s examine your last statement. How can anybody hide behind a gap? That’s like saying, he camouflaged himself in a vacuum, or, he took refuge in a quantity of nothing.”

“Quantity of nothing. You just made my point. What’s a gap, by definition, but a ditch, and what’s a ditch but something with nothing in it, no things, no people? If there aren’t any people around in the ditch, well, there’s nobody to see you, so you can hide damn
efficiently.”

“Logic, Quentin. No people around, no reason to hide.”

“What I mean is, there aren’t any people in the ditch, they’re lined up on both sides.”

“In that case, the ditch would have to be very wide, say 10 miles, before it could be used for hiding purposes.”

“Well, the way you’re digging at this particular ditch, it’ll be 10 miles wide in no time.”

“Whatever the dimensions of a gap, Quentin, you can’t hide behind it, the best you can do is hide in it.”

“I can’t buy that, Mr. Rengs. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, is there a sound? That’s philosophy, now don’t deny it. By the self-same logic, if you’re using a ditch for hiding purposes, and it works, that means there’s nobody close enough to see you, so who knows if you’re in the ditch, or behind it, or under it?”

“Whenever I’m within 10 miles of you, Quentin, I’m in the soup, not behind it or under it, and I’m not referring to this minestrone, which isn’t soup, it’s sheepdip.”

Over a zabaglione that tasted like detergent Quentin made a sudden announcement. He said, “The omen are interested in the Mah Own Tang lyric.” I said I was not aware that he had also written a song saluting his own body odor. He said he still had reference to the kit-bag lyric in which there was mention of the article Sir Edmund Hillary was always going up. I said, “When the subject is one omen the verb must be is, watch those singulars and plurals.” He informed me that The Omen were very singular but happened to be several people, they were a raga-rock recording group, some folk-hard material, too, but mostly raga, featuring sitars and tablas.

I was just becoming aware of the trend among recording groups to use common nouns in the singular as appellations for a collectivity. It was a source of concern to me that in time this might lead to a new vocabulary of aggregate nouns: a jefferson airplane of draft dodgers, a grateful dead of tambourinists, a loving spoonful of schizophrenes, a vanilla fudge of juvies, a holding company of dropouts. Now, it seemed, we had to allow for a new and still more worrisome formulation, an omen of hecklers.

“One thing you’re overlooking,” Quentin went on, “this song is a takeoff, and as such a howl.”

“A titter, maybe. To those who know the old song you’re taking off.”

“You know it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t give me that, you just mentioned it.”

“It was my race unconscious talking.”

“Your race prejudice, you mean, against the race of everybody under 30. All right, let’s see how prejudiced you get against some lyrics not in the language mix. Here.”

He handed me a page with scribblings on it at all angles. I could decipher only two bits:

suppose on the day of days

when comes the savior

to lead us way upstairs to best behavior

his name is mao

will we gao?

And:

if hell is hot

what’s the temperature of heaven

seven?

“I can’t go into these political and theological questions on a sick stomach, Quentin,” I said. “The zabaglione is giving me ptomaine, I think.”

“Ptomaine,” Quentin said, quickened. “There’s a great word to work with. Gives me an idea for a takeoff number about the trots tourists get when they go someplace like Spain. This is inspired. Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the—”

Everything considered, including the sharp pains in my stomach, that seemed a good time to go to the men’s room.

Not long after this takeoff of a dinner, the kind that will make you take off for even the worst ptomaine zones of Spain, Quentin asked if he could stay with my class in the second quarter. I categorically refused, on grounds that, though he was up to many possibly stunning activities with words, none could be related to writing or the English language, my two areas of competence. Quentin didn’t fight. He simply said that maybe I ought to let him into some of my areas of incompetence and maybe they’d shrink. My answer was, my areas of incompetence had been too hard come by, I couldn’t give them up. To match that, he decided there was something he couldn’t give up. Me. When class ended for the quarter, Quentin went right on. Deprived of me on campus, he showed up almost daily on my doorstep, with batches of lyrics. Once I ventured the thought that his lyrics were for the birds, for example, goonies. He informed me that The Byrds wrote their own lyrics, his efforts were mainly for The Omen. I came to see that an omen custom-made for me had been installed centrally in my life. In the person of Quentin Seckley, relentlessly, ominously, filled with song.

Days after the conversation about knuckles and their sound effects, my phone rang. A girl at the other end said, “Hello, Mr. Rengs? Would Ivar by any chance happen to be there?”

This voice sounded blurrily, adrenalizingly, familiar. It immediately made my tongue ache at the root.

“Ivar?”

“This is Mr. Gordon Rengs, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and there’s nobody named Ivar here. I don’t know anybody named Ivar. Take that as boasting if you want.”

I was nipping at the tip of my tongue with my fingers, as though to pull it out. This was annoying on several counts: I pride myself on having no tics, I had no reason to pull my tongue out, this interfered with my talking. The girl’s voice held bad echoes. That pulled at my tongue through my fingers.

“There’s some mixup, Mr. Rengs. You’re the Mr. Rengs teaches at Santana, aren’t you? You’re a good friend of this fellow I’m trying to locate, his collaborator.”

“I am? On what?”

“Lyrics, of course. You write those great lyrics with him. You know.”

“Lyrics? What type?”

“Hard, folk, country, jazz, raga, any rock lyrics they need.”

“I see. You’re looking for Quentin Seckley.”

A pause.

“Quentin what’d you say? Huh? I don’t know any Quentin.”

Simultaneously I bit my tongue viciously and remembered this voice, the bite in it when vicious.

“Miss, I have no dealings with an Ivar. I don’t do business with Quentin Seckley, either, but from time to time, when he holds a gun on me, I point out the shakier lines in his songs, the Parkinsonian ones.”

Another pause.

“Mr. Rengs, could I trouble you to describe this Quentin?”

“Yes. Sandy hair down to the eyes. Looks like shredded Naugahyde. Decided stoop, slight list. About five-ten. Mole on right cheekbone. Sneaky air. Writes his lyrics for The Omen. Also—”

“That’s Ivar. Well I’ll be.”

“I’ll join you, if there’s room. What do you want Quentin for?”

“Well, he was supposed to sleep with me, it was made very clear it had to be promptly at three, and he hasn’t shown up, and they’re all asking questions.”

“All. How many are there?”

“Well, all the regulars, six, at least. They’ve been waiting for an hour for us to get started, they don’t like to just sit around.”

“Who does? I’m curious as to where you got my name.”

“Well, Ivar, Quentin talks about you and what a help you are in his writing. I knew you teach at Santana, and right now I’m out here at UCLA, of course, so I called UCLA Administration and they had a Santana faculty directory—”

“You’re at UCLA? That’s where Quentin was supposed to, ah, join you?” I thought about synovial fluid. Flamenco guitar in the background. No sitar.

“Sure, that’s where we always do it. It wouldn’t work out anyplace else, this is where they’ve got all the apparatus. So, in short, you don’t have any idea where he might be, Mr. Rengs?”

“None. Unless he’s found some other place where they have the apparatus.”

“Not likely, Mr. Rengs, you don’t find machinery like this any old place. Well, case you hear from him, would you tell him call in right away to the Sleep Project? It’s very important, he’s throwing our whole schedule off.”

“Sleep Project. Certainly. I’m sorry about your schedule.”

Yet another silence, potently pulsed.

“Mr. Rengs, I know this sounds crazy, but would you do something for me?”

“Miss, of course you’d want to get back on schedule, it’s only natural, but I have a very complicated lecture to prepare for tomorrow, it deals with the quantity and quality of broken bones in the collected works of Hemingway, did you know that in his first 49 stories alone there were 28 cases of physical mangling, 15 involving legs, 5 hands, 4 groins—”

“No, what I want to ask is, would you say some words for me? I’m beginning to remember something about the name Quentin. Would you do me a big favor and just say the words, Hello, is Quentin there?”

“First say some things for me. Child molester. Filthy degenerate. Rip your tongue out. Pincushion.”

The longest pause yet. Calibrated with emotional exhalations.

“Well I’ll be triple flogged. You’re the man called me the other night.”

“You’re the 300-year-old lady.”

“When I’m woken up from a deep sleep I sound about 600. See, knocking myself out like I do on class assignments and all the hours at the Project in addition, by dinner I’m beat, so some nights I just take a pill after dinner and crawl into bed. Wow, I’m sorry I spoke that rough way to you, Mr. Rengs. I had no idea who it was, you can appreciate that. Also, I’d never heard of any Quentin, I knew the fellow in question as Ivar Nalyd. Oh, oh. Wait a minute. How’d you happen to get my number that night? What gave you the idea of calling me to locate him under any name?”

“I had a message to call him. The number he left was yours.”

“Now that’s real funny, Mr. Rengs. First, he’s never been to my place, second, I never gave him my number, though God knows he’s asked over and over, why I hardly know this guy, just see him at the Project and sometimes talk about rock lyrics and that’s all. My number’s not listed and my friends don’t give it out, they know how I insist on my privacy. This is in the category of weird.”

“Yes. Tell me, could you in any way be linked in Quentin’s mind with the idea of cracking knuckles, Miss—I’m afraid I don’t know your
name.”

“Victoria Paylow, Mr. Rengs. Vicki. What’s this about knuckles?”

“Could Quentin connect you in any way with the matter of cracking knuckles, Vicki? That was the subject on his mind the night he left your number.”

“Knuckles. Boy. This is insanity of the top echelons. Wearing a derby. I never got into knuckles with him, not in any deep way, that’s the truth. I never discuss much of anything with him, about all we do when we’re together is sleep. But awhile back I did have some kind of a dream about cracking knuckles. More than one, maybe. It’s mostly gone but I remember the loud sounds like pistols and how they scared me close to bald. But where’d Ivar, Quentin, get any thoughts about knuckles? Not from my dreams, that’s for sure, we’re under strict rules not to talk about our dreams. Well. Would you have any idea why he has two names, Mr. Rengs?”

“No, but the question might be refined. Why does he go to school at Santana under one name and sleep, participate in sleep projects at UCLA, under another?”

“It does seem fastidiously demented, Mr. Rengs. You have any theories about it?”

“Hard to say, Vicki. It could have something to do with keeping fluids and bones separate, he has strong feelings about—”

“No. This has got to stop. This is blue-ribbon lunacy. Somebody’s ransacking my brains.”

“Did I say something to upset you, Vicki?”

“Fluids and bones, I’ll be triple napalmed. That’s a theme that crops up time after time in my dreams. Offhand I don’t remember any particular dream but it keeps turning up. It’s against all rules to tell the contents of our dreams so where’s he get off slinging around my dream language? If there’s stuff like that in my memory banks, how come he can crack them? I swear—”

“If I find out anything I’ll certainly let you know, Vicki, I have your number—”

The following day, after lunch, Quentin rang my bell. He had another ream of lyrics with him. I threatened to send all his lyrics to the CIA if he didn’t give me a full explanation of the name Ivar Nalyd. The explanation was not what I would call simple, nor, in the last analysis, or any analysis, very explanatory.

Ivar was nothing but Ravi spelled backward, in honor of Ravi Shankar. Nalyd was a reversal of Dylan, in honor of Bob D., not D. Thomas. Quentin wrote all his songs under this name. He was afraid that if his family got wind of his income-producing activities, his father would cut off his allowance. Quentin held the view that any family as loaded as his should make allowances for a son busy in the arts, so any income the son produced would be gravy rather than bread and butter. Buttered bread is enhanced by gravy.

How, I wanted to know, was he safeguarding his allowance by passing himself off as Ivar Nalyd with such as Victoria Paylow?

He gave several starts. He tabulated his fingernails. He hummed for a time, in sitar glides.

“Victoria Paylow, I believe you said.”

“That is correct.”

“What would you be knowing about this young person, Gordon?”

“That she knows you as Ivar, and sleeps with you at UCLA with six people looking on. There’s a fair amount of apparatus involved, I gather.”

“Where’d you come across Vicki, Gordon?”

“She called here yesterday. Looking for you. You’ve got to learn finesse in dealing with the opposite sex, Quentin. When you make a date to sleep with them and don’t show up, they worry. So do all the people standing around.”

“Damn it, I called in and left word with the Project secretary that I couldn’t make it, she must have forgotten to tell them. The Omen were rehearsing for a record date and I had to be there in case they needed some lyric changes. Listen, how come Vicki was calling you to track me down?”

“Would it occur to her that you might be at home, when you write lyrics around the clock with your collaborator?”

“Collaborator?”

“She has the distinct impression that that’s my function in your life, Quentin.”

“I never used that word, Gordon, I swear it, all I said was, you’re kind of editor with my stuff. I’m searingly sorry she bothered you,
Gordon.”

“She has to be set straight, Quentin. She must be made to understand that I’m not your collaborator, you’re my contaminator. Now. Two more things need clearing up. First, why you leave this girl’s number for me to reach Quentin at, when she knows you as Ivar. Second, regarding this Sleep Project, what, exactly—”

“Who left Vicki’s number for anything, Gordon? Are you completely crazed?”

“I direct your attention to the night of the cracking knuckles, Quentin. You left a number for me to call. It was Vicki’s number. Vicki said she’d never heard of a Quentin, which was true. What would lead you to do such a rabid—”

“Syllogism serenade sweatshirt. This is a bummer. I was stoned, that was the thing. I must of plain forgot she knew me as Ivar. Oh, so no wonder you thought it was the wrong number. I get it now. Bllb. It was a slip on my part, from being stoned. Leaving that number altogether was a slip, if I did it. Grrz. I had the thought in the back of my head of going over to her place, that much I know. I was cracking my knuckles and getting tensed up and the urge was on me to drop over to Vicki’s, I don’t know why. The thing with the knuckles just naturally made me think of going to Vicki’s. I guess, being stoned, I just translated going there as being there, mixed up the wish and the result, so I left her number without realizing what I was doing. I really meant to drive over there but instead I passed out—”

“How did you know her address and phone number? She tells me she wouldn’t give them to you and she’s not listed—”

“Not in the phone book, no. But she is in the personnel files at the Project. I’ve had the idea of paying her a visit for some time, Gordon. I’ve had my eye on her at the Project, been building up some major urges about her. I’ll confess something. The urges got so major, I hung around the Project office one day until the secretary got called out, then I sneaked a look in the filing cabinet, located Vicki’s personnel record and memorized the salient facts. Look, it’s complicated. I’d have to reconstruct the whole situation for you. Where it begins is with the Sleep Project”

“I’d better know about that, too. Just try to spare me the details, such as why they need a secretary.”

“You don’t know about the Project, Gordon? Ah, then. None of this can make any sense to you, that’s obvious. That’s where I met Vicki, at the Project. They found out we sleep well together, for some reason, so they schedule us to do it together, for reasons they won’t explain. I use the name Ivar Nalyd over there for the same reason I use it on my songs—”

“Let me see if I’m following. You get paid for your activities at the Project?”

“Sure, Gordon, why else would I be putting in all that time? Sure, I get good hourly rates, so does Vicki. So, see, because I make money there, I figured, better do it under the alias, so my old man won’t hear about it and stop the allowance. Listen, I’ve got to take off now. Due at the Project. How about coming out with me and see the setup for yourself, it’s wild? Dr. Wolands likes visitors. Gordon, this is a whole new approach to a crucial human function. Look at it this way, here’s a thing you do every day of your life, yet you’re a blank about it. It’s like your knuckles cracking, the most intimate thing and you don’t know what’s going on. They’re studying every aspect at the Project, they go into it real deep, it’ll open your eyes . . .”

I had to go, of course. There were witless laminations between Quentin and Vicki, not as many as he would like, more than she warmed to. They made a leaky sandwich which had insinuated itself into my life, leaking from all sides. I felt a need to trace it to the bughouse short-order kitchen in which it had been put together, called, for some reason, the Sleep Project. To get this picture straight, I would have climbed any Mah Own Tang Quentin led me up. Followed him into any unhinged heaven, even if the temperature was seven. Had his name been Mao, I’d still gao.

As we drove along, Quentin told me something about Victoria Paylow. Graduate student at UCLA in history. Doing master’s thesis on the sadomasochistic aspects of late medieval sorcery, demonology, witchcraft, black masses, and alchemy. Played good guitar. Carried guitar around to play and sing Omen numbers to herself at odd moments. Adored Omen songs, particularly their lyrics, particularly those lyrics written by him, Quentin, Ivar. Her enthusiasm for said lyrics so intense as to suggest she had a big yen for him which she was trying to cover up by refusing to give him her phone number. Very vital presence to have sleeping next to you. Increasingly, the focal point of the increasingly agitated dreams Quentin was having at the Project. More spectacularly stacked than the Queen Mary.

“Quentin,” I said cautiously, “about the night of the knuckles. If I recall, you said you started the cracking, then the others joined in?”

“That’s the way it went, yes.”

“Do you remember why you started it? What train of thought you were in when you began bending your fingers?”

“Oh, I was thinking about Vicki, I guess. These days a major part of my thinking is about Vicki.”

“Can you recall what you were thinking about her, exactly?”

“Mmp, well, I guess I was thinking about her skirt. She wears this miniskirt to the Project, see, actually it’s more micro than mini, a figleaf stretched just enough to wrap around is what it amounts to. I devote a lot of thought to that flyspeck of a skirt, that iota of a skirt, what you might call that soupçon of a cover, just this side of bareass. I was thinking about that little-as-the-law-allows garment, then about reaching for some scissors, then beginning to snip at the skirt with the scissors. Yep, that’s about the sequence. I was cutting away, and humming.
And thinking, get this, about the La Brea Tar Pits, thinking they should be called the La Brea Arm Pits, though they’re between the legs, and laughing to myself. Then there was this voice. Her voice. I was imagining it, of course, remember I was some miles from my skull from this rich grass. The voice was loud, deep, and aggressive. Deeper than a bass. It said, you keep that up and I’ll give your hands a whack that’ll turn your knuckles to mush. Those are the exact words. The liquid threat first, then it said, fool around like that and I’ll crack your knuckles in half, plus each and every other bone in your body. The fracture threat. At that, you can bet, I dropped the imaginary skirt and then the imaginary scissors. All because of this imaginary voice, full of melts and breakages, which rattled my ears. That was when, sure, I began to crack my knuckles. Say, I’m glad you asked this question. It clears some things up. No wonder I got scared from the cracking. Actually I was already scared from the voice’s threats against my knuckles.”

“So you’d say the nervous cracking stemmed from some prior thoughts, imaginings, about Vicki.”

“Gordon, I not only would, I just did.”

We rode a while longer.

“Have you ever noticed, Quentin, how often references to fluids and bones come into your conversation?”

“I don’t know. Plenty of people talk about fluids and bones, they figure in everybody’s life.”

“In yours more than in some, I’d say. You like to keep your fluids in one category, your bones in another, and it annoys you when people get the categories mixed. I mention it because just now, when you remembered about this voice, you quoted it as threatening to hammer your knuckles to mush. The concept of reducing your osseous materials to liquid form would seem to disturb you, I think that’s a reasonable conclusion. Do you link this concept in any way with Vicki?”

“That’s a big batch of silliness, Gordon. True, the threat was in Vicki’s voice, but I was hallucinating, the voice was in my head, not coming from the outside.”

“True, but it was your head that, after originating the words, put them in Vicki’s mouth. You were the author, but it seemed important to put quotes around the words and attribute them to Vicki.”

“Gordon, I don’t know where you’re trying to get with this line of questioning. What’s the whole question of solids and liquids got to do with Vicki, anyway?”

“I don’t know, Quentin. But I have to ask you to stop cracking your knuckles and put your hands back on the steering wheel before you kill us both.”

Scientism is not for me. What are called the laws of Nature I take as gossip. They tell us a balloon filled with hot air rises because of Boyle’s Law, specific gravities, etc. I know different. I know that the balloon goes up because the sun sucks it up. How do I come by this information? By empathy, because my own head is often subject to the sun’s powerful suction, is heliotropic, so much so that my neck and shoulder muscles are pulled tight a good deal of the time, to keep my head in place. Medical men tell me this is neurotic tension but I know it for a healthy attempt to keep the organism in one piece. The migraine sometimes produced by this muscle strain is healthy, too, the head’s reassuring signal, in the only language it has, that it’s very much with me against all cosmic sabotage. Again, think about the peculiar behavior of water when the temperature drops below 32° Fahrenheit. This has always struck me as a highly emotional, and sick, reaction to unpleasantness, like the rigidification you see in certain advanced cases of schizophrenia. Well, science puts the stress on matter, art, on manner. This is probably not news to you.

The point is that I understood no part of the laboratory Quentin led me into. The large main room was laced with wires and cables leading to wall panels on which dials jigged and styluses twitched across revolving drums. Off this central room was a row of cubicles visible through wide walls of glass. Each contained a bed, plus a desk with a typewriter on it. In several of the beds people, men and women, were fast asleep. Electrodes were taped to assorted parts of the sleepers’ bodies, including their skulls. Technicians in white smocks sat in the main room, following the electronic messages being sent out by the sleeping parties. In one cubicle a man in pajamas, apparently just come awake, sat at the desk, typing energetically.

This, Quentin informed me, was the Sleep Center, where that crucial human activity, sleep, was being investigated from every angle, probed to the bottom. It was only in their waking hours, Quentin let me know, that men allowed themselves to be separated by the artificial barriers of color, ethnics, politics, ideology, hunger, territorial imperatives. In their repose all men were one because all slept, and slept alike. Sleep, you might almost say, was humanity’s least common denominator, because most common, indeed, universal. Sun makes men aliens to each other and, thus, themselves. Night unites. Mankind could open itself to, and assert, its true physiological community only with eyes closed. The Sleep Project, by ferreting out the true race-wide nature of sleep, was going to show all men their mutuality. The way to a lasting One World was to be revealed to us by that least likely leader, Morpheus, plus his right-hand men, his buddies, Somnus and Hypnos. In Thanatopsis our eyes would for the first time be opened. We would in the end cast off our false gods and pay full respect to His Worship Nod, the Sandman with his ingratiating sands. Something like that. He was very likely going to write a song about it. I couldn’t follow the argumentation because I was getting sleepy.

The chief psychologist had joined us during this impromptu lecture. He nodded his approval of the explication by Quentin, now Ivar Nalyd, who, he said, was this lab’s champion sleeper, though sometimes carried away in his poeticized claims about the lab’s work. Quentin introduced us. The man in the starched smock, truncated, coaly-haired, crisply managerial in manner if pudgy in matter, was Dr. Jerome Wolands. Dr. Wolands greeted my name with the precise opposite of somnolence. He took in so much air so rapidly, I expected all the Pentel pens in his breast pocket to pop.

“Gordon Rengs!” he said. “No! You can’t be!”

“I wish they’d told me sooner,” I said.

“Gordon Rengs! This is an occasion!”

“For me to leave immediately, unless you calm down.”

“No! Fantastic! I’ve read every word you ever wrote!”

Quentin, Ivar, took this as an occasion, not to leave, not to fall asleep like a champion, simply to put in something obnoxious. He said, “Doc, if those are the only words you’ve ever read, you’re in trouble.”

“I’m serious, Mr. Rengs,” Wolands said. “In fact, it was a book of yours, Messages, Hints, that led me to study psychology.”

I was not pleased with the undercurrent that he might have been led to psychology to figure out why he read me. Quentin had another interpretation: “I get your meaning, Doc. That book kept putting you to sleep, so you went into the psychology of sleep, to stay awake.”

“No, this man’s work kept me awake nights,” Wolands said. “He raises so many questions about how and why men claw at each other, up to the level of shooting wars, I turned to psychology to find some answers, and get my sleep again. Well. We’re certainly honored a man like you should take an interest in our investigations, Mr. Rengs. Believe it or not, through our studies of sleep we’re learning a considerable amount about how and why people provoke each other.”

“It’s a provocative approach,” I said. “What’s the basic idea, that if you make people sleep a lot you’ll cut down on wars?”

“It’s not the sleepers who make wars,” Wolands reminded me.

“Not while they’re sleeping, anyway.”

“Mr. Rengs, well-rested people don’t hit each other, asleep or awake. If we can get the insomniacs dozing off again, and improve the repose of the tossers and turners, you see how that ushers in a new epoch. The next great slogan may be, Sleepers of the world, unite! Conceivably that’s the only way men can ever forge the true communitas, in sleep. If we can just get them to sleeping soundly again, and that’s not a reference to snoring—”

This loonily Utopian dissertation on the politics of sleep was interrupted by the arrival of a bouncy, bubbly, extravagantly larded girl, the lab’s runner-up sleeper, the one contender to Ivar’s title. Victoria Paylow, of course. Carrying her guitar. She stretched outsize blue eyes at me in the very act of winking broadly. I was disturbed by this capacity of hers to enlarge her optic diameters in the process of a signifying contraction. How she managed to convey openness, readiness, a lusty receptivity, with a very literal narrowness of outlook, I don’t know. It seemed a trick, in a totally unexpected area, for blending fluids and bones.

She was, in fact, wearing a miniskirt that had the proportions of an iota, even a soupçon. It did, in fact, invite thoughts of scissoring. Ivar was, in fact, studying it in a scissory silence.

“Hi, Mr. Rengs,” she said, her two-way-stretch voice as elastic as her eyes. I considered the emotional gamut of a female who could make dock-walloper threats to rip out tongues one minute, utter a chirpy Future Farmers hi the next. “You come down here to see some world-champ sleeping?”

“I like to observe people who are outstanding in any field,” I said.

“We don’t do it standing,” she said. “Doing it on your feet is for amateurs.”

“If you keep on standing around, Mr. Rengs will question your professional standing,” Wolands said. “Hop to it, kids.”

Quentin and Victoria waved to me and slipped out a door. Very soon they reappeared in two of the vacant cubicles, adjoining ones, now dressed in pajamas. In a businesslike, practiced way they arranged themselves in their respective beds and lay still while lab assistants attached wires to all parts of their bodies, including their heads. They seemed unaware of each other and us. Wolands explained that they were in audio-visual isolation: blank wall between them, the windows we looked through were one-way glass. Soon they were alone, eyes closed. Soon after, they were asleep, as Wolands thought he proved by calling my attention to the movements of dials, gauges, meters, and recording styluses.

“You’re going to see some very special sleeping here today,” Wolands said. “Ivar and Vicki have real gifts for this. More than they know. Interlocking gifts.”

I recalled that Quentin had a good deal of Irish blood in him. Vicki had a colleen sauciness about her. I refrained from saying that this might be the lock of the Irish.

“Do you appreciate the full significance of what’s going on here, Mr. Rengs?”

“Something that’ll wreck the music world? Ivar writes lyrics, you know. I can’t believe he writes what he does in a waking state. I assume he creates them when he’s asleep.”

“It goes far beyond lyrics. Have you heard talk about our recent discovery, REM sleep?”

“You’ve discovered a new kind of sleep?”

“No, brought to light a very, very old type. REM means Rapid Eye Movement, Mr. Rengs. Every 90 minutes or so our subjects show signs of intense neural-cortical activity. Their alpha brainwaves energize and their eyes begin to move fast, as though watching something. They are watching something. A dream, which accounts for the sudden jump in cerebral energies. The typical sleep pattern is to dream every 90 minutes, Mr. Rengs, in other words, to show high alpha-wave and REM activity every 90 minutes. Part of our job here is to wake certain subjects after each REM episode and get them to write down as much of their dream as they remember. We’re learning revolutionary things about dreams. That they take place several times a night. That they release clamoring unused energies in the brain which, unless drained off during the alpha-REM phases, would in short order make us psychotic.”

“I don’t follow this. If Ivar’s a champion sleeper, that means he has a lot of REM episodes a night. If these are supposed to drain off potentially psychotic energies, why does he go on writing psychotic lyrics?”

“He may write fewer of them than you think, than he thinks. Can you keep a secret, Mr. Rengs?”

“As well as I can keep a distance, I’m a champion distance keeper. My one failure is with Ivar.”

“It’s absolutely essential that Ivar and Vicki have no inkling of this. You mustn’t breathe a word of it, it could destroy the stupendous thing that goes on between them. Stupendous in the sense that it comes out of their torpid states, stupendous also in that it leaves us scientists stupefied. Mouths hanging open. Come with me, please.”

He led me to an office off the main room, whose door he unlocked with three different keys. He proceeded to some filing cabinets which had to be opened with multiple keys, too. He brought out two thick dossiers, one with Ivar’s name on it, the other with Vicki’s. He showed me the contents of both dossiers, stacks of papers on which the dreams of both subjects were typed, each item dated. Each dream record had stapled to it the related alpha-wave, pulse, respiratory, skin-electricity, and other readings.

“I can best make my point by asking you to match a few of these records, Mr. Rengs. Take Ivar’s dream sheet for any given day and compare it with Vicki’s for the same day. Compare, first of all, the times recorded for the REM episodes.”

I took the top sheet from each collection, dated two days before. Vicki’s first dream was timed as beginning at 3:47. Quentin’s first one got under way at 3:49. Vickie’s second one started at 5:31, Quentin’s at 5:32. I glanced at some other sheets from both piles. The correspondences seemed to be of the same order.

“They dream together?” I said.

“Not quite,” Wolands said, eyes in a high glint. “You will note that there’s always a gap of two, three, or four minutes between the starting times. They’re close, but not neck and neck, especially at the beginning.”

“Vicki always starts before Ivar?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere, Mr. Rengs! Yes, the sequence is invariable, Vicki takes the lead, Ivar very soon falls in! The sensational point is that, each and every time, day in and day out, Vicki’s alpha-REM burst triggers Ivar’s! Isn’t it enough to make your head swim!”

The swimming in that portion of my anatomy was more localized than that. Each of my own eyes was trying to do the Australian crawl away from the other.

“Then their alpha-REM patterns are related as to chronological form. Is there any indication that there’s a give-and-take in content, too?”

“Spoken like a true scientist, Mr. Rengs! I’m proud of you! Yes, indeed, that’s the hammerblow question! And as for the answer, it’s a piledriver! I mean, yes, absolutely, quite so, staggeringly so, in each and every case Vicki’s dream sets off Ivar’s, then colors and seeps through all its content! The psychic traffic so far has been all one-way, from Vicki to Ivar, never the reverse! It’s her unconscious dictating to his all the way, much as he tries to fight it off! In this give-and-take Vicki gives and Ivar takes, takes, takes! Just read a few of the dreams for the same time slots and see for yourself!”

I picked a page from Vicki’s pile at random. It was dated sometime in March:

Mound of human bones, melting, making puddles. Some rock musicians on it, rehearsing. Sitar player resembles Ivar, hair like overcooked linguini. I say fingers too stiff, you need more liquid sound. He says, show me how. I pull sounding board off sitar. Sit, put hollow sitar between legs. Open 13th Century illuminated book, manual on witches’ concoctions. Read recipe for brew to dissolve bones: to contents of whale’s small intestine add 7 owls’ beaks, 5 hyenas’ tear ducts, 13 bats’ eyes, pinch of pulverized tarantula legs, sprinkle of finely ground rhino spleen, etc. Mix in ingredients, stirring slowly. Drone proper incantation: if Hell’s a boil, a boil, a boil, what’s the temperature of the Shiny One’s Rotunda, I wunda, zero or unda? Brew begins to steam. Sitarist says, I make hard-rock sound for the people, you’re putting me on. I say, no, I’m going to put you in. To show him how it works, I take human shinbone from pile, drop it in brew, bone dissolves with a hiss. I say, that’s the sound you should make, very soft rock. He hides his hands, screaming, get out, you don’t make soup out of my knuckles, bitch of the Styxian kennels. I say, if you know where I live, why’re you always trying to get my address and phone number? I add, what could you do if you came calling anyway, you with your already mostly soft bones? He says, never mind the insults, sticks and stones may break, but. I say, drop around to my place, buddy, I dare you, the Styx that runs through my house’ll break all your bones, soften them up, anyway. I grab his arm and shove it into the brew, up to the armpit. It dissolves with a hiss. He stands there with one arm gone, socket still steaming, says, now how do you expect me to play that sitar? I say, try your toes, if they’re still hard enough, but why make hard sounds when soft becomes you more . . .

I located Quentin’s corresponding dream. It had started to register less than two minutes after Vicki’s got under way:

House of Gnocchi. Having dinner with Vicki. Steaming bowl of stracciatella (spinach and egg drops) in front of her. She asks if I wouldn’t like her to dip my knuckles in her soup to make them soft like the rest of my bones. I tell her to stop talking crazy. She says if I don’t want her to fix my knuckles up why take her to a place like House of Gnocchi, which means knuckles, gnocchi as a matter of fact are soft farinaceous knuckles. She stirs her steaming soup with a spoon. This makes me hide my hands behind my back. She says my bones are brittle from trying to be so hard and would feel better with some lubrication, get soft, their natural state. I ask why when subject of bones comes up she always puts in something about fluids. She says my bones have tendency to go watery by themselves, don’t need her help. She says she’ll illustrate. She drops a breadstick in her steaming stracciatella, it goes soggy and begins to shred. I yell at her, breadsticks and breadstones can’t break my bones, and she can keep her goddamned address and phone number. As I’m about to rap her with my knuckles, idea for a lyric jumps into my head. Along these lines: If hell’s hot, what’s the temperature of heaven, seven? She says, how long you think you’d last at my house, anyway? I say, there’s nothing so threatening in a kennel but fleas. She says, how about in a House of Nyooki, Nyooki, Nyooki? I quick shove my hands behind my back again . . .

I put my own hands behind my back. Their palms were sweating in the manner certain novelists call profuse. My thoughts spiraled down to a crucial date, April 22. I was not sure I wanted to, but I began to search through the records for the dreams of that day. I found them:

Vicki:

Cauldron between legs. I’m enormous, cauldron’s enormous. Mixing a black, viscous brew, enormous bones swimming in it. Fumes smell like tar. Singing usual incantation in basso profundo: Fire roll down from the mountaing, the mountaing, the mountaing, cook up my good brew, burn up his house, burn up his goods, soften up his bones, cook up my melting brew. Ivar appears. He’s tiny. Looks up, says, why you sing about mountaings? I say, because I’m a Kentucky hillwoman, cooking up my home remedies. He says, don’t you know any other songs, I don’t like that song. I sing something else from my repertoire: If on Deliverance Day, when comes the Saver, to bring us Up There where They got the High Flavor, his name’s Ho Chi Minh, will we dig in? He says, what you cooking there? I say, stuff to keep your knuckles from cracking. He says, does this remedy have a name? I say, sure, we call it La Brea Arm Pits. He says, that stuff won’t melt any bones, look at all those bones in there. I pull some out, mastodon thighs, saber-tooth tiger fangs. I say, you a mastodon or saber-tooth, that your bones won’t melt down? He says, I got your address and phone number from another source, you witch. I say, don’t you call or come around, with your easy melted bones. He says, that won’t work, keeping that big mess of black threatening remedy between your legs, it won’t remedy me. I begin to sing another song: one’ll con off all your money, another’ll meddle away any wife you got, cause where you should be ossicle you are or will be all lappy treacle. To show him his problem, I crack my knuckles, they sound like pistol shots, frighten me. He begs me to stop. I crack harder. He gives a terrible cry and dives head first into the steaming tar . . .

Day and date with this, Quentin:

Going up steps to Vicki’s place. Not invited, she’s refused me the address, but I wheedled it out of our sitar player who sells her pots and pans and is operative for CIA. Pick the lock, go in. She’s cooking in the kitchen. I ask what she’s making. She says, Shrimps Remedie, old Alsatian delicacy. I ask why so many bones in this stew if it’s a shrimp dish. She says those are just Master Don’s knuckles for flavor, because she likes high flavor, that’s the saver, only she pronounces it saber, and says it’s toothsome. I say, Don who? She says, Don Juan, that’s spelled, W, A, N, Don Wan. She says maybe you haven’t heard but Don Wan always sucked his knuckles. Rest is very vague. Recall just bits and pieces. She sings a lot. One song has the line, Ho, G-Men. Another is some kind of folk number with the repeated stanza, Mah Own Tang. She beats out time on her knuckles and asks if I wouldn’t like to have my shrimp remedied. I say, sure, and to get away from that terrible drumming from her knuckles I jump into the big bowl of delicious-smelling steamy chocolate between her legs with the crisped nuts floating in it. Going down for third time I hear her singing, Ah-men, Ah-men, I try to yell to her that we’re known as Omen, but it’s too late, only make bubbles in this chocolate that smells and tastes like tar. I feel my right arm coming off. I tell myself, I’m drowning in Mah Own Armpit and tar is Mah Own Tang . . .

I put the typewritten sheets down. I had to, they were getting soaked through in my hand. I said, “I see. It’s some kind of devilish ESP.”

“We’re not prepared to give it a name,” Dr. Wolands said, “but we give it our fullest attention.”

“Her unconscious seeps, you said? Steamrollers. Rips to shreds.”

“All we know is, when they’re lying in adjoining rooms, fast asleep, there’s some terrifying traffic through that wall.”

“Missile launchers and 105’s. You were saying they don’t provoke when they’re asleep?”

“Not in a way that breaks bones, Mr. Rengs.”

“Bones don’t get broken, no. But melted, all over the place.”

“They harden again, by the time they’re needed. As they don’t in, say, Vietnam—”

Wild sounds from the central room. Quentin’s voice bellowing something. Vicki screeching a counterpoint. A crash, a splintering, more yells. Someone shouting for Dr. Wolands, Dr. Wolands.

Wolands looked disoriented. Loud noises were not the order of the day in this citadel of sleep. Again, the bellows, the shrillings. Wolands hurried out, with me close behind.

The commotion was coming from Vicki’s sleep chamber. It had an amplified, metallic quality because it was reaching us in the main room through the lab’s sound system.

Quentin had gone amok. He had apparently broken out of his own cubicle and into Vicki’s. He had smashed Vicki’s guitar over Vicki’s head, it was resting now on her shoulders with her head poking up from the ruins of the soundbox. He had two clumps of her long reddish hair in his hands and was pulling demonically at them, twisting her head from side to side. His eyes were bugged out in a mammoth raging. His gaped mouth appeared to be on the verge of producing foam.

He thundered, “Liar, am I! A liar, huh! I’ll show you, you bitch!”

She was trying to push him away, yelling back, “Cut that out! Quit it, now, you ultimate maniac!”

There were several lab assistants in the cubicle, trying to take hold of Quentin. He kept kicking and shouldering them away, with the strength of ten, of demons.

“Show who writes my words, you scabby she-hound!” Quentin boomed terribly, in day-of-reckoning tones. “Going to write the whole oration for your funeral, right now, on your scummy skull, in my own handwriting, every word, you refugee from the verminest kennels! Had just about all I’m going to take from you, understand! Insults and more insults till I’m up to here! They’re gonna break your bones, not mine, reject of the garbage hounds!”

She screeched, clawed at his hands. He kicked more attendants away. “What is it, what’s this insanity?” Wolands spat at the nurse hovering over the electroencephalograph drums.

“I don’t know! It was like an explosion!” the nurse sputtered, palms tight to her cheeks. “They both had REM episodes, close together as usual! We woke them when the energy levels went down, as usual! They went to their desks, as they always do, they began to type, then Ivar began making faces, he seemed to be getting angrier and angrier as he got more awake, then all of a sudden he jumped up shouting vile words, and rushed into the corridor, and broke into Vicki’s room carrying her guitar, he must have picked it up in the dressing room, and before anybody could stop him—terrible, horrible!”

Wolands looked grim. “I half saw it coming,” he said. “I sensed it, to a degree. I just didn’t know it would be this soon, and preferred to believe—”

“Make wisecracks about knuckles crack!” Quentin roared. “Go ahead! Here’s more crack for you, you apprentice bitch!” He whacked his hand, knuckles leading, across her left cheek, then her right, at the same time scattering more attendants.

“You’re a great big shipment of stenchy suet and that’s why you’ve got to go hitting your betters!” Vicki ground out at him, shutting her eyes tight against the slaps, struggling to pull free.

“Here’s some suet’ll knock your teeth out!” Quentin blasted, cracking her in the mouth. “Want to see how your teeth crack? Listen!” Crack, he went. “Want some teeth melted down? How’s this for melt!” Crack, again.

“We can’t just stand here, it’s not right!” the nurse groaned.

“No, you prepare a hypo, strongest tranquilizer, strongest dose,” Wolands said. “Get it ready and stand by. We’ll stop this one way or another.”

He rushed into the corridor, me close behind. We eased our way into Vicki’s crowded cubicle. Quentin was practically pulling poor Vicki off the floor by those ropes of hair, those two red asps, trumpeting, “Where’re your shitty magic brews now, huh! Put some on your scalp that’ll keep it from peeling off, that’s an invitation, you great boiler of bones!”

“All your stiff’s in your fingers, that’s why the knuckles crack, let’s see you do something with a girl with something besides the big noise fingers!” Vicki splatted back at him.

Wolands signaled to the assistants to close in on Quentin again, with us reinforcing their flanks. They made a concerted grab for him, as Wolands and I tore his hands away from Vicki and pinned them to his sides. He writhed, he did the exercises of the serpent. We had to stay well behind him to avoid his snapping teeth.

“Now, Ivar, you’re getting worked up over nothing,” Wolands said at his most syrupy. “You’ve simply misinterpreted, lad.”

“Easy, friend,” I said into Quentin’s ear. “You said the hourly rates are good here, keep them happy.”

“You don’t know the extent of their diabolism, Gordon,” Quentin panted. “They’re giving me the worst kind of injections, in the head, while I sleep.”

“We’ll give you the best injection, lad, you’ll sleep the sleep of the righteous,” Wolands said, helping to steer Quentin out to the corridor and back into his own cubicle.

We got the squirmy boy down on the bed and held him down. The nurse was immediately there, giving him the hypo while we all cooperated in keeping his arm still.

“Now I know what’s going on here,” Quentin puffed into my face. “They’re trying to see how many pieces they can break me into, that’s the project. Somnial suggestion, Gordon, I’ve read about it. The minute I’m asleep they start piping that she-devil’s voice into my ear, with all kinds of cackling witch suggestions, to make me dream their programmed dreams, and study how far they can go programming my dreams before I break down into a howling maniac entirely, somnial input, I had inklings of it before but I closed it out of my head but today it exploded in my head and I got their number, I already had her number, didn’t have to wait for her to give it, got it elsewhere, would of gone there and showed how much stiff but passed out, today got theirs, whole scheming bunch . . .”

His voice was trailing off. Whatever the nurse had pumped into him, it was powerful.

“They couldn’t pipe her voice or anybody’s in your ear,” I said into his ear. “Feel around, there’s just no apparatus for it under the pillow or anywhere. Besides, I was watching when you went to sleep, I didn’t see any signs of any such piping.”

“No sense looking for apparatus,” Quentin said sleepily. “Got it hidden well. Inside tubes of bedstead behind walls somewhere. Pipe her hellcat’s poisons up through pillow into my head so I dream against myself and they wait to see how long before I fall apart start raving. Put stop to this once for all. Gordon. Enough’s enough.”

His voice faded altogether and he was asleep. He began to snore immediately in soundest sleep.

“What’s got into him?” I said to Wolands. “Too much Vicki? He got too big a dose of her infiltrations and began to sense a plot?”

Wolands’ face was serious. He pulled the sheet of paper from Quentin’s typewriter and studied it, frowning.

“I’ve got an idea what happened, got to go to Vicki’s room and check it out,” he said. “Would you mind waiting for me in the file office, Mr. Rengs? I left the door open. Wait there, I’ll bring along the evidence in a moment.”

In a matter of minutes Wolands joined me, carrying the dream records typed by the tandem sleepers. He placed them on the desk, side by side, for me to examine.

“Before you read the texts,” he said, “look at the starting times registered on both alpha-REM graphs. The clue is there.”

I did as he suggested. Vicki’s dream, if the styluses were right, had started at precisely 3:47.91, Quentin’s at precisely 3:47.91.

“No gap at all,” I said. “This time they did start neck and neck.”

“The evidence is indisputable. I’ve wondered many times if this would happen, and if so, when, but I never dreamed, if you’ll forgive the word in this context, it would be so soon, and the results so violent. As a matter of fact, I’ve even had a careful study of the time differentials made, to ascertain if they indicated any trend. There certainly was a trend. It wasn’t straightline, there were waverings and backslidings, but we found an undeniable overall curve. Downward. When they began sleeping together, their dream initiation times were as much as five and six minutes apart. Slowly, and jerkily, the gap came down to four minutes, then three, then two. It was a mathematical certainty that in the end the gap would close, they would be identical starters, but we couldn’t say when. Today, as you’ve seen, the gap was closed. With a bang, and a variety of whimpers.”

“What does this tell you about his going berserk?”

“You’ve read samples of their earlier dreams, Mr. Rengs. You know his were never just mirror images of hers, he was resisting, fighting off her imposed content, distorting her symbols, cloaking, reshaping. But the resistance was going steadily down. In the last days his dreams have echoed hers much more strongly and nakedly. This explains why the gap was narrowing between their starting times. Because his unconscious was fighting hers off less and less, his dreams were triggered more and more rapidly by hers. As he became more and more her slave in point of time, so he did in the dream content.”

“And today the gap is wiped out altogether. Meaning his resistance is wiped out?”

“I see no way to avoid that interpretation.”

“If that’s so, wouldn’t his dream be an exact duplicate of hers, with no distortions, colorings, reshapings?”

For answer, Wolands slid the two typewritten sheets closer to me. Not wanting to, I read.

Vicki:

A classroom. Subject, musicology. Various instruments on display on pedestals. Students in kneepants and Eton collars are members of The Omen, plus Ivar. Lecturer is myself in academic robes but wearing tall conical hat with arcane symbols on it, plus an assortment of musical signs. I say, students, today our subject is lyrics. Students begin to take careful notes. I say, lyric derives from the word lyre, name for the old string instrument, the handheld harp, which was used in olden times to accompany vocalized words. I take down the lyre from its pedestal. I strum its strings. I say, the member of this class who calls himself a lyricist is a lyre, spelled, l-i-a-r, pronounced, liar. Because he claims to write original lyrics and only steals them from his collaborator. I say, I will now introduce the collaborator, who is not a liar but a true lyricist worthy to be accompanied on the lyre. Will our guest lecturer Mr. Gordon Rengs please come in. Mr. Rengs steps in, wearing a leopard-skin loincloth, more a jockstrap. I say, Mr. Rengs will now favor us with a few words on the musical potential of the human knuckles as an accompanying instrument. Mr. Rengs says, friends, music lovers, the melodic and harmonic capacities of the human knuckles are limitless, if they are in good condition and emit rich, resonant soundings, not the unpleasant cracklings of the over-dry and hence brittle, those who at their hardest may crack and shatter. Allow me to demonstrate with one of my own compositions. He begins to sing, Fire come down the mountaing, burn up all you house an goods, striking rich, resonant background chords from his knuckles with some xylophone hammers. He says, there is an individual present in this room who claims he strikes songs like Mah Own Tang from his own richly lyrical knuckles but I can attest that his knuckles only crack, as the too brittle bones crack in Hemingway, and, in short, that I wrote this song, as I write all his songs, and he is an ooze pretending to be a monolith, and only plagiarizes . . .

It went on and on. Vicki had been dreaming lavishly today. I felt I had read quite enough. With some reluctance I turned to the twin sheet.

Quentin:

Lecture hall. Some class in musicology. Lots of instruments standing on pedestals. All The Omen and me present, in short pants and wide starched collars with big bunched ties. Lecturer is Vicki, wearing doctoral robes, high cone-shaped hat with magic and music symbols all over it. She says, today our subject is lyrics. We begin to make notes. She says, lyric derives from the word lyre, name of an old string instrument, the handheld harp, which they used in ancient times to accompany vocalists. She takes the lyre down from its stand. She runs her fingers across the strings. She says, the member of this class who calls himself a lyricist is a lyre . . .

I felt an ache at the base of my tongue, as though it were being pulled at hard. I said, “Yes, I guess you could call this a breakthrough.”

“A break through and down,” Wolands said.

“This is what I get out of it. Ivar may have some potency doubts. I suspect this because one night, April 22, he was having heated erotic thoughts about Vicki, and decided to go to her place and establish his virility, but instead smoked a lot of marijuana and passed out, maybe to avoid the challenge. Let’s say it’s so. All right. Vicki senses this shakiness in him from the beginning. Out of her own malicious needs, she goes after this weakness in him, real or imagined. Her unconscious goes after it. Her dreams zero in on this sore spot, week after week. Today they score the full bullseye, all the fight’s gone out of him . . .”

“I would say that’s very acute, Mr. Rengs. To the extent that he’s an avoider, she’s an attacker, their whole sequence of dreams shows that. And this afternoon, when he had no more defenses left, no more energies to ward off her gibes, and her dream crashed into his full force, he felt invaded. He knew such a terrible dream had to come from somewhere. It was out of the question to name himself as the source. So he decided it was all trickery, we were in an elaborate plot against him, using sleep suggestion, piped-in voices, and so on. He’s right to suspect there’s some sort of psychic breaking and entering, of course. What he doesn’t know, because we haven’t been able to tell him, is that the footpadding is exclusively of the mental order, without electronic tricks.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why has she got me parading through her dream as a lyric writer in a loincloth?”

“The best person to ask about that is Vicki, Mr. Rengs. She’s down on the campus waiting for you. She thinks it’s important that you two talk.”

In parting I said, “You may have to revise your ideas somewhat. The worst wars may originate in dreams.”

He countered with, “Come, come, Mr. Rengs, you’re not going to argue that Ivar and Vicki are typical dreamers.”

“Maybe not. But they’re typical, if highly energized, infighters.”

“That’s precisely why we must study them in depth, Mr. Rengs. Thanks to the rich network of underground channels open between them, they afford us a rare opportunity to get some electroencephalographic and other insights into that most American of phenomena, togetherness. Don’t you think they’re the ideal mutually tuned couple? Perhaps, if we can learn enough about these two, we’ll come to appreciate that togetherness can be one of the weirdest and wildest variants of total war, if not its prime source . . .”

Her face was covered with bruises, but she was in good spirits. As soon as we found a place on a bench, she said, “I don’t blame Ivar for any of this.”

I said, “That’s broadminded of you. Whom do you blame?”

“Nobody, Mr. Rengs. The setup in the lab guaranteed that it would come to this sooner or later, I see that very clearly now.”

“How, exactly?”

“I’m not a fool, Mr. Rengs. I know now that what they’re really studying, at least as between Ivar and me, is some kind of ESP, and between Ivar and me there’s damn plenty.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve got a head to think with. And plenty to think about, after today. I don’t have to see Ivar’s dream records to know there are correspondences between our dreams, overlaps, echoes back and forth, that just can’t be explained by any kind of communication other than the extra-sensory. For example, the songs, incantations, whatever you want to call them, that show up in my dreams. Don’t you suppose I recognize how close they come to the lyrics Ivar keeps turning out for The Omen? I sing about what’s the temperature of the Shiny One’s Rotunda, zero or unda, only I never breathe a word about this dream to him, yet he comes back with, what’s the temperature of heaven, seven. Such reverberations need explaining, don’t they?”

“And your explanation is?”

“ESP, Mr. Rengs, there’s no two ways about it. It’s only a question of which way the ESP traffic goes, him to me or me to him. I’m dead sure of the direction now, it’s him to me all the way. And that’s the reason you showed up in the dreams today. In mine, and I suppose in Ivar’s, though there I’m just guessing.”

“You’re losing me, Vicki. How would ESP from Ivar to you bring me in?”

“I’ve got the whole picture now, Mr. Rengs, I assure you. You’re his collaborator! He’s boasted about it often enough when I’ve complimented him on his lyrics! He uses the word collaborator so he can claim a creative association with a distinguished writer and teacher like you, but what he’s hiding with that puffed-up boast is that you really write those great lyrics and he just steals them and puts his name on them! He’s an impotent scribbler but he gets a big creative potency from you, because you’re nice enough and generous enough to let him take all the credit! Well, he’s got to have a lot of secret guilts about that sleazy lie, which color his dreams, and, in reflex, mine. Today those guilts just shot up and took over his dream. He was making a naked confession as to his plagiarism in his dream, and it spilled right over into mine. Of course, he couldn’t acknowledge that the terrible revelation in that dream came from him, and spilled out to me. He had to claim it originated with me and was fed in some tricky way into him. And, of course, had to deny it was based on fact. We know the technical word for that, projection, sneaking your own guilts out and into others. So he came roaring after me, to beat me up for his own sleep admissions. But listen, I know I’m right about how the traffic goes. I know because of the inspired lyrics that come out of a clod and a dud like Ivar. They come up in you, a vastly talented man. He takes them over. They get fed into my dreams, even ones he’s still working on, ones I haven’t heard yet and couldn’t possibly know. So what I’m saying is, there’s a flow of rich psychic material through Ivar, and into me. Coming, if you want to name the source, from you. I know the logistics here, Mr. Rengs. Ivar’s only a transmitting belt, for marvelous excitements and incitements from you to me. That’s what I wanted to say to you. When there’s that much wild flow from one human being to another, they ought to face the fact and consider its meanings . . .”

The ache at the root of my tongue had become a nagging pulse. This was a new situation to me, the Muse accusing the a-mused of plagiarism, or having a ghostwriter.

“I think you’re exaggerating the sizes of my emotional exports, Vicki. To begin with, I really contribute very little to Quentin’s lyrics, you must believe—”

“Come on, Mr. Rengs. Really. How’s a klutz like that going to come up on his own with a shattering thought like, comes the savior, to lead us upstairs to best behavior, and if his name’s mao, will we gao? There’s a kind of genius in that. I can tell a klutz from a genius.”

“You should also be able to tell that this genius of mine does not produce such inspired lines in my own writing. These references to klutzes, Vicki. I’d like to get into that a little more. You seem to feel that Quentin is somewhat deficient in fields other than lyric writing. For example, why do you make so much of his knuckles? Their fragility, and so on?”

“Oh, that started with something simple. Once in the lab, while we were waiting to be called, just to pass the time, because he’s not exactly an inspired conversationalist, I said something about Hemingway. That’s it, he’d told me you were scheduled to give a lecture to the Santana branch of FANNUS on all the broken bones in Hemingway, and that interested me, so I said, that’s right, it’s a panorama of fractures, the males in Hemingway were always getting their bones broken, and having severe potency troubles too, so maybe the broken bones were as much symbols as anatomy. I said, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls can’t finally make it with Maria because they shot his leg into splinters at the bridge, but Jake Barnes can’t get together with Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises because his tool of the male trade was shot off in the war, and didn’t it add up to the same thing finally? That’s when I first noticed this funny habit in Ivar, how he began to suck on his knuckles like they were candy, and the color in his cheeks was high. I said to him on that occasion, what are you trying to do, dissolve your knuckles? His color got higher and he said something feeblemindedly irrelevant, something about, well, on the subject of sucking, you smoke and I don’t. He’s really a nowhere conversationalist.”

“Coming back to today’s dream, Vicki. The dream you feel Quentin originated and passed along to you. What’s your thought as to why Quentin would bring me on the scene dressed in a loincloth?”

“Nothing to it! You’re the creator, he’s the copycat and snitcher! The creative one’s the potent one, right! The source of all the flow! The male in the loincloth’s the walking epitome of potency, whereas the snotnose plagiarist is a kid in kid’s sissy clothes who can do nothing with his puny little pencil but sit there while the real man talks and take impotent notes! It’s so plain, no wonder the dumdum had to jump me and give me a working over! On the assumption that this humiliating picture was sent out by me, not you, of course.”

“I see.”

“Another thing I’ve been dying to ask you, Mr. Rengs. How come you know so much about synovial fluid?”

I bit my tongue hard, at precisely the point where it was still sore from my biting it some days before.

“Do I?”

“Plenty. See, the other afternoon Ivar and I were chatting for a minute, and when I remarked about his cracking his knuckles so much he said it had something to do with synovial fluid. He said you’d explained the whole thing to him, that it has mucinlike ingredients, it’s secreted by the synovial linings of bursae, articulations, and tendon sheaths. Well, I give you my word, that hit me hard. When I was an undergraduate I was set on being a doctor so I took the pre-med course, a lot of classes in physiology and such, so I know all about synovial fluid, but I wondered how a nonscientist would know so much. Where did you pick up all this technical information,
Mr. Rengs?”

“Here and there, I guess. Anybody who’s a writer browses a lot.”

“You might know the name of the fluid, yes. But all that detailed information about bursae and articulations and mucin? It just doesn’t figure, bright as a man like you must be.”

“Vicki, I once was friendly with the flamenco guitarist Segovia. He was a pre-med student before he gave up science in favor of his first love, the guitar. We spent many evenings together, talking about this and that, he gave me a lot of medical information that’s stuck in my mind. Forgive me, it’s been stimulating talking to you but I must go now, lecture to prepare—”

“You going to lecture any more on the statistical distribution of broken bones in Hemingway? I’d sure like to hear you talk about that.”

“No, I’ve about covered that, what I’m tackling next is a more fluid subject, the incidence of ptomaine in the 19th-century literature of the Iberian Peninsula.”

“Ho. Wowie. Now that’s irrevocably wild, Mr. Rengs. I had a dream way back there about ptomaine and Spain, one of my first dreams, if you don’t believe me ask Dr. Wolands to look it up in the records. If you needed any more proof about the traffic between you and me and its direction—”

“Yes. Goodbye, Vicki.”

“See you around, Mr. Rengs.”

“Right. I’ll be the one wearing the loincloth.”

I’m sorry to be breaking a prime rule of the writing game. Everybody knows about the so-called obligatory scene. If you’ve been building to a confrontation, laid the groundwork for a showdown, you’re obliged, it’s said, to carry through. This is known as going from premise to payoff. Now, in this REMMY story I’ve been telling, so full of rapid eye movements, there are certainly the seeds of one more encounter between Victoria Paylow and myself, a bang-up, all-out, full-bodied encounter in which all foreshadowed can come to, well, pass. The encounter never took place, I’m obliged to report, and that’s the extent of my obligation. It makes no difference how rapidly you’re eyeing me. This is the point where make-believe and the undoctored particulars part company. On the stage, for example, you have to stick with your premises to the neatly packaged end. In real life, you can vacate any premises any time you want. This is the great advantage of actuality over art, and why many people prefer it. All I’m saying is, being more interested in guarding my hide than weaving a plot, I was under no obligation to come face to face with Victoria Paylow again, and didn’t.

There was one more phone call, however. The voltage flow being, I hardly have to note, from Vicki to me. I mean, she was the one who placed the call, and made the major waves, I assume of the alpha order; arousing much REM in me.

“Mr. Rengs, I just wanted to tell you I got a new guitar, the Sleep Project paid for it, I’d love to show it to you.”

“Vicki, you’re half my age.”

“So? Does that make me half your weight? Height? Body heat? Itch?”

“It makes me twice as old as you.”

“I’m for all that separates the men from the boys. So I can get to the men without stepping around the boys and wasting valuable time.”

“Don’t you care about the generation gap?”

“I care about people who know how to hop it. Neither party has to travel the whole distance. I could meet you halfway. Or at any bar you care to name. For that matter, at your apartment. Say in about 15 minutes.”

“You’re a fluid always ready to call a cab.”

“A good ossicle’s hard to find. It’s worth some road work.”

Behind every successful man, we’re told, there has to be a woman. Yes, but a miniskirted graduate student of the incantatory arts with a guitar slung over her shoulder? Robert Graves may be right about the fount of all poetry being the primal Mother-Mate-Mistress-Muse, the chesty White Goddess fancied up with asps and corn shucks. But must she be putting all the words, every last one, in our mouths? What are we, then, sending stations, echo chambers?

I had a wobbly picture of Vicki and myself lying side by side, togethered in bliss, her unconscious dictating all my books to my unconscious. I thought about her, in some ESP-oriented future, having legal claim to my royalties. Suing me. For plagiarism.

“Vicki, you may be a fluid, but you’re acting like several petrified forests on the move. Which, I’ll make no bones about it, petrifies me. Which, I don’t have to point out to your sharp mind, is not a good state for your purposes. My calcifications and your liquefactions, I’m afraid, are destined to remain forever unjoined. That’s about the hard and the soft of it.”

“You’re a flinty man, Mr. Rengs. That’s what I like about you.”

“You’re the sort of lymphy girl I vastly admire, Vicki. At a distance.”

“A gap?”

“Agape.”

“I hear The Omen’s recording a new number Ivar just wrote, something called, Ptomaine in Spain Falls Rainly in the Plains. Now, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and Mary, doesn’t that prove—”

“My cup runneth over. With a grateful dead of migraines, a loving spoonful of cold sweats, a holding company of grand-mal seizures. I wish you and your whole generation well, and godspeed, without traffic jams. Goodbye, Vicki.”

Leopard skin. Ho. Syllogism serenade sweatshirt. Hm.