Читать книгу The Second Baptism of Albert Simmel - Rodney Clapp - Страница 7

After work, homeward bound, Al found himself still abuzz with the news about the repeal of the National Anti-Natal law. His was not a lone excitement. The repeal put subs in a condition to celebrate. And the drop in beer prices, starting tomorrow, meant that beverage budgets would stretch further this week. Weary with himself and the haunted, aching mood that had gripped him since the other night’s dream about Val, Albert joined the parade of peers who marched off the train stop straight down the block into the Dog and Duck Inn. In the subs’ neighborhoods, licensed taverns were allowed access to electricity four nights a week. The Dog and Duck was one of those, attracting customers not only for conviviality but for bright respite from the otherwise pitch-black night.

Ensconced at the bar, Al nursed a couple of lagers before he determined he would stay awhile. He ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and a D & D Iced Tea (the house specialty was bourbon-enhanced). He joshed with a neighbor and Uncle Eddie, the bartender, about whether or not he should settle in for the entire evening. Abcess Excess, a leading Old Chicago–area purveyor of celibate porn punk, was scheduled for its first set around 9:30 or 10.

Pretty soon Uncle Eddie brought Al’s sandwich, along with a sweating, ice-gorged pitcher to top off his drink. Four or five young constituents entered the Inn and took a table directly behind Albert’s barstool. They betrayed their slumming, alien status by their overly rowdy conduct—they were trying too hard to act as if they comfortably belonged. On top of that, they were unusually and immaculately garbed, especially one in the orange, billowing robes of a Tibetan monk. Al had an immediate idea what they were up to. They fell into noisy conversation about Abcess Excess.

One started, “This band’s music . . .”

“If music it can be called,” Uncle Eddie mock-whispered across the bar to Al. The constituents heard but missed only a beat or two.

The first speaker sounded from beneath a bushy beard and a Castro cap. “This band’s music,” he resumed his declamation, “represents the proletariat’s refusal to let its sexual vigor be tamed and co-opted by capitalism. It revels in sexuality but refuses to reproduce wage slaves for the exploitation of the owner-class.”

A second speaker, dressed in a vested suit with a watch-chain and brandishing a huge cigar, demurred. “From my psychoanalytic perspective, celibate porn punk is a denial of sexuality,” he said. “Like frightened grade-schoolers, Abcess Excess likes to talk about—or scream about—something it only vaguely understands and never experiences. People who will not copulate resist the biological imperative of reproduction. They are afraid of reproduction because it is untidy and unpredictable.”

“On the contrary,” bushy-beard parried, “celibate porn punk channels sexual energy into agitation for revolution. And revolution requires the ultimate courage.”

“Pferd hoden!” spat back the cigar-fondler. “Celibate porn punkers fear having children because it reminds them they will die. Sex and death are always conjoined. Together they make the original two-backed monster, from which the likes of this band flees as if it was Frankenstein on a rampage.”

Bushy-beard smiled in spite of himself. Albert was confirmed in his guess that the tablemates were playing hypocricket, a game recently popular with re-educated constituents just beyond their teens. In it callow nihilists impersonated proponents of various ideologies. The object was to stay in character all evening, or sometimes for weeks. Some devotees of the game argued that the true master of hypocricket was one who could switch from the imposture of one faith to another rapidly and serially, like a quick-change artist of the soul. Others insisted the real master of hypocricket was one immersed in character so long and so profoundly that loved ones began to despair that their original friend or family member might never re-emerge.

At this juncture the monkishly clad constituent intoned, “Sex and politics are both illusions. True salvation lies in detachment.”

“Salvation lies in getting out of here!” a fourth and new speaker shouted, as if hysteria confirmed the veracity of his statement. He slammed a Bible the size of a paving stone on the tabletop. “Whatever porn punk is, it is straight from the devil!”

The tablemates lurched into momentary silence. “Sheesh,” said the pseudo-Viennese, tossing his cigar down beside the Bible. “You are so pitiful at this . . .”

“Well,” the Bible-bearer whined, “why do I always have to be the fundamentalist?”

Their game derailed, the hypocrickets abandoned their characters. Just as people gathered over a mediocre meal resort to conversation comparing other, superior meals and restaurants, the deflated contestants turned to talk of exemplary games they had played on other occasions. This led to argument about who was the best hypocricket player in the game’s history, which naturally complicated itself with debates concerning the criteria for determining the master player. The tablemates rehearsed the merits of quick-change hypocricket versus those of long-term, immersive hypocricket. The blazing orange constituent, whose costume made him look as if he might be the source of a thickening layer of cigarette smoke now hovering across the room, recalled an acquaintance who dressed and acted like a radical feminist for three months, then apparently came to believe the ideology she was parodying. It seemed to her that gender divisions invariably did empower males and subjugate females. She told her boyfriend that all male-female sex was rape, by definition, and kicked him out of her apartment. “The question is, was she still playing hypocricket any longer?” said the would-be Tibetan holy man. “If she came to believe the role she was playing, and even to live it out—I mean, she and Walt had been together for a couple of years—isn’t she now really a radical feminist, instead of a hypocricket?”

The Bible-banger, who was much less excitable after being relieved of his fundamentalist impersonation, spoke pensively: “It shows you that hypocricket can be a dangerous game even if you’re not playing a gangster or a Nazi spy. If you concentrate on it and keep at it, you might become the part you play.” He shuddered.

“Then again,” he brightened, “maybe she didn’t really become a radical feminist. Maybe she really is a super, super dedicated player of the game. And maybe in a year or two she’ll say, ‘Just kidding! Fooled you all!’”

“And invite Walt back home?” bushy-beard muttered sarcastically. There was some tentative laughter around the table.

“Seriously,” said the cigar-fondler, who now held a cigarette with a constant blue smokestream sucked upward into the Inn’s pervasive cloud. “Seriously, he has a point. The greatest, the supreme player of immersive hypocricket, would be someone who assumed a role for years, for decades even. For a lifetime . . .”

“And then spoke from death,” the false fundie caught on. “She’d say, ‘Hey, those last twenty-five years? I wasn’t really a radical feminist. I just got into the game.’”

“‘And at least the game had meaning, gave me some kind of direction,’” the poseur-psychoanalyst ventriloquized on behalf of the hypothesized, not-so-genuinely-radical radical feminist.

“Exactly,” the bogus Bible-banger said. “Somebody might act like a practicing Jew or a Blakean mystic or an advanced capitalist, build a life around the role, leave everybody wondering, or not leave ’em wondering—have everybody convinced. Then, only after death is the mask removed. They send a telemortal text: ‘Gotcha!’ The greatest hypocricket move ever. By the greatest hypocricket player who ever lived. And died.”

“I never thought about the hypocricket and the telemort,” mused orange boy. “But the telemort could take the game to a whole new level . . .”

≤

Al departed the bar soon after Abcess Excess launched its sonic assault. Within seconds, the band’s thundering drums and crunching guitars breached even the strongest audio barricade—Albert saw Uncle Eddie screwing his spongy earplugs deeper inside his head. By the time Albert was a block away, he thought the booming music probably resembled what a countrysider heard when a nearby city was under artillery fire. “Only less melodic,” Uncle Eddie would add.

On his walk home, Al considered the technology mentioned by the young constituents. The telemortal texter, purportedly a means of communicating with the dead, had been perfected about ten years previously. The machines required tremendous amounts of power, so only four or five major cities hosted them. The telemort located in Old Chicago rested on the upper floor of a skyscraper, at the base of A-framed solar panels that soared another four stories above it. When operating, the telemort drew power not only from batteries charged by the sun, but from diesel engines and towering wind turbines planted offshore in Lake Michigan. The rarity of telemorts, coupled with the expense of activating them, meant that access to a telemort was limited and expensive. So it was mostly constituents who could afford a telemort session. Some subs—Al was one of them—saved for years for a fifteen-minute opportunity to communicate with a deceased loved one.

However precious the resources spent, what the telemort users got for their money was a chance to sit at a computer keyboard high in the sky, behind floor-to-ceiling glass facing out over the apparently endless expanse of Lake Michigan. They typed a few sentences and, assisted by a technician, launched them into the ether. Then they waited for a response to be displayed, trailing behind a cursor blinking on the bathtub-sized monitor mounted in the floor just beyond their keyboard. It could be a lone individual staring down at the monitor. But many times it was an entire family, semi-circled around the monitor, holding their breath and hoping Grandpa or Grandma had greetings from the great beyond.

Sometimes no response appeared. (No refunds: you paid for the opportunity only to attempt communication.) Sometimes a response would furl out across the screen in a language unknown to the family watching over the monitor—English-speakers, for example, might witness a few sentences instantiated in Arabic or Mandarin. (These could be translated upon payment of an additional charge.) Very occasionally the response was entirely straightforward and representative of the nether communicator’s style when he or she walked among the living. A deceased dyspeptic might complain, “Shit, I’m still tired.” A skinflint auntie might reveal: “The bonds are buried thirty-five steps west of the chicken coop. Cash ONLY IF NEEDED.” Most often the messages were cryptic, vague, or allusive, as in: “Make hay while the tide’s out” or “Light, light, light . . .” or “It ain’t so hot here” or “Dante was close.”

At its inception, the telemort had been hailed as the invention that would end all religious and philosophical mysteries. It would determine whether or not there was life after death and, if so, its exact nature. Poke McNearland correctly predicted this would not be the case. “Look,” he said. “Any message, even if it is a bona fide message from the dead, is still a message. It has to be interpreted. And where there’s room for interpretin’, there’s room for arguin’.” So, beyond basic questions of whether or not the telemort was a hoax and a con, various telemorted communiqués that were rapidly published were just as rapidly debated. One of the first published messages read, “Purge tory.” While some insisted this was an anathema on all Anglophilic conservatives, others said it was a locational remark from a bad Catholic who couldn’t spell. When telemort monitors remained blank, atheistic materialists said, “I told you so.” When an ellipses blinked across a screen (“. . .”), some Buddhists said it indicated the perfect dispassion of Nirvana, certain Hindus claimed it hinted that humans are drops in the vast ocean of being, and mystically inclined mathematicians said it represented infinity.

The double-jointed, circus-contortionist flexibility of language—even language ostensibly employed by the dead—was proven especially by the emergence of anagrammarians. Set up in storefronts and sidewalk booths in the vicinity of the skyscraper housing the telemort machinery, anagrammarians accepted fees to decipher the true (or at least more satisfying) meanings of freshly received telemort texts that were baffling or discouraging. A couple of sisters communing with their late mother were crushed to find her apparently as misanthropic in death as she had been in life. “Assholes leftover,” her telemort text grumped. But an anagrammarian, assuring them their mother really had mellowed and grown altruistic in her post-mortem sojourn, re-sorted the letters of the message to divine the magnanimous maternal command, “Love others as self.” A telemorting nephew considered himself much poorer in cash but no richer in wisdom after a late uncle texted “Bongo odd gut.” Actually a profound theological affirmation, “No God but God,” advised an enterprising anagrammarian. A newly married couple sought vocational advice from a beloved, gone-but-not-forgotten professor. “Gauge my wontons,” replied the sagacious professor from his grave. Were they supposed to open a Chinese restaurant, featuring very accurately sized dumplings? This though neither had culinary expertise beyond egg scrambling, nor a predilection for precision? They drifted aimlessly and disconsolately for days, until a consulted anagrammarian disclosed the true meaning: “Go west, young man.” Then they cheerfully packed for a move to Old California.

At this juncture in his ruminations, Albert arrived at his home. He stepped from the sidewalk onto the grass fronting the Church of St. Brendan the Wanderer. He leaned his wiry figure against the frame supporting the church sign. He looked up into the black sky punctured by the light of scattered stars. At the moment the stars appeared disarrayed, separate, each alone in a crowd. The skein of thoughts spooling through Al’s mind unwound in a jumble of impressions about the telemort, about death and life and any communion there might be between the two. He felt a bit drunk. He cocked his head back and shouted into the silence, “Bongo odd gut!” He waited for a reply.

Then he took a few deep breaths and cleared his skull. He evenly climbed the stairs to the door opening into his apartment. Before he reached for the knob he saw an envelope taped to the door. “Albert—URGENT” was written on the outside of the envelope. He immediately recognized his mother’s handwriting. She was not a woman given to dramatic flourishes. Al tore the message off the door and scrambled inside. In seconds he had a lantern aglow. Still on his feet, he read:

Dear Albert: I did not find you at home. Please come to me tomorrow. In light of recent events, I have much to tell you. To be honest, I have something to tell you and much to explain. Don’t be anxious, I don’t mean to alarm you. But we need to talk.

Now as always, with love, Mother

As his heartbeat accelerated, Al chuckled. Whatever was to be made about the veracity and meaning of telemort texts, there was no doubt about this message. He had a sense that his life was about to change, radically, irrevocably. He looked back at the door and saw that he had left it wide open.