“Seriously,” she asks, “what’s wrong with me?”
“Just one thing,” he gurgles under his Nietzsche moustache, pulling her down on the bed, “the simple fact that you were not born in 1890.”
“What else?”
“Darling, you will need a lot of money to get out of this mess. Write a book that gets you a fifty-thousand-dollar advance and it’s simple. You’re as free as a bird. Tokyo, Lima, Istanbul, anywhere. Spend your life on an airplane or cruising. It’s obvious you have to travel.”
“You really think so? O.K. I’ll try.”
He’s shaking his head. “You don’t believe it. If you could, really believe that, my dear. Can you think fifty thousand dollars?”
Each time she tries to think fifty thousand dollars, her lover’s image lights up. “No, I really can’t. There are things I should attend to. Besides, I should be somewhere else.”
“Darling, you are somewhere else.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Baby, I’m already in you.”
“It’s not right.”
“You prefer another position?”
“What about your lovely wife and children?”
“They’re three thousand miles away,” he yawns, “and you’re right here. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. You can laugh. It doesn’t bother me. Go on, laugh like a witch. It arouses me. Can you tell me now you don’t like how I screw around in you?”
“That’s O.K. But why do you have to have such a pot belly? What do you have in there—quintuplets?”
“I’ll tell you why. When God made me a genius he said, ‘Johann Tobler, I have made you a genius and I am giving you a big pot belly so you shouldn’t be vain.’ There you have the answer.”
“How sweet. Is that what you tell every woman?”
“What do you think? You would like me to invent something special for you?”
• •
“Leaving me, darling?”
“I have to make a phone call.”
“You forgive me if I don’t get up...so tired. You know how to get to the party?”
HELP BUILD PARADISE, she reads on the poster on the bathroom door.
“Oh, that’s a project we tried some years ago,” Kate Dallas shouts from the shower. “Environment chambers; everybody create his own. We got fantastic donations and bought five hundred acres of land in Colorado. The idea was happy pleasure. None of the old puritan masochistic stuff. But as a concession to human weakness we had what we called an Id-Lib chamber with whips and boots and girlies, the old sick bit. And you know, they spent all their time there, so we closed up the place. Just in time, too. So now we’re working to change people.” She emerges smiling and monumental in a long Greek robe Sophie remembers from the days they played together in The Trojan Women.
“I hear you’ve been doing LSD research—”
“That’s right. Do you want to go on a trip?”
“Christ no. I want to get off.”
Kate is combing her long hair before the mirror.
“I could have been another Garbo,” she sighs, “if only I weren’t six feet one.”
“Couldn’t you still?”
“As a matter of fact, I had a call just this morning...But no, I’m involved in this new project which will revolutionize consciousness. What a pity you missed my lecture! Do you realize all of psychiatry will be over in another decade? Freudian psychoanalysis will be looked on as the strangest witchcraft. It will have about as much relevance as Babylonian astrology. But tell me, what’s this about your being on a trip?”
“Well, I was on my way out of this world. An accident. It felt so fantastic I was sure this was it. But instead everything turned funny. Here I am on another trip, back on the old merry-go-round with Ezra. I have to appear at a trial tomorrow—my dead grandmother will be there and Reb Smuel of Nyitra, my cousins who died at Auschwitz.”
“The place will be crawling with ectoplasmic Jews! So what else is new?”
“Kate, I can’t stand it. I’m afraid I won’t hold out. If God appears, I’ll scream at Him.”
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know God can’t appear. He is still becoming. I happen to be, well, personally involved in His becoming...but that’s another story. How much time have we got?”
“I don’t know. I should be back there already.”
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“I was in a coffin.”
“Baloney! I went to your wake ten years ago and the next morning we had blueberry pancakes. Every time you get a little bit up-tight, you pull the Osiris bit. Atavism, sheer atavism. The eternal return. What a lot of crap. Entelechy, my dear...That’s the ticket. The purposive universe. The burgeoning processive, dynamic continuum. Alfred North Whitehead. The Teilhardian vision...”
“Ezra.”
“Ezra is a bad thought in the divine mind.”
“But why do I still have him on my back?”
“I threw him off mine. Oh, yes. Once he tried to make a pass at me. I picked him up, put him in an airplane spin and threw him across the room. He lifted his head from the floor and said, ‘The only thing for you darling is a very cerebral orang-utan.’”
“With me he was not so funny.”
“Listen, O Shulamite with your teeth chattering ‘like a flock of shorn sheep,’ Ezra is finished...The Jews are finished. Out of the past with you, down with the wailing wall. Yes, that’s it. We will demolish it brick by brick. Hot dog! You mustn’t tell anyone, but we’ve just started working with an extraordinary new substance. Actually, it’s a virus—attacks the duodenum of the Arkansas wood louse. But on humans—marvelous—it’s a forgetting drug. Memory, we discover, is stored in a glutenous protein substance—mucopolysaccharides—a cell glue. Fuzz collects around the neurons. Now, in studying brain waves it turns out that there is a best fit pattern in which a wave closely resembles the one where
