Gianni

world perceive that time-travel as a practical matter involving real human beings—no more frogs and kittens hoisted from last month to this—had finally arrived. There was going to be a whole business of press conferences, media tours of our lab, interviews with Gianni, a festival of Pergolesi music at the Hollywood bowl with the premiere of a symphony in the mode of Beethoven that he said would be ready by April, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time we would be taking Gianni on private tours of the L.A. area, gradually exposing him to the society into which he had been so unilaterally hauled. The medics said it was safe to let him encounter twenty-first-century microorganisms now. But would it be safe to let him encounter twenty-first-century civilization? He, with his windows sealed and his blinds drawn, his eighteenth-century mind wholly engrossed in the revelations that Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were pouring into it—what would he make of the world of spaceways and slice-houses and overload bands and freebase teams when he could no longer hide from it?

“Leave it all to me,” said Hoaglund. “That’s what you’re paying me for, right?”

On a mild and rainy February afternoon Sam and I and the main physician, Nella Brandon, took him on his first drive through his new reality. Down the hill the back way, along Ventura Boulevard a few miles, onto the freeway, out to Topanga, back around through the landslide zone to what had been Santa Monica, and then straight up Wilshire across the entire heart of Los Angeles—a good stiff jolt of modernity. Dr. Brandon carried her full armamentarium of sedatives and tranks ready in case Gianni freaked out. But he didn’t freak out.

He loved it—swinging round and round in the bubbletop car, gaping at everything. I tried to view L.A. through the eyes of someone whose entire life had been spent amid the splendors of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, and it came up hideous on all counts. But not to Gianni. “Beautiful,” he sighed. “Wondrous! Miraculous! Marvelous!” The traffic, the freeways themselves, the fast-food joints, the peeling plastic facades, the great fire scar in Topanga, the houses hanging by spider-cables from the hillsides, the occasional superjet, floating overhead on its way into LAX—everything lit him up. It was wonderland to him. None of those dull old cathedrals and palazzi and marble fountains here—no, everything here was brighter and larger and glitzier than life, and he loved it. The only part he couldn’t handle was the beach at Topanga. By the time we got there the sun was out and so were the sunbathers, and the sight of eight thousand naked bodies cavorting on the damp sand almost gave him a stroke. “What is this?” he demanded. “The market for slaves? The pleasure house of the king?”

“Blood pressure rising fast,” Nella Brandon said softly, eyeing her wrist-monitors. “Adrenalin levels going up. Shall I cool him out?”

I shook my head.

“Slavery is unlawful,” I told him. “There is no king. These are ordinary citizens amusing themselves.”

“Nudo! Assolutamente nudo!”

“We long ago outgrew feeling ashamed of our bodies,” I said. “The laws allow us to go nude in places like this.”

“Straordinario! Incredibile!” He gaped in total astonishment. Then he erupted with questions, a torrent of Italian first, his English returning only with an effort. Did husbands allow their wives to come here? Did fathers permit daughters? Were there rapes on the beach? Duels? If the body had lost its mystery, how did sexual desire survive? If a man somehow did become excited, was it shameful to let it show? And on and on and on, until I had to signal Nella to give him a mild needle. Calmer now, Gianni digested the notion of pass public nudity in a more reflective way, but it had amazed him more than Beethoven, that was plain.

We let him stare for another ten minutes. As we started to return to the car, Gianni pointed to a lush brunette trudging along by the tide-pools and said, “I want her. Get her.”

“Gianni, we can’t do that!”

“You think I am eunuch? You think I can see these bodies and not remember breasts in my hands, tongue touching tongue?” He caught my wrist. “Get her for me.”

“Not yet. You aren’t well enough yet. And we can’t just get her for you. Things aren’t done that way here.”

“She goes naked. She belongs to anyone.”

“No,” I said.. “You still don’t really understand, do you?” I nodded to Nella Brandon. She gave him another needle. We drove on, and he subsided. Soon we came to the barrier marking where the coast road had fallen into the sea, and we swung inland through the place where Santa Monica had been. I explained about the earthquake and the landslide. Gianni grinned.

“Ah, il terremoto, you have it here too? A few years ago there was a great earthquake in Napoli. You have understood? And then they ask me to write a Mass of Thanksgiving afterward because not everything is destroyed. It is very famous mass for a time. You know it? No? You must hear it.” He turned and seized my wrist. With an intensity greater than the brunette had aroused in him, he said, “I will compose a new famous mass, yes? I will be very famous again. And I will be rich. Yes? I was famous and then I was forgotten and then I died and now I live again and now I will be famous again. And rich. Yes? Yes?”

Sam Hoaglund looked over at him and said, “In another couple of weeks, Gianni, you’re going to be the most famous man in the world.”

Casually Sam poked the button turning on the radio. The car was well equipped for overload and out of the many speakers came the familiar pulsing tingling sounds of Wilkes Booth John doing Membrane. The subsonics were terrific. Gianni sat up straight as the music hit him. “What is that?” he demanded.

“Overload,” Sam said. “Wilkes Booth John.”

“Overload? This means nothing to me. It is a music? Of when?”

“The music of right now,” said Nella Brandon.

As we zoomed along Wilshire Sam keyed in the colors and lights too, and the whole interior of the car began to throb and flash and sizzle. Wonderland for Gianni again. He blinked, he pressed his hands to his cheeks, he shook his head. “It is like the music of dreams,” he said. “The composer? Who is?”

“Not a composer,” said Sam. “A group. Wilkes Booth John, it calls itself. This isn’t classical music, it’s pop. Popular. Pop doesn’t have a composer.”

“It makes itself, this music?”

“No,” I said. “The whole group composes it. And plays it.”

“The orchestra. It is pop and the orchestra composes.” He looked lost, as bewildered as he had been since the moment of his awakening, naked and frail, in the scoop cage. “Pop. Such strange music. So simple. It goes over and over again, the same thing, loud, no shape. Yet I think I like it. Who listens to this music? Imbecili? Infanti?”

“Everyone,” Sam said.

That first outing in Los Angeles not only told us Gianni could handle exposure to the modern world but also transformed his life among us in several significant ways. For one thing, there was no keeping him chaste any longer after Topanga Beach. He was healthy, he was lusty, he was vigorously heterosexual—an old biography of him I had seem blamed his ill health and early demise on “his notorious profligacy”—and we could hardly go on treating him like a prisoner or a zoo animal. Sam fixed him up with one of his secretaries, Melissa Burke, a willing volunteer.

Then, too, Gianni had been confronted for the first time with the split between classical and popular music, with the whole modernist cleavage between high art and lowbrow entertainment. That was new to him and baffling at first. “This pop,” he said, “it is the music of the peasants?” But gradually he grasped the idea of simple rhythmic music that everyone listened to, distinguished from “serious” music that belonged only to an elite and was played merely on formal occasions. “But my music,” he protested, “it had tunes, people could whistle it. It was everybody’s music.” It fascinated him that composers had abandoned melody and made themselves inaccessible to most of the people. We told him that something like that had happened in all of the arts. “You poor crazy futuruomini,” he said gently.

Suddenly he began to turn himself into a connoisseur of overload groups. We rigged an imposing unit in his room, and he and Melissa spent hours plugged in, soaking up the waveforms let loose by Scissors and Ultrafoam and Wilkes Booth John and the other top bands. When I asked him how the new symphony was coming along, he gave me a peculiar look.

He began to make other little inroads into modern life. Sam and Melissa took him shopping for clothing on Figueroa Street, and in the cholo boutiques he acquired a flashy new wardrobe of the