Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  Apparently no one did. She looked around the table twice, and there was silence on all sides. The meeting moved on to more mundane Center business. But afterward, when everyone was beginning to leave, Naresh Patel remained in his seat. The dapper neurolinguistics expert, small and fine-boned, ordinarily serene to the point of impassivity, looked oddly troubled.

  “You want to see me, Naresh?” Elszabet asked.

  “Yes. Please. Just for a moment.”

  “Go ahead.” She rubbed her jaw. It was definitely beginning to puff up where Nick Double Rainbow had belted her.

  Patel said in the softest possible voice, “This is a thing I did not want to say during the general meeting, though perhaps it would have been useful. This is a thing I am not yet ready to share with all my colleagues, and especially not with Dr. Waldstein in his present frame of mind. But with your permission I would like to share it with you, and only with you.”

  She had never seen him this disturbed. Gently she said, “You can count on my discretion, Naresh.”

  The little man smiled faintly. “Very well. It is this only, Dr. Lewis. I too have had what Dr. Robinson calls the Green World dream. Two nights ago. A sky like a heavy green curtain. Crystalline beings of extreme grace and beauty.” He gave her a rueful look. “I am not part of the conspiracy that Dr. Waldstein insists is taking place. May we accept the truth of that declaration? I am not in league with the patients to upset the equilibrium of the Center. Please believe me, Dr. Lewis. Please. But nevertheless I tell you this, that I have had the Green World dream. Indeed. I have had the Green World dream.”

  2

  “IT isn’t much,” Jaspin said. “Don’t expect much. It just isn’t much at all.”

  “That’s all right,” the blonde girl told him. “You don’t expect much, do you, times like these?”

  Her name was Jill. Her last name hadn’t stuck, one of those bland nice American names, Clark, Walters, Hancock, something like that. He’d find some way of getting her to say it again. Somehow she had stayed with him after the tumbondé ceremony, holding his head against her skinny chest while he was having those weird hysterics, helping him down from the hillside when he was so shaky in that scorching heat. And now somehow they were standing outside his little place in University Heights. Apparently they were going to spend the night together, or at least the evening. What the hell, it had been a long time. But part of him wished he had managed to shake her off back there in the countryside. That was the part that still was resonating to the drums of the tumbondé folk; that was the part that still saw the titanic form of Chungirá-He-Will-Come, absolutely and unquestionably real on his throne of alabaster on the planet of some far star. Having this girl around was only a distraction, a sort of a buzz, when there were things like that throbbing in his soul. Still, he had not done much by way of getting free of her after the ceremony. What the hell.

  He put his thumb on the doorplate and the door asked him who he was, and he said, “It’s your lord and master. Open the hell up, fast!”

  She laughed. “You’ve got a very individual style, Dr. Jaspin.”

  “Barry. Please. Barry, okay? I don’t even have a doctorate, hard as it is for you to accept that fact.” The door, having scanned his vocal contour and found it acceptable, slid back. He gestured grandly. “Entrez-vous!” They stepped inside.

  He hadn’t deceived her any. It wasn’t much. Two rooms, fold-out kitchenette, a little terrace facing south. The building was a decent one, Spanish style, whitewashed walls, red tile roof, lush California plants crawling all over everything—purple bougainvillea, red and white hibiscus, great spiky clumps of aloes, some agaves, sago palms, all that subtropical whatnot. Probably the place had been a nice luxury condo development before the war. But now it was divided into a million tiny apartments, and of course there was no maintenance being done any more, so the property was running down very seriously. What the hell: it was home. He had wandered into it at random his first day in San Diego after he had decided he ought to get out of Los Angeles, and he was starting to feel almost comfortable in it by now, fourteen months later.

  “You live in San Diego?” he asked.

  She managed not to answer that. He had asked it before, when they were going to the parking lot, and she had managed not to answer it then, either. Now she was drifting around the place, agog at his library: a considerable data resource, he had to admit, cubes and tapes and chip-clusters and disks and even books, good old ancient-but-not-yet-obsolete books.

  “Look!” she cried. “You’ve got Kroeber! And Mead! And Levi-Strauss, and Haverford, and Schapiro, and everybody. I’ve never seen anything like this except in a library! Do you mind?” She was pulling things off the shelves, caressing them, fondling them, the books, the tapes, the cubes. Then she turned to him. Her eyes were bright and glowing.

  Jaspin had seen that look of rapture before, from girls in his classes, in the days when he had had classes. It was pure love, abstract love. It had nothing particularly to do with him, the real him; they adored him because he was the fount of learning, because he walked daily with Aristotle and Plato. And also because he was older than they were and could, if he cared to, open the gates of wisdom for them with the merest gesture of his finger. Jaspin had used his finger on a number of them, and not just his finger, either, and he suspected that some of them had actually come away the wiser for it, though perhaps not in the way they had been expecting. He figured he was past all that stuff now.

  “Look, Jill,” he wanted to say into that adoring gaze, “it’s a real mistake to romanticize me like this. Whatever you may think I might have to offer, it just isn’t there. Honestly.” But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Instead he went toward her as if he meant to sweep her into his arms; but at the last moment he simply took the book she was holding from her and fondled it as she had been doing. A true rarity, Cordry on Mexican masks, a hundred thirty years old and the color plates still bright. He was gradually selling off his library to a professor at the La Jolla campus to pay for food and rent, the same way he had acquired most of this stuff ten and fifteen years ago when he was the one with money and somebody else had been down and out.

  “It’s one of my great treasures,” Jaspin said. “Look at these masks!” He flipped the pages. Diabolical horned faces, nightmare creatures. Chungirá-He-Will-Come? Maguali-ga? He heard the drums beginning to beat in his head again.

  “And this. And this. And this.” She was going into ecstasy. “Such a wonderful library! What an amazing person you must be, to have gathered all this knowledge, Dr. Jaspin!”

  “Barry.”

  “Barry.”

  She went out on the terrace, reached into the hibiscus, pulled off a bright red flower to stick into her hair. Just a waif, he thought, a stray. Probably a little older than he had first guessed—twenty-seven, maybe. “You live in a very nice place,” she said. “For times like these. We’re lucky, aren’t we, being in coastal California? It’s not so good inland, is it?”

  “They say it’s pretty rough in there. And the farther from the coast you get, the worse it is. Of course the worst is the states on the edge of the dusted zone. I hear that’s an absolute jungle, bandidos everywhere and nobody gives a damn, everyone dying of radiation sickness anyway.” He shook his head. It sickened him to think of it, the mess that the Dust War had made. No bombs, not a single bomb dropped, you couldn’t use bombs without touching off the ultimate holocaust that everybody agreed would mean mutual annihilation, so they just used the controlled radiation clouds instead, taking out the agricultural states, wiping out the whole heartland, breaking the country in half, in thirds, even. As we did to them, only worse. And now thirty years later we crawl around in the remains of western civilization, pruning our bougainvilleas and playing our music cubes and going to anthropology class and pretending that we have rebuilt the world out here in the sunshine of California while for all we know people have turned into cannibals five hundred miles east o
f here. He said aloud, “That’s what I was going to write about. The modern world from an anthropological view: almost sociology, sort of. The world as high-tech jungle. Of course I won’t do that now.”

  “You won’t?”

  “I doubt it. I’m not with the university any longer. I have no sponsorship. Sponsorship’s important.”

  “You could do it on your own, Barry. I know you could.”

  “That’s very kind,” he said. “Listen, are you hungry? I’ve got a little stuff here, and the prickly pears growing on that cactus in the courtyard are actually edible, so we could—”

  “Do you mind if I just take a shower? I feel real sticky, and there’s this paint all over me, the Maguali-ga markings—”

  “Sure,” he said. “What day is it? Friday? Sure, we have shower water on Fridays”

  She was out of her clothing in a moment. No shame. No breasts, either, no hips, buttocks flat as a boy’s. What the hell. She was female, anyway. He was pretty sure of that, although you couldn’t always tell for certain, the way they did transplants and implants and such nowadays. He showed her into the shower cubicle and found a towel for her. Then—what the hell—he stripped off and went in with her. “We don’t have much of a water quota,” he said. “We’d better double up.”

  She turned to him when they were under the spray and wrapped her legs around him, and he backed her up against the tiled wall, holding her with his hands under her buttocks. His eyes were closed most of the time, but once he opened them and he saw that hers were open and that she still had that adoring glowing rapturous look. Like he was putting fifty encyclopedias into her with each thrust.

  It was all very fast, but very satisfying, too. There was no getting away from that, the satisfaction of it. But afterward came the sadness, the guilt, the shame, and there was no getting away from that, either. Making love, somebody had called it, long ago. What love, where? Two pathetic strangers, jamming parts of their bodies together for a few minutes: love?

  Jaspin thought, I have to try to be honest with this girl. It would have been nicer if I had tried to be honest before we did it, but then maybe we wouldn’t have done it, and I guess I wanted to do it too much. That’s honest too, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

  Leaning calm and dejected on the edge of the sink, he said, looking at her little pink-tipped breasts, her boyish hips, her damp stringy hair, “I’ve got to tell you this flat out. You think I’m some sort of noble romantic intellectual figure, don’t you? Well, I’m not, okay? I’m nobody. I’m a phony. I’m a failure, Jill.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  He looked at her, startled. It was the first authentic thing he had heard out of her mouth since he had met her.

  He said, “I used to be somebody. Bright kid, rich L.A. family, lots of promise. Going to be one of the great anthropologists, but somewhere along the way I became farblondjet.” A mystified look. “You don’t know it? Yiddish word. Means confused, bewildered, totally mixed up. The cafard of the soul, the great early-twenty-second-century disease, what I think they’re calling Gelbard’s syndrome now. I fell apart, is what I did. And I didn’t even know why. It became too much trouble to get up in the morning. It became much too much trouble to go to classes. I wasn’t exactly depressed, you understand—Gelbard’s syndrome is something a little different from clinical depression, they tell me, it’s deeper, it’s a response to the whole human mess, a sort of cultural exhaustion, a burnout phenomenon—but I was farblondjet Still am. I have no career. I have no future. I am not the heroic demigod of culture that you probably imagine me to be.”

  “I sat in on your course. You were very profound.”

  “Repeating the stuff I had found in these books. What’s profound about a glib tongue? What’s profound about a good memory? I sounded profound to you because you didn’t know any better. What was your major at UCLA, anyway?”

  “I didn’t have one. I just audited courses.”

  “No degree?”

  A shrug. “I wanted to learn everything. But there was so much, I didn’t know where to start. So I guess I never started. But now I’ll have a second chance, won’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a strange bright edge on her voice, like thin copper wires scraping together. “To learn. From you. I’ll do the cleaning, the shopping, whatever, all the jobs. And we’ll study together. That’s all right, isn’t it? I’ll help you with your book. I don’t actually have a place to live right now, you know. But I don’t take up a lot of room, and I’m very neat, and—”

  It surprised him that he had not seen it coming. He felt his forehead beginning to throb. He imagined that Chungirá-He-Will-Come had reached out with one enormous paw and had closed it around his entire head, and was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing—

  “I’m not going to write the book,” Jaspin said. “And I’m not going to stay here in San Diego.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. I won’t be here much longer at all.”

  He was startled beyond measure by what he had just said. That came as news to him, that he was leaving San Diego.

  “Where will you go?” she asked.

  He waited a beat for his mouth to supply the answer, and then he heard himself say, “I’m going to go wherever Senhor Papamacer goes. To the Seventh Place, I guess. Following the tumbondé people to the North Pole if I have to.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I suppose I do,” Jaspin said. “I have to do it.”

  “To study them?”

  “No. To wait for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.”

  “You believe in Him, then.” He could hear the capital H.

  “I do now. Since today, on that hillside. I saw something, Jill. And it changed me. I felt literally knocked to my knees, the true conversion experience. Maybe conversion’s too pretentious a word, but—” This is preposterous, he thought, a couple of naked people who don’t even know each other, sitting in a tiny bathroom talking nonsense like this. “I’ve never been a religious man,” he said. “Jewish, at least my parents were, but that was just a cultural thing, nobody actually went to synagogue, you understand. But this is different. What I felt today—I want to feel it again. I want to go wherever I stand a chance of feeling it again. It’s the times, Jill, the era, the Zeitgeist, you know? In times of total despair, revelatory religion has always held the answer. And now it’s happened even to me, cynical urban you-name-it Barry Jaspin. I’m going to follow Senhor Papamacer and wait for Maguali-ga to open the gateway for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.” There was fire pumping through his veins. Do I really mean all this, he wondered? Yes. Yes. I actually do. Amazing, he thought. I actually mean what I’m telling her.

  “Can I come with you?” she asked timidly, reverently.

  3

  CHARLEY said, “Now tell me about the one you saw yesterday, the one where the starlight lights up the sky like day.”

  “The world of the Eye People, that’s what you mean?” Tom asked.

  “Is that it?”

  “The Eye People, yes. Of the Great Starcloud.”

  “Tell me,” Charley said. “I love to listen to you when you’re seeing this stuff. I think you’re a real prophet, man, you’re something straight out of the Bible.”

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Tom said.

  Softly Charley said, “I wish you’d stop saying that. Do I tell you that I think you’re crazy?”

  “I am crazy, Charley. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Ran away from one madhouse right into another one.”

  “A madhouse? Really? An honest-to-Christ nuthatch?”

  “Pocatello,” Tom said. “You know where that is? They had me locked up a year and a half.”

  Charley smiled. “Plenty of sane men locked up like that, plenty of crazy ones outside. Don’t mean a thing. I try to tell you, I respect you, I admire you. I think you’re phenomenal. And you sit here saying I think you’re crazy. Come on. Tell me about the Eye People, man!”

 
Charley seemed sincere. He isn’t just making fun of me, Tom thought. It’s because he’s seen the green world himself. I hope he gets to see some of the other ones. He really wants to see. He really wants to know about these worlds. He’s a scratcher, maybe even used to be a bandido, I bet he’s killed twenty people, and yet he wants to know, he’s curious, he’s almost gentle, in his way. I’m lucky to be traveling with him, Tom told himself.

  “The Eye People don’t exist yet,” he said. “They’re maybe a million, maybe three million years from now, or maybe it’s a billion, that’s very hard to know. I get confused when these past and future things come in. You understand, all the thought impulses, they float around the universe back and forth, and the speed of thought is much faster than the speed of light, so the visions overtake the light, they pass it right by, you can get a vision out of a place that doesn’t even exist yet, and maybe a million or a billion years from now the light of that sun will finally get to Earth. You follow what I’m saying?”

  “Sure,” Charley said doubtfully.

  “The Eye People live—or will live—on a planet that has maybe ten thousand stars right close around it, or a hundred thousand, who can even count them, one next to another all jammed together so that from this planet they look like one single wall of light that fills the whole sky. You go out any time of day or night, what you see is this tremendous light blazing away from all sides. You don’t see any one star, just a lot of light. All white, like the sky is white-hot.”

  Mujer came over. “Charley?”

  “Be with you five minutes.”

  “Can you talk to me now, Charley?”

  Charley looked up, annoyed. “Okay, go ahead.”

  The scratchers were camped a little way east of Sacramento, toward the coastal side of the Valley. There still were some working farms around there, and most of them were very well defended. The scratching was lousy here; Charley and his men were getting hungry; he had sent a bunch of them out scouting that afternoon.