Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Part IV

52.

FOR CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR, Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable.

There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and ein Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, “If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today.”

It was a fascinating gift and not inexpensive, but Sissy might have known there was a catch to it.

Julian couldn't keep to himself very long the information that the village had been made by a young man who had had both arms amputated after a tricycle accident at age three. He had made the village with his toes. Moreover, the fellow was in trade school, studying to be a pastry cook. In another year, he would be decorating cakes.

Naturally, this was supposed to be inspirational to Sissy.

Julian even arranged for Sissy to meet the student chef, whose name was Norman. He left the disabled pair alone in a coffee shop, where they might speak heart to heart for half an hour. When Julian returned, he found that Sissy had talked Norman into carving a Tyrolean with enlarged thumbs to hitchhike up and down the streets of her village.

53.

THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS were mellow and cozy for the Gitches, after a rather tempestuous autumn.

Sissy had returned to New York on October 8, to face an angry, anxious husband and an incredulous Countess. Where had she been; why hadn't she telephoned; had she aided and abetted the Rubber Rose coup d'état and so forth. She was Perry Masoned from pillar to post, and Franz Krafkaed, too. Only when she threatened to leave again did the interviews finally cease.

For the Countess's part, his attitude toward the revolt on his ranch was ambivalent. One day he would curse the cowgirls as the most disgusting cat pack of female filth to ever gag a decent nostril, and the next day he would reiterate how much he admired women who could make their way without men and would wish them luck. He'd lost interest in the ranch, he said. Now that he had friends in the White House, the taxes the Rubber Rose saved him were a drop in the bucket; he could save more with a single phone call.

“That ranch is anal excruciation,” the Countess complained, his dentures working over his ivory cigarette holder like a chiropractor realigning the spine of a Chihuahua. “When the market improves, I'm going to sell it. Then we'll watch how the new owners handle those little primitives. Say, are you certain the old fleabag who lives on the butte had nothing to do with all this?”

The Countess was never quite satisfied with Sissy's explanations, but he grew quickly bored with making an issue of it. He scrapped his plans for a whooping crane TV commercial and threw himself into new projects.

Julian, on the other hand, had to be forced to muzzle his interrogations and even then his soft brown eyes narrowed harshly at the most innocent and irrelevant references to Sissy's Rubber Rose assignment. He turned off the radio once when the deejay announced a song by Dakota Staton.

Actually, Sissy would have appreciated someone with whom to talk about Jellybean and the Chink — but there was no one she felt she could turn to. Julian, certainly, would not have been a good listener. As it was, he spent a great deal of time, even at his easel, wondering about the changes that had come over his wife, wondering about their origin, whether they were for better or worse. Before her trip West, Sissy had been an ardent lover but a reluctant student. Upon her return, however, she exhibited wolfish intellectual appetites for Julian's discourses upon history, philosophy, politics and the arts, but her responses between the sheets seemed no more than perfunctory. Had the Yale man gained a brain and lost a vagina? And was the Indian happy about it?

As mentioned, the cheer of Christmas brought an end to their discord. One day, while shopping in East Village boutiques, Sissy snapped out of the stupor she'd been in for weeks. Between second and third fingers, she held a sprig of mistletoe over Julian's head and kissed him right on the street. She hummed a carol on the way home. Through the holidays, she was gay and bright, with only an occasional far-away look in her eyes.

Then, on December 31, a few hours before the Gitches were to join the Barths for New Year's Eve at Kenny's Castaways, the news broke that several hospitals in both America and Denmark had been privately following a policy of letting deformed babies die. On the CBS Evening News, one doctor was heard to say, “If a baby is too deformed to be loved, then its life is going to be hell. Death is mercy for the unlovable.” The disclosure slammed Sissy into a dungeon of depression, from which she did not begin to emerge until sometime in February, when she came across by chance an item in the Times.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Manila newspaper reported yesterday the birth of a boy with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

"This will bring good luck to the family," said the infant's elated mother.

54.

ALTERNATELY SKIPPING AND STAGGERING, an overwhelmed Sissy had come down the Siwash Trail after three days at the clockworks. She found a work party of cowgirls, headed by Delores, removing hair dryers and Exercycles from the damaged wing of the main house while a second party, led by Big Red, was busily renovating the old ranch privy. Bonanza Jellybean was nowhere to be seen. Kym disclosed that Jelly and Debbie had hauled a couple of sacks of brown rice out to Siwash Lake in the chuck wagon. They were going to feed the whoopers, who were there now in full strength, and see if the birds couldn't be enticed to extend their usual stay on the ranch.

The cinematographers were no longer at the pond. They had gone off to the Pacific Northwest to shoot a new Walt Disney family feature, The Living Mud Puddle. They would be spending a lot of time poking their wide-angle lenses under wet rocks.

Sissy debated waiting for the boss cowgirl's return. She packed slowly, but when the rucksack had been snapped shut there was still no Jellybean. Kym suggested that maybe Jelly and Debbie had stopped to “roll around.” That settled it. Sissy shouldered her rucksack and trudged away. She had walked no more than three miles when the goat-chawed Cadillac limousine — which, as it turned out, was registered to the Rubber Rose — pulled up alongside her. Kym leaned out the driver's window. “Well,” she called. “Aren't you gonna hitchhike me?”

Kym, who had defied Delores in order to give Sissy a ride, dropped her off at the main highway. She hugged her. “You're always welcome,” she said. Over the cowgirl's shoulder miles of wheatgrass shimmered like the brushed hairs of a gopi. Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey's bookshelf. The sun, which in those parts appears as a half-breed — its father a prairie fire and its mother a wolf bite — shampooed Siwash Ridge in blood, so that it resembled the freshly scalped head of a trapper. This was the West. Dakota.

Back in Manhattan. . Sissy gazing over the primordial rim. . of mixing bowls. . dishpans. . brandy snifters. Sissy listening to the lope of Tenth Street traffic. Sissy staring down the poodle. Sissy, the next time Marie made a pass at her, surprising them both by taking the offensive, and afterward, while getting dressed, feeling that it had been a mistake and swearing off women forever. Sissy pumping Julian for ideas, facts, opinions — then sometimes interrupting his lectures to snigger “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Sissy painting her nails so that they were a blizzard of cherry coughdrops when she hitched from room to room. Sissy introspective, Sissy brooding, Sissy calm as ever except that now her lifelong serenity seemed thin and brittle and she gave people the disquieting impression that at any moment she might lunge away in an unexpected direction.

Julian refused to give up on her. “She is immature and self-indulgent,” he explained. “Those traits can be overcome.” It was the Mohawk's belief that his wife had been born into an ordinary family in the ordinary way, and had not some gene broken down under pressure, some chromosome slipped and fallen on its ass, she might have become a woman like any other. “She's lovely and intelligent. She needs only to be taught to overcome her affliction instead of reveling in it.”

“Quite probably you are correct,” agreed Dr. Goldman. “As you know, some social and behavioral deviants develop subcultures that, like the ethnic and racial ghettos, constitute havens where the individuals can live openly and with mutual support and insist that they are just as good as anyone else. Social deviates such as homosexuals and drug addicts may congregate in enclaves or live in small communities and take the line that they are not only as good as, but actually better than, 'straights,' and that the lives they lead are superior to those led by the majority. The socially stigmatized individual, by entering a subculture, accepts his alienation from the larger society, and by identifying himself with like souls claims that he is a full-fledged 'normal' or even a superior human being and that it is the others who are lacking. This type of adjustment is much more available to ethnic minorities, such as Jews, Amish or Black Panthers, and to stigmatized social deviants, such as hippies, drug addicts and homosexuals, than it is to the blind, the deaf and the orthopedically handicapped. So your wife may have chosen to become a subculture of one, so to speak.

“You say that she frequently makes a sincere effort to function as a normal woman in a normal household; well, every nonconformist secretly believes that he or she could live a straight life if only they so chose, and no doubt your wife yearns to prove that, within her dextrous limitations, she can adapt at will. Yet, as you say, so long as she indulges her handicap and the fantasy life she has constructed around it, she is not likely to succeed.

“At this juncture, however, I see no need in forcing her to visit the clinic against her will.”

“No, no, I wouldn't wish that,” said Julian.

But that evening when he returned home and saw what Sissy had done, he telephoned Dr. Goldman:

“I'm bringing her in,” he wheezed.

55.

"THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF CRAZY PEOPLE," Dr. Goldman said. He said this privately, to close friends, and with no intention of being quoted. “There are those whose primitive instincts, sexual and aggressive, have been misdirected, blunted, confused or shattered at an early age by environmental and/or biological factors beyond their control. Not many of these people can completely and permanently regain that balance we call 'sanity,' but they can be made to confront the source of their damage, to compensate for it, to reduce their disadvantageous substitutions and to adjust to the degree that they can meet most social requirements without painful difficulty. My satisfaction in life is in assisting these people in their adjustments.

“But there are other people, people who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a lifestyle. I've found that there is nothing I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support.”

By Dr. Goldman's unofficial classifications (and he would have been the first to term them personal and oversimplified), the mental “problems” of Sissy Hankshaw Gitche should have fit squarely into the first category, for she had certainly been attended by sufficient traumas in her formative years. Yet, after two sessions with her, one in which she was administered the talk serum to penetrate her reticence, Dr. Goldman was left with the uneasy notion that Sissy belonged partly, if not wholly, in the category of the voluntarily crazed.

Since he was frustrated, annoyed, even a little scared by the second category, Dr. Goldman decided to turn over Sissy's case to one of his assistants. In particular, he decided to dump Sissy's case on Dr. Robbins, the young intern who had only recently assumed duties at the upper East Side clinic.

Dr. Robbins spent much of his time in the garden, a dreamy expression on his face. He looked like Doris Day with a mustache. He had been overheard yelling at a patient who complained of a lack of purpose in life: “Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever its going.”

To a patient who had expressed a wish to overcome his alleged irresponsibility, Dr. Robbins had said, “The man who considers himself 'responsible' has not honestly examined his motives.”

To a patient expressing outrage, Dr. Robbins had shouted, “Don't be outraged, be outrageous!”

At least two patients had received from Dr. Robbins the following advice: “So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with wit style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

It should come as no surprise that some of the clinic staff looked upon the new intern with less than favor. Dr. Goldman, however, resisted pressure to dismiss Dr. Robbins. “These young guys come out of school nowadays with their heads dripping Erik Erikson and R. D. Laing. Robbins is bright and those radical ideas are temporarily attractive. After he's been in the field for six months he'll recognize what idealistic hogwash they are and gradually reject them.”

Dr. Goldman summoned Dr. Robbins from the garden, where he'd been fingering a crocus. He gave him Sissy's file. “When you interview Mrs. Gitche, you should consider the following variables: Depression — tensions combined with guilt derived from feelings that deformity is a punishment, tending to immobilize the deformed with consequent sadness, helplessness and inadequacy; Pessimism — a defense against the environment reflected by verbalization of a limited level of aspiration; Inadequate feminine role identification — poor identification with that which in our society constitutes womanhood, with resultant passivity and lethargy; Sociopathic impulsivity — emotions translated into aggressive action regardless of consequences to others; Inadequate compensatory ambition — the inability to mobilize additional effort to overcome the physical limitations of deformity; and, especially in this case, Inverted compensation — denial of the deformity or an irrational capitalization upon the deformity, exaggerated to the point of delusions of grandeur. A well-prepared line of questioning should narrow these variables down fairly quickly to one or two of primary interest and I rather suspect it will be the last that you will find yourself acting upon.”

When he met with Sissy the next morning, however, Dr. Robbins ignored Dr. Goldman's suggested line of inquiry, asking Sissy directly and simply, “Okay, why did you turn your husband's birds loose?”

“I couldn't bear to see them caged any longer,” answered Sissy. “They deserved to be free.”

“Yeah, I understand. But don't you see, those birds had been in a cage their whole lives with somebody to provide for them. Now they're having to fend for themselves in a huge alien city where they don't know the rules and where they're probably frightened and confused. They won't be happy being free.”

Sissy didn't hesitate. “There's just one thing in this life that's better than happiness and that's freedom. It's more important to be free than to be happy.”

Dr. Robbins did hesitate. “How did you arrive at that opinion?” he inquired.

“I may have always felt it,” Sissy said. “But it was the Chink who put it into words for me.”

This time Dr. Robbins hesitated longer. As if he could bow it like a violin, he ran a finger back and forth through his shaggy mustache. The music that resulted was soft and dry, the sort that might make one flake of dandruff say to another, “Darling, they're playing our song.” Then, the intern buzzed the office intercom. “Miss Waterworth,” he said, “cancel my appointments for the remainder of the day.”

Dr. Robbins arose, his mustache rising with him. “Sissy,” he said with a smile, “let's get a bottle of wine and go out in the garden.”

56.

THE GARDEN WAS AN ANATOMY lesson of calyxes and pistils. With no more embarrassment than an old professor, spring was turning the pages. On leather couches throughout the clinic, throughout the upper East Side, in fact, people were confessing the most bizarre and boring details to analyst after analyst, but out in Dr. Goldman's walled garden the flowers didn't care. The flowers stood around with their petals hanging out, lasciviously awaiting whatever bees might make it through the smog. And for the adjustments of neither the first nor second category of psychosis did the flowers care.

Sissy didn't much care, either. Julian had promised that if she was a" good girl” and stayed at the clinic for a minimum of thirty days, he would take her upstate to meet her in-laws. Julian's father and his father's father were deceased, and his mother and paternal grandmother had moved back near Mohawk, New York, where, to Julian's discomfort, they had reassumed some of the old ways. For the length of her marriage, Sissy had yearned to probe the Indianness in her husband's background. Yet it wasn't merely the prospect of finally meeting the squaws in his closet that had her rosebudding that May morn. Sissy was being affable to Dr. Robbins, Sissy was glowing in each of her sockets, primarily because of the letter she'd just received.

The letter had been delivered earlier that morning by a flunky of the Countess's. It was, in fact, addressed to her in care of the Countess, with a notation on the envelope: “Please forward — or it'll be your ass.” The postmark wore the word DOKATA as the queen of ink would wear a necklace.

Dearest Sissy,

Gee, it's been quite a spell hasn't it? It's not like I haven't had time to write. We were snowed in all blessed winter as usual, with nothing much to do. But although I thought of you a thousand million times, I just couldn't get it together to compose a letter. Today, though, the first whoopers came back — on their way north to hatch their chicks — and seeing them out there at the lake again was such a flashback, and made me miss you so much, that I just had to take pen in hand, as they say.

Let's see now, what's the news? Well, we traded our Cadillac to Billy West for forty goats. Delores says we were robbed, but how else were we going to get a herd of goats? I ask you. We got no money to speak of and these are all prime animals, rustled out of Minnesota, but no sense spreading that around.

So we've got our goats out to pasture and we've been busy putting in the garden and making repairs. The ranch got sort of messed up in our takeover, but I guess you noticed that. Sorry if I didn't pay attention to you at that time, but I was under a heap of pressure to pull the whole caper off. I'm just glad you got out of the way, and hope the Countess, as he calls himself, hasn't given you any trouble about it.

We got a bunch of new cowgirls, almost twice as many as before. They're from all over. Some were involved in radical politics, some worked in the peace movement and some were pretty heavy into drugs. We even got a Gospel-quoting Jesus lady, her name's Mary. Linda is a professor's daughter from Berkeley, California — she and Kym are really hitting it off. Then there's Jody, she's a regular simple ranch girl out of Nebraska somewhere. But they're all cowgirls now.

Lost a couple, too. That rich woman from Detroit, the guest that joined up with us, she got such a case of cabin fever along about February that she hired a helicopter to come in and fly her out. She actually was talking out of her head. Then Gloria, she managed to get herself knocked up in Mottburg. I hated to see Gloria go, she was one of the original beauticians that helped me get cowgirls on the Rubber Rose in the first place. But Delores insisted that Gloria couldn't have a baby on the ranch, and of course there's nowhere in the Dakotas where a woman can get an abortion. So she had to split. That was weird, too, because Delores and Gloria were close friends. Delores and Debbie went round and round about it. Delores said that if women have any hopes of getting out from under men's thumbs — oops! pardon me, Sissy, I better say that a different way. Delores said that if women have any hopes of ceasing to be enslaved by men, then they've got to control and escape their biological roles, they've got to free themselves from motherhood. It's motherhood, both the fact and the threat of it, that makes us — wait a minute, got to look up this word in Kym's dictionary—vulnerable (according to Delores). She's all for testtube babies, made in laboratories and cared for by professional nurseries. Well, Debbie, she says such ideas are dumb. Debbie says sexual reproduction is the basic and primary difference between men and women, and we'd better not forget it. She says the ability to bring life into the world puts a woman closer to the Divine Mystery of the universe than males are, and that her motherly feelings are what gives her her protective and peaceful qualities, thus accounting for what is best in her— and best in the human race. She says the capacity for motherhood is the source of women's strength. Only women stand between technology and the destruction of nature, Deb says. If we're ever going to get the world back on a natural footing, back in tune with natural rhythms, if we're going to nurture the Earth and protect it and have fun with it and learn from it — which is what mothers do with their children — then we've got to put technology (an aggressive masculine system) in its proper place, which is that of a tool to be used sparingly, joyfully, gently and only in fullest cooperation with nature. Nature must govern technology, not the other way around. Only then can all oppression end. Nothing is more vital to the human species than the reproduction of life. That is woman's trump card. But if we allow babies to be created in plastic wombs or by any other than natural means, we are letting the sacred life process fall into the hands of men. The final and greatest power on Earth will be in the hands of logic-mad reason-crazed juiceless technocrats. They already own death, and use it to repress life. If women let them, they may also own life.

What do you think of all that? Me, I guess I have to take Debbie's side this time. I might not be objective, however, because it's impossible for me to get pregnant. Result of being shot with a silver bullet.

Oh, Sissy, now I'm remembering your sweet hands on my scar!

In a few minutes, I'm going to return to the scene of our love. Last fall, Debbie and I left mountains of brown rice for the cranes to munch, and they stayed at the pond longer than they ever had in the past. This time we're going to try a different diet on them to see if they won't stay even longer.

By the way, you might be interested in knowing that the Chink survived the winter in fine shape. I'm visiting him once a week again. Now you know my little secret, huh? Well, I hear tell that you didn't exactly sit at his feet listening to Bible stories. Ha ha. He's really something, isn't he? The billy goat!

Let's see. Delores still hasn't had her Third Vision. Peyote is making her look green around the jaws. Billy West is going to try to snatch us a stereo because that goddamn radio plays nothing but polkas. Heather's eyebrow healed up fine. Big Red led a revolt against Debbie's cooking, so we're taking turns on the chuck wagon these days. Kym may have a poem published in Rolling Stone. Elaine has a bladder infection. I guess that's all the news for now.

Sissy you are such a special person. I can't tell you how much you mean to me. I hope you're happy. Oh, I know that you are. You're so on top of it you could never be unhappy. You're an example to us here.

I'm pretty happy myself. Riding the range in the spring sunshine I see my shadow against the grass and I swear that shadow extends far beyond this place. This prairie. This world. It's like my life is sparkling in every direction, through all of space and all of time. You of all people understand.

I love you,

Bonanza Jellybean

As if it were a gift neither expected nor deserved, the letter caused new life to begin in Sissy. Observing her, Dr. Robbins sensed this stirring. He knew that whatever it was would be hard to name and hard to trace — it always is. And he recognized that no doctor, not even in the name of healing, has a right to set his shoes among the bloomings of the human soul. He poured wine. He inhaled the garden (although not deeply, for East Eighty-sixth Street was but a wall away). He observed her. Sunlight enhanced her yellow hair, her fruit-taste complexion, her pouty lips. Sunlight even did something for the inflated rubber turkey legs that were her thumbs — although Dr. Robbins was not sure what.

“Tell me about this Chink,” said Dr. Robbins.

Sissy was ready. She let out a sigh that could have inflated the whole turkey. And then she told him everything.

57.

TO NEITHER THE SIWASH nor the Chinese does the Chink belong.

As are many of the best and worse contributions to the human race, the Chink is Japanese. With their flair for inventive imitation, the Japanese made the Chink.

He was born on an island in the Ryukyu chain. It was called an island, but in actuality it was a volcano, a half-submerged dunce cap that Nature had once placed on the noggin of the sea for forgetting which had come first, land or water. For centuries this volcano had sent shock after shock of purple smoke into the sky. It was a chain smoker. A Ryukyu chain smoker.

Upon the sides of this smoking volcanic cone the Chink's parents had raised yams and upon the sides of this smoking volcanic cone the little Chink had played. Once, when he was six, he climbed to the top of the volcano. His sister found him there, on the edge of the crater, unconscious from the fumes, his hair and lashes singed. He had been looking in.

When he was eight, he emigrated to the United States of America, where his uncle tended gardens in San Francisco. Dr. Goldman's garden was okay for a clinic in New York City, but the Chink's uncle would not have wanted one of his gardens to marry it.

The Chink picked up English and other bad habits. He went to high school and other dangerous places. He earned American citizenship and other dubious distinctions.

When asked what he wished to do with his life, he answered (although he had learned to appreciate movies, jukebox music and cheerleaders) that he wanted to grow yams on the side of a volcano — but as that was impracticable in the city of San Francisco, he became, like uncle, a gardener. For more than a dozen years he made the grass greener and the flowers flowerier on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Robbins would have admired his work.

By special arrangement with his employers, the Chink attended one class a day at the university. Over a twelve-year span he completed a good many courses. He never graduated, but it would be a mistake to assume he did not receive an education.

He was astute enough to warn his relatives, on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, “The shinto is gonna hit the fan. We'd better get our yellow asses back to some safe volcano and eat yams till this blows over.” They didn't listen. After all, they were patriotic, property-owning, tax-paying American citizens.

The Chink wasn't anxious to flee, either. He was in love again. Camping on the rim of a different volcano. So to speak.

On February 20, 1942, came the order. Two weeks later, the Army took steps. In March, evacuation was in full swing. Some 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were moved out of their homes in “strategic” areas of the West Coast and settled in ten “relocation” camps further inland. They could bring to camp only what they could carry. Left behind were houses, businesses, farms, home furnishings, personal treasures, liberty. Americans of non-Nip ancestry bought up their farmland at ten cents on the dollar (The crops failed). Seventy percent of the relocated people had been born and reared in the U.S.

“Loyal” Japanese were separated from “disloyal.” If one would swear allegiance to the American war effort — and could pass an FBI investigation — one had the choice of remaining in a relocation camp or finding employment in some nonstrategic area. The camps were militaristic formations of tarpaper barracks, supplied with canvas cots and potbellied stoves. Six to nine families lived in a barracks. Partitions between “apartments” were as thin as crackers and did not reach the ceiling (Even so, there were an average of twenty-five births per month in most camps). There was no great rush to leave the camps: a loyal family that had been relocated on an Arkansas farm had been killed by an irate anti-Jap mob.

Disloyal Japanese-Americans — those who expressed excessive bitterness over the loss of their property and the disruption of their lives, or who, for various other reasons, were suspected of being dangerous to national security — were given the pleasure of one another's company at a special camp, the Tule Lake Segregation Center in Siskiyou County, California. The Chink had been asked if he supported the American war effort. “Hell no!” he replied. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” He waited for the logical next question, did he support the Japanese war effort, to which he would have given the same negative response. He was still waiting when the military police shoved him on the train to Tule Lake.

Tule was even less of a lake than Siwash. It had been drained so that land could be “reclaimed” for farming. Reclaimed! Which came first, land or water? Give the wrong answer, you have to sit in a corner with a volcano on your head.

The detention camp had been built on that part of the dry lake bottom that was unsuitable for cultivation. However, the inmates (or “segregees,” as the War Relocation Authority preferred to label them) were put to work on surrounding farmland, building dikes, digging irrigation ditches and producing crops that proved once again that the greenest thumbs are often yellow.

(Perhaps the author is telling you more about Tule Lake than you want to know. But the camp, in Northern California near the Oregon border, still exists, and while time, that ultimate diet pill, has reduced its 1032 buildings to their concrete foundations, the government yet may have plans for them which may someday be your concern.)

Baked in summer, dust-blinded in fall, frozen in winter and mud-up-to-elbows in spring, the Tule Lake camp was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Soldiers in lookout towers kept constant watch — on kids swimming in ditches, adolescents hunting rattlesnakes, old men playing Go and women shopping for notions in a commissary where the latest issues of True Confessions were always on the racks. It was reported that, even if the guards were removed, the segregees would not try to escape. They were afraid of Tule Lake farmers.

The Chink petitioned to be allowed to join his family in a less restrictive camp. But his FBI check disclosed that he had, over a period of years, pursued such heathen practices as jujitsu, ikebana, Sanskrit mushroom magic and Zen archery; that at UC he had written academic papers that suggested anarchist leanings; and that he had had repeated intimate relations with Caucasian women, including the niece of an admiral in the U.S. Navy. Please to remain at Tule Lake.

In early November of 1943, there was trouble at Tule Lake. A careless GI truck driver accidentally killed a Japanese farmworker. Angered, the segregees refused to complete the harvest. There followed a confrontation that Army spokesmen identified as a “riot.” Among the 155 ringleaders who were beaten and imprisoned in the stockade was the man we now call the Chink. The Chink had not participated in the “riot,” had, in fact, been looking forward to the rhythm of harvest, but camp authorities claimed that his notoriously insubordinate attitude (not to mention the crazed way he had of venerating plants, vegetables and other men's wives) contributed to unrest at the camp.

If he liked the segregation center little, he liked the stockade less. For several days and nights he meditated upon the yam, that tuber that, while remaining sweet to the taste and soft to the touch, is so tough it will thrive on the sides of live volcanos. “Yam” became his mantra. Om mani padme yam. Hare yam-a. Wham, bam, thank you yam. Hellfire and yam nation. Then, like the yam, he went underground. He tunneled out of the stockade, out of the camp.

In wartime America, where even toddlers and lobotomy patients remembered Pearl Harbor, the sneaky little slant-eyed yellow-bellied infidel was on the yam. So to speak.

58.

THERE IS AN ELIZABETHAN MAXIM, “To tend a garden is to be civilized."

Sir Kenneth Clark's boundless love for Western civilization seems to purr most contentedly when he is displayed, tweed-suited, in a landscaped garden.

The formal garden is an outdoor room where Nature is purged of its wildness, or, at least, is held in limbo.

It was in a high-quality garden that the fall of man began. The question is, fall from where into what? Innocence into sin? Substance into form? Primitivism into civilization?

Granting that primitive, unfallen man had access to nourishing psychic processes, which the clipped hedges of civilization have obscured, would it be unfair to conclude that the ecstatic mind degenerates as it begins to contemplate gardening?

Japanese gardening, with its emphasis upon irregular interval, as opposed to European gardening, with its emphasis upon ordered form, generates points of departure rather than sets of conditions. .

Dr. Robbins, already vicariously affected by the Chink, was eyeballing the clinic garden from new perspectives while Sissy went inside to use the facilities. Suddenly, Miss Waterworth's red Bibanas wedgies appeared among the tulips.

“Excuse me, Dr. Robbins,” Miss Waterworth said, “but Dr. Goldman has asked that you reconsider your request to cancel the rest of your day's appointments.”

From where he lay in the barbered grass, cradling the one-third-empty bottle of Chablis, Dr. Robbins did not look up, but continued to focus upon the red shoes. He was reminded of the skinned knees of our betrayed Savior kneeling in Gethsemane's dew, of the speedy flick-flick of the Serpent's tongue, of the blood that oozed in pain and pleasure in King Louis's Deer Park, of cleverly disguised microphones blossoming among the roses on the White House lawn — and other ominous scenes from past issues of Better Homes and Gardens. “One moment, Miss Waterworth,” said Dr. Robbins.

Sissy was returning.

“Sissy, you do have more to relate about the Chink, do you not?”

“Oh my yes,” she said. “I haven't even told you how he came to live with the Clock People. Or anything. But if my time is up. .”

“Never mind. Miss Waterworth, you are interrupting the only interesting sentences I have ever heard uttered by a patient — or, I might add, a staff member — in the three months that I've been an asset to this institution. Convey to Dr. Goldman my regrets. Now, Sissy. Another thimble of wine? Do go on.”

“Let's see. Where was I?”

“The Chink was so unhappy at the Tule Lake Segregation Center that he dared to escape.”

“No,” said Sissy. “I've given the wrong impression. The Chink wasn't charmed with the camp, but he was not unhappy there. The soil around Tule Lake grows the finest horseradishes in the world. It grew big white onions and tons of lettuce. He planted, cultivated, harvested and venerated. He wasn't really unhappy.”

“Okay,” said Dr. Robbins. “I get it. He wasn't unhappy but neither was he free. And freedom is more important than happiness. Right?”

Sipping her wine, Sissy thought it much too dry. The Countess had cursed her with a taste for the Ripple. “No, that's not exactly right, either,” she said. “Even though the Chink was still in the early stages of his development, he was advanced enough to know that freedom — for humans — is largely an internal condition. He was free enough in his own head, even then, to endure Tule Lake without undue frustration.”

“What made him split, then?” With the top of the bottle, Dr. Robbins prodded his caterpillar mustache. As if trained for just such a function, it undulated until it formed a shaggy question mark.

“You're not yet aware of the Chink's peculiar fascination with the science of the particular, with laws governing exceptions.”

The caterpillar repeated its question mark routine.

“You see,” explained Sissy, “there were three categories of Japanese-Americans in the country during the war. There were those in detention camps, including Tule Lake; there were those who had been released to perform menial labor in remote, rural areas of the interior; and there were those serving in the U.S. Army. Each member or each category was carefully watched over and supervised by the government. The Chink busted out of Tule Lake because he believed there ought to be an exception. After enough provocation, he took it upon himself to enact the singular as opposed to the general, to embody the exception rather than the rule.”

59.

HE HEADED FOR THE PROVERBIAL HILLS. The Cascade Mountains lay to the west, across twenty or more miles of lava beds. The lava felt sharply familiar. Each rip in his shoes brought him closer to his childhood. All night, he jogged, walked, rested, jogged. At sunrise, Mt. Shasta, a cone of diamond ice cream, a volcano on a sabbatical, adorned (like the whooping cranes) with the power of white, was waiting. Encouraging him. An hour after dawn he was in tree-cover.

His plan was to follow the crest trail through the Cascades, down the full length of the Sierra Nevada and into Mexico. In the spring, perhaps, he would wetback into the U.S. again and work the crops. There weren't many farmers who could distinguish a Nip from a Spic, not under a straw hat, not with spine bent to the rutabagas. Alas, Mexico was a thousand miles away, the month was November, there was already snow at the higher altitudes, flop flap was the song of his shoes.

Fortunately, the Chink knew which plants to chomp, which nuts and mushrooms to toast over tiny minimum-smoke fires. As best he could he patched his shoes with bark. His journey went well for a week or more. Then, out of the mysterious dwelling place of weather, there rode an abrupt and burly storm. For a while it toyed with him, blowing in his ears, aging his normally black hair, hanging flakes artfully from the tip of his nose. But the storm was on serious business, and soon the Chink, crouched though he was in the lee of a cliff, realized that, by comparison, the passion of this storm to storm made puny his own desire to reach Mexico. Snow snow snow snow snow snow. The last thing a person sees before he dies he will be obliged to carry with him through all the baggage rooms of lasting death. The Chink strained to squint a sequoia or at least a huckleberry bush, but all his freezing eyes saw was snow. And the snow wanted to lie atop him as badly as any male ever wanted to lie on female.

The storm had its way with him. He lost consciousness trying to think of God, but thinking instead of a radiant woman cooking yams.

Of course, he was rescued. He was rescued by the only people who possibly could have rescued him. He was discovered, hauled in, bedded down and thawed out by members of an American Indian culture that, for several reasons, cannot be identified beyond this fanciful description: the Clock People.

It is not easy, perhaps, to accept the fact of the Clock People's existence. You might read through every issue of National Geographic since the Year One and not find an exact parallel to the Clock People's particular distinctions. However, if you think about it for a while — the way Sissy did, the way the author has — it becomes obvious that the civilizing process has left pockets of vacuum that only Clock People could have filled.

60.

THE ROOM in which the fugitive regained consciousness was large and well heated, draped with crude blankets and the skins of animals. Whether it was a cave, a camouflaged cabin or an elaborate tipi/hogan-type dwelling the Chink would not say. He was careful not to disclose any details that might aid in pinpointing the location of his hosts. Sissy, moreover, would never have mentioned the Clock People to Dr. Robbins had she not been assured that conversation between psychiatrist and patient is privileged and confidential, immune, even, from governmental subpoena. That Dr. Robbins was someday to violate that privilege. . well, let's pass over that for now.

As had been written, the Clock People are of an American Indian culture. Ethnically speaking, however, they are not a tribe. Rather, they are a gathering of Indians from various tribes. They have lived together since 1906.

At the dawning of April 18, 1906, the city of San Francisco awakened to a terrible roar, mounting in intensity. For sixty-five seconds the city shook like a rubber meatball in the jaws of Teddy Roosevelt. There followed a silence almost as terrible as the roar. The heart of San Francisco lay in ruins. Buildings had tumbled into creviced streets; twisted bodies of humans and horses colored the rubble; gas hissed like the Snake of All Bad Dreams from dozens of broken mains. During the next three days, flames enveloped 490 blocks, unquenched by the teardrops of the homeless and lame.

History knows the catastrophe as the Great San Francisco Earthquake. That is not how the Clock People know it, but, then, the Clock People don't believe in earthquakes.

Among the crowds who watched the blazing devastation from surrounding hills was a scattering of American Indians. Largely from California tribes, though including folk from Nevada and Oregon, and in whose midst there moved representatives of the few but notorious Siwash, they were the first of the urbanized Indians. Poor, generally, they held jobs of menial or disreputable stature along the Barbary Coast (It should be emphasized, however, that they had been drawn into the city, each and every of them, not by desire for money — they needed no money where they came from — but by curiosity alone). The white San Franciscans camping on the smoky hilltops surveyed the ruins in a state of shock. Perhaps the Indians, too, were overwhelmed by the spectacle, but they, as always, appeared as inscrutable as the other side of a nickel. Yet the Indians were to display shock aplenty. It was when the fires were at last controlled and the citizens began to rush back into the still-warm ashes, singing, praising the Lord, and shouting to one another their plans for rebuilding their metropolis, that Indian eyes widened in disbelief. They simply could not comprehend what they were witnessing. They realized that the white man lacked wisdom, but was he completely goofy? Couldn't he read the largest and most lurid of signs? Even those Indians who had grown to trust the white man were grievously disappointed. Rebuild the city? They shook their heads and muttered.

For several weeks they remained on the hill, strangers united by shock and disappointment as well as by a common cultural comprehension of what had happened below. Then, through communications the nature of which is known best to them, several of the Indians led a migration of a small band of souls into the Sierras, where, in a period of thirteen full moons, they generated the stalk of a new culture. (Or, should we say, under their impetus, the ancient stalk of Life Religion put forth unexpected and portentous shoots.)

61.

ON BEHALF OF THE SUSQUEHANNA, the Winnebago, the Kickapoo, the Chickasaw, the Kwakiutl, the Potawatomi and all the other splendidly appellated aborigines who came to be labeled “Indians” through the ignorance of an Italian sailor with a taste for oranges, it is only fitting that “Indians” misnamed our Japanese-American hero “Chink."

There were very few Japanese in San Francisco in 1906, but Chinese were plentiful. Already there was a Chinatown, and its exotic trappings were a lure to tourists. Drugs, gambling and prostitution abounded in the Chinese quarter, just as they did on the Barbary Coast, and the Indians often had overheard their employers speaking of the competition from the “Chinks.”

In the years between 1906 and 1943, the Clock People had, naturally, discussed on many occasions the circumstances of their Sierra migration. More than once, they had wondered aloud why the yellow people had been so unenlightened as to join the whites in resurrecting San Francisco. It had been astonishing enough to watch the white man set about to repeat his mistake, but to watch the Orientals follow him. .!

Their curiosity about yellow men probably had influenced their decision to rescue this near-frozen outsider. During his days of recuperation, the storm victim had heard several of his hosts inquire about the condition of the “the Chink.” His sense of irony was not so frostbitten that he could refrain from perpetuating, once he had recovered, the misnomer.

Eventually, perhaps, he confessed to his Japanese ancestry. Certainly and soon, he confessed to being a fugitive. The Clock People elected to harbor him, and were never to regret it. In the years that followed, the Chink performed many services for them. In return, he was accepted as one of them, and gained privity to all of the secrets of the clockworks.

The pivotal function of the Clock People is the keeping and observing of the clockworks. The clockworks is a real thing. It is kept at the center, at the soul, of the Great Burrow.

The Great Burrow is a maze or labyrinthine sequence of tunnels, partly manmade, partly of geological origin. To be more specific: a natural network of narrow caves, lying beneath a large knoll in the Sierra wilderness, was lengthened and elaborated upon by the Indians who exiled themselves from San Francisco in 1906. Many, if not most, of the tunnels are deadends.

The Clock People, as we now know them, divided themselves into thirteen families, not necessarily along tribal lines. (What is the numerical significance of the Clock People's taking thirteen months to structure their ritual, then separating into thirteen families? Well, briefly, they consider thirteen a more natural number than twelve. To the Babylonians, thirteen was unlucky. That is why, when they invented astrology, they willfully overlooked a major constellation, erroneously assigning to the zodiac only twelve houses. The Clock People knew nothing of Babylonian superstition, but they knew the stars, and it was partly in an effort to override the unnatural twelve-mindedness of Western culture that they chose to give thirteen its due.) To each family was assigned the responsibility for one section of the Great Burrow. Each family knows one section inch by inch, but is completely ignorant of the other twelve sections. So no one family nor individual knows the Way. The Way, of course, being the true path that takes one through the Great Burrow maze to the clockworks. Moreover, it is not possible for the families to compile a map of the Way, for each family holds as a sacred secret its knowledge of its burrow or section of the Way.

(In naming these tunnel sections “burrows,” the Clock People were not particularly identifying with animals — no more so than were the Indians in whose culture totems played such a large and vivid role. Totemically oriented Indians utilized the characteristics of certain animals metaphorically. It was simply a form of poetic symbolism. They used animals to think with.)

Okay. Who gets to the clockworks, how and when? Each morning at sunrise that day's designated guides — one from each of the thirteen families — gather at the portal of the Great Burrow. Then they are all blindfolded, except for the guide representing the Family of the First Burrow. The blindfolded twelve link hands and are led by the first guide through any of several routes he or she may take to reach the beginning of the Second Burrow. A guide will purposefully attempt never to use the same route twice. Often a guide will backtrack, and sometimes he or she will instruct the others in the party to let go of each other's hands and spin. Since, by this date, there are around twenty members in each family, an individual acts as guide only about thirteen times a year.

Now, when the first guide reaches the terminus of his burrow and the beginning of the next, he instructs the guide for the Second Burrow to remove his blindfold, and then binds his own eyes. And so it goes until the group is at the large central chamber that contains the clockworks. There, they go about “keeping the time” until the hour for the return trip. Theoretically, the thirteen daily guides emerge from the Great Burrow at sunset, although this occurs in actuality only on those days when there are thirteen hours of daylight.

Occasionally other people accompany the guides on their mission. An aged or sickly person who is about to die or a pregnant woman commencing labor is led, blindfolded, to the central burrow, for insofar as it is possible, all Clock People deaths and births occur in the presence of the clockworks. Aside from birthing or dying, the reason for the daily visits to the clockworks is to check the time.

Maybe we should say “check the times,” for the clockworks is really two clocks and the sort of time each one measures is quite distinct. (Maybe we should also establish that it is the original clockworks that is being described here: there was later to be another, and the second figures even more prominently in our story.)

First, there is a huge hourglass, at least seven feet in diameter and thirteen feet tall, made from the finely stitched and tightly stretched internal membranes of large beasts (elk, bears, mountain lions). The hourglass is filled with acorns, enough so that it takes them approximately thirteen hours to pour or funnel, one by one, through the slender passage in the waist of the transparent device. When the daily guides enter the soul burrow, the hourglass is turned on its opposite end. When they depart — in approximately thirteen hours — they flip it again. So “checking the time,” or “keeping the time” is, in the twenty-six-hour day of the Clock People, the same as “making time,” or, more generally, “making history.” The Clock People believe that they are making history and that the end of history will come with the destruction of the clockworks.

Please do not construe the “end of history” or the “end of time” to mean “the end of life” or what is normally meant by the apocalyptically minded when they speak (almost wishfully, it seems) of the “end of the world.” That is paranoiac rubbish, and however one may finally evaluate the Clock People, their philosophy must be appreciated on a higher plane than doomsday drivel.

Well, then, what do the Clock People mean by the end of history and how will the clockworks be destroyed?

Zoom in on this: These people, these clandestinely exiled Indians, have no other ritual than this one: THE CHECKING OF THE CLOCKWORKS — the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call the Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. They look forward to a state of timelessness, when bored, frustrated and unfulfilled people will no longer have to “kill time,” for time will finally be dead.

They are preparing for timelessness by eliminating from their culture all rules, schedules and moral standards other than those that are directly involved with the keeping of the clockworks. The Clock People may be the most completely anarchistic community that has ever existed. Rather, they may be the first community so far in which anarchy has come close to working. That is impressive in itself and should fan with peacock tails of optimism all those who dream of the ideal social condition.

The Clock People manage their anarchism (if that is not a contradiction) simply because they have channeled all of their authoritarian compulsions and control mania into a single ritual. It is clearly understood by all members of the community that there is no other ritual, no other required belief than this ONE — and, furthermore, that they themselves created the ritual: they have no silly superstitions about gods or ancestor spirits who hold this ritual over their heads in return for homage and/or “good” conduct.

Ritual, usually, is an action or ceremony employed to create a unity of mind among a congregation or community. The Clock People see the keeping of the clockworks as the last of the communal rituals. With the destruction of the clockworks, that is, at the end of time, all rituals will be personal and idiosyncratic, serving not to unify a community/cult in a common cause but to link each single individual with the universe in whatever manner suits him or her best. Unity will give way to plurality in the Eternity of Joy, although, since the universe is simultaneously many and One, whatever links the individual to the universe will automatically link him or her to all others, even while it enhances his or her completely separate identity in an eternal milkshake unclabbered by time. Thus, paradoxically, the replacement of societal with individual rituals will bring about an ultimate unity vastly more universal than the plexus of communal rites that presently divides peoples into unwieldy, agitating and competing groups.

Now, the Clock People, being visionaries, are not content with their time-checking ritual. After all, it is the lone authoritarian, compulsive action that binds them. They chafe to dispense with it. If it could be eliminated, they could pass out of history and into the Eternity of Joy. Timeless, they could bear their children and bury their dead wherever they chose. However, they understand that at this evolutionary stage they still require the ritual, even as they realize that destroying the clockworks is entirely within their power.

They will not destroy it. They have agreed — and this is central to their mythos — that the destruction must come from the outside, must come by natural means, must come at the will (whim is more like it) of that gesticulating planet whose more acute stirrings thoughtless people call “earthquakes.”

Here, we can understand a bit more about the origins of their culture. The great rumble of 1906, which destroyed practically the whole of San Francisco, was taken by the Indians as a sign. They had left the land and gone to the city. That the city could be destroyed by the land in sixty-five seconds gave them a clue as to where the real power lay.

Within a natural context the phenomenon would never have appeared as a holocaust. Away from the herding centers we prize as cities, an “earthquake” would manifest itself only as a surface quickening of the globe's protoplastic movements, which, at various depths and various intensities, are occurring all of the time, and so not in time but all over time. Being “all over time” is the same as being out of time, because the notion of time is welded inseparably to the notion of progression, but what is already everywhere cannot possibly progress.

From there, it is a short leap to the ledge of the dream: the Eternity of Joy (a continuous present in which everything, including the dance of aging, which we mistake as a chronological unfolding rather than a fixed posture of deepening cellular awareness, is taken together and always).

When the citizens of San Francisco began immediately to rebuild their city, the Indians were understandably very disappointed. The white (and yellow) San Franciscans hadn't learned a thing. They had been given a sign — a powerful, lucid sign — that urban herding and its concomitant technologies are not the proper way to partake of this planet's hospitality. (Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way — the industrialized, urbanized, herding way — to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one wrong way.) The people of San Francisco failed to heed the sign. They capitulated, opting to stay in time and so out of eternity.

Readers may wonder why the Indians, who recognized the earthquake for what it really was, did not simply usher in the Eternity of Joy then and there. Well, they had both a realistic view and a sense of humor regarding their situation. They understood that it would take at least three or four generations to cleanse them of previous cultural deposits. The patriarchs — only two or three of whom are still alive — reasoned that if they could channel all of their fellows' frustrations and self-destructive compulsions into a single, simple ritual, then two things would follow. One, outside that ritual, the community could experiment freely with styles of life instead of the attractions of death. Two, sooner or later, the Earth would issue another potent sign, one powerful enough to destroy their last icon of time-bound culture, the clockworks, ending the ritual even while it was reshaping much of American civilization.

Which brings us, ticking, to the matter of the second clock. The first clock in the original clockworks, the membrane hourglass, sits in a pool of water. The Great Burrow is situated upon a deep fracture, a major branch of the San Andreas Fault. The Sierra fault is clearly shown on geological maps of Northern California (which does hint at the location of the original clockworks, doesn't it? even though the fracture is very long). In addition, the underground stream that feeds the Great Burrow pool flows directly into the San Andreas Fault. That pool of water is the second clock into the clockworks system. Consider its components.

Moments prior to an earthquake, certain sensitive persons experience nausea. Animals, such as cattle, are even more sensitive to prequake vibrations, feeling them earlier and more strongly. By far the most quake-sensitive creatures in existence are catfish. Readers, this is scientific fact; the doubtful among you should not hesitate to check it out. Catfish.

Now, there is a species of catfish, hereditarily sightless, that dwells exclusively in subterranean streams. Its Latin name is Satan eurystomus, again for the skeptical, but spelunkers know these fish as blindcats. Relatively rare in California, blindcats are quite common in the caverns and caves of the Ozark states and Texas.

The clockworks pool is inhabited by such catfish. Their innate catfish earthquake sensitivity is compounded by the fact that they are tuned in, fin and whisker, to the vibrations of one of the globe's largest and most frenetic fault systems. When a tremor of any Richterian passion is building, the catfish go into a state of shock. They cease feeding, and when they move at all, it is erratically. By constantly monitoring changes in the Earth's magnetic field or the tilt of the Earth's surface or the rate of movement and intensity of stress where faults are slowly creeping, seismologists have correctly predicted a handful of minor tremors, though with no great exactitude. The clockworks catfish, on the other hand, have registered upcoming quakes as far away as Los Angeles (in 1971) and as early as four weeks in advance.

On the earthen walls of the Central Burrow, the Clock People have marked in sequence the dates and intensities of all tremors, mad or mild, that have occurred along the two thousand miles of West Coast faults since 1908. The whole pattern, transcribed from the catfish clock, reveals a rhythmic structure that indicates to the rhythmic minds of the Indians that something emphatic is going to be coming along any week now.

This peek on destruction is Pythagorean only in the sense that with the cataclysmic konking of the last vestige of cultural ritual will come the kind of complete social and psychic freedom that only natural timeless anarchy can offer, the birth of a new people into the Eternity of Joy.

The Clock People regard civilization as an insanely complex set of symbols that obscures natural processes and encumbers free movement. The Earth is alive. She burns inside with the heat of cosmic longing. She longs to be with her husband again. She moans. She turns softly in her sleep. When the symbologies of civilization are destroyed, there will be no more “earthquakes.” Earthquakes are a manifestation of man's consciousness. Without manmade follies, there could not be earthquakes. In the Eternity of Joy, pluralized, deurbanized man, at ease with his gentle technologies, will smile and sigh when the Earth begins to shake. “She is restless tonight,” they will say.

“She dreams of loving.”

“She has the blues.”

62.

IN THE FLIPPERS of dolphins there are five skeletal fingers.

Once upon a time, dolphins had hands.

Observing the residual fingers that remain in their flippers, it is possible to conclude that dolphins had opposable thumbs.

Picture a dolphin holding an ace. Picture a dolphin plucking petals from a daisy: loves me, loves me not. Picture a dolphin, way back when, drawing an astrological chart and discovering that all of its planets were in Pisces. Can you see a dolphin fingering its blowhole? A dolphin at a typewriter writing this book?

Imagine the dolphin, a land animal then (although the Pisces Express stops only at the bottom of the sea), wagging a slick thumb in the lizard-filtered air of prehistory, hitchhiking to Atlantis or Gondwanaland. Would you pick up a hitchhiking dolphin? What if you were driving a Barracuda?

Look, look, look, the author wants to say (to the shortsighted and temporal-minded), the dolphin used to have thumbs! Ponder that when you have a moment. Right now, however, dolphin thumb is eclipsed by Sissy thumb. Flexing in a sooty city garden.

Dr. Robbins, bottoming out the wine, wished to know if the Chink swallowed the Clock People's ideas.

The answer was, and is, no, he never was in total agreement with the Clock People's viewpoints and suppositions, and as the years passed, he agreed with them less instead of more. However, he fell into the hands of the Clock People at a time when most of the world was banging heads together bloodily over vague, meaningless manias such as economic expansion and ethnocentric geopolitics, and his own peoples, the Japanese and the Americans, were among the most fanatical about victory as they prayed to the gods of bullets and taught their babies to walk on the edge of the knife. So, when he met the thirteen families of the Great Burrow and learned the rhymes and reasons of the clockworks, the Chink emitted a long overdue “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Said he, “It is reassuring to see on the planet signs of intelligent life.”

“My sentiments exactly,” mused Dr. Robbins, as he watched the shadows of Sissy's thumbs leaping like dolphins against the garden wall.

63.

AMONG THE CLOCK PEOPLE, who never had tasted a yam nor seen a whooper, who were unfamiliar with the practice of hitchhiking, who would have been flabbergasted by a can of Yoni Yum and who knew better than to believe in such Fig Newtons of the American imagination as cowgirls, the Chink dwelt for twenty-six years.

For the first eight of those years, he lived virtually as a Clock Person himself, an honorary member of the Family of the Thirteenth Burrow, sharing its food, lodging and women. (Being an anarchistic, or, more precisely, a pluralistic society, some of the Clock People were monogamous, some, perhaps most, practitioners of free love. In a pluralistic society, love quickly shows all of its many smeared and smiling faces, and it should be noted that the term family was relevant only to the clockworks ritual, outside which there was uninhibited intermingling. For example, a man from the Family of the Fifth Burrow might impregnate an Eleventh Burrow lady, and the resulting child, once of age, might be assigned to the Family of the Ninth Burrow.)

In 1951, the war now only a glint in the American Legion's shell-popped eye, the Chink moved into a shack that he built some nine or ten miles west of the Great Burrow. The shack was strategically erected at the narrow entrance to the valley, which, with a creek as its racing stripe, totaled out against the base of the tunnel-filled knoll. In the other direction, a couple of miles beyond the shack, was a trail that led to a dirt road that led to a paved highway that led past, eventually, a combination gas station, café and general store. The Chink began to take fortnightly hikes to that store, where he picked up newspapers and magazines, along with other supplies. These he read to those Clock People (all spoke English but few could read it) who were interested; these were mainly the younger ones, the old Indians regarding that “news” that did not have to do with quakes, hurricanes, floods and other geophysical shenanigans as trivia. The belch of civilization, they called it. Maybe the older Indians were right. It was the Eisenhower Years, remember, and the news read as if it had been washed out of a Pentagon desk commander's golf socks.

The Chink also linked the older Indians with the rest of the world, but in a different manner. Throughout the decades, the Clock People had mysteriously maintained periodic contact with certain Indians on the outside. These outside contacts were medicine men or shamans, although exactly what was their relationship to the clockworks ritual and Eternity of Joy legend the Chink was never to ascertain. However, in the mid-fifties, one or more of these outsiders took to showing up at the Sierra store at the precise hours of the Chink's unannounced visits. They'd drink a beer with him and give him a piece or two of seemingly insignificant gossip, which he would feel compelled to pass along once he was back at the Great Burrow. Thus, he functioned as a medium, as the air is the medium for drumbeats, connecting Clock People, young and old, with distant drummers.

He also functioned as an agent of diversion. When hunters, hikers or prospectors entered the area, the Chink used his wiles to guide them away from the vicinity of the Great Burrow. Conversation studded with tips about game, scenic waterfalls or ore deposits was usually enough to divert the intruders, but occasionally a small rock slide or other mishap would have to be arranged. Even so, a few interlopers, especially rangers of the U.S. Forest Service, slipped through the Chink's net. Those who got too close were slain by the Clock People. From 1965 to 1969, seven outsiders took arrows through their breasts and were buried inside the Great Burrow.

These slayings were a source of contention between the Chink and the Clock People, the latter regarding them as the regrettable but necessary price of protection, the former declaring, “There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”

The Chink tried to impress upon the Clock People that, with the increase in air traffic over the mountains, as well as in the number of outdoorsmen whom civilization was driving into the wilderness, it was only a matter of “time” before their culture was exposed. What would they do then? Obviously, the System would not be gracious enough to leave them alone. “We will hide in the tunnels,” answered some of the middle-aged. “We will defend ourselves to the death,” answered some of the youths. “The movements of the Earth will take care of all that,” answered the elders, smiling enigmatically.

If the killings upset him, the Chink accepted with ease other contradictions in the Clock People's philosophy. When faced with a contradiction, as he was — as we all are — daily if not hourly, it seemed only fair to him to take both sides.

Yet he grew increasingly impatient with the Clock People's notions, and toward the end of his Sierra stay his hickory dickory mouse of mockery ran frequently up their clock.

Now, a number of the young men of the Great Burrow had lost patience, too. Through the Chink's news broadcasts they had learned of mushrooming militancy among American Indians. They learned of Red Power and of reservations whose proud residents were freshly painted — and armed to the teeth. In early spring of 1969 a quartet of bucks slipped away from the Great Burrow, venturing into the strange world beyond the still snowy mountains, to see for themselves. A couple of months later they returned, excited, feathered, beaded, buzzing of revolution. Two comrades threw in with them and they deserted the Clock People to go face the white man on his own terms — and in his own time. The bucks called at the Chink's shack on their way down the mountains. “You're as tired as we are of sitting around waiting for a motherfucking earthquake,” they said in the idiom they had recently adopted. “You're strong and smart and have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement.”

“This movement of yours, does it have slogans?” inquired the Chink.

“Right on!” they cried. And they quoted him some.

“Your movement, does it have a flag?” asked the Chink.

“You bet!” And they described their emblem.

“And does your movement have leaders?”

“Great leaders.”

“Then shove it up your butts,” said the Chink. “I have taught you nothing.” He skipped down to the creek to gather watercress.

A few weeks later he accepted the invitation of an aged Siwash chief who was the principal outside confederate of the Clock People, a degenerated warlock who could turn urine into beer, to be initiated as a shaman, an honor that gave him rights of occupancy in the sacred cave on far-away Siwash Ridge. At once he left for the Dakota hills to construct a clockworks whose ticks might more accurately echo the ticks of the universe, which, as he listened, sounded more and more like “ha ha ho and hee hee.”

64.

WHEN YOU'RE IN THE SADDLE ALL DAY, you need something to do with your mouth besides sing “Yippee eye oh ki yea.” Usually it's too hot and dry for singing, anyhow. You just end up with a throat full of dust.

However, when you're stuck in the saddle from dawn to dusk, you need something of an oral nature to keep you occupied and calm. That's why so many cowboys chew tobacco or puff roll-yer-owns. That's why it really is Marlboro Country.

But cowgirls of the New Age, they aren't much into the tobacco habit. Gloria was mighty attached to the Pall Malls that dit-ditted to her in an endless dotted line from South Richmond, Virginia, and Big Red was prone to accept a chaw. On the whole, though, the gals had a nonpreference for tobacco that was close to contempt, even if they did not agree with Debbie, who predicted, “When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls among us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension.”

At any rate, cowgirls need something to do with their mouths while riding herd, and this is what they do: they stick a butterscotch Life Saver in one cheek and a clove in the other. They seldom suck and never chew, but just concentrate on the mixture of juices that drips onto their tonsils from the Life Saver and the clove, in a steady drip like rainwater running off the candied rooftops of Fairyland.

Now, aside from being calming and occupying, requiring no spitting and no assistance from the hands, a butterscotch Life Saver and a clove give a person the most interesting breath in the world.

It's no wonder the Rubber Rose ladies were always kissing on each other, although what a cowgirl does with her mouth once she's back at the bunkhouse shouldn't really concern us students of Western lore.

When there were thirty or more cowgirls riding for the Rubber Rose, sometimes the wheatgrass and the hills and the whole wide sky itself would start to smell like butterscotch and clove.

Sometimes the Chink would smell it way up on his ridge. Not when he first came to Dakota, of course. Then he could smell only pollen and sagebrush and woodsmoke and his own hairy self. Who was it once said, “A hermit is mysterious to everyone but the hermit.”

65.

WHEN HE FIRST LIT ON SIWASH RIDGE, the Chink couldn't catch a whiff of butterscotch/clove cowgirl breath or of Countess-gagging cowgirl snatch. Which is just as well, for had there been cowgirls then on the Rubber Rose range, they might have drawn his nose out of his own business. And he had business aplenty. The cave proved to be as wondrous as advertised, but enormous amounts of labor and ingenuity were required to adapt it to his lifestyle and make it comfortable for year-round residency. Moreover, he had a clockworks to assemble and that is not a simple task. In the process of readying the cave and planning his clockworks, he had also to extricate himself from Clock People consciousness, because twenty-six years among the Indians of the Great Burrow had molded him more than he had realized when he set out again on his own.

The mass of humanity has minds like soft wax. Once an impression is made upon them, it won't change until you change it for them. They are malleable but not self-malleable (a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage). The Chink, however, was perfectly capable of reshaping his ball of tallow: it just took longer than he had anticipated.

When, four years later, he spoke of the Clock People to Sissy, it was with admiration, appreciation and amusement.

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings — artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers — to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption. The Chink snickered his hell-crazed snicker when he imagined the doubt and confusion that would follow society's eventual discovery of the Clock People. He snickered even though he suspected that the encounter would destroy the Clock People, and even though he scorned the sickening democratic more-is-better fallacy inherent in the notion that the part must be sacrificed for the whole.

“I loved those loony redskins,” the Chink said to Sissy. “But I couldn't be a party to their utopian dreaming. After a while it occurred to me that the Clock People waiting for the Eternity of Joy was virtually identical to the Christians waiting for the Second Coming. Or the Communists waiting for the worldwide revolution. Or the Debbies waiting for the flying saucers. All the same. Just more suckers betting their share of the present on the future, banking every misery on a happy ending to history. Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second — happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothing to wait for. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

The shaggy old fart slid his arms around Sissy and. . no, wait, she wasn't telling Dr. Robbins that part. Yet.

Sometime in the course of things, the Chink had made it clear to Sissy that, while he might not buy the Clock People's dreaming, he did respect the quality of their dream. The vision of an era, however lasting, during which all ritual would be personal and idiosyncratic, made the Chink's heart want to stand up and dance. Furthermore, while a return engagement by Jesus appears as impossible as worldwide Marxist revolution is improbable, a general disruption of the planet by natural forces is inevitable. The Clock People had narrowed the apocalyptic credibility gap.

“In the end, though,” observed the Chink, “for all their insight, the Clock People were a collection of human animals banded together to prepare for better days. In short, just more victims of the disease of time.”

Ah, time! Back to time. Dr. Robbins struggled to sit upright. The wine had said its good-bys. He was a trifle drunk. His mustache could not deny it. Every so often, Dr. Goldman would appear at the French doors. This didn't bother Dr. Robbins. Dr. Goldman would never have the courage to interrupt, not so long as Sissy continued her exercises. Great digits wallowed in the garden air.

(Dr. Goldman's face, as red and swollen as a smallpox vaccination, pressed to the pane. He saw the thumbs promenade stiffly in their suits of blushes. Then they began to quiver. They made wild and ultrarapid swoops, like water spiders on the surface of a pond. As he watched, a kind of radiant ectoplasm formed all around them. Sissy was smiling absently. Dr. Robbins lay, as if in adoration, at her feet. Dr. Goldman whirled abruptly and strode away.)

In truth, Dr. Robbins was a bit more anxious than he might have appeared. His patient's testimony had gradually become secondary to her hitch practice, her running of the scales. What had begun as casual muscle flex had escalated, as she lost self-consciousness, into a thorough inventory of the extravagant moves and motions stored in her gross appendages. Now she had fallen silent, absorbed in the piloting of her blimps. Dr. Robbins was agog at the display, but he wished, like old-fashioned novelists, to stay to the point, to keep the story flowing. You see, Dr. Robbins had a theory that was apropos the clockworks and the Chink. It had long been Dr. Robbin's belief that the central problem facing the human race was time.

As for defining time, or speculating upon its nature, forget it. Neither tipsy nor sober was he about to dance with the angels on the head of that pin. Since embarking upon a career in behavioral science, however, Dr. Robbins had searched to find at least one fundamental truth about the psyche, and the closest he had come to a fundamental was the discovery that most psychological — and, therefore, social, political and spiritual — problems can be linked to pressures exerted by time. Or, more precisely, civilized man's idea of time.

Of course, he wasn't absolutely sure that there were any problems. It was entirely possible that everything in the universe was perfect; that all that happened, from global warfare to a single case of athlete's foot, happened because it ought to happen; and while from our perspective it would seem that something horrendous had gone wrong in the development of the human species, vis-à-vis its happy potentialities on the blue green sphere, that that was an illusion attributable to myopia, and that, in fact, development was proceeding beautifully, running right as a Tokyo train, and needing only a more cosmic overview in order for its grand perfection to obscure its momentary fits and faults.

That was a possibility, all right, one that Dr. Robbins had by no means ruled out. On the other hand, if such an approach was, like religion, merely a camouflage system created to modify experience in order to make life more tolerable — another exercise in escapism festooned with mystic crêpe — then one had no choice but to conclude that mankind was a royal fuck-up. Despite our awesome potential; despite the presence among us of the most extraordinary enlightened individuals, operating with intelligence, gentleness and style; despite a plethora of achievements that no other living creatures have come within a billion light-years of equaling, we were on the verge of destroying ourselves, internally and externally, and of taking the entire planet with us, crumpled in our tight little fists, as we shoot down the shit-chute to oblivion.

Now, if that be the case, one is compelled to ask what went wrong; how and when did it go wrong. The answer to that question of questions breathes on so many buds that the wimpy brain gets hay fever, its eyes puff shut, it sneezes away whole bouquets of hidden and half-guessed truths, and it probably doesn't want to know anyway. From his psychiatrist's stance, however, a stance only slightly less allergic than any other, Dr. Robbins was able to venture this far:

Most of the harm inflicted by man upon his environment, his fellows and himself is due to greed.

Most of the greed (whether it be for power, property, attention or affection) is due to insecurity.

Most of the insecurity is due to fear.

And most of the fear is, at bottom, a fear of death.

Given time, all things are possible. But time may have a stop.

Why do people fear death so? Because they realize, unconsciously at least, that their lives are mere parodies of what living should be. They ache to quit playing at living and to really live, but, alas, it takes time and trouble to piece the loose ends of their lives together and they are dogged by the notion that time is running out.

Was that it, or was the pebble in the dancing slipper the phobia that time does not have a stop? If we could live our average 70.4 years and know for certain that that was that, we could readily manage. We might complain that it was far too short, but what there was of life we could live freely, doing exactly what we pleased insofar as our conscience and capabilities allowed, accepting that when it was over it was over: easy come, easy go. Ah, but we aren't allowed the luxury of finality. We dilute and hobble our most genuinely felt impulses with the idea, whether fervently held or naggingly suspected, that after death there is something else, and that that something may be endless, and that the correctness of our behavior in “this” life may determine how we fare in the “next” one (and for those poor souls who believe in reincarnation, the ones after that).

Thus, whether it is in danger of stopping and catching us with our pants down, or whether it runs on forever and demands that we busy ourselves preparing for the next station on the long ride, either way, time prevents us from living authentically.

Perhaps the fault is that we are Dr. Frankensteins who have created time as a monster with three heads: past, present and future. In which case, back to the drawing board! The present is okay, the present is sharp and clean; leave it where it is, on top of and directing the body. But relegate the past to some other anatomical function. The past, for example, would make a perfect asshole. As for the future, let's see, the future could be time's. .

Thumbs.

Like papier-mâché spaceships in an old Buck Rogers movie, they wooshed in a wobbly fashion toward imaginary worlds. She fueled them with rocket powder mined in her heart. She juggled them without ever letting go, tossing and catching them simultaneously, so that the shower of thumbs — that aerial ballet of warm pineapples — struck over and over again the same rods in the observer's eye. The hammered eye blinked beneath this banging of bubbles. Thumbs tumbled end over end in the field of vision. Thumbs wheeled and thumbs floated. Thumbs squirmed like the tickled bellies of babies. Thumbs spanked the bottom of the sky.

It was all Dr. Robbins could do not to surrender to the spectacle, to let thumbs carry him to wherever thumbs desired he go. After all, this was not a sight many had seen but he was a stubborn man with time on his hands. So, at last, he exclaimed, loudly enough to pierce his patient's reverie, “Sissy, don't keep me in suspense! What were the Chink's thoughts about time? And how did he apply them to building his own clockworks?”

“Oh,” said Sissy, a trifle startled. “Oh yes.” She let her thumbs fall into her lap and bounce gently there. “Oh yes. Well, you see, you must understand that the Chink doesn't do a whole lot of talking. He says what he has to say very quickly and seldom repeats or explains himself. He's more apt to be laughing and scratching than expounding ideas. But if I humored him — and let him do what he wanted with me” (Sissy lowered her lashes)—"he would share a few of his thoughts. Now, I'm not sure what this has to do with time itself, but the Chink sees life as a dynamic network of interchanges and exchanges, spreading in all directions at once. And it's all held together by the tension between opposites. He says there is order in Nature, but there is also disorder. And it is the balance of tensions between the order and the disorder, the natural laws and the natural randomness, that keeps it from completely collapsing. It's a beautiful paradox, as he describes it. Personally, I don't know. When I mentioned the concept to Julian, he just scoffed. Julian says that everything in Nature is ordered and there is no randomness. The more we learn about the way Nature works, the more laws we discover. Julian says there isn't any paradox, that the only reason certain aspects of Nature seem disorderly to us is because we haven't understood them yet. Julian says. .”

“Julian doesn't know his scrotum from Kentucky fried chicken,” grumbled Dr. Robbins. “I recognize that paradox the Chink was speaking of; it's inside us as well as all around us. I went into psychiatry with the desire to help set people free. But I soon learned that man is stuck with a lot of conflicting behavioral and emotional traits that have a genetic basis. We have built-in contradictions; they're standard equipment on all models. No matter how much people long to be free — even to the point of valuing freedom over happiness — an aversion to liberty is right there in their DNA. For eons of evolutionary time, our DNA has been whispering into the ears of our cells that we are, each one of us, the most precious things in the universe and that any action that entails the slightest risk to us may have consequences of universal importance. 'Be careful, get comfortable, don't make any waves,' whispers the DNA. Conversely, the yearning for freedom, the risky belief that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, is also in our DNA. But it's of much more recent evolutionary origin, according to me. It has arisen during the past couple of million years, during the rapid increase in brain size and intellectual capacity associated with our becoming human. But the desire for security, the will to survive, is of much greater antiquity. For the present, the conflicting yearnings in the DNA generate a basic paradox that in turn generates the character — nothing if not contradictory — of man. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? But, since the genetic bent for freedom is comparatively recent, it may represent an evolutionary trend. We may yet outgrow our overriding obsession to survive. That's why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and always cut against the grain. By pushing it, goosing it along whenever possible, we may speed up the process, the process by which the need for playfulness and liberty becomes stronger than the need for comfort and security. Then that paradox that the, er, Chink sees holding the show together may lose its equilibrium. What then, Mr. Chink, what then?” Dr. Robbins scratched his mustache with the stem of his Bulova, thereby simultaneously satisfying itch and winding watch. With time the central problem facing mankind, such efficiency had to be admired.

Sissy, soothing her thumbs, smiled. She liked that baby-faced junior shrink. In some ways, he even reminded her a little of the Chink. In other ways — dress and demeanor — he reminded her of Julian. She supposed that he would be pleased by the former comparison, vexed by the latter. So she said:

“That's fascinating. Not the kind of talk I expected to run into at the Goldman Clinic, I'll tell you. You think a bit like the Chink yourself.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, you do. Although I wouldn't dare to presume to speak for the Chink, it sounds to me like you're talking about the same paradox. Or, at least, a similar one. Well, to try to get back to your question. . The Chink sees in the natural world a paradoxical balance of supreme order and supreme disorder. But man has a pronounced bias for order. He not only refuses to respect or even accept the disorder in Nature, in life; he shuns it, rages against it, attacks it with orderly programs. And in so doing, he perpetuates instability.”

“Hold on a minute,” called Dr. Robbins. He propped his Oxford cloth-shirted back against the stone bench upon which Sissy was sitting. “Let me make sure I'm with you. Wine made me fuzzy. You say — the Chink says — the bias for order leads to instability?”

“Right,” said Sissy. “For several reasons. First, worshiping order and hating disorder automatically shoves great portions of Nature and life into a hateful category. Did you know that the center of the Earth is red-hot liquid covered with a hard crust, and that that crust is not a single unified layer but a whole jumbled series of shifting plates? These plates are about sixty miles thick and very plastic. They appear and disappear. They move around and buckle and bump into each other like epileptic dominoes. New mountains and new islands — once in a long while, new continents — are being created and old ones destroyed. New climates are being formed and old ones altered. The whole thing is in flux. Existing arrangements are temporary and constantly in threat of disruption. This whole big city of New York could be sucked into the Earth or quick-frozen or flattened or inundated — at any second. The Chink says the man who feels smug in an orderly world has never looked down a volcano.”

Dr. Robbins appeared a tad disappointed. Maybe it was the sun heating the wine in his eyes. “Yeah, I had a geology course in college,” he mumbled. “Geophysical turmoil is a reality, all right, but hardly a defense of disorder. I mean, cancer — cellular turmoil — is a reality, too, but that doesn't make it lovable or even acceptable.”

“True,” agreed Sissy. Her big digits had quieted down. They lolled upon her thighs like exhausted sea cows run ragged by some cowgirls of the deeps. “True. That wasn't the Chink's point. He was saying simply that the vagrancies and violence of nature must be brought back into the foreground of social and political consciousness, that they have got to be embraced in any meaningful psychic renewal.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

“But as for stability. . In general, primitive man enjoyed great stability. It blew my mind to hear the Chink say that, but now I can see that it was true. Primitive culture was diverse, flexible and completely integrated with Nature at the level of the particular environment. Primitive man took from the land only what he needed, thus avoiding the hassles that result in modern economics from imbalances of scarcity and surplus. Hunting and gathering tribes worked only a few hours a week. To work more than that would have put a strain on the environment, with which they related symbiotically. It was only among mobile cultures — after the unfortunate domestication of animals — that surplus, a result of overachievement, led to potlatches and competitive feasts — orgies of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste — which attached to simple, healthy, effective economies the destructive elements of power and prestige. When that happened, stability was shattered. Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of primitive stability. Another thing about primitives; they deified forces of disorder as well as of order. In fact, the gods of wind and lava and lightning were often honored above the deities of more placid things — and not always out of fear.”

Still not satisfied, Dr. Robbins dragged his nails through the label on the empty wine bottle. “Interesting,” he said. “Pretty interesting. But here you've got the Chink praising disorder on the one hand and stability on the other. .”

“Exactly,” answered Sissy. “Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth. Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. As a psychiatrist, wouldn't you say that a stable individual accepts the inevitability of his death? Likewise, a stable culture, government or institution has built into it its own demise. It is open to change, open even to being overthrown. It is open, period. Gracefully open. That's stability. That's alive.”

“Makes sense, makes good sense,” agreed Dr. Robbins, upon whose girl-next-door face a wine-stained mustache made little sense at all. Dr. Robbins's mustache was the ruins of a lost city of hair discovered by archeologists in the Bald Mountains, or Dr. Robbins's mustache was a fur coat worn by an eccentric widow to a picnic in Phoenix, Arizona, on the Fourth of July, or Dr. Robbins's mustache was an obscene phone call to a deaf nun. “Yeah,” agreed Dr. Robbins, tugging at his mustache as if even he didn't believe it. “I can fit that into my jigsaw puzzle. But time, Sissy; where do time and clockworks connect to this?”

“The Chink didn't exactly say how they connected, but I think I've got it figured out.” Sissy pulled a scrap of paper from a jumpsuit pocket. “A physicist named Edgar Lipworth wrote this,” she explained. “He writes, 'The time of physics is defined and measured by a pendulum whether it is the pendulum of a grandfather's clock, the pendulum of the Earth's rotation around the sun, or the pendulum of the precessing electron in the nuclear magnetic field of the hydrogen maser. Time, therefore, is defined by periodic motion — that is, by motion related to a point moving uniformly around a circle.' Got that?”

“Sure,” said Dr. Robbins. “And there's the pendulum of the heart beating, the pendulum of the lungs breathing, the pendulum of music finding its beat. .”

“Those too. Right. Okay, then, civilized man is infatuated with the laws he finds in Nature, clings almost frantically to the order he sees in the universe. So he has based the symbologies, the psychological models with which he hopes to understand his life, upon his observations of natural law and order. Pendulum time is orderly time, the time of a lawfully uniform universe, the time of cyclic synthesis. That's okay as far as it goes. But pendulum time is not the whole time. Pendulum time doesn't relate to trillions of the moves and acts of existence. Life is both cyclic and arbitrary, but pendulum time relates only to the part that's cyclic.”

“Although the manner in which we relate to pendulum time is often arbitrary, too,” threw in Dr. Robbins. He thought of the arbitrary dial of a clock and how certain arbitrary numbers on that dial, such as nine and five and noon and midnight have been left dog-eared by undue emphasis.

“Yes, I reckon so,” said Sissy. “But the point is, although a lot of our experience occurs outside of, or relates only artificially and tenuously to, pendulum time, we still envision time only in pendulum terms, in terms of continuous compulsory rotation. Even the Clock People's hourglass; it wasn't designed for perfect accuracy or anything, but it was modeled upon an orderly flow. It clung to the frayed edges of a time its builders wanted to transcend. The catfish pool came closer to measuring the 'other' time of life, but its limitations. .”

“Sissy.”

“Yes.”

Dr. Robbins had spotted Dr. Goldman at the French doors again. “What is the Chink's clockworks like?” he asked.

“Ha ha,” laughed Sissy. “Criminey. You wouldn't believe it. It's just a bunch of junk. Garbage can lids and old saucepans and lard tins and car fenders, all wired together way down in the middle of the Siwash cave. Every now and then, this contraption moves — a bat will fly into it, a rock will fall on it, an updraft will catch it, a wire will rust through, or it'll just move for no apparently logical reason — and one part of it will hit against another part. And it'll go bonk or poing and that bonk or that poing will echo throughout the caverns. It might go bonk or poing five times in a row. Then a pause; then one more time. After that, it might be silent for a day or two, maybe a month. Then the clock'll strike again, say twice. Following that there could be silence for an entire year — or just a minute or so. Then, POING! so loud you nearly jump out of your skin. And that's the way it goes. Striking freely, crazily, at odd intervals.”

Sissy closed her eyes, as if listening for the distant bonk or poing, and Dr. Robbins, ignoring Dr. Goldman's gestures from the French doors, seemed to be listening, too.

They listened. They heard.

They were assured then, together, the psychiatric intern and his patient, that there was a rhythm, a strange unnoted rhythm, that might or might not be beating out their lives for them. For each of us.

Because to measure time by the clockworks is to know that you are moving toward some end. . but at a pace far different from the one you might think!

66.

DR. ROBBINS HAD HAD ALL THE FOOD for thought he could stomach at one sitting. He wished to be home alone with another bottle of wine. He dismissed his patient politely. Then, in order to avoid Dr. Goldman, left the clinic by scrambling over the garden wall, tearing, in the process, a knee out of his thirty-dollar slacks.

Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, who never had talked so extensively before in her life, was weary and glad to be excused. Men of ideas, men such as Julian, the Chink and now Dr. Robbins, intrigued her. But she welcomed the chance to go to her room and dream of cowgirls, while, with a cube of unsalted kosher butter from the clinic dining room, she greased the creases in her thumbs.

Julian Gitche failed to visit or phone his wife upon that day in May. Julian had just contracted to paint a series of watercolors for a West German pharmaceutical house, the firm that once manufactured thalidomide. He was entertaining a representative of the firm and he feared that any whisper of his spouse's physical peculiarities might evoke for the former thalidomide salesman embarrassing memories.

The Chink hoofed into Mottburg that morning to purchase yams and a can of Chun King water chestnuts. His devotion to yams was unflagging, but he increasingly looked to the water chestnut as an example of endurance, of will and of fidelity to the particular. The water chestnut, after all, is the only vegetable whose texture doesn't change after freezing, changeth not after being cooked.

The Countess spent the day in his laboratory, laboring feverishly to develop an antipheromone. A pheromone is an air-borne hormone given off by the female animal, bird or insect to attract a male of her species. The human pheromone had only recently been isolated. The Countess hoped to produce and market a pill that, ingested periodically, would counteract human pheromone activity, eliminating all prurient odors from that part of the female anatomy the writer Richard Condon has so beautifully described as “the vertical smile.” (To Richard Condon, a dozen purple asters and a pound of goat cheese from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

Bonanza Jellybean rode Lucas out to Siwash Lake to see if the whoopers were still there. They were! She celebrated by sticking a feather in her hat, though she'd be damned if she'd call it macaroni.

The author (who is also one of the above — which one doesn't matter) would like to take this opportunity, here at the conclusion of Sissy's remarkable account of Clock People and clockworks, to advance an earthquake theory of his own. As the author sees it, the Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

67.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Dr. Robbins sent for Sissy early, before Dr. Goldman had a chance to get at her. Again he escorted her into the little walled garden, although this time without a bottle of wine. As a matter of fact, Dr. Robbins's blue eyes were being squashed by about a hundred pounds of hangover.

“Okay,” he said softly, wishing not to agitate the punitive and vindictive deities of fermentation, “tell me how you met the Chink.”

“I met him at the can-dee sto-ore,” sang Sissy. “No, seriously. I'm thankful to have an opportunity to talk to someone safe — trustworthy, you know — about the Chink, but aren't you supposed to be asking me about. . about the reasons I'm in this institution?”

“I haven't the slightest interest in your personal problems,” snapped Dr. Robbins, inwardly cursing the chemical Calvinism that causes alcohol to make us suffer for the good times it gives us.

“Oh? Well, my husband is spending quite a sum of money to have my personal problems aired at this clinic.”

“Your husband is a fool. As for you, if you let yourself be subjected to the indignities of psychoanalysis, you're a fool as well. And Goldman is certainly a fool for sending you to me. I, however, am no fool. You've told me some of the most fascinating stories I've heard in a long while. I'm sure as hell not going to waste these sunny hours among the flowers listening to your dreary personal problems when I could be hearing more about your adventures with the Chink. Now. Tell me how you met him. And don't hesitate to, uh, to perform the, er, the antics you do with your thumbs. If you'd like.”

“But won't that attract attention?” Without the wine to encourage her, Sissy was hesitant to repeat the digital abandon of the day before.

“Sometimes,” said Dr. Robbins, glancing with bloodshot peepers at the French doors, “sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.” He flopped in the grass.

“Doctor,” said Sissy with a smile, “forgive me but I get the impression that you're a bit of a mental case yourself.”

“It takes one to know one,” replied Robbins. “That's probably why all the penguins ended up at the South Pole.”

68.

PART BADLANDS BUTTE, part grasslands hill, part high chaparral, Siwash Ridge is a geological mutant, a schizophrenic formation embodying in one relatively small mountain several of the most prominent features of the American West. A willy twisting and unpredictable trail zigs and zags up its eastern side, through thickets of scrub oak and juniper, upward over grassy bumps, finally clinging by its shoelaces to limestone walls. The top of Siwash, though disposed in a few places to jut and peak, is very nearly flat: a calcium carbonate aircraft carrier, a ship that water built from land.

Toward the center of the butte top is a horse-deep, circular depression that in fair weather serves the Chink as a sunken living room. From the northern wall of the depression gapes the mouth of a cave.

A person of Sissy's height has to crawl into the cave on her hands and knees, and almost nowhere in the entrance chamber — covered with Japanese straw matting — is there room for a leggy model to stand up straight. The entrance chamber, however, is merely the top level of three levels of caverns. The bottom level, deep inside the butte, consists of two freight car-sized rooms, heated by thermal updrafts and remarkably dry. On the middle level, there are five or six enormous chambers, connected by narrow passageways. In one of these chambers is the clockworks.

From the walls of the middle-level room, fresh pure water drips constantly. It is as if the walls are weeping. It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping.

Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.

It weeps

for the black people who think like white people.

It weeps

for the Indians who think like settlers.

It weeps

for the children who think like adults.

It weeps

for the free who think like prisoners.

Most of all, it weeps

for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

69.

HER THUMBS HAD STOPPED HIM. Her thumbs were good at that. If the man who cried “Stop the world, I want to get off!” had only had Sissy's thumbs. .

She had stopped him cold on the side of Siwash Ridge. So, what next? He wore the wary look of a wild animal. He wouldn't stay stopped long. It was her move. What could she say? His gaze went through her like beavers through a paper palm tree. His was the look of the strong who will not tolerate weaklings. She must speak and she must speak with prehensility, for not even her thumbs would stop him a second time. It was imperative that she say the right thing. He was turning as if to scamper off again.

“Well,” said Sissy, with what passed for nonchalance. “Aren't you going to shake your whanger at me?”

It broke him up. He slapped his thighs and giggled hysterically. Ha has, ho hos and hee hees squirted out of his nose and through the gaps in his teeth. When the laughter finally died a nervous chipmunk death, he spoke. “Follow me,” he said, in a voice unaccustomed to invitation. “I'll fix you supper.”

Follow him she did, although he set a powerful pace up the tricky twilit trail.

“I'm a friend of Bonanza Jellybean's,” she said between puffs.

“I know who you are,” he said without looking back.

“Oh? Well, there's been some trouble on the ranch. I came up here to get out of the way. It's so dark now I doubt if I could find my way back down. If you could help. .”

“Save your breath for the climb,” he said. His voice wore no pants.

From the top of the butte there could still be seen light in the west. The haunted shapes of the badlands were silhouetted navy blue against a pumpkin-colored horizon. To the east, across shadowed hills, the prairie lay on its back in the dark, hidden, yet making felt its awesome flatness, a flatness that flavors so much of America, beginning with her emotions and her taste; a flatness that makes a perfect surface for those wheels of Detroit whose rotations are for millions the only escape from the chronically flat. Sissy turned from east to west and back again. The faintly lit badlands were so tortured and melodramatic they seemed, like the prose in a Dostoyevsky novel, almost a corny joke. The blacked-out prairie, on the other hand, had a style identical to that of rural weekly newspapers throughout the middle of the nation: blandness in such high concentration as to become finally poisonous. An owl flew over the ridge from Crime and Punishment to the Mottburg Gazette, scanning the pages for a literate rodent, asking the librarian for a whooo-done-it.

Directly below them, lights twinkled at the Rubber Rose. The ranch was quiet. Sissy could imagine showers running full blast in the bunkhouse as glossy pubes, folded labia and hooded clitorises were lathered and scrubbed clean of the perfume that had been allowed to accumulate to plague the Countess. Sissy imagined she heard popping washcloths, girlish laughter.

When she had caught her breath, Sissy was led to the depression and down a ladder of sticks. The Chink built a fire, an open fire, the depression itself being adequate protection from winds. He roasted yams. He heated meadowlark stew. The stew contained Chun King water chestnuts. Their texture did not change in the cooking. A lesson.

After supper, eaten in silence upon a rough wooden bench, the Chink went into the cave and returned with a tiny peppermint-striped plastic transistor radio. He switched it on. Their auditory nerves were immediately jangled by “The Happy Hour Polka.” Still clutching the radio in one hand, the Chink hopped into the wheel of firelight and began to dance.

Sissy in her travels had never seen anything quite like it. The old geezer heeled and toed, skipped and hopped. He flung his bones; he flung his beard. “Yip! Yip!” he yodeled. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Arms swimming, feet firecrackering, he danced through two more polka records and might have had a fourth except that the music was suspended for a news report. The international situation was desperate, as usual.

“Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,” confessed the Chink, “but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.” To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

When the music commenced again with “The Lawrence Welk is a Hero of the Republic Polka,” the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. “But I don't know how to polka,” she protested.

“Neither do I,” said the Chink. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” In a second they were traipsing over the limestone, arm in arm. Their shadows reeled against the curves of the depression. Night birds flew past with trembling feathers. A bat fluttered out of the cave, took one radar reading and headed for Kenny's Castaways.

When they had danced their fill, the Chink escorted Sissy to the opposite, and darkest, side of the depression and sat her down upon a pile of soft stuff: dried wheatgrass, faded Indian blankets and old down pillows without cases. The stuff reeked. It was that unmistakable sex blend of mushrooms, chlorine and tide pool. And cutting through that odor, the equally unmistakable smell of Bonanza Jellybean: clove, butterscotch Life Savers and a lotion made from cactus juices, which she rubbed daily upon the spot where she had been shot, so she said, by a silver bullet.

“So this is how Jelly spends her visits to the Chink,” thought Sissy. She started to wonder whether the other cowgirls, manless as they were, suspected — but halfway through that wonder she interrupted it to wonder if the Chink thought he was going to help himself to her. She had always been passive when it came to being pawed, pinched and the like, but no man had ever taken her against her will. In fact, no man had ever taken her but Julian.

Just then the Chink did an astonishing thing. Without preamble, without hesitation, the white-maned Jap reached out and grasped her thumbs! He squeezed them, caressed them, covered them with wet kisses. All the while, he cooed to them, telling them how beautiful and exceptional and incomparable they were. Not even Julian had ever done that, you bet. Even Jack Kerouac hadn't dared touch her thumbs, although he had been fascinated by them and had written to them a poem on a cornhusk, an ode that might have been widely published had not it been eaten by a hungry hobo as Kerouac and the boys boxcared into Denver to search for Neal Cassady's daddy, the most missing man in the history of American letters, leaving it up to this author to tell the story of those awesome appendages.

Even Bonanza Jellybean hadn't loved Sissy's thumbs.

As we might imagine, Sissy was bowled over. She was frightened, stunned, elated, moved almost to tears. Apparently sincere, the Chink extended his adoration of the digits far into the night. When at last he got around to adoring the rest of her, her heart, like her thumbs, was aglow.

“If this be adultery, make the most of it,” she cried. As he plunged into her, she arched her spread bottom against the blankets and reared up to meet him halfway.

70.

"SO, YOU HAD SEXUAL INTERCOURSE with the old man?” asked Dr. Robbins.

“Repeatedly,” blushed Sissy.

“And how was it? I mean, how do you feel about it now?”

“Er, I'm not really sure. You see, sex with Julian is like hitching a ride around the block on a fire engine. With the Chink, it was like hitching from Chicago to Salt Lake City in a big old nineteen fifty-nine Buick Roadmaster.” She paused to ascertain if her similes had been understood. Dr. Robbins was pulling and releasing his mustache, pulling and releasing, as if his mustache were a window shade in a cheap hotel. The window shade wouldn't hang the way Dr. Robbins wanted it to.

Sissy decided to elucidate.

“With Julian, it's fast and furious. It's always been sort of desperate. There's such need. We cling to each other, like we were holding on with our genitals to keep from falling into emptiness, a kind of lonely void. I have a feeling that it's like that with a lot of lovers. But with the Chink, it was completely relaxed and smooth and slow and, well, nasty. He giggled and grinned and scratched all the time, and could go for ages without orgasm. A real Roadmaster. Once, he ate yam pudding while he was balling me. Fed it to me, too — with his fingers. He licked it off my nipples; I licked it off his balls. I felt like we were a couple of baboons or something. I liked it. I guess I miss it. But no more than I miss it with Jellybean.”

“You mean. .?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Umm. Well, let's stick to the Chink. During those three days of. . of, er, lovemaking. .”

“It was lovemaking, Doctor. Even though it was nasty. Maybe especially because it was nasty. Love is smutty business, you know.”

Dr. Robbins pulled hard on the mustache window shade. It came down with such force it nearly tore loose from its roller. “The old geezer really made you feel something, didn't he?”

“How could I help feeling something? He adored my thumbs.”

Dr. Robbins looked hard at Sissy's preaxial digits, then at his own. Magnitude was the only appreciable difference. In both sets of thumbs, Sissy's and his own, Dr. Robbins could see shafts, flat on the volar surface, smooth and rounded on the dorsal surface, that is, semicylindrical in shape. He knew that these bones were bound together with ligaments and cartilages. He remembered that the thumb joint is officially called the carpometacarpal joint, although it is informally referred to as the “saddle joint.” Saddle joint. That's nice. Cowgirls could relate to that.

He knew that when Sissy bent a phalanx, revolving took place around an axis passing transversely, determining the movement in a sagittal plane, just as it did when he bent a phalanx. It was just more of a production number with Sissy, that was all.

With effort he could harken back to med school and recall the musculature of the thumb, thinking that a flexor pollicis brevis is a flexor pollicis brevis, regardless of its size.

But then Dr. Robbins looked at his patient's thumbs again — and suddenly the difference seemed more extensive than scale. He saw a pair of hammerhead sharks, devouring with a sharkish hunger the space around them. He blinked, and in the blinking the sharks were replaced by a couple of pears, full and luscious, swaying there in their outsized sweetness as if Cézanne had painted them on a canvas of air. Again he blinked, and. .

Sissy noticed his blinking; perceived the unsatisfactory comparison. “Maybe, Doctor,” she said, “my thumbs have known poetry and yours have not.” She paused. “Or maybe it's simply this: you have thumbs; I am thumbs.”

The shade shot to the top of the window, wrapping itself noisily around its roller.

“During those three days of lovemaking,” resumed Dr. Robbins, the stubborn bastard, “the hermit obviously talked to you. He told you about his background and something of his philosophy. You've graciously shared his words with me. .”

“I needed to talk about him to somebody. I need to talk about Jellybean, too.”

“Right. Right. We'll get to her. But I'm curious. Did he say anything else? Did he say anything about uh, well, about life, anything further about, anything that I might. .”

Sissy smiled. A skinny bumblebee with Con Edison soot on its fur cruised her psychiatrist's mustache (perhaps a few of the hairs were still sticky with wine), but Robbins paid it no mind. Dr. Goldman was standing in the French doors (perhaps gathering courage to finally interrupt this interview), but Robbins ignored him, too. Sissy's smile broadened. “The Chink said that some people run after sages the way others run after gold. He said we've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door. He said if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his NO TRESPASSING signs.

“Is that why you're so interested in the Chink, Doctor? Do you think he knows something that the rest of the world doesn't? Something that can contribute to our salvation?”

Turning loose the shade, letting it hang any way it damn well pleased, Dr. Robbins retorted, “No, no, a thousand times no! In the first place, I distrust completely any man who holds himself up as an answer to those who can't find the inner resources to overcome their own sense of time-entrapment and loneliness. In the second place, I'm not the least concerned with salvation because I'm not convinced there's anything to be saved from. My position is this: I'm a psychiatrist who has been betrayed by the brain. That's akin to an astronomer betrayed by starlight. Or a cook betrayed by garlic. Nevertheless, I have developed an outlook on life that amounts to both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. It isn't perfected yet, but it gets me by — and to those very rare patients who possess the guts and imagination to pick up on it, it might set a helpful example. Any psychiatrist or psychologist whose own life isn't happy and whole enough to be exemplary isn't worth the hide it takes to upholster his couch. He ought to be horsewhipped and sued for malpractice. But, to return to the point, as soon as you began to speak of the Chink, I sensed a rapport, an overview similar — perhaps — to my own. Maybe he has notions about the ebb and flow of the cosmic custard that are improvements upon mine. Maybe not. If not, c'est la frigging vie. If so, if might be beneficial to both of us, you and me, to rap about them. It sure as hell beats talking about 'inverted compensation.'”

“In that case,” said Sissy, obviously pleased, “I'd be pleased. To be honest, I don't know whether the Chink has anything of value to offer or not. He didn't claim to, but that could have been a coverup. I'll tell you as much as I can remember of our conversations, such as they were, and you can judge for yourself. Fair enough?”

“Let 'er rip,” said Dr. Robbins, as if speaking of the window shade that hung in tatters from his upper lip.

71.

PRAIRIE. Isn't that a pretty word? Rolls off the tongue like a fat little moon. Prairie must be one of the prettiest words in the English language. No matter that it's French. It's derived from the Latin word for “meadow” plus a feminine suffix. A prairie, then, is a female meadow. It is larger and wilder than a masculine meadow (which the dictionary defines as “pasture” or “hayfield"), more coarse, more oceanic and enduring, supporting a greater variety of life.

If the prairie may be compared topographically to a rug, then the Dakota hills are prairie with bowling balls under the rug. The flora and fauna of the Dakota hills are much the same as those of the prairie that adjoins them. From a cliff high above, the Chink was pointing out to Sissy some of the organisms that choose to live in those hills. He pointed out different kinds of grasses: wheatgrass and little bluestem, June grass and dropseed, needlegrass and side-oats grama. He pointed out flowers: asters and goldenrod, snakeroot and cone flowers, prairie roses and purple clover. He said clover was delicious; he ate it often for breakfast, grazing in it like a goat. He pointed out prairie dog villages and badger rathskellers. He pointed out where they could find a coyote or a golden eagle if they needed one. He pointed out where his meadowlark traps were set, and the rocks where the best frying-size rattlesnakes hung out. The Chink pointed out the habitats of rabbits and burrowing owls, weasels and grouse. Although the millions of little eyeballs certainly could not be seen from Siwash Ridge, the hills were micey and the Chink told Sissy of mice, too: deer mice, meadow mice, harvest mice, pocket mice and kangaroo rats. The Chink must have spoken, intimately, of every creature that lived in the Dakota hills (not to mention those that, like the whooping cranes, were just passing through) except one. Cowgirls.

“What's the problem with you and the cowgirls?” asked Sissy eventually. They were perched directly above the Rubber Rose. It looked like a toy ranch from there, a miniature that might have been carved by Norman the pastry chef, had he but toes enough and time. “Why aren't you more friendly to them?” The Chink only shrugged. His gaze was focused on Siwash Lake, where several more whooper flights had joined the early arrivals.

“You obviously get along with Jellybean, that horny little sneak. And poor Debbie thinks you're some kind of god. But most of the girls agree with Delores. Delores says you're a god, all right. She says the way you sit up here so high and mighty is just like our big daddy macho God: paranoid, ill-tempered and totally aloof.”

The shaggy Jap snickered. “Delores is right about God,” he said. “He's best known by his absence. Judaeo-Christian culture owes its success to the fact that Jehovah never shows his face. What better way to control the masses than through fear of an omnipotent force whose authority can never be challenged because it is never direct?”

“But you aren't like that.”

“Of course I'm not like that. I'm a man, not a god. And if I were a god, I wouldn't be Jehovah. The only similarity between Jehovah and me is that we're bachelors. Jehovah almost alone of the ancient gods never married. Never even went out on a date. No wonder he was such a neurotic, authoritative prick.”

“But look at you,” Sissy insisted. “People come from all over to seek your help and you won't let them within forty yards.”

“What makes you think I have anything helpful to give them?”

Sissy wheeled on him, turning her slender back to the hills and prairie. “You've told me lots of wonderful things. Don't be coy! You may not be an oracle — I don't know — but you're wise enough to help these people who seek you out, if you chose to.”

“Well, I don't choose to.”

“Why not?” By then Sissy was so full of Chink semen she squished when she walked. She felt she had a right to probe his personality.

The old hermit sighed, though the grin never left his lips. “Look,” he said, “these young people who seek me out, they're wrong about me. They're looking at me through filters that distort what I am. They hear that I live in a cave on a butte, so they jump to the conclusion that I lead a simple life. Well, I don't and I won't and I wouldn't. Simplicity is for simpletons!” The Chink underscored that remark by tossing a fair-sized chunk of limestone over the cliff. Look out deer mice! meadow mice! harvest mice! pocket mice! kangaroo rats! Look out below!

“Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol. It's an antilife attitude. These 'simple' people who sit around in drab clothes in bleak rooms sipping peppermint tea by candlelight are mocking life. They are unwittingly on the side of death. Death is simple but life is rich. I embrace that richness, the more complicated the better. I revel in disorder and. .”

“But your cave isn't disorderly,” protested Sissy. “It's neat and clean.”

“I'm not a slob, if that's what you mean. Slobs don't love disorder. They're ineffectual people who are disorderly because they can't help themselves. It's not the same. I set my cave in order knowing that life's disorder will only mess it up again. That's beautiful, that's right, that's part of the paradox. The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts. .”

“The beauty of simplicity, you say? Then you do find value in simplicity. You've contradicted yourself.” Julian had taught Sissy to sniff out contradictions.

“Of course I've contradicted myself. I always do. Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves. And in their consistency, they contradict life.”

Hmmm. Sissy wasn't getting anywhere at all. Maybe she ought to back up and come in from a different angle. Thumbs were of no help here. “How else do the pilgrims misjudge you?” It was the best question she could muster at the moment.

“Well, because I've lived in wilderness most of my adult life, they automatically conclude that I am gaga over Nature. Now 'Nature' is a mighty huge word, one of those sponge words so soaked with meanings that you can squeeze out interpretations by the bucketful; and needless to say Nature on many levels is my darling, because Nature, on many levels, is the darling. I was lucky enough to rediscover at a fairly early age what most cultures have long forgotten; that every aster in the field has an identity just as strong as my own. Don't think that didn't change my life. But Nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trial and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh, my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously — paradoxically — brilliant and superb. But to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism — which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they both are effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, but the inorganic isn't bad, either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises.”

The Chink picked up his candy-striped plastic transistor radio and kissed it — not as passionately as he lately had been kissing Sissy, but almost.

“A thing is good because it's good,” he continued, “not because it's natural. A thing is bad because it's bad, not because it's artificial. It's not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun. Unless it's with a silver bullet. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

“But. .” said Sissy. Sissy said “but” while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.

“But,” said Sissy, “how can you criticize the misconceptions of your pilgrims when you do nothing to correct them? People are eager for the truth, but you won't give them a chance.”

The Chink shook his head. He was exasperated, but continued to grin. His teeth caught the sunlight like spurs. He would die with his boots on.

“What kind of chance are they giving me?” he asked. “A chance to be another Meher Baba, another Guru Maharaj Ji, another bloody Jesus? Thanks but, no thanks. I don't need it, they don't need it, the world doesn't need it.”

“The world doesn't need another Jesus?” Sissy had never felt much craving for Jesus, personally, but she assumed that for other people he was ice cream and pie.

“Most definitely not! No more Oriental therapists.”

Rising and stretching, pulling some of the tangles out of his beard, the Chink motioned with his head. “See those short sunflowers growing way over there near the lake? Those are Jerusalem artichokes. When properly prepared, the roots taste a bit like yams.” He smacked his lips. Obviously, he had tired of their dialogue.

Sissy's curiosity, however, had suffered pique. She persisted. “What do you mean, Oriental therapists?”

“Oriental therapists,” repeated the Chink, uninterestedly. He reached into his robe, pulled out several juniper berries and began to juggle them expertly. Too bad the Ed Sullivan Show was off the air.

“What does Oriental therapy have to do with Jesus?” Sissy asked. “Or with you?” She smiled at the cascading juniper berries so that he would know she wasn't indifferent to his talents.

In group formation the berries followed the rock over the edge of the precipice. Mice, don't forget to wear your hard hats! “Well, if you can't figure it out for yourself. .” said the Chink. “Meher Baba, Guru Maharaj Ji, Jesus Christ and all the other holy men who amassed followers in recent times have had one gimmick in common. Each of them demanded unquestioning devotion. 'Love me with all your heart and soul and strength and do my bidding without fail.' That has been the common requirement. Well, great. If you can love someone with that completeness and that purity, if you can devote yourself totally and unselfishly to someone — and that someone is a benevolent someone — then your life cannot help being the better for it. Your very existence can be transformed by the power of it, and the peace of mind it engenders will persist as long as you persist.

“But it's therapy. Marvelous therapy, wonderful therapy, ingenious therapy, but only therapy. It relieves symptoms, ignores disease. It doesn't answer a single universal question or put a person one step closer to ultimate truth. Sure, it feels good and I'm for anything that feels good. I won't knock it. But let nobody kid himself: spiritual devotion to a popular teacher with an ambiguous dogma is merely a method of making experience more tolerable, not a method of understanding experience or even of accurately describing it.

“In order to tolerate experience, a disciple embraces a master. This sort of reaction is understandable, but it's neither very courageous nor very liberating. The brave and liberating thing to do is to embrace experience and tolerate the master. That way we might at least learn what it is we are experiencing, instead of camouflaging it with love.

“And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that. In order to escape the bonds of earthly experience, you bind yourself to a master. Bound is bound. If your master really loved you, he would not demand your devotion. He would set you free — from himself, first of all.

“You think I'm behaving like a cold-hearted ogre because I turn people away. Quite the contrary. I'm merely setting my pilgrims free before they become my disciples. That's the best I can do.”

Sissy nodded in appreciation. “That's fine; that sincerely is fine. The only problem is, your pilgrims don't know that.”

“Well, it's up to them to figure it out. Otherwise I'd be dishing them the same precooked and packaged pap. Everybody has got to figure out experience for himself. I'm sorry. I realize that most people require externalized, objective symbols to hang on to. That's too bad. Because what they are looking for, whether they know it or not, is internalized and subjective. There are no group solutions! Each individual must work it out for himself. There are guides, all right, but even the wisest guides are blind in your section of the burrow. No, all a person can do in this life is to gather about him his integrity, his imagination and his individuality — and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.

“Be your own master!

“Be your own Jesus!

“Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself.

“Be your own valentine! Free the heart!”

Upon the sunny rock on which she sat in her semen-stained panties Sissy was very quiet. She supposed she had been given a lot to think about. There was, however, one more question on her mind, and eventually she asked it. “You use the word 'freedom' fairly regularly,” she began. “Exactly what does freedom mean to you?”

The Chink's reply was swift. “Why, the freedom to play freely in the universe, of course.”

With that, he reached out and grabbed the elastic band that moored Sissy's underpants to her hips. She raised her legs and in one smooth motion, he pulled her panties off — and flung them over the edge of the cliff. In the Dakota mouse world, it was quite a day for aerial phenomena.

72.

MAYBE the clouds just got sick of all the publicity. Posing for Ansel Adams's big camera had been okay; the landscape artists who had painted them had been sympathetic and discreet; even their appearance in occasional movies, floating unobtrusively in the background while cowboys and soldiers did their manly deeds, had less offended the clouds than amused them. But now these weather satellites, these paparazzi of outer space, following them everywhere they went, photographing them constantly, giving them no peace or privacy, their pictures in the papers every single day! They knew how Jackie felt. And Liz. Maybe the clouds just got sick and tired of it. Maybe they ducked under the South Pole, in dark glasses and wigs, for a well-deserved vacation.

At any rate, not a cloud had been seen over the American plains in about two weeks. The seasonette known as Indian summer persisted. A sky as open and dry as the brain is wrinkled and goopy stretched above the Dakota hills, permitting sunlight to warm, uninterrupted save by night, the long feathers of resting whooping cranes, the jubilant faces of postrevolutionary cowgirls and the rectal tissues of Sissy Gitche.

Although her mind was aware that Marie Barth, not to mention millions of Arabs, enjoyed it regularly, Sissy's body had not yet decided whether the unfamiliar pleasure of anal intercourse compensated for the unfamiliar pain. The Chink, with yam oil as a lubricant, had just performed for a half-hour in Sissy's fundamental orifice, and now she rested belly-down on a blanket in the sun.

So quiet was she that her host finally looked up from the snakeskin belt he was stitching (He would trade it in Mottburg for water chestnuts and yams) and asked what she was thinking. Flattered that such a self-contained man was interested in her thoughts, she answered quickly, “About the cowgirls.” It was true; she was thinking about cowgirls. It was only her gently throbbing rectum that was paying attention to her gently throbbing rectum. “You've managed to avoid telling me how you feel about the cowgirls.”

Returning his attention to the slender, squamous hide, every sun-fired scale of which reflected for Sissy a bad memory of Delores, the Chink kaff-kaffed and hawked, muttering through the last hurumph, “They certainly have improved the view from up here. Umm. Kaff.”

“They're just cute little things for you to ogle, eh?” said Sissy. There was an accusatory note in her voice. She wondered from where it had come.

“I would think that a woman who worked as a professional model would be cautious about how she criticized ogling.” The Chink looked up long enough to ascertain that he had made his point, then went back to the elegant epidermis of the creepy-crawler. “They're cute, all right. Although all of them aren't so little.” Perhaps he was recalling the day he'd seen Big Red wrestle a steer. “There are other reasons for watching them, however.”

“Such as?”

“Ah, well, Sissy, you see, a lot of noisy rain has fallen on our people in the past few years. Riots and rebellions, needless wars and threats of wars, drugs that opened minds to the infinite and drugs that shoved minds into the mushpot forever, awesome advances in technology and confusing declines in established values, political corruption, police corruption and corporate corruption, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, recessions and inflations, crime in the streets and crime in the suites, oil spills and rock festivals, elections and assassinations, this, that and the other. Well, you and I, we separated ourselves from all those happenings, they haven't touched us. You passed right through them; I let them pass right through me. You practiced the art of perpetual motion; I practice the art of stillness. The result has been much the same. We've maintained a kind of strange purity, you and I; you too mobile for current events to infect you; me too immobile, too remote.

“But those young women down there on that ranch. .” The old man took one hand off the rattler hide and gestured toward the Rubber Rose. “Those young women have been dipped in the events of our times, immersed from head to toe. You were born with your trauma and you survived it magnificently, but they've been shuttled from trauma to trauma most of their young lives. Their parents' culture failed them and then their own culture failed them. Neither drugs nor occultism worked for them; neither traditional politics nor radical politics lived up to their expectations. A whole banquet of philosophies has been nibbled at and found tasteless. Many of their peers have surrendered: jumped back with broken spirits into the competitive System or withdrawn into a private mushbowl—'spaced out,' they call it, though 'ambulatory catatonia' might be a more accurate description.

“These ladies, however, they're making another attempt at something honorable, another try at directing their own lives. Jellybean. . ha ha ho ho and hee hee. . yes, that incomparable Bonanza Jellybean, has taken a fiction and turned it into a reality. She has given form to a long-lost childhood dream. This is nurturing them. And that is why I watch them with such interest. To see where it leads them, and if they will be free and happy there.

“Of course, I also watch the way their rowdy buttocks punch at the bags of their jeans. And speaking of such, my dear Sissy, how is your sweet brown opening convalescing?”

Sissy ignored the indelicate query. “Isn't there something you could do to help them?” she asked.

“Help them? Ha ha ho ho and hee hee. There you go again. Help them, indeed. In the first place, they've got to help themselves. By that, I mean each individual one of them has got to help herself. In the second place, I thought I'd made it clear that I cannot help anyone.”

“But. .”

“No buts about it. Spiritually, I'm a rich man. Because of my Asian ancestry, I've inherited a certain amount of spiritual wealth. But — and you and Debbie and the pilgrims and would-be pilgrims have got to understand this — I cannot share this wealth! Why? Because Eastern spiritual currency is simply not negotiable in your Western culture. It would be like sending dollar bills to the pygmies. You can't spend dollars in the African jungle. The best use the pygmies could make of dollar bills would be to light fires with them. Throughout the Western world, I see people huddled around little fires, warming themselves with Buddhism and Taoism and Hinduism and Zen. And that's the most they ever can do with those philosophies. Warm their hands and feet. They can't make full use of Hinduism because they aren't Hindu; they can't really take advantage of the Tao because they aren't Chinese; Zen will abandon them after a while — its fire will go out — because they aren't Japs like me. To turn to Oriental religious philosophies may temporarily illuminate experience for them, but ultimately it's futile, because they're denying their own history, they're lying about their heritage. You can hook a rainbow to a goofy vision — Jellybean is doing that — but you can't hook a rainbow to a lie.

“You Westerners are spiritually poor. Your religious philosophies are impoverished. Well, so what? They're probably impoverished for a very good reason. Why not learn that reason? Certainly that's better than shaving your noggin and wrapping up in the beads and robes of traditions you can never more than partially comprehend. Admit, first of all, to your spiritual poverty. Confess to it. That's the starting point. Unless you have the guts to begin there, stark in your poverty and unashamed, you're never going to find your way out of the burrows. And borrowed Oriental fineries will not conceal your pretense; they will only make you more lonely in your lie.”

Sissy elevated herself on her elbow, keeping her anal compass pointed into the sun. “But what can a Westerner do, then, in his or her poverty?”

“Endure it. Endure it with candor, humor and grace.”

“You're saying it's hopeless, then?”

“No. I've already suggested that the spiritual desolation of the West probably has meaning and that that meaning might be advantageously explored. A Westerner who seeks a higher, fuller consciousness could start digging around in his people's religious history. Not an easy task, however, because Christianity looms in the way, blocking every return route like a mountain on wheels.”

Sissy's sphincter was a tiny fist, pounding on the table of love. For the moment, the pounding suited her mood. “I don't get it. I thought that Christianity was our religious heritage. How has it blocked. .?”

“Oh, Sissy, this really is tiresome. Christianity, you ninny, is an Eastern religion. There are some wondrous truths in its teachings, as there are in Buddhism and Hinduism, truths that are universal, that is, truths that can speak to the hearts and spirits of all peoples everywhere. But Christianity came out of the East, its origins highly suspect, its dogma already grossly perverted by the time it set foot in the West. Do you think there was no supreme deity in the West prior to that Eastern alien Jehovah?. There was. From earliest Neolithic days, the peoples of Britain and Europe — the Anglos and Saxons and Latins — had venerated a deity. The Horned One. The Old God. A bawdy goat-man who provided rich harvests and bouncy babies; a hairy, merry deity who loved music and dancing and good food; a god of fields and woodlands and flesh; a fecund provider who could be evoked through fornication as well as meditation, who listened to songs as well as to prayers; a god much loved because he loved, because he put pleasure ahead of asceticism, because jealousy and vengeance were not in his character. The Old God's principal feast days were Walpurgisnacht (April thirtieth), Candlemas (February second), Lammas (August first) and Hallowe'en (October thirty-first). The holiday you now call Christmas was originally a winter revelry of the Old God (all historical evidence points toward Christ's having been born in July). These feasts were celebrated for thousands of years. And veneration of the Old God, often disguised as Jack-in-the-Green or Robin Goodfellow, continued surreptitiously long after Christianity closed its chilling grip around the West. But the Christian powers were nothing if not sly. The Church set about to willfully transform the image of Lucifer, whom the Old Testament informs us was a shining angel, one of God's chief lieutenants. The Church began to teach that Lucifer had horns, that he wore the cloven hooves of the lecherous goat. In other words, the leaders of the Christian conquest gave to Lucifer the physical traits — and some of the personality — of the Old God. They cunningly turned your Old God into the Devil. That was the most cruel libel, the greatest slander, the worst malicious distortion in human history. The President of the U.S. is a harmless carnival con man compared to the early Popes.”

From somewhere down the mountainside, there came the vibratory drumming of a grouse. It was precisely the sort of noise Sissy's anus might have made were it wired for sound. There was a time, her rectum chaste then except for the occasional probing finger, when Sissy had had a minimum of curiosity about the matters she and the old hermit now discussed; she had established, in motion, her relationship to the universe, and it was concrete and thrilling and whole; in gloriously articulated stops and starts she embodied its life/death rhythms and was one with them, riding high, riding free, riding out on the crazy edge of it All, scooping up with her own two thumbs life's ecstasy and its terror. Things change. Perhaps now that she no longer strongly felt the universe, she had to know the universe. Sissy asked another question.

“If I — if we Westerners dug back into our heritage, what would we find there? Something valuable? Something as rich as your Oriental inheritance? What would we find?”

“You'd find women, Sissy. And plants. Women and plants. Often in combination.

“Plants are powerful and harbor many secrets. Our lives are bound up with the plant world far more tightly than any of us might imagine. The Old Religion recognized the subtle superiorities of plant life; it tried to understand growing things and pay them their due. One of the most highly developed orders of the Old Religion, the Druids, took its name from the ancient Irish word druuid, the first syllable of which meant 'oak' and the second syllable, 'one who has knowledge.' So a druid was one who had knowledge about oak trees — and about the allegedly poisonous mistletoe that grows on oaks and that was sacred to the Druids.

“Every village in olden times had at least one Wise Woman. These ladies had profound expertise in botanical matters. Mushrooms and herbs were their intimates. They used plants to heal the body and to free the mind. These women, of course, were nurturers and nurses. Many of their herb remedies, such as digitalis (from foxglove) and atropine (from belladonna) are still in use today.

“Yes, if you scratch back past the Christian conquest into your true heritage, you will find women doing wondrous things. Women were not only the principal servants of the Old God, women were his mistresses, the power behind his pumpkin throne. Women controlled the Old Religion. It had few priests, many priestesses. There was no dogma; each priestess interpreted the religion in her own fashion. The Great Mother — creator and destroyer — instructed the Old God, was his mama, his wife, his daughter, his sister, his equal and ecstatic partner in the ongoing fuck.

“If you can look beyond Christianity, you will find legions of midwives, goddesses, sorceresses and Graces. You will find tenders of flocks, presiders over births, protectors of life. You will find dancers, naked or in greenery gowns. You will find women like the women of Gaul, tall, splendid, noble, arbiters of their people, instructors of their children, priestesses of Nature, the Celtic warrior queens. You will find the tolerant matriarchs of pagan Rome — what a contrast to the Caesars and Popes! You will find the Druid women, learned in astronomy and mathematics, engineering Stonehenge, the premium acme apex top-banana clockworks of its era, bar none.

“So there is plenty of treasure in your antiquity, if you could get at it. How it compares to mine is another matter. Maybe where it is lacking is in the realm of light. Buddha and Rama and Lao-tzu brought light into the world. Literal light. Jesus Christ also was a living manifestation of light, although by the time his teachings were exported into the West, Saint Paul had trimmed the wick, and Jesus' beam grew dimmer and dimmer until, around the fourth century, it went out altogether. Christianity doesn't even have any warmth left; it probably never was very calorific. The Old Religion, on the other hand, was profoundly warm. It decidedly was not lacking in heat. But it was a heat that generated very little light. It warmed every hair on the mammal body, every cell in the reproductive process, but it failed to switch on that golden G.E. bulb that hangs from the loftiest dome of the soul. There was enough pure sensual energy in the Old Religion that had it been directed toward enlightenment it surely would have carried its followers there. Unfortunately, it was subverted and enervated by Christianity before its warmth could be widely transformed into light. Maybe that's the path that needs to be completed, that's the logical goal for Western man. As individuals, of course; not in organized groups. And the United States of America is the logical place for the fires of paganism to be rebuilt — and transformed into light. Maybe. I could be wrong. But I can say for sure, there is plenty of treasure in your antiquity if you can get at it.”

“But we can't go back,” said Sissy. “We can't dwell in the past.”

“No, you can't. Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe the peoples of the West are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from Nature to make extensive use of their pagan heritage. However, links can be established. Links must be established. To make contact with your past, to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development, is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles. To attempt to be a backwoods homesteader in an electronic technology may be as misguided as attempting to be Hindu when one is Anglo-Saxon. However, your race has lost many valuable things along the road of so-called progress and you need to go back and retrieve them. If nothing else, to discover where you've been may enable you to guess at where you're going.

“If anywhere. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

Sissy lowered her arms and cradled her blond head in them. The Chink might be right, she thought. Her pre-Christian ancestry might bear looking into. Her race, the poor Scotch-Irish, had produced nothing of note, spiritually or materially, in modern times, but perhaps there had been a day. . Yes, it was worth investigating. But what of that part of her that was Indian; where did that fit in?

For as far back as she could remember, she had felt apart from her neighbors and kin. Oh Lord, South Richmond! There once was a neighborhood, its name was South Richmond, and it let numerous frame houses peel, fade and sag along its gritty streets. It allowed numerous cars — clunkers and junkers — to be parked in front of the houses, even though the cars dripped oil into the grit and even though they had to be pushed to get them started on frosty mornings, sometimes on warm mornings, too. What a constant puff and grunt and goddamn, pushing those cars! And South Richmond permitted numerous people to occupy the houses, even though the people chewed Juicy Fruit gum so hard they cracked the wallboards, and even though on Saturday nights husbands exhaled bourbon fumes through those cracks, and frequently, if the week had been mean enough in the cigarette factories or the unemployment lines, stuffed their wives' heads into those cracks, pin curlers and all. There once was a neighborhood called South Richmond, where women sported bruised jaws and men purchased bleacher seats for the stock car races and children never learned that James Joyce invented the tape recorder, that Scarlet O'Hara had a seventeen-inch waist or that the original Frankenstein monster spoke fluent French; a neighborhood where dogs and preachers whined and hillbilly vocalists sang mournfully of somebody running off with somebody else's little darling, and toy Confederate flags fluttered over everything and a girl grew thumbs so big they made rolls of baloney swoon in their casings, and she didn't care, because those thumbs meant that she was something her neighbors and kin were not, hallelujah.

When Sissy had learned she was one-sixteenth Siwash, she thought that maybe her thumbs were the Siwash part, that the ancient Indian spirits had sent her the thumbs as a sign that she was not made of South Richmond stuff, that circumstances more glorious and heroic lay in her past and her future.

That was naíve, of course. Now, she was not sure that those sparse Siwash cells made any difference at all. Look at Julian — he was full-blooded, and look at him. Yet she remained curious about it, and finding herself upon real estate holy to the Siwash, in the company of a man, Japanese though he be, who was an ordained Siwash shaman, she had been waiting only for the right moment to begin her inquiry. This moment seemed as right as any.

Before she could speak, however, there was heard a noise so sudden and loud it made her sit up straight with no thought to her bottom. It must be told that the Chink was startled, also, running a needle through the snake's skin into his own. But he quickly relaxed and sniggered, “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” And Sissy realized that it was the clockworks that had chimed — there it went again!

Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! and unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing — linear and purposeful — of another hour on the inexhorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis shoe, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully oblivious of any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said: “Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical with yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. Poing!”

73.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bonk!

74.

YAM OIL SEEPED INTO HER PORES. Her thumb pores, this time. The Chink was anointing them. He waved burning twigs of juniper around them. He shook a little bell at them. Hung garlands of goldenrod 'round them. Serenaded them — his instrument was a cigar box across which was pulled tight a single wire, which he bowed furiously. It made the worst music Sissy had ever heard. It made her want to turn on the all-polka radio.

They were in the entrance chamber of the cave, protected from stone by Japanese matting. Just outside, a small campfire flickered on their third and last night together.

At dawn, the Chink would go down into the hills and plains to harvest. There were foodstuffs that he must gather and add to the supply that he already had stored in the lower level of the cave, where he would winter.

Sissy would leave before he returned next day. She had a husband waiting. She had a cowgirl to see, a Countess to appease. She had questions to answer and maybe to ask. For example, “Where did all this lust come from!”

It is important to believe in love. Everyone knows that. But is it possible to believe in lust?

Sissy wasn't positive what she believed anymore. Once it had been simple. She had believed in hitchhiking.

She asked the Chink what he believed. Just like that. She interrupted thumb-worship, parted the meat curtains of lust, stared at his teeth and asked, “What do you believe in? I mean, really, what do you really believe?”

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” He laughed at her, saying nothing. His laughter and his silence made her weep. Tears, however, did not dampen her lust.

Lust lasted late, and when in midmorning she awoke, the Chink was gone.

Sunbeams galloped through the cave mouth, following the same route firelight had taken. Something was different about the cave. Trying to determine what it was brought her fully awake. With the sun's help, she saw that an inscription had been freshly scrawled with sumi ink across the right wall. Then her eyes were drawn to the left wall, where another graffito was dripping.

On the right wall had been written:

I BELIEVE IN EVERYTHING; NOTHING IS SACRED.

And on the left wall:

I BELIEVE IN NOTHING; EVERYTHING IS SACRED.

75.

DR. GOLDMAN caught up with Dr. Robbins shortly after the intern submitted a report requesting that Sissy Hankshaw Gitche be discharged immediately from the clinic. The confrontation between the two psychiatrists came to be known in psychology circles as the Gunfight at the I'm O.K./You're O.K. Corral.

“Am I to understand,” asked Dr. Goldman, “that you regard Mrs. Gitche a stabilized personality unneedful of treatment?” His voice had an incredulous tone.

Dr. Robbins chinned himself on the saggy bars of his mustache. “Stabilized schmabilized,” he said. “What could this clinic possibly treat her for?”

“What indeed,” snorted Dr. Goldman. “Here we have a woman more than thirty years of age, who, though unusually intelligent and lovely to look at, has failed to transcend a slight, albeit bizarre congenital deformity. .”

It was Dr. Robbins's turn to snort. Although a younger man, less experienced at snorting, Dr. Robbins's snort made up in bravura what it lacked in finesse and was the match of the older fellow's. “Transcend, you say. What a pompous word! The very idea of transcending something smacks of hierarchy and class consciousness; the notion of 'upward mobility' with which this country attracts greedy immigrants and chastises its poor. Jesus, Goldman! The trick is not to transcend things but to transform them. Not to degrade them or deny them — and that's what transcendence amounts to — but to reveal them more fully, to heighten their reality, to search for their latent significance. I fail to detect a single healthy impulse in the cowardly attempt to transcend the physical world. On the other hand, to transform a physical entity by changing the climate around it through the manner in which one regards it is a marvelous undertaking, creative and courageous. And that's what Sissy has done since childhood. By erasing accepted standards of perception, she transformed her thumbs while affirming them. In her affirmation of them, she intensified the vividness and richness of associations they might arouse. To paraphrase a remark she made to me, she introduced them to poetry. I would think that Sissy is an example for every afflicted person, which is to say, Doctor, an example for each of us.”

Snort time again. The pig war was on. Inspired by his junior colleague, Dr. Goldman's latest snort was issued with a certain boldness, although the dignity of the snorter was carefully uncompromised. “Pardon me, but the concept of introducing a deformed thumb to poetry is one I find rarefied and imprecise, one that most people, afflicted or otherwise, would consider utter nonsense. Nonsense is of no help to anyone. .”

“It isn't? Are you sure?”

“Nonsense, if you'll let me speak, Robbins, is of no help to anyone except as it might manifest itself in a neurotic fixation upon which one's stability depends.”

“Stability, schmability.”

“Centering her life on her handicap rather than overcoming that handicap; building, if you will, a mystique around that handicap might seem a poetic undertaking to Mrs. Gitche. It might even seem such to you, God forbid. But I am not convinced, nor is Mr. Gitche, who cares for her most and knows her best. Mr. Gitche. .”

“Mr. Gitche is a flaming asshole.”

“Hardly a professional evaluation, Robbins.”

“Oh no? I thought you Freudians were really big on assholes. I recall entire lectures devoted to anal expulsion, anal retention. .”

“Don't be cute. We haven't got all day.” Dr. Goldman glanced at his office clock the way an insecure husband glances at his flirtatious wife at a party. The clock went right on batting its big eye at eternity. “To return to the point, Mr. Gitche contends, with apparent justification, that his wife is immature. .”

“Growing up is a trap,” snapped Dr. Robbins. “When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive. Alive in a dying culture.”

Dr. Goldman stirred a half-amused little chuckle into his snort, much as a splash of red Burgundy might be stirred into a pot of lard. “We could have an interesting argument about that sometime,” he said. “For the present, however, let's appreciate Mr. Gitche's viewpoint. Mr. Gitche told me once that what bothered him the most about his wife's devotion to hitchhiking was its obviousness. She was afflicted with enlarged thumbs, ergo she hitchhiked. Now, had she decided, instead, to become a fine seamstress or to excel at tennis or to take up painting. .”

Speaking of painting, there was a Julian Gitche watercolor on the wall above Dr. Goldman's desk. It was a landscape, a Central Park scene, rather free and airy, like a hose spray of green Easter-egg dye in which some sprite or minor deity was taking a bath. One wondered what would happen to the artist's protoromantic style were he to set up his easel in the Dakota hills. And one suspects that the experience of the Dakotas is too strong for any established aesthetics to withstand. At any rate, the painting quivered a bit on its hanger when Dr. Robbins boomed:

“There you go again! Transcendence! Wishing her to deny her thumbs by compensating for their limitations instead of affirming them by exploiting their strengths. Jesus!”

“But hitchhiking, Robbins. What kind of affirmative activity is that? Mrs. Gitche wasn't even interested in travel. It seems to me that fairly early in life she seized upon hitchhiking as a means of coping with an understandable anxiety, and that what began as an ill-chosen defense mechanism gradually evolved into a pointless and somewhat grotesque obsession. Hitchhiking, of all things. .”

Dr. Robbins grasped his mustache, as if to prevent it from turning and leaving the room without him. There is a point where even hair can become exasperated. “Hitchhiking, schmitchhiking. Don't you see that it doesn't matter what activity Sissy chose? It doesn't matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn't matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I'm not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That's not it. That's tame and insular and severely limiting. I'm talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further — to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.”

A flicker of comprehension lit up Dr. Goldman's heavy orbs the way a flash of heat lightning might light up the nocturnal droppings of a well-fed mule. “I see,” he said. “You're referring to Gestalt — or to some far-fetched interpretation of Gestalt. Are we leading into a confrontation between Freudian and Gestalt psychology?”

“Gestalt schmagalt,” growled Dr. Robbins. “What I'm referring to is magic.”

Dr. Goldman shook his head wearily, even sadly. After a while he said, “In your rather abbreviated report" — he held up a single page of paper against which some rude sentences had been smacked as if slapped there by the nasty tail of a barnyard animal—"You recommend only that Mrs. Gitche be discharged and that she be encouraged to divorce her husband. Surely you're aware that there is no way in which we can therapeutically, ethically or legally encourage a patient to divorce her mate. Our business is preserving marriages, not ending them. .”

“Our business should be liberating the human spirit. Or if that's too idealistic for you, if that strikes you as the business of religion — which it should be, too — then our business should be assisting people to function — crazily or not isn't our concern; that's up to them — helping them to function on whatever level or levels of 'sanity' they choose to function on, not helping them to adjust and locking them up if they don't adjust.”

Past the point of snorting, Dr. Goldman removed his horn-rimmed glasses, rubbed his eyes and said evenly, “Dr. Robbins, our fundamental differences are greater than I had imagined. I'll have Miss Waterworth schedule a conference for us next week and we can give them an airing and decide if they can be reconciled. For the present, however, my concern is for the patient. Encouraging her to divorce is, of course, out of the question. Mr. Gitche is a talented, educated sympathetic man who loves his wife a great deal. Mr. Gitche. .”

“Mr. Gitche has pulled his wife away from the edge and into the center. In here with the rest of us. I don't mind the center. It's big and mysterious and ambiguous — perhaps as exhilarating in its soft, shifting complexity as the edge is exhilarating in its hard, stark terminations. But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge. Normality has been a colossal challenge for Sissy and I think she's met the challenge bravely and well. However, normality is a neurosis. Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. It's rare to discover someone who hasn't been infected, to greater or lesser degree, by that neurosis. Sissy hasn't. Yet. If she continues to be exposed, she'll eventually succumb. I think that would be a tragedy akin to sawing the horn off the last unicorn. For our sake as much as for her own, I believe Sissy should be protected from normality. Freed from the center and left to return to the edge. Out there, she's valuable. In here, she's just another disturbing noise in the zoo. Julian Gitche may be, as you say, kind and sympathetic, but he's a threat to Sissy, nonetheless. He's seduced her into a situation that is the mirror-opposite of what she believes it to be. Julian is driven by material ambitions; narrow, insatiable, intense, systematic, egocentric. In other words, he's a settler. Broad-based, timeless and dreamful, Sissy is the Indian. You're aware, Doctor, of the destruction met by the Indian when the settler lands on his shores.”

A sigh, not a snort, was what Dr. Goldman issued next: a soft sigh like a trade wind blowing its nose against the sail of a toy boat. “Robbins, you're introducing concepts that are intriguing but, to my mind, irrelevent. Let me ask you one direct question. Do you honestly feel there is no disturbance in the personality of this woman, this woman with these. . these thumbs, except the effects of a bad marriage?”

“No, I never meant to imply that.” The younger man flicked the end of his mustache as if he were knocking the ash off an impotent cigar. “Sissy is suffering a bit of confusion.”

“Ummm. And to what do you attribute this confusion?”

“To the fact that she's simultaneously in love with an elderly hermit and a teen-aged cowgirl.”

Dr. Goldman got his snort back. He almost choked on it. “Mein Gott man! Are you joking? Well, why didn't you mention that in your report? Surely you don't regard it lightly? You don't think it's all right?”

Flicking the other end of his mustache, Dr. Robbins answered, “For many people, maybe for most people, being in love simultaneously with an old hermit and a teen-aged cowgirl might be a horrendous mistake. For other people, it might be absolutely right. For most people, having oral sex with anteaters may be the wrong thing to do; for a few people it may be perfect. You see my point? As for Sissy, she's finding the situation a bit confusing. I'm not sure that it's doing her any real harm.”

The senior psychiatrist slapped his forehead. Had there been a mosquito there it would have vanished as completely as Glenn Miller, leaving only the memory of its music behind. “Mein Gott: I mean, my God. So. Well. I'd say that this evidence of homosexuality in Mrs. Gitche's libido rather firmly substantiates the fact of her emotional immaturity. You will agree with that?”

“Nope. Not necessarily. Lesbianism is definitely on the rise. I can't believe that the many who practice it are all suffering from preadolescent fixations. No, I'm more inclined to believe that it's a cultural phenomenon, a healthy rejection of the paternalistic power structure that has dominated the civilized world for more than two thousand years. Maybe women have got to love women in order to remind men what love is. Maybe women have got to love women before they can start loving men again.”

Once more Dr. Goldman was rendered snortless. “Robbins,” he said softly, as if drooping from a cross, “never in my career have I encountered anyone, neither psychiatrist nor psychiatric patient, with such a hodgepodge of confounding ideas.”

“Well, Doctor,” said Robbins, “The Chink says if it gets sloppy, eat it over the sink.”

“The Chink? Oh, you mean Mao Tse-tung?”

Dr. Robbins laughed so abruptly he frightened his mustache. “Yeah, yeah, right. Mao Tse-tung.”

“Heaven help me. It's not enough I've hired a kook. He's a Communist as well.”

Robbins laughed again. This time the mustache was ready. “So you think I'm a kook, do you? Maybe you're right, Doctor. Maybe you're right. I've never mentioned this to anyone, but as a child. .”

“Yes?” There was a sudden gleam in Dr. Goldman's tired eyes.

“As a child. .”

“Yes? Go on.”

“As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.”

Dr. Robbins escorted his grateful mustache out of the room.

76.

YOU'VE HEARD OF PEOPLE CALLING IN SICK. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well?

It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, “Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.” Call in well.

That's what Dr. Robbins did, exactly. The morning following his consultation with Dr. Goldman, he called in well and he wasn't faking. You can't fake a thing like that. It's infinitely harder to pretend you're well than to pretend you're sick.

After telephoning, Dr. Robbins donned an electric yellow nylon shirt, and when he tucked it into a pair of maroon bell-bottoms, it was like lightning striking a full wino. Before he left his apartment, he fed both his alarm clock and his Bulova to the disposal unit. “I'm passing out of the time of day and into the time of the soul,” he announced. Then, when he considered how pretentious that sounded, he corrected himself: “Strike that!” he said. “Let's simply say that I'm well today.”

Out on Lexington Avenue, Dr. Robbins strolled leisurely. He sat on a park bench and smoked a Thai stick. He ducked into a phone booth and looked up Gitche in the directory. Didn't call; just looked at the number and smiled. Sissy, on her own insistence and with Julian's hesitant permission, was, indeed, being discharged from the clinic that day.

On Madison, Dr. Robbins went into a travel agency and asked to see a map of the western United States. He stared at the Sierra range of California and at Dakota and not much in between. A travel agent, who looked like Loretta Young and who appeared as if she feared Robbins's mustache had sneaked into the U.S. in a bunch of bananas, was obliged to be of service, but there was little she could do for a traveler with clockworks on his mind.

Dr. Robbins strolled on. Without knowing it, he strolled beneath the laboratory windows behind which the Countess was pitting the full ray of his genius against that furtive deep-swimming mammal whose sea breath escapes in sultry condensations from the dank lungs of the cunt.

In a glass display case in the lobby of the Countess's building lay a handmolded red rubber syringe — the very first Rose, the awkward prototype, the blushing original, the progenitor of the line of sensationally successful squeeze-bags whose name still adorned the largest all-girl ranch in the West. In innocence, Dr. Robbins passed it by.

Dr. Robbins wasn't certain where he was going on that May morning. As to his eventual destination, however, he was clear. He would go to the clockworks. And to the Chink. What's more, Sissy would lead him there. You see, the healthy and unemployed psychiatrist had recently arrived at a twofold conclusion: (1) if there was any man alive who could add yeast to the rising loaf of his being, that man was the Chink; (2) if there was any woman who could butter that loaf, that woman was Sissy. Dr. Robbins was quite convinced, quite determined, quite excited, quite in love. He faced the future with a sparkling mind and a silly grin.

However, there was a force at work that Dr. Robbins had not reckoned on, a force that Sissy had not reckoned on, a force that had not been reckoned on by anybody in North America, including the Clock People, the Audubon Society and that man who, due to someone's calling in sick (not well at all in this case) at the White House, was soon to be the new President of the United States. That force was: the whooping crane rustlers.