Hocus Pocus

25

My lawyer found only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.

The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.

The convicts didn’t create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they weren’t against America. He said, “We are America.”

So 1 took my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.

It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadn’t realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.

But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasn’t talented, frightened the old novelist.

Slazinger was no prize himself, of course.

After the prison break, I told the GR1OT~ here all I knew about Pamela, and asked it to guess what might become of her after her breakup with Paul Slazinger. GRIOT™ had her die of cirrhosis of the liver. I gave the machine the same set of facts a second time, and it had her freezing to death in a doorway in Chicago.

The prognosis was not good.

After leaving Pamela, whose basic problem wasn’t me but alcohol, I started to climb Musket Mountain, intending to think things out under the water tower. But I was met by Zuzu Jackson, who was coming down. She said she had been under the water tower for hours, trying to think up dreams to replace those we had had of running off to Venice.

She said that maybe she would run off to Venice alone, and take Polaroid pictures of tourists getting in and out of gondolas.

The prognosis for her was a lot better than for Pamela, short-term anyway. At least she wasn’t an addict, and at least she wasn’t all alone in the world, even if all she had was Tex. And at least she hadn’t been held up as an object of public ridicule from coast to coast.

And she could see the humorous side of things. She said, I remember, that the loss of the Venice dream had left her a walking corpse, but that a zombie was an ideal mate for a College President.

She went on like that for a little while, but she didn’t cry, and she ran out of steam pretty quick. The last thing she said was that she didn’t blame me. “I take full responsibility,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked away, “for falling in love with such an obvious jerk.”

Fair enough!

I decided not to climb Musket Mountain after all. I went home instead. It would be wiser to think things out in my garage, where other loose cannons from my past were unlikely to interrupt me. But when I got there I found a man from United Parcel Service ringing the bell. I didn’t know him. He was new to town, or he wouldn’t have asked why all the blinds were drawn. Anybody who had been in Scipio any length of time knew why the blinds were drawn.

Crazy people lived in there.

I told him somebody was sick in there, and asked what I could do for him.

He said he had this big box for me from St. Louis, Missouri.

I said I didn’t know anybody in St. Louis, Missouri, and wasn’t expecting a big box from anywhere. But he proved to me that it was addressed to me all right, so I said, “OK, let’s see it.” It turned out to be my old footlocker from Vietnam, which I had left behind when the excrement hit the air-conditioning, when I was ordered to take charge of the evacuation from the roof of the embassy.

Its arrival was not a complete surprise. Several months earlier I had received a notice of its existence in a huge Army warehouse that was indeed on the edge of St. Louis, where all sorts of unclaimed personal property of soldiers was stored, stuff ditched on battlefields or whatever. Some idiot must have put my footlocker on one of the last American planes to flee Vietnam, thus depriving the enemy of my razor, my toothbrush, my socks and underwear, and, as it happened, the late Jack Patton’s final birthday present to me, a copy of Black Garterbelt. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, “Yes.” A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that.

So I had the UPS man help me lug it into the garage. It wasn’t very heavy. It was just unwieldy.

The Mercedes was parked out front. I hadn’t noticed yet that kids from the town had cored it again. All 4 tires were flat again.

Cough, cough.

The UPS man was really only a boy still. He was so childlike and new to his job that he had to ask me what was inside the box.

“If the Vietnam War was still going on,” I said, “it might have been you in there.” I meant he might have wound up in a casket.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Never mind,” I said. I knocked off the lock and hasp with a hammer. I lifted the lid of what was indeed a sort of casket to me. It contained the remains of the soldier I used to be. On top of everything else, lying flat and face up, was that copy of Black Garterbelt.

“Wow,” said the kid. He was awed by the woman on the magazine cover. He might have been an Astronaut on his first trip in space.

“Have you ever considered being a soldier?” I asked him. “I think you’d make a good ohe.”

I never saw him again. He could have been fired soon after that, and gone looking for work elsewhere. He certainly wasn’t going to last long as a UPS man if he was going to hang around like a kid on Christmas morning until he found out what was inside all the different packages.

I stayed in the garage. I didn’t want to go into the house. I didn’t want to go outdoors again, either. So I sat down on my footlocker and read “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore” in Black Garterbelt. It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of light-years long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the title, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don’t blame him. I can’t think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete’s foot.

The Elders agreed at the meeting that the only practical way for life to travel great distances through space was in the form of extremely small and durable plants and animals hitching rides on meteors that ricocheted off their planets.

But no germs tough enough to survive a trip like that had yet evolved anywhere. Life was too easy for them. They were a bunch of creampuffs. Any creature they infected, chemically speaking, was as challenging as so much chicken soup.

There were people on Earth at the time of the meeting, but they were just more hot slop for the germs to swim in. But they had extra-large brains, and some of them could talk. A few could even read and write! So the Elders focused in on them, and wondered if people’s brains might not invent survival tests for germs which were truly horrible.

They saw in us a potential for chemical evils on a cosmic scale. Nor did we disappoint them.

What a story!

It so happened, according to this story, that the legend of Adam and Eve was being written down for the first time. A woman was doing it. Until then, that charming bunkum had been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth.

The Elders let her write down most of the origin myth just the way she had heard it, the way everybody told it, until she got very close to the end. Then they took control of her brain and had her write down something which had never been part of the myth before.

It was a speech by God to Adam and Eve, supposedly. This was it, and life would become pure hell for microorganisms soon afterward: “Fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.”

Cough.