Jitterbug Perfume

Part IV. DOWNWIND FROM THE PERFECT TACO

THE CITADEL WAS DARK and the heroes were sleeping. When sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.

Except that the “citadel” was Concord State Prison and the sleeping “heroes,” who had been damaged by sorry environments and shoddy genes long before they had had a chance to wax heroic, were testing the air for tear gas. These were men who didn't care if the world was round or flat. Their dreams were haunted by jack handles and cash registers, and those who had been incarcerated for five years or more dreamed only in black and white.

Alobar did not dream at all. He was as awake as the guards on the cell block. More awake, actually, for the guards dozed over their detective magazines, dreamily musing about the long Thanksgiving weekend that was approaching, while Alobar was kept fully conscious by the smell of his body aging.

Yes, he could smell it. During the first year of his sentence, he hadn't aged a notch. His body was still running on the impetus of a millennium of immortalist practices. With the exception of breathing techniques, he was unable to continue those practices in prison, however, and one day it dawned on his cellular bankers that the immunity accounts were overdrawn and there hadn't been a deposit in fifteen months. The DNA demanded an audit. It was learned that Alobar's figures were juggled. He had successfully embezzled more than nine hundred years.

Outraged, the DNA must have petitioned for compensation, because within a week, Alobar's salt-and-pepper hair had turned into a pillar of sodium. Wrinkle troops hit the beaches under his eyes, dug trenches, and immediately radioed for reinforcements. Someone was mixing cement in his joints.

Now, in his third year behind bars, he could smell, taste, and hear the accelerated aging going on inside him. It smelled like mothballs. It tasted like stale chip dip. It sounded like Lawrence Welk.

That very morning, Doc Palmer (five-to-ten for Medicare fraud) had said to him, “Al, you looked your age when you got to Concord.” (In prison records, “Albert Barr” was listed as forty-six years old.) “Now, I swear you're looking twice that much. You want a slip for the infirmary, let us have a look?”

“No, I'm okay.”

“But your skin. .”

“Must have been something I ate.”

Doc Palmer shook his head. “If you say so, Albert.”

Alobar smiled. He enjoyed being called “Albert.” It reminded him of all the nights he spent cleaning up after Einstein.

Looking back, it was amazing how few male friends he had had in his lifetime. Some men make more friends in a day than Alobar had made in a thousand years. There was Pan, of course, if one could describe their odd association as friendship. There had been the shaman, but they'd met only once. Fosco, the Tibetan artist, might be included, although Fosco had been often withdrawn and enigmatic, and as for Wiggs Dannyboy, well, he just wasn't sure about Dannyboy. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, was a pal.

Sort of a pal. They never went bowling together or guzzled beer in a bar, but Einstein had lent him money, as a true friend will do, and they'd had some wonderful talks. If you and another guy know things about each other that nobody else knows, and you keep those things confidential, then you and the guy must be pals.

Only a month or two before, while leafing through a magazine in the day room, Alobar had chanced upon an article that began, “When Albert Einstein died in Princeton Hospital at 1:15 on the morning of April 18, 1955, having mumbled his last words in German to a night nurse who knew no German. .” He couldn't help but laugh. The magazine implied that Einstein's last words were tragically lost to history. Alobar conceded that such might be the case. But he knew what Einstein's last words were.

Did they imagine that the dying Einstein suddenly pulled himself up in bed and uttered, “E equals MC cubed"?

Did they think that he had mumbled, “Der perfekt Tako"?

On numerous occasions during the past three centuries, Alobar had come to the brink of suicide, driven there not by despair, or even boredom, but by the longing for reunion with Kudra and the wish to prove incorrect her accusation that longevity for longevity's sake was for him a limiting obsession. To some degree, Kudra's charge must have been accurate, because he never lowered the shade. He would decide that he was finally ready to die, or, at least, to dematerialize, for he had no intention of leaving his dear body behind to be poked at by policemen and lied over by priests, but always something would come up at the last minute to change his mind.

Alobar was fairly certain that he could manage a dematerialization. He was uncertain that he could rematerialize. Since Kudra had failed to reappear, he supposed that it must be impossible. His ego prevented him, except in rare moments of self-doubt, from believing that Kudra had remained on the Other Side by choice.

In any case, Alobar would decide to board the spook express at last, and he'd dust off his antique lab equipment in order to whip up some K23. He had to be reeking of the perfume when he reached the Other Side, he reasoned, to insure that Kudra would recognize him. So, he'd proceed to assemble the ingredients, which was not quite as easy as making cherry pie, since citron was scarce, quality jasmine oil scarcer, and beet pollen scarcer yet (it was available only a few weeks out of the year, and then in widely scattered locations). Invariably, before he had his aromatics together, he'd find a reason to postpone the journey.

That was exactly what had happened the last time, back in 1953. It was the Eisenhower Years and things were slow. The Eisenhower Years were so slow that if they fell off a cliff they'd only be going ten miles an hour. The Eisenhower Years were a slow boat to Abilene, and it looked as if it would be many a crewcut moon before America turned lively again.

For nearly half a century, Alobar had owned and operated a spa outside Livingston, Montana. This enterprise afforded him daily access to mineral springs. Hot baths, remember, are part of the immortalist process. In rural Montana, he also was convenient to the disintegrated spirit of Pan, which roamed the Wild West in the company of the disintegrated spirit of Coyote. Occasionally, Pan and Coyote would blow by (for they were like the winds), stirring things up (for Coyote was an agent of mischief) and causing spa guests to clamp towels against their faces (for Pan still stank to the stars).

It had been quite a while since Pan had come to call, however. If the Eisenhower Years bored Alobar, imagine what they did to Pan. If anything could finish Pan off, it was the vibration of all those self-righteous Eisenhower puritans shuffling canasta decks and defense contracts. This was no time for the strong of heart. If Alobar was ever going to take the step, if he was ever going to kick the longevity habit and rejoin his beloved Kudra (or Wren, or Kudra and Wren: who knew how heavenly the Other Side might really be?), 1953 was opportune.

Moreover, while he had arrived in Montana with his hair dyed ebony, gradually allowing it, over the decades, to return to its natural salt-and-pepper (he had learned a few tricks in his millennium), fifty whole years had passed, and curiosity was rising among neighboring ranchers. The same old problem alas, that back around 1031 had ejected him from Constantinople just ahead of a mob. It was time to move along.

So, Alobar sent away to New York for citron and jasmine, and, from inquiries, pinpointed where Minnesota beet fields would be ripening in a matter of weeks. He had never actually concocted a single drop of K23 since the original batch, but he was confident that he could reproduce it.

Ah, but then, a fortnight before he was to set off for Minnesota to procure the beet pollen, an outhouse copy of Reader's Digest called his attention to the news that geneticists at Princeton University seemed to be on the verge of discoveries that could more than double human life span. Toward the end of the article one of the scientists was quoted as saying that if the experiments panned out, he imagined that the White House would assume direct control, assuring America's leaders primary access. Federal grants, after all, were funding much of the research.

Small wonder that Alobar was alarmed. Consider the prospect of Ike, John Foster Dulles, and Dick Nixon indefinitely preserved. Consider the prospect of the Eisenhower Years going on forever.

Such frightening thoughts might have been by themselves enough to motivate him. However, it was the promise that he had made to Lalo the nymph nine hundred years earlier that caused Alobar to cancel his trip to the beet fields, sell his spa, desert his current mistress, and head for Princeton to become Einstein's janitor.

“Someday,” Lalo had said, “there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone.” She warned that huge evil would result if those men should attain immortality, or rather, “false immortality,” since true immortality requires advancement of heart and soul as well as mind.

Were the Princeton geneticists the false immortalists of whom Lalo had prophesied? To find out, Alobar wrangled a job as assistant custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study, where the geneticists had their offices and lab. Assigned originally to boiler room duties, Alobar had to bribe the chief custodian to be allowed to clean the wing in which the geneticists worked. Upon finding documents that proved White House and Pentagon interest in the experiments, Alobar began to throw monkey wrenches at the delicate machinery. He flicked drops of dirty mop water into culture dishes, waxed the guinea pig's protein pellets, unplugged incubators, and altered figures on charts. Once he fed a prize long-lived white rat one of Einstein's cigar butts. The rat was kaput by morning.

Professor Einstein's office was down the hall from the genetics area. It was a mess. And not just a common two-plus-two-equals-four mess. Einstein's office was a genius equation mess. (A disarray in which Priscilla might have felt at home.)

Books, reports, binders, sheaves, scrolls, periodicals, letters, and uncashed checks were piled, layers deep, all over the floor and furniture, making it virtually impossible to sweep or dust. It was especially frustrating because the place sorely needed a sweeping. In amongst the piles of paper were strewn orange peels, banana skins, Dixie cups, chalk sticks, pencil nubs, sweater lint, violin strings, and drifts of cigar ash (the snows of El Producto). To make matters worse, Einstein himself was usually in the office until well past midnight, and should so much as a sheet of paper be disturbed, he became agitated.

Alobar began postponing the cleaning of Einstein's office to the very end of his shift, but still the professor was there, 2:00 A.M., slumped in his chair, looking like a musical teddy bear with its springs and stuffing flying out. By and by, Einstein confessed that he waited for Alobar so that the two of them might talk. His wife mothered him, he complained, and denied him his cigars. Mrs. Einstein thought that a pipe was more dignified. Her favorite topic of conversation was bowel productivity.

They had some fine discussions, Alobar and Einstein. The special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, the unified field theory, they were what Einstein was famous for, but they were not his best work, he said. Einstein told Alobar that he had thought of many more wonderful things than relativity, but he wasn't going to let “der kats out of der bag” because he didn't trust politicians to put his ideas to moral uses.

Upon hearing some of the unpublished theories, Alobar agreed that they were wonderful, if difficult, and had best be saved for a more enlightened age. Made bold by Einstein's revelations, the janitor told the professor some secrets of his own.

Whether Einstein actually believed the janitor's stories is questionable, but he relished them. He was fascinated by Alobar's views on life and death. His depression was relieved by Alobar's cheerful nature and strongly regal bearing. When Alobar disclosed, cheerfully, that his financial nose was in the mud, Einstein dropped to his knees, rummaged in his papers until he found a royalty check from The Physical Review, and promptly endorsed it to his late-night friend.

The reason Alobar was short of cash was because he was being blackmailed. The chief custodian, suspicious of the new janitor from the onset, eventually had caught him tampering with experiments in the genetics lab. Soon he had extorted from him every penny of the proceeds from the spa sale and was demanding the bulk of his salary. It was expensive business, keeping a promise to a nymph.

That the longevity experiments at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study were terminated in 1956 probably was due as much to faulty procedures on the part of the geneticists as to Alobar's sabotage. In trying to increase human life span by building virus-resistant cells in rodents and dogs, the scientists were barking up the wrong chromosome. In any event, by the time the custodian turned in Alobar to the police, nobody cared very much about the experiments. Alobar was questioned and released. He lost his job, of course. It was just as well. His buddy was dead.

Einstein's office was now a museum. It was very clean and very tidy. There was a rack of pipes on his desk.

Alobar hadn't been allowed to visit Albert in the hospital. He was hanging around the waiting room, however, when word came that the professor had refused surgery for the rupturing aorta that was wiping his personal equation off the blackboard of life. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” Einstein had told his physicians.

Alobar's reaction was summed up ten years later by a British fashion designer named Mary Quant, who, in a different context, announced, “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”

Saddened by Albert's decision, disappointed that his own philosophy had had no stronger influence upon his friend, Alobar returned to the institute to mop and mope. The following week, after the funeral (which Alobar, on principle, refused to attend), he heard a local radio interview in which the nurse who had ministered to Einstein on his deathbed attempted to re-create the German that the patient had mumbled with his last breath.

Alobar seized his broom and danced it around the boiler room. His laughter echoed through the heat ducts of the Institute for Advanced Study. No wonder they didn't understand Einstein's last words! Einstein's last words weren't in German at all. Einstein's last words were in the language of an obscure and long-lost Bohemian tribe, and had been taught to him by Alobar.

Einstein's last words were, “Erleichda, erleichda.”

Memories of Einstein, and of his own first (but, alas, not last) exploits as a science saboteur, distracted the prisoner “Albert Barr,” permitting him to escape momentarily from the two cells in which he was locked; the chamber of steel, cold and indestructible; the chamber of flesh, feverish and deteriorating.

The instant the reminiscence faded, the symptoms of deterioration took over, grabbing the limelight like an insecure celebrity, drowning out, with Welkian schmaltz, the shy snores of embezzlers, the out-of-sync rasps of homicidal maniacs, the nocturnal whimpers of lifelong bullyboys. The noise of aging came from deep inside him, and although it was relatively soft, it had an urgency that the distant country/western of the guards' radio did not.

More disturbing was the odor. What chemical evil could be working in his tissues to cause them to smell like the bottom drawer in a maiden aunt's dresser?

At that moment, Alobar became aware of a new symptom. His ears had started to burn. Of itself, it wasn't a ruinous sensation, and he recalled the folk wisdom that attributed ear heat to gossip. If your ears burned, it meant that someone was talking about you. That would be okay, Alobar thought, especially if it were the parole board. But at this saw-log hour of the morning, who on Earth could possibly be talking about him?

Who, indeed?

“A thousand years old,” said Priscilla. “No-oo! He was feeding you a whopper.”

“Your man here is a scientist,” said Wiggs. “I am trained in skepticism. I'm not the chap to be swallowin' whoppers.”

“Ha! I've heard from informed sources that you believe in fairies.”

Wiggs reddened slightly. “'Tis an entirely different matter,” he said.

“Maybe not.”

“Myths explain the world.” He cleared his throat in a pedagogic manner. “Both the psychic and physical world. The world past, present, and future. When your ancient Celts spoke o' fairies, they were describin' the photon. Not the unintelligent pulse o' light that is the basis, the creator, o' all matter, but the pulse o' light charged with consciousness, the new photon that is evolvin' out o' matter. Faith, don't be gettin' me started on quantum physics and the wisdom o' the Irish. Alobar, for all his age, was no bloody fairy.”

“You know, your brogue is getting worse by the minute.”

“'Tis the drinkin'. And I shouldn't be drinkin'. Alcohol runs counter to me immortalist aspirations.”

Priscilla looked at her own glass of spirits. She thought of Ricki, waiting — perhaps worrying — at her apartment. “I shouldn't have anymore, either. Here, I'm gonna go in the kitchen and get us some ice water.”

“Arraugh!” Wiggs grabbed his collar as if he were strangling. “Water?” He rolled off the couch, still clutching his throat. “Water! Of all the liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse the baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!”

Priscilla giggled, which delighted him. His heart thought it was an electric toaster, set for “tan.” In her heart, the yeast was rising.

“Okay, okay, no water. What can I get you to replace the booze?”

Dr. Dannyboy straightened his tie and his eye patch, and reoccupied his seat on the sofa. The only illumination in the room was from the fireplace. It lent a cheerful glint to the cannibal cutlery above the mantel. “Another nice wet kiss would be fillin' the bill,” he said quietly.

Pushing aside anxiety about Ricki and curiosity about beets, she slid into his arms.

Across the continent, near Boston, in a cell inside Concord State Prison, Alobar's ears abruptly ceased burning.

“Ahh, I do love zippers. Zippers remind me o' crocodiles, lobsters, and Aztec serpents. I wish me tweeds had more than the single fly. . Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult, don't you think? Ahh. Little alligators of ecstasy, that's what zippers are. Sexy, too. Now your button, a button is prim and persnickety. There's somethin' Victorian about a row o' buttons. But a zipper, why a zipper is the very snake at the gate of Eden, waitin' to escort a true believer into the Garden. Faith, I should be sewin' more zippers into me garments, for I have many erogenous zones that require speedy access. Mmm, old zipper creeper, hanging head down like the carcass of a lizard; the phantom viper that we shun in daytime and communicate with at night.”

“Here, let me help you with that.”

Throughout Dr. Dannyboy's monologue, he had been trying to unzip Pris's dress, to part the teeth of the Talon that ran down the length of her green knit back; trying to maneuver it coolly, unobtrusively, as if Pris, suddenly noticing her dress falling away, would regard it as a spontaneous act of nature, organic and ordained, but he couldn't budge the damn thing, though he tugged until sweat burst out on his brow, and finally, she said. .

“Here, let me help you with that.”

And with one smooth stroke, she separated the interlocking tracks, the 'gator yawned, and, lo, there she sat in her underwear.

Her bra was rust-stained and more than a size too big.

Is that a brassiere or a flotation device? Wiggs wondered.

At least it was a cinch to remove. He simply pulled it over her head without unhooking it, catching her breasts as they tumbled out, like croquet balls from a canvas bag. They were as smooth as peeled onions and perfectly pinked. He squeezed one, nuzzled the other. The pink did not lick off.

There was a run in the seat of her nylon panties. Neither of them seemed to notice. His hand passed over the run like a streetsweeper passing over a skid mark, maintaining momentum, registering nothing. The longest finger on his left hand curled like a celery stalk and dipped into the bowl of her buttocks, a bowl in which metaphors were easily mixed.

“Sweet Jesus, 'tis wonderful you feel!”

“Wiggs. . you're still dressed for dinner.”

In a minute he was wearing nothing but his eye patch.

“You feel wonderful, baby,” he said, fingering her again. He had dropped his brogue with his shorts.

Priscilla had forgotten how it was with older men. The last man with whom she had lain was a twenty-year-old dishwasher from El Papa Muerta. During a single evening, he had made love to her four times — for three minutes each time. Perhaps it is noteworthy, she thought, that the performance of a young man in bed is roughly the same length as a rock song on AM radio.

“I. . had. . ummm. . forgotten. . how. . it is. . with. . older. . men.”

That must have been the wrong thing to say. Wiggs paused in midstroke. “Age,” he grumbled. “There are only two ages. Alive and dead. If your man is dead, he should go lie down somewhere and get out o' the way. But if 'tis alive he is. .”

He completed the stroke, then paused again. Oh, no, thought Priscilla. Surely he isn't going to get pedantic at a time like this?

Her worry was soon abated, for although Wiggs cleared his throat and tapped his patch with his finger, a clear signal that he was on the verge of expounding, he became distracted by the wiggly thrust of her pelvis, and gradually, after mumbling something about senility being wasted on the old, and something else about never having met an adult who really liked him, he fell silent, except for the occasional sweet grunt, and gave full attention to the further stoking of the hot box in which he found himself.

“Yes, God, yes,” moaned Pris. This was the way Effecto had loved her: muscular and tender, relaxed and confident, carefully modulating rhythm and tempo, prying her apart with sweet determination, kissing her adoringly all the while; a far cry from those young guys who were either trying to score touchdowns in bed or else practicing to join the tank corps. “Daddy!” squealed Pris.

“Daddy?” asked Wiggs.

“Uh, no, Danny,” said Pris. “Dannyboy.”

“Your man,” said Wiggs.

Effecto had played Priscilla like an accordion. Wiggs worked her as if she were an archaeological dig: spading, sifting, dusting, cataloging. Now, lying in a puddle on the sofa, she felt like she was ready to be shipped to the British Museum. Accompanied by a crate of late twentieth-century come shards.

Wiggs covered her with a Sepik war blanket and lay down beside her. A fresh Pres-to-log sputtered in the fireplace, and rain tapped messages in Morse code against the windowpanes. “You can't stay indoors forever,” and “There's plenty more where this came from” was what the rain was sending.

“Did you invite me here to seduce me?” asked Pris. She didn't care, at that point, she was merely curious. She caressed his flaccid shillelagh, wondering if Ricki would ever forgive her; wondering, too, if she would have felt half this good after sex with Ricki.

“I wish I could say yes, but the truth is, darlin', I wasn't that smart. This was an unexpected bonus.”

“Then why did you invite me?”

“Smell,” said Wiggs.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Now don't be takin' offense. Personally, you smell dainty as a lamb.” Dr. Dannyboy ducked his head beneath the blanket and took a vigorous whiff. “They can have their loaf o' warm bread, their new-mown hay. Nothin' beats the smell of a lassie freshly laid.”

“Hey. .”

“Again, no offense.” He surfaced, and kissed her with earnest affection. “See here, Priscilla, I have an interest in smell. That is, I have an interest in the evolution o' consciousness. Smell is the only sense to communicate directly with the neocortex. It bypasses the thalamus and the other middlemen and goes direct. Smell is the language the brain speaks. Hunger, thirst, aggression, fear, lust: your brain interprets these urges with a vocabulary o' smell. The neocortex speaks this language, and if we can learn to speak it, why we may be able to manipulate the cortex through the nose.”

“For what?”

“For expeditin' the evolution o' consciousness.”

“For what?”

“So's we can be happy and live a long, long time and not be bloody blowin' each other to bits.”

“You're going to disappoint a lot of generals.”

“Worse. It could mean the end o' Monday Night Football.”

“Well, fuck the Dallas Cowboys if they can't take a joke. But, Wiggs, wait a minute. What does any of this have to do with me?”

“You make perfume, don't you, darlin'?”

Priscilla raised herself on one elbow. “Uh, yeah, sort of. How did you know that?”

“I've learned a lot about perfumers since I met Alobar.”

“Alobar. The guy in prison.”

“Him.”

“The janitor.”

“And former king.”

“Who's a thousand years old.”

“Yes.”

She sat completely upright. “This is the nuttiest thing I've ever heard. I'm getting more confused by the minute. . ” She sounded genuinely distressed. Wiggs gripped her sticky thigh.

“'Tis a long story.”

“I don't care. And cut the brogue, please. You talked like an American when we were making love.”

“Sure and 'twas because your wild little wooky sobered me up. Now the grape has got hold o' me tongue again.”

“All right, fine, I don't care if you talk like Donald Duck. Just tell the story.”

“Should I start at the beginning?”

“If that's not too traditional.”

“But what about your date?""Her?"

“You've already eaten her share.”

“Never mind. Talk to me. Now.”

“I'll start with the sixties.”

“Fine. You were probably more interesting then. I understand everybody was.”

“I'll start with the seventies.”

“I like you, Wiggs.”

“Sure and I like you, too.”

He cleared his throat and, tapping his patch with a wooky-scented knuckle, commenced to pin a tail on the beet.

By then, it was that part of the day that is officially morning but which any dunce can see is purest night. The streets of Seattle were as wet and greeny black as freshly printed currency. Despite the hour and the weather, people were lined up outside the Last Laugh Foundation as if the Last Laugh Foundation were a radio station giving away rock stars to pubescent girls. Some of the people looked at Ricki's tea strainer of a car as it ever so slowly rattled by. Others persisted in gazing expectantly at the darkened mansion.

Squint as she might, Ricki could detect not a glimmer in the house. She bit her lip to keep from crying. “It's two-thirty,” she said sorrowfully, as if “two-thirty” were the name of a fatal disease. “It's two-thirty in the son-of-a-bitching morning.”

Were Ricki concerned with precise expression, and she was not, she might have added, “here,” for while it was indeed, two-thirty in Seattle, in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic. Still awake, Alobar lay upon his prison cot, practicing Bandaloop breath.

That's what he called it, what he and Kudra had called it all those years: Bandaloop breath. Of course, there was an absolute lack of evidence that the Bandaloop ever breathed in that manner. For that matter, there was precious little evidence that the Bandaloop ever existed. Absence of proof failed to faze Alobar, however, since, thanks to the Bandaloop, he had witnessed three hundred and eighty-five thousand, eight hundred and six sunrises in his life, and judging from the milky molluscan glow seeping through the barred window, was about to witness yet another.

Moreover, if he concentrated on his breathing, and the parole board soon ruled in his favor, he might go on witnessing sunrises indefinitely, despite the aging that worked in him now like naphthous bees in a leathery hive. That was his hope, although, considering his prospects, why he should want to go on — and on and on and on — was a question he could not easily answer. One thing was certain, he didn't intend to risk the Other Side without a splash of K23, and he was starting to wonder if he shouldn't have gone ahead and given Wiggs Dannyboy the formula for it. Dr. Dannyboy could have had some made and smuggled it in to him. His intense secrecy about K23, his long-standing refusal to tap its commercial potential, was a bit irrational, he must admit. But, then, were he a rational man, he would have been dead a thousand years. Ho.

Joints creaking like the lines of a storm-tossed ship, Alobar arose and hobbled to the window. He looked for his old benefactor, the morning star, but the window was tiny, and the only celestial light in the slice of sky available to his scrutiny was a blinking satellite circling the Earth. “The world is round-o, round-o,” he started to sing, but embarrassment shut him up. “If the parole board doesn't act soon, I'll send Dannyboy the formula,” he promised.

Alobar wasn't the only person thinking about a secret formula that morning (or night). Distracted by first one thing and then the other, Wiggs and Priscilla hadn't gotten around to it yet, but in New Orleans — time: four-thirty — Madame Devalier lay in her canopied bed, bejeweled hands crossed upon the vault of her belly, pondering a possible bottom note, mixing dozens, scores of ingredients in her mind's nose, not ever imagining how simple it could be; and not imagining, either, that in a cheap motel near the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where it was, yes, two-thirty, thank you, Ricki, V'lu Jackson slept with the answer — a drop or two of the answer — in an ancient bottle beneath her vinyl-wrapped, foam rubber pillow; and, of course, neither of them, Madame, awake, formulating, nor V'lu, dreaming, fist pressed against lonesome labia, could imagine that before they lay abed again, Bingo Pajama would be shot at their feet and that his little swarm of bees, masterless, would be frightening New Orleans half to. .

. . death. Arrgh! How Wiggs Dannyboy hated that word.

His reaction to “death” was neither terror nor resignation, avoidance nor morbid longing, shock nor denial, but, rather, fury. Controlled fury. Challenge, if you please. Combat. Wiggs was at war with death and had vowed never to surrender.

The declaration of war had been drawn up while he was in Concord State Prison. He had been transferred to Concord from a federal penitentiary in the Midwest at his own request after the incident in which a guard had poked out his right eye with a matchstick.

In the investigation that followed the blinding, it was revealed that Dr. Dannyboy had been subjected to almost continuous physical and mental harassment during his months in federal custody. The media, which, while it may have condemned Dannyboy's life-style and philosophy, had always found him good copy, fanned the story into a scandal. In addition, there was the threat of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. The government was hardly in a position to deny the request for transfer.

At Concord, Wiggs was near friends, mavericks who had managed to remain on the Harvard faculty or who had entered one or another of the “New Age” businesses that flourished in Cambridge and Boston. His pals kept him supplied with books from the university library and with the latest journals and papers in his fields of interest: anthropology, ethnobotany, mythology, and neuropharmacology. They paid him gossipy visits, monitored his health, and delivered his occasional contributions to The Psychedelic Review. They smuggled out the half-frozen dinner roll into which he had freshly ejaculated, rushing it to the parking lot where his ovulating wife (who was eventually to jilt him for a more available partner) received it and immediately did with it what she had to do: the origins of Huxley Anne.

It was, despite the many difficulties of prison life, a reasonably productive and stimulating period. There was plenty of time for contemplation, however, and Dr. Dannyboy used it to review what had been accomplished in the sixties, by himself and like-minded others. Then, he placed those accomplishments within the context of history, not merely the official history, with its emphasis on politics and economics, or the more pertinent history of the various ways that we have lived our daily lives since we first crawled out of the ooze or swung down from the foliage, but also the higher, more complex history of how our thought patterns, our nervous systems, our spiritual selfhoods have developed and changed.

This much Wiggs concluded: illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition; in every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals, living their lives upon the threshold, at the gateway of the next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization is probably still hundreds of years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of these elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole, thereby laying a significant patch of brick in the evolutionary road. He thought of the age of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. ("The Celts would have produced a major culture, too,” he told Priscilla, “if the Church hadn't got hold o' them first.") Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1971.

Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age, Wiggs admitted. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

Moreover, Wiggs believed that the American womb eventually would bear fruit. The United States was the logical location of the next enlightened civilization. And since the sixties phenomena had at least prepared the soil — many of the individuals who had successfully mutated during the sixties were carrying on, out of view of the public eye — the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away.

Even though, in social terms, the sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone, and Wiggs was proud that he had been able to lend a helping hand in ushering in that dizzy period of transcendence and awareness (transcendence of obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of inner reality). Still, he was dissatisfied. Anxious. Unhappy. It wasn't prison or the blinding that was bothering him, they were small sacrifices to make for what had been accomplished. It was something else, something that had haunted him since boyhood, undermining his every triumph, dulling his ecstasies, amplifying his agonies, mocking his optimism, spitting in his ice cream.

It was, he came gradually to realize, the specter of death.

If a person leads an “active” life, as Wiggs had, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just above his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.

Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we “live on” in the memory of the lucky ones still kicking.

Wiggs wasn't buying that “live on in memories” number. He had typed himself a small footnote in academic and social history. More important, he had, in his opinion, contributed to the evolution of consciousness in his time. But that sort of immortality was a hollow prize. If what he had accomplished in his “electronic shaman” days in the sixties was destined to have an impact on the future, he wanted to be around to enjoy it.

Not that he hadn't enjoyed himself already. He'd had more fun than an electric eel in a public bath, and, prison or no prison, eye patch or no eye patch, doom or no doom, he was confident the joy wasn't over yet. (As Wiggs related this sentiment to Priscilla, he patted her bare bottom for emphasis.) What's more, he didn't classify himself as a greedy fellow. It was simply that aging was so rapid and death so final that ultimately they robbed life of any meaning.

PHYSICAL PLEASURE

SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

ARTISTIC MASTERPIECES

SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS

even

LOVING RELATIONSHIPS

or even

SPIRITUAL ECSTASY

Could any or all of these balance the dark weight? The certainty that the most gifted, the most beautiful, the most wise, the most virtuous of us must grow old and die?

“It was then and there, wallowin' on me cot in Concord Prison, that I decided to do somethin' about it,” Wiggs said.

“Because every bloody thing else is secondary to the creepin' chill o' personal extinction.

“Death is the fly in everybody's ointment.

“Death has never been acceptable to humanity, and 'tis less so today.

“To the religious chap, I say, if God loves ye, he wouldn't sicken ye and then murder ye. To the rational fellow, and to the hedonist, as well, I say, death makes a mockery of your logic and your pleasure, alike.

“Folks can never be truly happy, or truly free, or even truly sane as long as they got to be expectin' the vigor to decline and the swatter to fall.

“So, darlin', I pushed aside everything else, cleared me jail cell o' professional journals and scholarly books and, yes, girlie magazines, too, although Alobar was to teach me that was a mistake, and I vowed to dedicate me every erg o' energy to this modest pursuit: the eradication o' death.”

Priscilla looked at him with respectful disbelief. “Well, frankly,” she said, “I've got to classify that under the label of beating the old head against the old brick wall.”

“Indeed?”

“Why, yes, Wiggs. Of course. Everything that's alive was born, and everything that was born has got to die. There's no getting around it. It's the law of the universe.”

Nude though he was, Dr. Dannyboy drew himself up like a bank president. He tapped his patch portentiously, like a master of ceremonies testing a microphone. Then, in a surprisingly soft and even tone, he said:

“The universe does not have laws.

“It has habits.

“And habits can be broken.”

Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind. It taxed the wipers, ragged and lame, that limped, complaining every step of the way, back and forth across Ricki's windshield; first plangent, then lambent, then plangent again, it addressed the tarpaper roof of V'lu's motel, adding an extra dimension to her dreams; it stacked its liquid telegrams against the windowpanes of the Last Laugh Foundation.

Ricki pulled the VW into the driveway of her duplex, killed the engine (a mercy killing), and dashed for her door. She ran not to minimize rain-soak but in order to catch the ring of the telephone should Pris be on the line.

A horned man with the haunches of a goat forced his way into V'lu's dream. The dreamscape was lit by a yellow flame, and there was a suck suck sound as the creature, advancing on her, pulled his hooves in and out of soupy mud. V'lu was awakened by the pounding of her own heart. She was surprised and disturbed to find her pussy quite wet. Realizing that the man in the dream and the man on the bottle were the same, she wisely removed the bottle from under her pillow and buried it beneath the neatly folded clothes in her suitcase. In the darkness, tinted slightly by a seepage of NO VACANCY neon, she walked to the window. Although it was permanently sealed, through it she could smell the rain. Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain, thought V'lu. She was right. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.

Except to the extent that it enhanced the coziness of their fireside chat, Priscilla and Wiggs were oblivious to the rain. It was simply there in the background, like the feeble fire in the grate. In the foreground were hormones, questions, and wild ideas.

Priscilla was willing to accept Dr. Dannyboy's notion that mortality was the principal source of misery for the human race. She might, moreover, sympathize with his painful conclusion that his previous philosophy had been a sham because it had been friendly to death, accommodating it, making excuses for it, even celebrating our vulnerability to it. But his apparently sincere conviction that he could snatch the mouse hair and remove the scimitar struck her as the kind of high-pitched delusion that can shatter a man's mind like a cut-glass punching bag.

“Wiggs,” she said, “all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and Amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically, uh, barbecued your brain?”

“Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.”

At that, even the rain backed away.

Things were quiet for a while, what with the slack in the weather and a conversational pause. After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Boing! The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism. Pris was beginning to experience a resurgence of powerful urges in her loins when all at once there was a thumping noise from the floor above them.

“What's that?” she asked.

Wiggs spat out the nipple. “Morgenstern. I hope he doesn't wake Huxley Anne.”

“What's he doing up there?”

“Oh, 'tis a dance that he does, a dance against dying.”

“Wiggs, what is going on in this nuthouse? I mean, you don't have a laboratory on the whole blessed premises, but you've got a Nobel chemist dancing with himself at three in the morning — or is he dancing with a full-grown kangaroo? It sounds like it — and do you actually believe you're going to live forever? Tell me you don't believe it. Please.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You don't?” She sounded relieved.

“No, I don't believe that Wiggs Dannyboy will be livin' forever, but future generations will, Huxley Anne quite likely will, and even so, I expect to outlast me detractors. I could see me hundred-and-twentieth birthday, I could easily.”

“But how? And why? Is this some sort of grandiose and rococo midlife crisis? Are you that afraid of getting old? Aging is the most natural thing in the world.”

He snorted. “Sure and there's where you're bloody mistaken, me darlin'. There's where you're as wrong as garters on a nun.” He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip. “Agin' is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a hell of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. 'Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust.”

“Rust? I don't—”

“I'm talkin' about the degeneration o' cells. I'm talkin' about the gumming up o' cells with superoxide free radicals and toxins, I'm talkin' about the gradual breakdown o' healthy cell reproduction due to progressive deterioration o' nucleic acids. 'Tis all a form o' rustin'.”

“And it can be prevented?”

“It can.”

“Why don't doctors know about it then?”

“You might as well ask why didn't mariners in the Middle Ages know the world was round?”

“A few did.”

“Sure and a few doctors today know the truth of agin'.” He paused, gazing into the fire. Eventually, he smiled and said, “Your man, Alobar, he knew the world was round way back then. And in his own fashion, he knows the truth about age.”

“Ah, yes, Alobar: the janitor who never rusts.”

“Well, until recently he didn't. I should be gettin' back to me story.”

“That's for sure.”

“A kiss first.”

“Mmm.”

At Concord, Dr. Dannyboy had cleared his cubicle of journals and papers relating to his erstwhile (and some said, alleged) profession, only to gradually replace them with material relating to gerontology, genetics, and life extension. From prison, he became privy to the latest longevity research at universities in North America, Europe, and Japan, and at private institutions such as the Bjorksten Research Foundation, Montesano Laboratories, the Menninger Clinic, and the Institute of Experimental Morphology in Soviet Georgia. Allowed one telephone call per week, he found himself, guiltily, dialing a biologist at Cornell or a gerontologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School, rather than his wife and infant daughter in nearby Boston.

It was far from easy, keeping pace with the leading edge of some of the most esoteric science, but Dr. Dannyboy was resourceful and, despite his unfashionable address, charming. What he learned encouraged and delighted him. To be sure, it also frustrated him in the saddest way that there wasn't more effort and money behind rejuvenation research. With an immense national effort, such as the project that brought us the atomic bomb, we could add fifty years to the average life span in no time at all, he was convinced of that. Wiggs also was depressed by the fact that he was unable to benefit personally from the information that he was accumulating. Nutrition was one area, for example, where he might have done some immediately salubrious work, but, alas, there were few diets on Earth so perfect for rusting out the machinery as the starch-and-sugar blizzard, the fatty acid monsoon of prison fare.

Wiggs began to fall prey to wide swings in mood. One day, brightened by the latest report from the UCLA Medical Center or some such place, he would be as optimistic as a newborn fly in a Mexican restaurant (an insect that might have its own vision of “the perfect taco"), but the next day, crushed by the realities of the slowness of underfunded research and the deadlines of prison life, he'd be aboard that nickel submarine that is anchored at the bottom of the Black Lagoon.

Then, late one evening, as Wiggs whispered coarse curses at the Capital of Adjectives — the moon — there was an explosion across Middlesex County at MIT, at one of the very laboratories that Wiggs was monitoring; and about three months later, as if in slow motion or delayed reaction, that blast blew into Concord Prison a new inmate named Al Barr, who would soon have incandescent beet leaves curling out of the eye of Dannyboy's periscope.

When he first learned about the bombing of the MIT lab, Wiggs was irate. A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus. While other experts in the field spoke of “the challenges presented by the mysterious and implacable process called aging,” scientists in the MIT experiment talked about slowing down aging as if that feat were already possible, and they stated publicly that in the future, “society might be able to abolish death from natural causes entirely.” Dannyboy admired people who could rescue themselves from modest objectives.

He had expected the “middle-aged” janitor convicted of destroying the lab to be a fundamentalist Christian fanatic, a sexually repressed lout driven loony as an outhouse rat by charlatan evangelists and the ambiguous poetry of the Bible; a knife-nosed, tight-lipped, lost-eyed ignoramus on a self-appointed mission to punish scientists for playing God, like those peasants who burn down the mad doctor's castle at the conclusion of countless monster movies.

When Wiggs thought of lodging with this yahoo under a common roof, the green Spanish worm of revenge began to turn in his heart.

Therefore he was not only surprised but a bit abashed when Al Barr proved to be the most dignified prisoner in Concord. Straight of spine and sapphirine of eye, Barr appeared poised, intelligent, and master of a certain smile. Whereas Wiggs, on his good days, had a smile that snipped the tense prison air like musical scissors, Barr's smile was on the order of those stone-cut enigmas that, wired to a heroic nerve, grace the faces of classical statues. He wore an air of mystery and some very interesting scars.

Having decided that this chap was no ordinary janitor (although it was known that he had swabbed the tiles of Boston's Turkish Bath House for years), and having become increasingly curious about the motives for the vandalism at MIT, and, further, having had little luck in generating conversation with Barr in the exercise yard (where the new inmate was occupied with a strange kind of yoga), Wiggs pulled some strings (had Wiggs been Geppetto, Pinocchio never would have left home) and arranged for Barr to become his cellmate.

The arrangement was acceptable to Alobar, who intuited that the one-eyed Irish drug maniac would be better company than the blue-collar sister-raper with whom he had previously been bunking. Although Alobar never trusted Wiggs completely (Wiggs was open and eccentric in ways the more closed and conservative Alobar found unsettling), the pair slowly, gradually became such friends that Alobar told him his life story. All thousand years of it. Everything.

Well, not quite everything. He told Wiggs more than he had told Albert Einstein. He told him of exploits in Asia, adventures in French Canada (when Pan, half-mad from the lingering effects of K23, was still close by), which even the reader of these pages has not been told. He told him, more than once, of the perfume that was so strangely significant in his life. But he never told him how to make the perfume.

He told him almost how to make the perfume. He told him of the jasmine theme, the citric top note, and how he had finally discovered the great elusive and startling base note of beet. Ah, but Alobar, the fox, left something out. He said “beet” to his bunky, but he did not say “beet pollen.” If he had, things would have gone differently for several people that we know.

What's more, Alobar forced Wiggs to swear upon his mother's grave, his wife's knickers, the Book of Kells, the fairy hills of County Dublin, his one good eye, and everything else that he held holy, including whiskey, vision root, the true universe, Huxley Anne's future happiness, and the Salmon That Fed on the Nine Hazel Nuts of Poetic Art, that he would never ever mention to anyone that beet was the secret ingredient in an allegedly unique and wonderful perfume.

Therefore, Wiggs kept the word beet to himself, fine and private, despite his sensitivity to Priscilla's burning curiosity about the comettailed vegetable that had extended its crimson orbit into her atmosphere. He did, however, tell her the rest of Alobar's life story. Rather, he told her the highlights of Alobar's life story, for to tell the whole of it would have taken months. As it was, it took a full two hours, what with Pris getting up twice to pee, and Wiggs tiptoeing upstairs three times to check on Huxley Anne.

By the end of the story, Dr. Morgenstern had long since ceased his immortalist jitterbug, the fire was out, the windowpanes nearly dry — and Priscilla was practically faint from the knowledge that she was in possession of the ancient bottle that had held the Kudra-baiting, Pan-deodorizing K23.

Finding herself stunned and upended by that knowledge, like a myopic houseguest who has walked into a patio door, Pris groped for sturdy furniture with which to right herself. “But—” she said, “but if they really truly did live all that time, all those centuries. . I mean, how? It's medically impossible, isn't it? How could they have done it?” She was stalling. She wasn't prepared to talk about the bottle just yet.

“Medically impossible 'tis not. Humanly impossible 'tis not. Can it be done? ye ask. Does koala-beer poop smell like cough drops?”

Wiggs then went on, applying an occasional rat-a-tat to the shamrock, to explain Alobar and Kudra's program and how it was based upon the Four Elements. He took each element in turn and did a little number with it.

AIR

“We relate to air through the breath. Most of us don't breathe properly, which is to say, we take in too little or too much and fail to consume it efficiently. Alobar and Kudra developed a method o' breathin' whereby the inhale and exhale were connected in an uninterrupted rhythm, a continuous, circular, flywheel pattern like a serpent swallowin' its own tail. Their breathin' was deep and smooth and regular. When they brought air into their bodies, they visualized suckin' in as much energy and vitality as possible; when they expelled air, they visualized blowin' out all the staleness and flatness inside o' them.

“Simple, 'tis true, but hardly simplistic when we understand that much o' the cellular damage that leads to tissue breakdown — agin', in other words — is caused by the accumulation in our bodies o' the toxic by-products o' metabolizin' oxygen. Superoxide free radicals, which is what these garbage molecules are called, combine with fatty acids to produce lipofuscin, which is an unstable, repulsive gunk that clogs up a cell like grease clogs a drain. The more goop ye have gummin' up your cells, the greater the strain on your metabolism, and the more taxed the metabolism the easier 'tis for still more poisons to accumulate.

“Biological studies have proven that the animals with the longest life spans are those with the lowest rates per body weight of oxygen consumption, apparently because they dump fewer superoxide free radicals in their cells. Since we're stuck with havin' to breathe oxygen until somethin' better comes along — laughin' gas is me own nomination, but so far Nature's not seen fit to make the improvement — we need to learn to consume less of it and to burn it more efficiently. Sure and that is precisely what your couple, oblivious though they were to the putrid perils o' lipofuscin, succeeded in doin'.

“Proper breathin', in addition, reduces stress, and stress is a major contributor to agin', disease, and death. Alobar had been introduced to the virtues o' slow, relaxed breathin' at Samye lamasery. 'The lungs are not plow yaks,' the lamas said, 'so do not drive them. Neither are they potting sheds, so keep them free of cobwebs.' What the Bandaloop 'told' him, on the other hand, is impossible to translate, but 'tis obvious, 'tisn't it, darlin', that if a serpent of air is to swallow its tail — thereby perpetuatin' the circle o' life — it must be flexible, not tense.”

WATER

“Water, too, is helpful in alleviatin' stress. How many bloomin' times have ye heard, 'Why don't ye get into a nice hot bath and relax?' Sure, but relaxation may not o' been the primary result of Alobar and Kudra's bathin' rituals, nor was the psychological benefit o' ceremonial purification the main thing, although neither should be underestimated for their effect in promotin' salubrious longevity. O' greater benefit may have been the ability o' the bathin' ceremony to lower blood temperature.

“Research at Purdue University, the UCLA Medical Center, and other lovely places has demonstrated that agin' can be forced into the slow lane, if not off the road altogether, by decreasin' the body's temperature. Hypothermia not only slows down the metabolic pump, allowin' it to coast a bit and refresh itself, it puts a lid on the autoimmune reactions that contribute to an organism's deterioration. You see, darlin', our immune systems tend to be trigger-happy, especially at high or 'normal' temperatures, frequently attacking the very cells they hired on to defend — not unlike your police department or your FBI. When body temperature is depressed, the immunological cops remain in the station house playin' checkers, respondin' with their pistols, tear gas, and billy clubs only to genuinely threatenin' situations. The wear and tear this saves on the body is the difference between a cherry and a beater.

“Now, being European, Alobar was less than an enthusiastic participant when Kudra discovered a thermal spring in one o' the caves, but gradually he came to appreciate the contribution o' the bath to their program. Their procedure was to soak for a half-hour or so, then withdraw to shade for a quarter-hour, repeatin' the process four or five times. The hot water caused their blood to rise to the skin surface, where, once they left the tub, it was in a position to be rapidly cooled. Ye understand? Over a period of centuries, this regular cooling down o' the blood may well have reset their internal thermostats — their hypothalamuses — so that they registered permanently two or three degrees below borin'—and debilitatin'—old ninety-eight point six. In Concord, alas, I never got a chance to take your man's temperature.

“'Tis not the whole of it, though. Our bodies, splendid though they be, are as gullible as your widow in love or your farm boy on Broadway. The body will fall for the same line from the same slick-talking placebo over and over again. Fortunately, it is usually as much to our advantage to be conned by a placebo as to be blarnied by an Irishman, and that was the case when the hot tub fooled the DNA of Alobar and Kudra into reactin' as if its hosts were back in the womb again. The temperature o' womb fluid is a fairly constant one hundred degrees. That happened to be the temperature o' the cavern spring where your couple bathed in India, and they duplicated it as precisely as possible whenever they heated baths in Constantinople or Europe. Floatin' suspended in one-hundred-degree water as often as they did may have conned their DNA into believin' they were neoembyronic, thus supplyin' them with the strongest and freshest hormones and enzymes, because 'tis the nature of DNA to lavish life-enhancin' goodies upon the fetal and the young, while deprivin' us that is over twenty.

“In the centuries when they traveled the fair circuit, they carted a barrel about with 'em, going to the trouble to fill it nightly with bathwater heated in Kudra's silver teapot. Their patience and persistence paid off. Every time the teapot whistled, your Pale Figure would lay down his scythe and mop his bony brow with a black bandanna: quittin' time on the corpse plantation, the most productive farm on Earth. Sure and Alobar stuck to his bathin' throughout his years in America.”

EARTH

“Trees and houses and diamond mines may attach themselves like lice to this element, but ye know that soil itself is fastened to the belly. Dirt is the mother o' lunch.

“There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition, but 'tis obvious that diet must've played an important role in Alobar and Kudra's long-run performance.

“By now, even congenital idiots shut up in cellars in Saskatchewan grain towns are aware that excess body fat promotes infirmity and shortens life expectancy, but are ye familiar with the experiments at Cornell, Montesano Laboratories, the University of California, and the Nebraska Medical School? Severely reduced calorie intake and restricted ingestion o' certain amino acids by laboratory animals drastically altered the process of agin'. There was an unfortunate side effect: your animals who were deprived of amino acids suffered from weakened immune systems. However, ye might recall that Alobar and his woman were, in perfect bloomin' counterbalance, strengthenin' their immunological effectiveness by coolin' their blood.

“Your man and his wife ate simply, but apparently they ate with gusto. They consumed small amounts o' food at a time, and let me impress somethin' upon ye, darlin', 'tis the best kept secret o' nutrition that 'tis healthier to eat small amounts o' 'bad' food than large amounts o' 'good.'

“Alobar told me that they fasted for five days each month. Now there's nothin' like periodic fastin' for cleanin' out your pipes, and remember 'tis the accumulated death o' cells — their failure to reproduce — that ages and kills a body, and 'tis the accumulation o' toxins that kills a cell. How does your sweet little cell get polluted with toxins? From improper breathin' and improper diet.

“One other thing about your couple's menu. Ye'll be rememberin', o' course, that they were eaters o' beets. They were your original beetniks, ha ha. Well, 'twas only a few years past that Dr. Benjamin S. Frank discovered that beets build up the blood, stimulate the liver (which is our main organ o' purification), and supply a body with nucleic acid, nucleic acid being absolutely essential to the efficient reproduction o' youthful cell structure. Ta-da!”

(Dr. Dannyboy felt a wee bit guilty about bringing up beets in the context of nutrition while saying nothing about their application in perfumery, a subject that, for the present, at least, was a hell of a lot more interesting to Priscilla. In the near darkness, he watched something flicker in her tired violet eyes at his mention of beets. Surely the poor girl didn't think that a good samaritan was sending her beets in order to improve her diet?)

FIRE

“With the element o' fire, sex enters the picture.”

A little too obviously, he squeezed the cheeks of her ass. Not to be outdone, she squeezed the cheeks of his ass. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine sex entering the picture. Would sex enter the picture in a silk robe, or would it be as nude as a platter of cold cuts? Would sex enter the picture from the left or the right? Would it ring first, or would it just slide in slyly, too quick and slippery to be denied; or, would sex barge in forcibly, red-faced and green-bereted, pushing all other things aside? She was very tired. .

“Now we know that sex can ease stress, and we know that stress wears out the rubber on the wheel o' life. But sexual fire, like the breath of air and the bath o' water, makes other contributions to the immortalist program.

“The human organism is designed by DNA to maintain an optimum of strength and health to sexual maturity — and just a few years beyond. Once it has presumedly done its procreative duty, (and the perpetuation o' the species may be the only thing DNA really cares about) 'tis kissed off, abandoned to steadily deteriorate. What Alobar and Kudra did was to keep their sexual fires so hotly stoked that DNA was fooled into believin' that they were just entering into sexual maturity. The fact that, despite their adolescently high hormone levels, they never actually produced a pregnancy, only contributed to the ruse. What with their womb soaks and sex spurts, their DNA couldn't get a clear fix on their age. 'Twas only aware that they had somethin' going, and to be safe, it had better support them.

“You're yawnin'.”

Priscilla stretched. “You know what time it is?”

“I hope I've not been borin' ye—”

“Oh, no. .”

“—with me gab. But ye wanted to know if 'twas medically possible for your man to live a thousand years, and I had to make me case. Next you'll be wantin' to know how 'tis medically possible for a tongue to wag incessantly without comin' unhinged. Me ex-wife said, 'Wiggs, you talk so much that when you die they'll have to beat your tongue to death with a stick.' I resent that remark. She should've said, 'if' you die.”

Pris made two small fists and rubbed her eyes. “Oh, Wiggs,” she said.

“Hey, 'tis true! Your man programs himself to die. Almost with our first breath, we're taught to expect our last. The power o' suggestion will pack you up if nothin' else does. Check the statistics sometime on how many people die at the same age that their parents died, the parent whom they most identified with. Your man Elvis Presley not only packed it up at the same age as his mum, but the very same day o' the year. The body is the servant o' the mind, and if we keep tellin' our bodies that they're probably goin' to croak, age seventy-two, then come seventy-two, croak they will. Maybe the main reason your Alobar lived on was because he believed he could. It doesn't matter how ye take care o' yourself, beets and baths and breaths and whatever, if ye think that your death is inevitable, it will be. Attitude, attitude. 'Tis the death wish that nails 'em, every bleedin' time.”

Wiggs actually paused for a moment, but before Pris could take advantage of the situation, he coughed up a couple of chuckles. “Funny thing,” he said, “but that's where Alobar went wrong.”

“Where? Did he go wrong?” Her voice was limp and webby, as if it were being filtered through mummy wrapping. “I was under the impression that he did everything right.”

“Sure and 'twasn't right puttin' the torch to that laboratory. Landed him in Concord, where he's in a bloody fix. And 'twas completely unnecessary.”

“He gave his promise.”

“No matter. 'Twas in vain. Ye see, even if MIT, or any other institution, should come up with a purple elixir, some formula for indefinitely extendin' life, it wouldn't help those old boys in the White House and the Pentagon. Not a whit. The death wish is so ingrained in 'em, in every polluted cell o' their shriveled old brains, that nothin' could make a difference. They can change their diets, change their chemistry, but they can't change their fundamental attitudes. If ye could peek at their personal TV listings, ye'd find they've got a fiery finish scheduled on every channel. What's more, they're lookin' forward to it.”

“But why?” she asked weakly.

“'Tis their religion. To a man, your leaders believe that life on this ball o' clay is merely a test. An entrance exam for eternity. 'Tis the next life they're interested in, a life spent swappin' tales o' power with God, sittin' around the lobby o' the Paradise Hotel. That's why they're so dangerous, those righteous old farts. If they pushed the button and furnaced the Earth, they'd say the Earth had it comin'. Sin and immortality and all. Most o' them are secretly wishin' for it. Fry those of us who are at ease with Nature and enjoyin' ourselves, then harpsichord off to their reward. No wonder people are scared silly. Most o' them won't let it show, but they're scared. Look at the line outside this house. It grows longer week by week.”

“What do they want?”

“Those people in line? They want somebody to tell 'em they have a chance at the i-n-g of life and not just the e-d.”

“Are you going to tell them, Wiggs?”

He sat upright and ran his fingers through his copse of chromium curls. “Me? I don't know. I had a fling with messiahhood once. The Caesars tried to crucify me, but they only got one eye. Ha! Still, I wonder if 'twas worth it. If you look this good to me out o' one eye, darlin', imagine how ye'd look out o' two.” As if releasing a pigeon from a cage, he freed a sigh. The pigeon was so heavy it could barely fly. Priscilla stroked his jaw. Sensing some pity in the gesture, he brushed her hand away.

“At any rate, 'tis too early to help the poor bastards. If I let 'em in here now, they'd only feel ripped off. Just like you, they'd be lookin' around for the laboratories. How could I make 'em understand that I am the laboratory? And not a very good one. I drink too much. And I let me daughter get chubby.

“When I established the Last Laugh Foundation, it was to research the psychological barriers to immortality. Because what I learned from Alobar was that we have to evolve beyond our death consciousness if we expect to claim our divine right to life everlastin'. If we expect to be i-n-g instead of e-d. When I met Professor Morgenstern six months ago and found that he'd become a bloomin' nonstop immortalist, I invited him, at great expense, to take up residency here, not merely because o' the credibility he'd lend to the joint but because I thought he'd be settin' up a lab, and we could run some test-tube experiments out o' here as well. Oh my, and the fairies tricked me on that one! But it all fits together. Do ye know what 'tis called, that jig Morgenstern is always doin'?”

There was no response from Priscilla. Unless “Zznnphh” may be considered a response. She was snoring.

It was a pretty little snore. A rustling of scarabs in the mummy wrappings. Wiggs listened attentively. Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon. But Priscilla's snore, it had a Stevie Wonder sound. A lyrical scrap left over from “My Cherie Amour.” Wiggs tried to hum along.

For a while, he listened and watched, marveling at the manner in which the dawn light seemed to cling to her lashes, at the tiny shadow cast by her Frito nose.

Then he slid gently off of the couch and gathered his tweeds. Huxley Anne would be waking soon, and he must be there. There were nine bedrooms in the Last Laugh Foundation, but he shared a room with his child. Never did he want her to go looking in the morning for a parent who was really a bookend.

Before he climbed the stairs, however, he tiptoed into the dining room and surveyed the centerpiece. Selecting the largest of the beets, a specimen that weighed as much as the skull of a lemur, he fetched it back to the den and laid it upon the cushion next to Priscilla's snore.

Pris slept for about two hours. The length of a Stevie Wonder concert and a few minutes more. When she was awakened by a thud-a-thump on the ceiling, she knew, even before opening her eyes, exactly where she was.

She caught a whiff of Irish Spring cologne. She sensed the presence of a face beside her own. Smiling, she turned toward the face and kissed it.

Blech!

What she kissed was rough and cold and flavored of topsoil.

Her lids popped open. Any morning light that might have been stuck to her lashes fell away like spilled sugar.

For a long time, she sat there regarding the beet, looking at it with optimism, misgiving, wonderment, bewilderment, and slight disgust, like a beginning medical student confronting her first anatomical drawing of a prostate gland.

At that moment, in Concord, Massachusetts, Alobar was likewise engrossed in anatomical scholarship. He had very nearly reported to sick call that morning, but changed his mind when his ears suddenly cooled. Instead, he decided to consult his library of Penthouse magazines.

As he had pointed out to Dr. Dannyboy, frequent sexual stimulation was essential to a youthful physiometry. And for a heterosexual behind bars, what stimulation was there besides memories and magazines?

On page 83, a young actress was bent over like a map of Florida, affording an unobstructed view of the inland waterway around Cocoa Beach. Sailing in those backwaters would be sunny and brisk. But at the end of the voyage, he'd be searching the horizon for Kudra again.

He was thinking of Kudra, her courage, her character, her crazy wisdom, when a guard rattled his cage. “Barr! From the warden!” The guard shoved an official-looking envelope into the cell. “They're gonna hang ya first thing tomorrow. Tough luck. Ha ha.”

“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” said Alobar, mouthing what to him, from the vantage point of having seen hundreds of countries come and go, come and go, was one of the most shortsighted utterances for which a man was ever remembered.

The letter informed him that his hearing before the parole board was being postponed until “after the holidays.”

Which holidays? Did they mean Thanksgiving, which was only three days away, or all the holidays, Christmas and New Year's as well as Thanksgiving? He sat down on his bunk with his head in his hands. If they kept postponing parole, they might as well hang him. A lump formed in his throat. It was as large as a beet. It was imperative that he dissolve it.

He ripped up the letter. “I am immortal,” he said, ignoring the granny's wedding dress smell that streamed from each of his pores.

He returned to Penthouse, opening it to the centerfold. In this photograph, the actress reminded him of Alaska, the centerfold of states: big, beautiful, unrefined, empty — and absolutely irresistible to the type of man who shoots a lot of pool in taverns while dreaming constantly of striking it rich.

“Now, Kudra. .”

The beet reminded Priscilla, rather rudely, that Wiggs had managed to talk until sunup without ever explaining her connection to his obsessions. She rose, dressed (feeling pleasantly sordid as she wriggled into the green party dress), and went searching for her host.

Had she thought clearly about it, she might have realized that it was Monday morning and Wiggs had doubtlessly taken Huxley Anne to school. There remained, however, a yard or two of mummy bandage festooning her brain, so she went about the ground floor of the house calling, none too loudly, “Wiggs.”

Unsuccessful, she ascended the stairs and repeated the procedure. No response there, either. She did, however, hear a thumping and bumping noise emanating from the master suite and assumed that it was Wolfgang Morgenstern.

The door to the suite, thrice her age, was graced by an old-fashioned keyhole. In secretive New Orleans, keyholes were always plugged, but this one was as open and inviting as a prostitute's kimono. She laid a bloodshot peeper to it.

Dr. Morgenstern, fully dressed, was skipping and bounding about the suite in a kind of exaggerated, athletic polka. Every once in a while, he would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step; then, necktie flapping, an exultant yelp springing from his heaving breast, he would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.

Well, she'd witnessed some crazy dances during Mardi Gras and all, but this one took the cake, and the coffee, too. Actually, it looked like fun, although on a morning such as this it would surely put her in the morgue. Nervously, she spied a bit longer, then pulled away. There was an imprint upon her upper cheek that resembled an archway in a sultan's palace.

Downstairs, slipping into her raincoat, she noticed that the beet still lay on the sofa, but now, unless her nostrils were playing games with her, there hung a vulgar odor about it, the familiar beet-delivery stink, which she was positive had not been present earlier.

The genius waitress walked home through sunlit traffic. Puddles shrank before her eyes and she could practically hear the pavement drying. “The mountains were out,” as they said in Seattle, meaning that the overcast had lifted and snowcapped peaks were flashing flossed fangs from every quadrant, as if Seattle were the object of some cosmic plea for dental health.

It was one of those glorious days that, had they occurred less rarely, would have led to Seattle being more populous than Tokyo or India. Gulls circled downtown skyscrapers, derelicts with faces like soup bones luxuriated on jewel-bright park benches, and out in the glittering bay, flotillas of sailboats showed off for watercolorists. Despite her bedraggled condition, or because of her bedraggled condition, men smiled at Priscilla as they passed, and she could not help smiling back.

To be sure, she was exhausted; obviously, she was confused; but she was excited, as well. She felt that she was caught up in some chaotic but grand adventure that was lifting her out of context and placing her beyond the normal constraints of society and biology.

The idea of a thousand-year-old convict with a dematerialized wife and Pan for a pal was difficult to swallow, and the goings-on at the Last Laugh Foundation were enough to strain the elastic on the cerebral panty hose. Ah, but then there was the bottle! In the past, the bottle had meaning to her only as a means of getting rich — of getting even — but now. . now, she sensed that the drop or two of exquisite fragrance in that weird old vessel had greater worth than she had imagined. The bottle seemed charged with omen and portent, it had a mojo working, as Madame Devalier and her black friends used to say. That bottle was a link to something. It could melt the ice on the dog dish of destiny, and it was hers!

She was glad that she hadn't told Wiggs about the bottle. It would give her an excuse to see him again soon. It would undoubtedly elevate her in his view, and, speaking of links, it would serve to hook them up like sausages in this Alobar adventure.

For the first time since she learned the truth about her daddy, Priscilla felt lucky, blessed. Furthermore, unless she was misreading the symptoms, she was in love.

A rat-bite of guilt accompanied the admission of her amorous state, and she decided that she had better call Ricki right away. To that end, she nipped into Market Time Drugs on Broadway and made for the pay phone, which, as reality would have it, was just across the aisle from the perfume counter.

Ricki's phone rang three or four time, and then Pris heard that click and moment of artificial silence that meant she was about to be the recipient of a recorded message.

“Hello, this is Adolf Hitler. I'm out of the country right now, but I'll be happy to return your call as soon as I'm back in power. If Aryan, leave your name and number at the beep.”

After hanging up, Priscilla entertained the notion of taking a bus over to the Ballard district for a meeting face to face. She was reasonably certain Ricki was at home. Then, the last strip of mummy wrap fell away from her brain: Hey! It was Monday, there was a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special at the 13 Coins at 11:00 A.M. Ricki would be there. Moreover, the waitresses were going to vote that very day on candidates for a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar grant.

She looked at the drugstore clock. Jesus, Mary, and Pepto-Bismol! It was ten already.

Priscilla had been looking forward to fishing out the bottle and, well, studying it, adoring it, consulting it or something, but she barely had time to soap away (a bit reluctantly) the dried and aromatic frosting of coital secretions, to comb her tangles, apply cosmetics, and change into sweater and jeans. As it was, she arrived at the 13 Coins twelve minutes late.

“They're hiring at that new seafood restaurant on Lake Union,” Trixie Melodian was saying. “What's it called? Fear of Tuna.”

“Forget it,” said Sheila Gomez. “I've seen the menu. They're serving Bermuda triangles with shark dip.”

“So what?” countered Ellen Cherry Charles. “I caught the special yesterday at that pit where you work: 'spaghetti western.'”

“It actually wasn't bad,” said Sheila.

“Yeah? Well, hang 'em high, honey.”

Priscilla surveyed the room. Ricki wasn't there yet.

“We've got live music now, three nights a week,” said Doris Newton.

“Improve your tips?”

“Are you kidding? Stark Naked and the Car Thieves?! Bunch of kids look like they're dressed to invade Iwo Jima. Sound like a cat with its asshole on fire.”

“I know that band,” said Trixie. “They're fun to dance to.”

“Is that dancing or walking in a mine field?”

“People can't dance and eat at the same time.”

“Worse, people can't dance and tip at the same time.”

“Car Thieves' fans don't tip. They garrote and strafe.”

There were no windows in the banquet room, so Priscilla put her ear to the walnut paneling. She thought that she could hear Ricki's clunker maneuvering for a parking space.

There was a new member present. She was skinny, bepimpled, getting rapidly drunk, and didn't look as if she'd been to college. Of course, looks can be deceiving. The girl gulped a swallow of wine large enough to drown a parakeet, then announced, “Dear Abby is a man.”

“Pardon,” said Ellen Cherry.

“Did you know that? Dear Abby is really a man.”

“Yeah,” said Ellen Cherry. “Say, anybody get any tempting and entertaining propositions this week?”

“In real life, I mean,” said the new girl.

“Right,” said Ellen Cherry, turning her back and trying again to change the subject. “Come on, ladies. Didn't anybody get invited to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?”

“I got invited to the Fountain of Youth,” said Priscilla. She couldn't help it, it popped right out. “A gentleman asked me to join him in achieving something more than mere animal succession, in perpetuating indefinitely the distinctive personality, the individual self. What do you all think of the idea of human beings living to be a thousand years old? What do you think about death?”

A silence as thick as an Eskimo throw rug fell over the gathering.

Fingering her crucifix, Sheila Gomez looked as if she wanted to comment, but the air in the banquet room was so taut she couldn't spit a word out. Finally, Ellen Cherry turned to the new girl. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Are you sure Dear Abby is a man.”

The girl brightened. “Oh, yeah,” she chirped. “Bald old guy in a wheelchair. Lives in Australia or someplace.”

“How about her sister?” asked Doris.

“Huh?”

“The other one. Ann Landers. The sister.”

“Oh, Ann Landers,” said the new girl. She smiled triumphantly. “Ann Landers is a man, too.”

Conversation skittered along for a few minutes, Doris wondering, aloud, what university might have given the girl credit for reading The National Enquirer, and Priscilla wondering, to herself, when Ricki was going to arrive. Then President Joan Meep, the driftwood poet, called the meeting to order, and they turned to the business of awarding the grant.

“We have three contenders,” said Joan. “There's Amaryllis Tidroe, who wants to complete her portfolio of photographs of wrestlers' wives; there's Trixie Melodian, who, by the way, was a winner year before last, and she's choreographing a ballet based upon the social habits of lemmings—”

“Ought to have a spectacular ending,” put in Doris.

“—and there's Elizabeth Reifstaffel, who wants to research her master's thesis on the effects of the menstrual cycle on dream content. Okay. .”

“Wait a minute!” shouted Priscilla. “What about my project? What about me?”

There was a bloated pause, after which Joan said, “I'm very sorry, Pris, but Ricki Sinatra, who was your sponsor, called this morning and withdrew your nomination.”

Priscilla wept all the way home. Pushing her bike up Olive Way, her tears threatened to refill the puddles that the unseasonal November sunshine had been evaporating. At one point, she passed a dilapidated building in front of which Tito, the famous Spanish photographer, was posing some local fashion models. “No! No!” Tito screamed at an intimidated young beauty. “Do not smile! Do not smile! Look sophisticated.” Priscilla wanted to yell “Happy Birthday, Tito" — she wanted to yell, “Are any of you girls married to wrestlers?" — but her throat was too choked with sobs.

At the top of the hill, she stopped at a telephone booth and dialed Ricki. A few rings, then that mechanical click and the canned silence: “Hello, this is Ricki Sinatra. I've been stricken with eight varieties of virus, including the Mekong Delta chills, the Mongolian railroad flu, and the Hong Kong rubber pork chop. I'm under doctor's orders not to be disturbed. The AMA joins me in requesting that you honor. .”

“Screw her!” said Priscilla, slamming down the receiver. “Screw all of 'em!” Through the disappointment, the humiliation, the fatigue, and the guilt, there surged a voltage of defiance. “I have the bottle,” she said. “I don't need Ricki, I don't need her goddamned educated waitresses, I don't need Stepmother Devalier and her pickaninny. I don't need any of 'em. I have the bottle!”

But, of course, she did not have the bottle.

She made that devastating discovery immediately upon returning to her studio apartment, where the refrigerator made noises at night like sea cows ruminating, where the toilet sounded like the audio portion of a white-water rafting expedition, where fallout from fifty failed base-note experiments perfumed the peeling wallpaper, and where the Kotex box on the bathroom shelf was empty now, except for a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.

Priscilla did not have the bottle, not anymore, and if she hadn't the bottle, she hadn't hope or dream, and lacking hope or dream, why would she wish to live to be a thousand? Or twenty-five? for that matter. The bottle, once a flagon of fulfillable fantasy, once the repository of ambition and purpose, was falling into the category of galloping mind-fuck — and a woman really didn't need more than one “perfect taco” in her life.Monday afternoon, November 26: Priscilla Lester Partido traveled to Seattle's Ballard district, where despite pounding, kicking, and screaming that aggravated the murmuring hearts of every old Norwegian in the neighborhood, she was denied admission to the duplex of Ricki Sinatra.