Another Roadside Attraction (27 page)

There are additional catacomb chambers through whose barred doorways I can detect the nasty evil glitter of silver and gold, and there is at least one room that is permanently sealed. I'm going to continue my snooping. Should I come across any startling stashes I'll inform you in my next letter. Meanwhile, pray that my employers don't learn that I'm not Brother Dallas, because that old Vatican jailhouse looks as mean as any I've seen in the dog lands of Mexico.

Oh yes, while I think of it, John Paul, our mutual acquaintance George O. Supper has a studio not far from here. George is the first pop artist to win the
Prix de Rome
and he'll be in Italy all summer. Sunday, I'm going to slip into my civilian spy suit and pay him a call. George should have a lot of gossip about the New York art crowd, and maybe he'll have the grace to direct me to a good whorehouse. Happy zoo-keeping, and don't forget those prayers.

Yrs. in His Holy Name,

Plucky P.

Mark Marvelous was beside himself. Double redheaded wow! Purcell's letter he took as a personal triumph, an academic accolade long overdue. It offered further proof, did it not, that the largest church in Christendom has been stilt-walking over quicksand for ages? Now Marvelous, having been recently engaged in religious research, was, even prior to the reading of Plucky's Wildcat Creek epistles, informed of the black side of churchly history. He was not ignorant of a single purge; no conquest, no Vatican intrigue had escaped his notice. But the comparative trifles that the Mad Pluck exposed seemed so instant, so direct that they excited him as secondary historical sources never could.

The indiscretions itemized by Purcell were, so it seemed to Marvelous, indications of increasing Christian entropy. To wit: Christianity has gradually lost spiritual energy over the centuries, only to replace it with political and economic energy. That imbalance has warped the religious structure and although it has heightened its physical force it has pushed its spiritual potential toward zero. Political and/or economic power create frictional resistance to the natural flow of love. In the case of the Church, such friction has resulted in an engine that has considerable momentum but fails to generate salvation.

Yes, Purcell's findings did a lot to bolster Marx's theory, and awarded the dropout thinker new hopes for the successful projection of future religious systems. On and on, Marvelous jabbered about it, jabbering to John Paul as the magician tied his loincloth, jabbering to Amanda until . . . he noticed the big green tears in her eyes.

Had Purcell's disclosures upset her, poor angel? Had Marx's interpretations, underscoring as they did the decadence of our religious heritage, depressed her? No, it wasn't that. While looking out the bedroom window, Amanda had spotted—just below the southern nub of the giant benevolent weenie—a monarch butterfly, the first she'd seen in a year.

Can we, with a straight face, regard it as an omen?

"I understand,” said Marx Marvelous, “that as far as you are concerned the most important thing in life is style."

Amanda sighed. She was being challenged again. Worse, her Wednesday bread-baking was being interrupted. As usual, she forgave the intrusion. “Marx Marvelous is in the process of shedding values,” she reasoned, “and as the old values are discarded his mind moves him closer and closer to questions of absolute meaning.” She preferred to think that was the case, rather than that Marx Marvelous was simply another intellectual tight-ass smugly ripping at every cosmic curtain to expose the specter of dank feminine (irrational!!!) mysticism that he is certain lurks behind it. She preferred not to link her zoo manager with those
Time
magazine types who regard every transcendental experience as some sort of Halloween prank, but who grow as unctuous as sperm whales when they run into a bishop at a cocktail party.

Speaking on his own account, Marvelous still would admit to no interest in the “meaning of meaning.” “Purpose is not a scientific concern,” he would insist. “You see those stars up there—there is no reason for me to question their purpose or to speculate on their meaning. The age, position, size, velocity, distance from the Earth and chemical composition is the only information I desire about a star. Any additional data are destined to be vague and hesitating in comparison. When I learn what an object consists of and how it behaves, my curiosity about that object has very largely been satisfied.”

Yes, Marx purported himself to be an objective man in an objective environment. He liked to assume that of all the billions of aspects of our total experience, only those aspects that inform us about the quantitative properties of material phenomena are concerned with the “real” world. He did believe, however, that man's (mostly illusory) sense of religion had a material counterpart. It was this belief, and his desire to acquaint himself with the quantitative laws of religious phenomena, that had, in fact, led him to the roadside zoo where, as materialistic as his attitude toward stars might be, he did not hesitate to enter verbatim in his notebook Amanda's assertion, “Stars are merely projections of the human psyche—they are pimples of consciousness—but they are at the same time quite real.”

It is possible that Marvelous also recorded Amanda's thoughts on style. “Maybe I'm attracted to style because the notion of content is a very difficult notion for me to comprehend,” said she, patting dough into loaves. “When you subtract from an object the qualities it possesses, what do you have left? After you have taken from a star its age, position, size, velocity, distance from Earth and chemical composition, are you left with a hole in the sky—or something other? This lump of dough on the table has the properties of being soft, pliable, white, moist, smooth and cool to the touch. But what is it exactly, what is the thing—the content—that possesses those qualities? It can't be defined. I'm afraid that the notion of content has to be replaced by the notion of style.” She paused to brush back a curl, leaving, in the act, a gull of flour on her cheek. “But then I'm just reciting the voices, you know. The way the robot kids recite their catechism, the way a river recites the gradation of its bed, the way a farter recites his starch.”

“Amen to that last,” said Marx Marvelous, “amen and amen again. It must have occurred to your 'voices' that content places limitations on style, in fact
determines
style. You believe in astrology, you contend that the color-light-magnetic pulsations of celestial bodies affect us to the extent of shaping our basic personalities. I say that's bull hockey because the total electrical output of the human body is about one two-thousandth of a volt, hardly enough force to be acted upon by planetary or stellar magnetism. But whether you favor astrology or a more rational concept such as genetics or behavioristic psychology, you must admit to a certain predetermining of our lives. Content is there before we are even consciously aware of it, it is all we have to work with and what that amounts to is that style is merely an
expression
of content. Tell me I'm right and I'll get out front and get ready to sell those sausages. Say, you're sure lovely with flour on your face. You look like Julia Child of the Spirits.”

As she assigned her loaves to their stations in the oven, Amanda once more sighed. “I'm not going to choose between astrology and genetics because I fail to see any contradiction. The influences on the human animal are too complex and too paradoxical to be explained in terms of any one particular branch of knowledge. When I was twelve years old I watched a spider drink water. You think that didn't change my life?”

In the rinsing of her mixing bowl her hands played like a line of dolphins. “Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom—not the freedom to say 'shit' in public or to criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be
free
of languages and leaders and gods—well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live
on top
of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That's what the voices said. They said that content is what a man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade.”

She nibbled a petal of batter from the curve of her wooden spoon. “By the way, Marx, when you're eating your bread tonight would you mind keeping an alert out for my pre-Columbian rock-crystal skull ring. I do believe I dropped it in the dough.”

"I understand that you believe in cellular memory,” said Marx Marvelous, “that you think that a record of everything that has ever happened—including the secret most inner workings of the universe—is stored inside each human being's cells; and that under certain conditions you can browse in this cellular depository as in a library."

Oh bother. He was at it again. It was a mild afternoon and the clouds were breaking. The sun, like a winning ace up the gray coat-sleeve of Skagit summer, had been played with a sudden flourish. Amanda sat in the fir needles of the grove, eating a tomato and avocado sandwich, helping to rake in the chips. With some effort, she smiled sweetly at Marx's latest confrontation. The ragged lips of her sandwich smiled with her.

Marx took her silence as an admission of guilt. “I can appreciate how you might have jumped to those conclusions blah blah blah . . . Jung's theory of racial memory and collective unconscious blah blah blah . . . drug-induced rememberings of experiences which you could not possibly have had in this lifetime blah blah blah . . . migratory habits of insects and birds blah blah blah . . . the stories primitive man told around the campfire; myths so complex, so multi-leveled, so insightful and symbolically revealing that no atavistic mind could possibly have made them up blah blah. I frankly cannot explain how human—or animal—intelligence has access to such material. Perhaps a form of memory is indeed involved. But I'll tell you this, Amanda, it is not any so-called cellular memory nor is it a part of the genetic process. Memory is a kind of phenomenon different from the retention of genetic information. Memory is an
electrical
phenomenon. Its impulses can be measured by instruments. The DNA genetic information process, on the other hand, is a
chemical
phenomenon. You need only consider the difference in an electrical reaction and a pure chemical reaction to see what a sloppy analogy you've made. Both the memory bank and DNA retain information, that's true. Both your Jeep and my wristwatch have wheels and mechanical workings. But you can't drive my wristwatch to town blah blah blah . . .”

Amanda just grinned at this wonderful logic. (Her sandwich had nothing left to grin about.) But Nearly Normal Jimmy would not have stood for it. He would have countered Marvelous' cool argument with words of fire. John Paul Ziller and even Plucky Purcell might have argued with him, also, for to Marx's chagrin, Jimmy, who possessed the best instincts of capitalism, Ziller, an ultimate artist, and Purcell, a social activist at heart, all shared that tragic leaning toward the nonobjective and irrational shadows of life.

“Tragic” was Marvelous' word for it. Who would know better than he how tragic it truly was? Hadn't he had to fight his entire adult life against similar impulses? Hell, he could have wallowed in the transcendent, could have broadcast magical visions out of both blue eyeballs if he had weakened and given in to his primitive stirrings. But he held firm. He knew that man's potential on earth, his security and survival, lay in the proper exercise of reason. There were technological solutions to all of life's challenges if only scientific reason was permitted to provide them. It had been impressed upon Marx at the university and in the think tank the importance of resisting regressive cultural tendencies. Resist them he was prepared to do, even though he must suffer some in resistance. The angel of the bizarre he wrestled nightly into submission, though he often lost the first two falls. He wore the stains of the “dream world” as shamefully as a guilty smoker wears the yellow on his digits.

“I understand further,” continued Marvelous, “that you believe there is no difference between the external and the internal. Well, not only is there a difference, I'll have you know that it is that difference that makes life possible.” He launched into an explanation and, as if in retaliation, the sun card slipped back up the coat-sleeve of sky. On and on he went, blah blah, but when he noticed Amanda singing to a newly found cocoon, he began to suspect that she was paying him no attention. When the cocoon opened and a small butterfly wobbled out, he was sure of it.

There was one thing that might shut Marx Marvelous up, and Amanda realized that she must quit postponing it. Alas, however, she could not bring it off.

“I'm sorry, Marx Marvelous, but I can't fuck you.” It was ten o'clock at night. Amanda was dressed in a silken lavender tunic upon which had been embroidered scenes from the biography of the queen who chased butterflies while awaiting death. Amanda stood in the doorway of Marx's garage apartment. Her long lashes twitched, fluttered and jerked again, as if they were a pair of feather dusters being machine-gunned against an igloo; and then they drooped elegantly, tugging her lids half the distance over the curve of her eyeballs. “You undoubtedly believe that I've been leading you on, but the truth is I've discussed it several times with John Paul and we have decided that it would not be wise. You're an attractive man and I'd like to, but it would not be smart.”

Marvelous, who wore only the trousers to his checkered suit, pulled nervously at a hair on his chest. “So,” he said with some bitterness, “your liberated husband
does
care if you go to bed with other men.” Archimedes, who discovered the principle of the lever, once said, “Give me a place to stand on and I could move the world.” Archimedes could have stood on Marx's lower lip.

“No, that is not the case. As long as it's done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn't mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy.” Her smile was the pride of Botticelli's cherubs.