Einstein's Monsters (8 page)

Last night I made a distinguished addition to my vast repertoire of atomic dreams, my dreams of nuclear supercatastrophe (you could hardly call them
nightmares
anymore). The last civilian is running across the last plain pursued by the last pilot in the last aircraft with the last warhead. These last two actors are moving at the same speed—an interesting departure from the usual crux (escape, weird retardation), with the aircraft experiencing all the human metal fatigue of nightmare. The last civilian runs with a ragged and desperate stride. The last pilot stalks him heavily through the smoke. I cannot tell whether I am the last civilian or the last pilot or simply the last observer, and it doesn’t matter, because all will vanish in the last flash-boom and glitter-sizzle, in the last pouring insult of light.

Uncle Ned was twenty years younger than my father. On the other hand, he is twenty years older than Francesca, this new wife of his. She watches television for hours, or at least she is present while it’s on. She reads the dumb stories in the dumb magazines: how Elizabeth Taylor licked her drink problem; how Cher’s house is seriously haunted; how President Kennedy is alive and well, living with Buddy Holly on the planet Krypton. Fran sprawls with the baby and listens to rock-pop all day long. That
music
—its fatuous lack of complication: songs of personal growth. With all that brown flesh of hers Francesca takes up a lot of space. She is prodigious. She floods the room. It goes without saying that Ned cannot satisfy her. She has one baby, but she will soon be wanting more.

Like most schizophrenics, I was born in the winter quarter. Many people are baffled by this seasonal disposition. With
insight
, however, the explanation seems straightforward enough. Fall and winter are the hardest times for the schizophrenic. They feel terribly schizophrenic in the fall and winter. Not until March or April do they feel like making love. Not until March or April do they feel like making schizophrenic babies.

Dad was a fat schizophrenic. I am a thin one, so far. He had plenty of
buffer tissue
and could function normally—indeed brilliantly—for long periods. His psychotic breaks were few and far between. But the last break broke him. Suicide. I never consider suicide. I never do. I never even think about it. It just isn’t an option. Dad was a physicist, of a kind. I’m going to be one too. He worked in the subatomic realm. I am attracted to radio and x-ray astronomy, to cosmology and uranometry—to the stars. I can see them now, as I sit in the screened porch and write these words: the heavenly bodies, so gravely, so heavily, so forbiddingly embroidered onto the fabric of space-time.

I can sit outside now, in the black shade, often for an hour at a stretch. It is like breathing fire. The baby Harriet, wearing only a diaper, flaps about on the ground among the twigs and bits of bark, the needled carpet of pine. Occasionally the baby pauses in its baby projects and together we squint out at the lake’s heavy water and listen to the background radiation of the insects in the encircling forest.

Ned’s Diary

July 22.
Well now—progress, distinct improvements! We have a way to go yet, of course. I wouldn’t call him happy-go-lucky exactly, but at least he looks a lot less like Franz Kafka or Ivan Lendl (yes, Lendl, two sets down to his worst enemy and trailing love-five in the third). He goes outside, he doodles in his notebook, he has some color in those long cheeks. To smile as you take your chair at the table is not the task it was a few days ago. Fran is far more relaxed, though a little faint, as we all are, with the temperatures we’re experiencing (the baby stares at all this heat around her as if she won’t ever believe it). We no longer feel, for instance, that we need to hide out in our bedroom. Sure, there are still weird things. The kid is covered with mosquito bites. He looks as though he has measles. They seem to go for him in a big way, because none of us are troubled by them. One time I walked past him on the lakefront and there were five or six of the little bastards patiently feeding on his face. Fran remarked that Dan has an odor, not unpleasant exactly, like bruised fruit (his father had it too, sometimes), and maybe that’s what attracts the bugs. I asked him if he wanted some repellent or anything but he just smiled and said—It’s okay, Uncle Ned, it’s no big thing, I’ll avoid them now. You see, he’s so numbed up on all the pills and chemicals he takes, he doesn’t feel the bites. He feels no pain.… He seems to be delighted by Harriet, as indeed we all are. Maybe Hattie swung it for him. I have to say that she is just the dream baby. Coming to parenthood late in life—well, I count my blessings. A while ago I had nothing. Now here are these two little honeys. Parental love is strange, and so fearful. I love Fran for her qualities. I love Hattie for her life. I don’t want anything from her, except her life. I just want her to be. I would die for that. I just want her to be.

Dan’s Notebook

No, I don’t think I’ve ever felt calmer.

It was a simple and courageous move: yesterday I ceased all medication, not only the sedatives but the megavitamins—and the antipsychotics. Slizard would be mad if he knew. But Slizard will never know. I am deprogramming myself, once and for all. From now on I will rely exclusively on
insight.
Already I can feel the symptoms pressing in on me, looking for an opening, seeking me out. Some are really rather bizarre, or they would be, if I had less
insight.

Let me give an example. This afternoon I was lying on the living-room floor, watching the way the overhead fan deranged the rafter cobwebs (and I am surrounded here, you understand, by the usual furniture of lakeside life, with its shanty feel, the damp salt, the fishing tackle, the graphs of the screens charted by the corpses of bugs). Heralded by the familiar double shuffle, the sound of handsteps, kneesteps, little Harriet crawled in from the kitchen. She paused. I turned my head. The baby gave a smile of greedy recognition, and I guess she was about fifteen feet away when, “before my eyes,” she started to grow. Within a second she was as large as a five-year-old; within a second more she was the size of a pig. I lay there as she billowed like a circus fat lady, the face growing faster than the body until it filled the room, my whole vision, until it seemed to burst the bounds of the house itself. Alarming? Not really. A routine case of
size-constancy breakdown.
All the baby had done was crawl toward me. Our noses were almost touching, and I had a fisheye-lens view of her marbled eyes, her food-storing cheeks, her depthless teeth, and the ears, translucent, glowing like eyelids shut to the sun.

Dad was one of the fathers of the nuclear age. Then, when the thing was born, he became its son, along with everybody else. So Dad really threw an odd curve on that whole deal about fathers and sons. First he was the thing’s father, then he was the thing’s son. Great distortions and malformations should clearly be expected to follow on from such a reversal.

He worked in delivery systems, bus-and-warhead technologies, Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles—the
MIRVS
. My urine contains bufotenine, a chemical originally isolated from toad venom. Bufotenine shows mauve in certain tests. When I am hallucinating, there is more bufotenine, more mauve, in my urine than when I don’t. Tonight I will pour all my pills into Flame Lake, and go it alone. Tomorrow, perhaps, now that Fran has stopped dragging Uncle Ned off to their room the whole time for sex, I will tell them the truth about the baby. I will break it to them about the baby. Meanwhile I stare into the brilliance and burnish, into the mauve of the
MIRV
ed lake.

Ned’s Diary

July 24.
No break in the weather. Dan continues to come on wonderfully well. He has bouts of agitation and gloom—but who doesn’t? No, he’s much, much happier. Those chance meetings you have twenty times a day in a shared house are no longer a matter of courteous disquiet. I’m pleased to see the kid, and he’s pleased to see me. We’ve put the baby back in her room, next to Dan’s. She’s a powerful little sleeper (twelve hours a night, plus naps!),and when she does wake in the small hours she just babbles to herself for a while and then checks out again. It doesn’t bother Dan. But the heat does. Instead of getting cooler it just gets hotter. Someone has his thumb on the controls. Fran handles it with cold baths and about fifteen dips a day. Otherwise she schlepps around in that youthful world of TV, radio, and photoprint. Actually I’m touched by her appetite for all that garbage. What the hell. Even the
Trib
reads like a shock-sheet these days. Maybe the whole world is just turning to trash. Dan won’t go in the water. He sits under the fan. I can talk to him now about his problem—the problem he has when relating to reality. And at last I have the freedom to address all
my
reality problems, the pump, the roof, the cesspit, the loose screens, that wreck of a jeep (I think I’ll take the plates off and use it as a tractor). I had Dan help me shift the logs from the turkey hut to the storeroom. He ran back and forth all afternoon and stacked wood till his fingers bled.

Dan’s Notebook

In all probability Fran senses that I am still a virgin.

How else am I supposed to explain her behavior? She swims bare-ass in the excited lake, and makes sure I am watching. I have strolled into the bathroom and seen her lying there in her birthday suit: for a while she pretends not to notice; then she asks me to leave but makes no move to cover herself. Her heavy flesh shines a deeper brown in the moisture. She breastfeeds the baby right in front of my nose.

Francesca has obviously taken it upon herself to initiate me into the so-called mysteries of sexual praxis. She goes to bed deliberately early, and Uncle Ned is soon obliged to follow. Most nights they make love in absolute silence (presumably she insists on this, to keep me guessing), but once, as I knelt there outside their room, she lost control and openly sought me out with her cries of pain and yearning. All these complications will make it much harder for me to break the truth to her about the baby.

Down at the Section, Dad had a Russian friend, a defector and a staunch American, though he often moaned and wept—and sang—about his beloved motherland when he’d taken a drink or two. (Everybody drinks up a storm, down at the Section; and Slizard heads a big team.) Whenever they said good-by, in person or on the telephone, they always signed off in the same way. Dad: “Death to the babies.” Andrei: “And to your babies.” Dad: “And to your babies’ babies.” Andrei: “And to your babies’ babies’ babies.” And so on. It was kind of a joke. After all, everyone jokes about their work, even people in the extinction business. They said it, let off steam. To stay sane.

I am a schizophrenic and my thoughts would be mad anyway (I know this, using
insight
), but there are mad thoughts everywhere now and at least mine are mine, not manmade, like Francesca’s, all ditties and jingles and lies. Uncle Ned has run away with the idea that I have a reality problem. Oh yeah?
Reality
has the reality problem. Reality is right out of control and could try anything, anytime. It is like the lake, always ready to explode. Ned will understand this all too well when I tell him—and I will tell him soon—that the baby has schizophrenia.

Ned’s Diary

July
27. Benson Holloway says he’ll give me $150 for the jeep and I have half a mind to accept. If I strip off the plates and use it only on the property then I don’t pay tax or insurance—but the old crate still guzzles money anyway. In this weather it overheats in five minutes and starts to drip and gurgle with gook and fumes. Just coming back from town you have to drive with your head practically out the window. But Benson is a shrewd bastard and why is
be
interested? This time next summer, though, I’ll have to pay somebody to come and haul it away. Hell, I’ll take the $ 150 and look around for something more practical. Mother and baby blooming (Fran sleepily, Harriet noisily!) and Dan absolutely no problem. The sun is really going it. You look up there and you think—the sun is really going it. The sun is really going nuclear.

Dan’s Notebook

Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, the sun is powered by the weak force.

It is fueled by particle decay. If you want to witness nuclear fusion, then take a look at the sun. Ah, but you can’t. Even at a distance of ninety million miles, it still hurts the eye. A thermonuclear detonation gives rise to temperatures appreciably greater than those to be found in the sun’s core—or anywhere else in the universe, except for transient phenomena like exploding stars. At the Section one time, Dad showed me a film of a steel ball undergoing a significant fraction of this superstellar heat. It liquefies, and bubbles, like boiling water. And now the lake looks like boiling steel, what with the sun piling into it day after day.

Harriet, they tell me, was a premature baby. Well she has certainly made up for lost time. Many people believe that schizophrenia is a postadolescent occurrence. They are mistaken. An infant can show schizophrenic symptoms at a mere eight weeks. Harriet is eight months gone now and the condition is already far advanced. I’m afraid she is more or less a classic case.

Deviant pattern of receptor preferences.
If you give her a rattle or a toy or anything else, what does she do? She shakes it, sniffs it, and puts it in her mouth. Thus the higher functions of vision and audition are rejected in favor of touch, taste, and smell.

Repetitive and stereotyped behavioral patterns.
For meaning-lessly long periods she bangs on flat surfaces with her palms. She shows a tragic failure to learn from her own errors. While babbling, she indulges in a random series of identical noises—then forgets them and starts making new ones!

Faulty depth perception.
The baby shows early signs of deviant ambulation. She falls over all the time and bumps into things because, to her, spatial relationships are unstable and contingent.