Fun House (8 page)

A
PERIOD OF
watchful waiting began. In the meanwhile, the St. Ewagiow carnival continued with some not altogether unexpected events. Bonafide members of that death cult, stimulated by the mushroom cloud exploding around the clock, started several bloody riots.

On the evening of June 26th, I was alone in my room. Gladys had just gone — after some offensive jokes about Tunnel of Love soul-mates. I owed my success with Cleo F. to Gladys, but being a woman she had already become indifferent to the long view of history. In a few minutes, I would be leaving to meet Cleo and escort her to Atomic Park. I finished my bourbon, and as I put the glass down, the first of the evening’s imitation fission-fusion blasts lit up the room’s windows. As if timed with it, there was a knock on the door. Before I could open it, the door swung open and a short dark man stepped inside, wearing the black and purple cape, and black hat with purple feather of a magicientist.

He bowed and then facing the door he lifted his hand and the door closed. A typical magicientist trick, I guessed. On that door-closing hand of his, I had noticed a big black metal ring with a purple stone that probably contained a magnet.

“How do you do?” I said.

He looked at me in silence. He had dark brown eyes, and maybe because of his dramatic entrance they struck me as being not only penetrating but very unpleasant. For one thing they seemed too youthful
¹
for a man his age. He was in his eighties or nineties, and his face was a web of wrinkles.

“May I ask who you are?” I said politely.

“Think!” he said in a deep voice that was also surprisingly youthful.

It came on me like a flash, I knew him. His name and his face. I had seen them both in the dossier on Barnum Fly. He was none other than Dr. M. E. Bangani, the famous magicientist who had turned Government witness and revealed the facts about the You-Too-Can-Be-A-Think-Machine Conspiracy.

“Dr. Bangani!” I said. “What do you want?”

He pulled off his black hat and swished it mockingly before him. “I want what you want, Crockett Smith, Life!”

Red and green and yellow bursts from the mushroom outside streaked across his old bald skull. “Commissioner Sonata was ill-advised not to consult us,” he said. “Of course we magicientists are suspect. Still the Commissioner was ill-advised. Or should I say our Omnipotent Rulers were ill-advised? But nobody advises Them, do they, Crockett Smith?”

“Who told you about me?”

He chuckled, but without humor, spiteful and malicious. “Our minds are free, my friend. We magicientists and you Reservationists. How would you like to meet my former pupil Barnum Fly?”

“You should go to Commissioner Sonata with your information.”

“And be arrested for illegal associations? No thank you. You hesitate, my friend. Ah, conflicting theories, the main occupational hazard in the life of a police officer. Ah, there is that word
Life
again. Life, sweet life!”

“You should see the Commissioner!”

“You question my motives? Am I an agent of the Rulers? The answer is no. I am an agent of Life. Old as I am I want to continue living on this earth of ours.” He lifted one old bent finger and his eyes narrowed. “A Presidential pardon would appeal to Barnum. A brilliant mind, too brilliant perhaps; but enough of personalities.”

“You’ve spoken to his daughter Cleo!” I accused him.

“No,” he said and his wrinkled hand vanished into his black cape. He held up a triangular object that seemed to be made of three transparent clock-faces. “I can read your thoughts with this Trans-rec
¹
that I had the honor of inventing. Believe me, my friend, I want what you want.” He waved his other hand and a burst of golden sunshine filled the room. “Life, sweet life. I live for my visions, my friend. I live to bridge the gulf between the known and the unknown. Ah, the fearful unknown. It has always fascinated me. That is why I became a magicientist. To escape the humdrum of ordinary life.”

I blinked at the golden sunshine he had created and he chuckled. “A simple polaroid phenomenon. Child’s play, like turning dust into gold, or the flying atomic carpets so popular ten years ago. Child’s play, my friend, but I take pleasure in even the simplest conquests of our magicience.”

The golden sunshine was fading. He lowered his old wrinkled face. “If you agree to a few simple precautions, I am prepared to bring you to Barnum Fly — ”

“You expect me to believe that? You testified against him! He’s your enemy!”

“He was once my friend. The egg is round, the sun is round, life is a circle, and a Presidential pardon will make him my friend again. And you? You would be a hero. You would be able to ask the Rulers for a grant of new territory for the Reservation. With your large families, you must have new territory.”

He had read my thoughts all right, my most secret thoughts and ambitions that I had mentioned to no one on the Outside. New territory! And if I was successful how could the Rulers refuse?

“A few simple precautions. Why do you hesitate? You haven’t heard from Barnum, and it’s June 26th. There are only eight days left to prevent disaster, and you hesitate?”

“What precautions?” I said.

“This hotel is surrounded by the Commissioner’s men. Your police shadows. They will have to be neutralized. You will have to disguise yourself, my friend, and it will be necessary for me to temporarily blank out your consciousness.”

“Not that,” I said.

“Ah, you don’t trust me. Neither do I trust you. I can’t risk your calling on your police shadows as you plan to do.”

With that Trans-rec in his hand, I had no secrets. In that room of changing lights, that old man in his black cape was like a ghost sitting inside my very brain.

“You’re afraid, and you’re tempted,” he said. “The thought of succeeding without the Commissioner’s help is tempting. The lone wolf from the Reservation, that’s who you are! The rugged individualist of the ancient American Dream! Can you trust me? I betrayed Barnum Fly once before to the Rulers? And what if I am still Their agent? No, my friend, I am an agent of Life. Our Rulers are rigid and I am an agent of Life! A few precautions?”

I nodded, and his wrinkled lips smiled. He held up the Trans-rec and the last thing I remembered was that its central clock-face showed a spot of black light or rather blackish purplish light. The spot moved out towards me in a narrow beam and on it I returned, all my senses seeming to flow into that central clock-face, into time without end …

When I opened my eyes I slowly realized that I was in an alley. Dark walls and barred windows stretched before me. I heard voices. Entering the alley was an Oriental in a turban carrying a flaming torch, behind him twenty or thirty people. As they approached closer I saw that they were Americans in white suits and pith helmets. The Oriental paused and lifted his torch over my head. “In all our bazaars you will find these pitiful remittance men.”

“He doesn’t look as if he’s from an aristocratic family,” one of the Americans said while another asked the guide. “Is he a hasheesh eater?”

I lay there stupefied and then watched them go, shaking their heads. Behind them a caravan of camels trooped by, led by Hindus or Moslems. I was certain that I was dreaming when one of the camels urinated. The flying drops, the smell were unmistakably real. Am I going crazy, I wondered. In a frenzy I got to my feet and ran down the alley after the party of American tourists. Wait, I thought to myself, you forgot something.

I went back to where I had been and picked up a sign attached to a stick. Then I again hurried after the tourists. They were in a street that emptied into the alley. Torches burned over rows of street stalls and merchants in fezzes shouted their wares. Mostly rugs and copper pots. I touched the arm of the tourist who had thought I was hasheesh eater, “Where am I?” I asked in a trembling voice.

“In Calcutta, my poor man,” she said. She was a plump lady all in white.

I moaned, and she examined me with pity. I must have been a sight, dirty and smelling from those camels. “Calcutta,” I mumbled, dazed.

The guide walked over and whispered. “Yes, Calcutta-in-Miami. Go back to your hotel and stay away from opgin.”

I gasped with relief. “Where is Paris?”

I followed his directions into a street where toy-sized tigers and elephants
¹
were for sale. The elephants snorted, the tigers snarled. Miniature snorts and miniature snarls. Veiled women in sarongs glanced at the sign I was carrying on my shoulder. “Sahib,” one of them murmured and offered me a leaflet with the motto
²

Picturesque brown-skinned gamins chased each other, but now I knew who they were. Child actors hired by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.

As soon as I entered Paris-in-Miami, my destination flashed into my head. I wanted the Venus on Rue Bouillabaisse. I remember glancing up at the street signs and thinking dreamily, Not the Rue de Quatre. Not the Rue des Chats Morts. I asked directions of a loitering gendarme, and still carrying my sign walked through a maze of dark streets, apparently the Apache section of Paris-in-Miami adjoining the Calcutta slums. At last I was on the Rue Bouillabaisse and in another minute I stopped before a small wine shop whose dirty window was lettered in white; V
ENUS
. A common-enough name here where dozens of cafés were so-called and where many of them also sold the favors of a class of women known as the doves.
³

Although there was a sign in the window,
AWAY ON VACATION
with the symbolic number 28, I went inside. There were no customers, only a man I took for the proprietor who said,
“Bon Soir, monsieur.”

“Bon soir,”
I said and as I stood there, my reflection in the mirror on the wall instantly restored my reviving memory. There was my face which I recognized despite the beard. It was a real beard for I tugged at it with my fingers. I stared at a bearded man in a black shroud-like St. Ewagiow suit, wearing a white necktie with a black design that might have represented a coil of intestines. This stranger who was myself was carrying a sign which read:
HTAED EHT LASREVINU REMEEDER
. The words might have been Arabic or Hittite, a deliberate device of the International St. Ewagiow who were always boasting of their world-wide membership. But it was only another St. Ewagiow motto spelled backwards:
DEATH THE UNIVERSAL REDEEMER.

That sign, that suit, that necktie, that beard — I owed them all to M. E. Bangani. I had come here to this cheap-looking shop with its white washed walls scrawled with drawings of naked women — complete some of them, others incomplete — because of M. E. Bangani!

Thoughtfully, I scratched at my beard and read a brand-new banner, evidently supplied by the arrangement committee of the St. Ewagiow carnival, that hung over a shelf of dusty wine bottles.

This was another of the endless anti-life slogans of the St. Ewagiow, or rather of one of their splinter anti-Negro groups.
¹
Anybody with even a shred of education knew that although Salk was a Negro whose pioneering serum had been very effective against polio in the twentieth century, Pasteur was a white man who had first discovered the existence of bacteria.

“Welcome,” the proprietor said, and poured me a drink.

I took the glass, but remembering the effects of the Trans-rec, I didn’t drink. “Don’t be afraid, monsieur,” the proprietor said. “It’s only burgundy fortified with a little opgin. Defortified opgin,” he added with a smile, proving that he wasn’t immune from the prevailing disease, good humor.

I gulped the drink down in the tradition of the open-range country where I came from. “Where is Dr. Bangani?” I said.

“One minute, monsieur.” He walked to a door in the rear and knocked. It opened, and a giant stepped out. I’m six-foot-one, but he was six or seven inches taller and weighed about three hundred pounds. He wore the black cape of a magicientist and a white suit with odd buttons and a very odd hat. Not a magicientist’s black slouch but a black skullcap equipped with a revolving white circle like a halo.
²
It was held in place, I guessed, by invisible wires. His face was long and intelligent — that is from the nose up. He had a high forehead and brooding eyes, but below the nose his face was — I can think of no better word than the one we use — the face of a varmint. Thick brutal lips and a heavy chin and jaws.

“The master expects you,” he said in a soft voice that didn’t belong to those lips of his.

“Who are you?” I asked nervously.

“An interesting question. Who are you? Who am I? Are you a member of the St. Ewagiow as you appear? Or Crockett Smith, the L. and O. agent? And does it matter so very much? Who among us is always certain of his identity? Who are we? Where do we come from? What is right, what is wrong? Only when the psyche is attuned to the neurological thought-beat of another personality can we know ourselves as human beings. Love,” he whispered gently. “Love, the only positive element in life. And far more stable than a half dozen atoms I could mention. Without love we all carry a stranger inside our hearts and souls. A perpetual tenant who never pays emotional rent. Without responsibilities. Living on a fee simple. And this stranger is all of us. Only love matters. Not matter, which is made up of molecules, atoms, protons, electrons, neutrinos and all the rest of that mysterious hodge-podge.”

The buttons of his white jacket had begun to gleam and I found myself staring at them. Buttons made of three circles arranged in triangles, the letter H
₃
in their centers.
¹
The H
₃
’s were all glowing with a purplish light, reminding me of the purplish mesons I had seen on the Rollercoaster.

“Now, let us see the master,” he said.

I pulled my attention away from his buttons, which were beginning to have a hypnotic effect, and followed him into the rear room. Seated at a table was Dr. Bangani. He was holding a flower in his hand that, biologically, seemed like a cross between a rose and an iris, inhaling its fragrance while he pulled off and ate its leaves. These were shaped like tiny green cucumbers or leafcumbers as they were called. Behind him on a couch was a sleeping man, his face turned to the wall, his hands behind his back. His hands were tied with All-Emergency Thread as were his ankles.