Letters (104 page)

In reply to yours of the 6th. (Show him, LIL.)

Let’s get things straight. Attacomputer. We did indeed spend the 1st ½ of 1969 (enough) believing that you and yours had swatted us for keeps; that you had somehow wooed Merope Bernstein into the anti-Bonaparty (stop). Even that LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel
NOTES
must be either a monstrous ciphered anagram beyond anyone’s unscrabbling or a mere dumb jumble of numbers. We had thought M.B. to be our destined mate, right repository of our seed; had expected this season to preserve our line in her like a blank in amber, forever, stop. Then we reckoned her our betrayer: no Bea she, not even a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, play that on your acrostical
Notarikon,
but our devourer!

In desperation next we fancied B.G. our proper queen, pursued as she was already by two drones so to speak. Her several rejections did not deter us; it was not yet flight time; queens do not yield themselves till the peak; let her “mate” as she will with Prinz and Mensch (who think themselves adversaries, not having met the foe who will ally them), they cannot fertilize her; our hour would come, so we believed: 8:23 PM EDST 8/15/69, as the sun sets into Lake Erie on the evening of our 36th. Undeed that may be our ultimate mission still: the
Gadblank
Illuminations leave this point obscure: whether so to speak we need only a toe or must go whole frog.

What they illumine is the true nature of LILYVAC’s printout; the true revolutionary character of what we had naively called 1st NOVEL and then NOTES—and our immediate task not only in the Fall Work Period but in this mating season: a task not you nor all your swarm of hommes de lettres can prevent our accomplishing. (Go, LIL.)

O Ma! O Da! We see now you sent M.B. to us by way of initial prophecy, J. Baptist heralding the 1 Who Shall Come After. Her “betrayal” of us was but the Godflaw’s sting, your message that Merope was mere means, not end;
you
bid her take the role of Margana Le Fay and lead us into vain decipherment of LILYVAC’s numbers, in order to purge us of our last illusion about
RN:
that it was to be a revolutionary work of
literature
(and, ipso facto, no more than a
literary
work of revolution). Thanks! R.S.V.P.

The hardest truths to see, with howsoever many eyes, are those right under our proboscises. We were raised in the Backwater Marshes, source of life; we ourself programmed LILYVAC to make no mention of , always to say blank or blank instead of blank. Yet there we were on 7/4 aboard the renamed
Blank III,
a.k.a.
O.F.T. II
(a substitute for our dear
Blank III
no more resembling the original than Chesapeake Bay resembles Chautauqua Lake), pursuing Bea Golden in our error as skyrockets scuttled and spread like Crab Nebulae over the river; jealously wondering what revolutionary sort of
letter
A.M. was wooing her with, there in the bow, and Bea discarding leaf by leaf like daisy petals or shucked carapaces as she read and R. Prinz gnashed his puny mandibles. The female we’d remarked at the Farm because she was miscalled Pocahontas (no Indian blood in her), and whose presence aboard
“Blank III”
we had re-remarked but paid no heed to, drew an utter blank when she muttered into our ear:
“There’s
a pair I’d like to do a number on. My name’s Marsha. What’s yours?” Not till we’d told her and numbly mumbled Marsha Who did Truth scuttle and RESET Like the supernova 1st observed by Chinese astronomers on July 4, 1054.

Marvelous to enumerate! True 13 2, of whom M.B. I was but the initial RESET No honeybear she, but as splendidly venomous a blank as ever stung twice! The question, Ma, is whether you sent her to be our queen as well as the number of our enemies, please advise, it’s that time of year, she’ll wake up any day now. Sprung in fact from the marshes whence all life RESET From a swampy mons veneris called Golden Hill, never mind, not far from dear Backwater, she was early mismated with A.M. and thirsts for retribution as in our error once did we: Marsha Blank!

She repeated her name and wish, this time as a proposition: if we would help her do a number on her ex, she’d help us do a number on Bea. We did not know that slang expression: nothing foreign is human to us. She explained its meaning (to trick, cheat, exploit, or take advantage of, LIL, including sexually), but we could scarcely attend her, such a chain of insights—what we have since termed the
“Blank
Illuminations”—was triggered by that key, like a metaphor.

NUMBERS!

You cannot touch us now, “sir”; we are as far beyond your grasp as was Bellerophon past Chimera’s when he flew on mighty Pegasus to his rendezvous with the Godblank. How had we not seen that if the media are to revolutionize Revolution, to their number must be added a revolutionary medium? What had we been doing with our
Gematria,
our
Notarikon,
our
Themura,
but attempting to betray LILYVAC’s radical numbers into the very seeds of Literature’s limitations,
i.e., letters?

You think to make us a character in yet another piece of
literature!
You, “sir”—now we have your number programmed into LILYVAC—will be a character in our
18 14
(a.k.a.
R.N.):
the world’s 1st work of Numerature!

Ourself innumerate, like most literati, we have yet to learn our 1 2 3’s; everything must be reviewed, revised in this new light! How we itch to spring, after the Flight, into the Fall Work Period! When, 1st of the
numerati,
our new Queen royal-jellied, we readdress that mighty printout! Ha RESET

P.S.: Hum. We conceive, as a parting shot at the exhausted medium you practice, a little classical story-in-letters to be located at the Phi-point of our story-in-numbers: .618 RESET The Greek mythic figure Bellerophon, having killed the Chimera and turned Pegasus out to pasture in his life’s 1st Cycle, wonders at the Phi-point what to do with the remaining .382 of his allotted span. Though he has imitated perfectly the program of mythic heroism, he has not achieved immortality. His days are numbered. Can he, in the final quadrant of the heroic cycle, reset his program and ascend to the company of 1st-magnitude stars? Yonder rises cloud-capped Olympus; yonder grazes lulled Pegasus, who can fly anywhere quicker than LILYVAC adds 2 + 2… Eat your heart out,
writer!

P.P.S.: Our last to you. An end to letters! ZZZZZZZ!

July 7, 1969

Truly, Yours,

Cancer is the reigning sign; petrifaction the prevailing state. A lull’s laid on like that that descends on novels in their third quarter: everything’s suspended, held, arrested, as if Time had declared time out.

I write you on a steaming, breathless just-past-noon: siesta-time in barren Barataria. Slick calm yonder in Hooper Straits, where when the tide turns I’ll post this in a crabber’s Clorox-bottle buoy. Turkey buzzards hang overhead as if still-photo’d; blue herons stand like lawn ornaments in the shallows where yesterday Bea and I went wading after soft-shell crabs—and netted only hard.

Dorchester County’s shaped like a pelvis: Blackwater and Transquaking rivers are its fallopian tubes; Fishing Bay is its busy womb. Three days ago Bea and I came down through its southmost marshes here to Bloodsworth Island, which hangs under it on the map like a thing discharged.

Now Bea’s gone, after this A.M.‘s little flurry. Our wake-up fuck, one of the few (Too bad, she told me yesterday, your Medusa couldn’t’ve petrified just
that
part), was interrupted by Casteene’s phone call from Fort Erie: Doctor missing since July 4th storm; presumed drowned in Lake Erie, where he’d been whitefishing. Remobilization Farm at a standstill. Memorial service tonight; perhaps Mlle Bibi should return for it?

Phone and phallus are that woman’s natural instruments. Ever less firmly pegged atop me, she set the former on my chest for ease of dialing and never let the latter slip (nor paused in her special slide-and-squeeze) even after I was long come, till she’d checked flights, made air reservations from Washington to Buffalo, arranged for Morgan to meet her plane and fetch her thence to Fort Erie and the Farm, dispatched a cab to drive the thirty miles from Cambridge down to Bishops Head (just across the straits, Y.T., at the county’s labia, whither I would ferry her in A. B. Cook’s runabout) and the hundred more back to Washington National, relayed instructions to me from Casteene for closing up Cook’s cottage (kindly proffered her for our half-assed tryst)—
and
brought herself to perfectly malicious orgasm smack in the middle of apprising Reg Prinz in New York of all the foregoing plus her intention to be back on location for the next shooting plus exactly where and with whom she was as she spoke and exactly what doing: i.e., Ay! Eee! Ai! Oh! Ooo!

Reggie would have her ass for
that,
she chirped after, hanging up and swinging off me in one easy motion. But she couldn’t resist; anyhow, when one came one came. Come on, said I: you’re here because he let me have one inning, to justify his retaliation. It’s
my
ass he’s after; yours he’s got. It’s a dandy, Jeannine.

You think so? she said, apropos of I don’t know which assertion. She was throwing things into a suitcase, smoking and smiling all at once, livelier than she’d been in three days. What she’d meant, she said, was calling him collect; he hated that. But it was Cook’s phone; she had run up the bill enough already. Anyhow, she’d
liked
what I’d written her there on the boat, right at the peak of the party. We really
had
given old Reggie a jolt. I was wrong: he didn’t own her, not any part of her; she’d
loved
being with me again after so many years—especially the soft-crabbing, even if we hadn’t got any! And so what if I hadn’t come on like a sex machine? There were enough of
those
in the world. Would I be a doll and make coffee now and come back and close up the place when she’d left? The connections were tight, but she really owed it to Casteene and the Doctor to give it a try.

Bea’s breasts were bare, and tanned from three days of toplessness; as she chattered she slipped into her slacks with a tomboyish snap and snug I’d forgotten since I’d last seen her do it twenty years ago. I was smitten by time and tenderness; had to bestir myself kitchenwards, not to let her see my eyes run. Once at nineteen I’d stood bone-hard for her five times in a single night (it remains my record); but entering our lives’ third quarter she’d been bored stiff with me, and I bored limp with her, by the end of our first Baratarian day. We’d stayed on—I don’t know why: to purge entirely our curiosity, perhaps; to play through some subscene in The Script. To complete my mistreatment of Germaine. Or out of mere inertia, in a place and weather where even lotus-eating is too much effort.

What relief she’s gone! Cook’s cottage is tidied, stowed, secured; I’m to return his boat to Bishops Head, forward his keys back to M. Casteene-from-whom-they-oddly-came (a key in itself, that, no doubt, but not to any door I pine to pass through), and return myself through the sluggish marsh to the paused world and my exasperated Lady. But there’s no rush, no rush. Petrifaction’s too hard a term: Time’s congealed; things are stuck hereabout like shrimps in aspic.

I make these sentences, Y.T., in default of the ones I want. My Perseus is stuck in his spiral temple like Andromeda to the cliff, because his author is not Perseus enough to rescue him. Language fails me like my phallus: shall I simply send you the diagrams? Magda’s not menstruated since that anniversary coupling of May 12, two months and two letters since: no other signs of pregnancy, thank God, and she’d been off and on for a year before she pulled that fast one. Refuses, of course, to check it out medically; wants to savor the improbable possibility while she can… Has she told Peter, one wonders? On whose obdurate mind something heavy surely is, over and above Mensch Masonry’s final bust-up, which scarcely now seems to bother him, and Mother’s long dying, which decidedly does. There truly, Truly, is your cancer petrified, more so than in our hard crabs’ case: Death itself dozes off; Terminality takes siesta.

Magda, my Medusa,
femme fataliste:
Zeus make this pause your menopause! And Germaine…

No doubt it is the lull before some further storm. No doubt Mother’s terminality will recommence, the Tower of Truth resume our ruin, Magda’s womb (for one) do this or that, the Perseus story sink or swim, and Reg’s return unfreeze our frame, re-move the unmoving Movie. Meanwhile, in Suspense’s welcome lieu, this strange suspension.

Tide’s turning: the Hooper Straits buoys begin to lean towards Sharkfin Shoal; time to bottle this and begone. Henry Burlingame III, we are told, was launched in his infancy from this island, to which in middle manhood he returned for better or worse. Do you likewise, letter, if return you must; not to the sender, who, something tells him, shan’t.

July 6, 1969

Jerome B. Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, New York 14752

Mr. Bray:

Let’s get things straight.

I did indeed spend the first half of the 1960’s writing a long novel which was published in August 1966, under the title
Giles Goat-Boy.
It is the story of a child sired by an advanced computer upon a virgin lady and raised by kindly goats on the experimental livestock farms of a nameless university which encompasses and replicates the world. In young “manhood” my goat-boy learns from his tutor that the extraordinary circumstances of his birth and youth correspond to those of the wandering heroes of myth. With this actuarial pattern as his map and script, he adventures to the heart and through the bowels of the campus, twice fails at the accomplishment of certain ambiguous labors, and the third time succeeds—though in a fashion equivocal as the tasks themselves—to the status of “Grand Tutor.”