Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (28 page)

But no one came, and again the rapping: delicate, importunate.

“Come in, goddammit, I’m in the sack. Who is it?”

He threw back the covers with a moan and shuffled naked across the room, unable to find Fitzgore’s bathrobe. When he unlocked the door, Irma Rajamuttu, in gauze, smiled back through red teeth. In one hand she held the usual glass of gin and grenadine, in the other the
Daily Sun
.

“My particular congratulations,” she said.

Gnossos covered his groin and blinked spasmodically.

She handed him the paper, raised her drink in a mock toast, and glided off silently on bare feet, one two three.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he called, but she was gone. Only the sound of tinkling icecubes.

His nearly forgotten letter was on the front page, and he had to steady his head before sitting down to read with a nervous twitch.

April 1958

Our Dear Miss B. Pankhurst:

To the issue, yes?

The presence of women in Lairville apartments is not to your taste. You suggest registration and chaperons. A coed would be denied access to gentlemen’s quarters unless accompanied by another coed and two protective couples. One over thirty, the other married, right? Me, for instance, if I wanted a coed over for dinner, I’d have to ask her roommate, a graduate student couple, and someone like you and your husband, if you were married, which I believe you are not.

A dinner party of eight. All of whom would have to be out before 10:30 on weeknights, weekends at 11. But surely enough time to eat, you’ll agree. The hassle,
Miss B. Pankhurst, is like so. We don’t entirely believe you’re worried about dinner conversation. Again to the point, you want to prevent the occupation of a Lairville apartment by a coed and a, well, man.

Why?

We assume you’re worried something will happen. Handholding, kissing? Fondling perhaps? Something more critical. Plainly, we’d like to know
precisely
what you object to. We would like this objection made public. If in fact you object to the possibility of sexual intercourse, be good enough to say so. The implications of such an objection may well transcend the breed of action you are considering.

It is spring. See the forsythia; Athené is blessed with its abundance. Smell the pollen in the air. Observe the birds and beasts of the realm.

Love,                             
Gnossos Pappadopoulis

The phone rang immediately, and it was Heffalump.

“Holy shit, Paps, are you serious?”

“Ain’t never serious, Horralump, just do things to pass the time. An’ why are you up so early?”

“Packing for Cuba, man. But how come? I mean, what—”

“Kristin.”

“The knee-sock chic?”

“I’m involved.”

“Wow, I know you’re involved, but this is like politics or something. She talked you into it?”

“We discussed it, man. Anyway, Oeuf did most of the final draft. I only really wrote the last paragraph.”

“But you signed it, baby, I told you you’d get dosed. Jesus.”

“Keep your cool, it’s all right. Oh, and make it over here about three. There’s a meeting.”

“A
meeting?
You serious, or what?”

“Bring Jack, the rest of the crew, little Red Cap.”

“Man, you
know
what this means.”

The phone rang again and it was Juan Carlos Rosenbloom.

“You are my general,” he told Gnossos, voice shaking emotionally.

“Crap. Just make it at three.”

“I die for you.”

“Bring potato chips, some Fritos.”

“You want a Sten gun? Air-cooled job? Special from my country.”

The third call was from the infirmary.

“
Verbum sapienti
,” said Oeuf. “We’re home-free.”

“Don’t put me on, man, I did it for Kristin.”

“Keep your
sang-froid
. The word has proceeded
ex cathedra
, sport, we’re under way.”

Gnossos hung up uncomfortably, brushed his teeth with hair cream, screamed oaths, and in order to dissipate a fraction of his culpable energy, padded next door about the paper. He could hear them murmuring secrets, yet no one answered his heavy knocking. Goofy Benares maniacs. He stormed back and waited for Kristin to call, but the next voice belonged to Judy Lumpers.

“It’s
fab
ulous, Paps, my God, the dorms are going
wild
.”

“Is Kristin in her room, baby?”

“
Really
, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s just too great to be
true
, can you hear them?”

“Kristin is all, man. She there?”

“Golly no, I don’t think so. She signed out last night and didn’t come back.”

His heart sank. “What?”

“I mean, isn’t she at your place? Can you
hear
them? They’re all jumping around in their underwear. Oh, I wonder if there’ll be a panty raid?”

This time he sought diversion in the cosmos. Hours went by in the drab Quonset astronomy building as he considered the relative motion of the stars and became hideously depressed. Two separate methods of calculation told him that if the universe had been expanding at a given rate, it had had its beginnings in a coagulated mass of—call it crap—some ten thousand million years before. So much for that. But after one thousand million years of expansion the crap had settled into clusters, all of which had been moving away from one another ever since. The separate answers were the same, so the universe seemed to be exploding, but Gnossos was hardly in a mood to worry about it. Just the same, to set concerned minds at ease, the weasel of a lab assistant drew sine waves on the blackboard and argued for another theory.

“The expansion of the universe is slowing down,” he pronounced in a sexless monotone, one hand grasping his technician’s lapel. His teeth were bad. “Eventually it will cease and be followed by contraction. Assuming that even though one kind of matter changes into another and produces or destroys energy in the process, the total amount of energy and/or matter in the universe does not change. Enough energy is thus left at max contraction to start the clusters moving together again under the force of their own attraction. Gravity, as it were. Your calculations ought to show that a whole expansion-contraction cycle takes about thirty thousand million
years and that at present we’re two thirds of the way through an expansion phase. How about it?”

A positive murmur from most of the class. Gnossos checked his figures desultorily. If they were correct, it meant the universe had a center and an edge and that with the right instruments he might even get a look at this edge. But again, it didn’t seem worth the effort. He had a craving for pickled watermelon rind.

He tried to forget it in the mechanics of a steady-state theory. Clusters of crap expanding outward, new crap being born at a rate providing for constant density in space. Individual crap clusters changing shape, evolving, but the whole crappy system (viewed objectively) not changing at all. No beginning, no end. Every individual piece of crap, yes, but the system, no. The assumption being that permanence of matter and energy was also a lot of crap. Gnossos, sitting miserable on his stool, reconsidered the Las Vegas fission, the drunken movie star, the two strawberry blondes, the Oklahoma oil-cowboy and his Radcliffe muse—all in the relative luminosity of the new information. Subjectively, then (viewed even as an integral piece of crap), his own end was assured. I mean, why the hell bother to burn the candle at both ends when you can use an oxyacetylene torch on the middle. Less aesthetic, but more people see the flame.

Armed with this suicidal confidence, he made his way back down the hill after lunch and rolled a needle-thin Black Elks hipster joint. He wore it over his ear to tempt the secular fates, but his stomach still churned at the meaning of Kristin’s all-night absence from the dorm. Something distant, irreverent in her attitude ever since he’d penned the letter, bowing to her coy insistence, the promise of lewd, extraordinary pleasures. An improbable whisper of betrayal, came the thought, but Love was said to conquer all.

Jumping up the freshly painted steps to his pad, he reflected that it ought not to. Hope you’ve been stewing, baby, Daddy’s home from school.

Nonetheless, at the three-o’clock meeting she was missing.

“Panghurts,” said Rosenbloom, in his cowboy hat. “We break her.”

“She’ll answer the letter,” from Youngblood, “that much is certain. Jack, can you take care of posters?”

“Where the hell is my woman?” asked Gnossos.

“I think so,” said Jack, staring at the angora Lumpers breasts. “There’s all that paint in Polygon Hall. As long as we know what to say.”

“There’s a whole lot of stuff written down somewhere,” from Heff, working to distract her, handing over an unopened Red Cap.

“In three weeks, a revolutiong. Esmash.”

“
God
, can you imagine? I mean, do you really think it will work?”

“The guys at the house are already writing chants,” from Agneau, in a crewneck sweater. “Some of them are
incredibly
good.”

“Hey, Jack, you seen Kristin?”

“Got to keep momentum over spring vacation,” from Youngblood, with his sleeves rolled up. “Can’t let it slide. Students go home, change roles, come back and have to readjust.”

“Maybe some kind of mailing list,” suggested Jack to Lumpers, sliding a hand over her thigh.

“No mercy,” tried Rosenbloom, pulling his finger like a straight razor across the jugular vein. “We eslit them oping.”

The phone rang every two or three minutes, Youngblood always first to answer, hushing the rest of the room with a gesture, sometimes laughing with excited satisfaction. Agneau sent cables, Judy Lumpers took shorthand, Juan Carlos Rosenbloom studied Gnossos with unbridled admiration, and Heffalump tried without success to keep Jack’s attention from the Lumpers anatomy. “Make some corn bread, baby,” he said.

When Kristin finally arrived, she was out of breath, accompanied by two renegade officers from the women’s undergraduate judiciary board. She was wearing her knee-socks, and she touched the lobe of Gnossos’ left ear as she passed him, knocking the joint to the floor. “Any progress?” she asked officially.

“Where you been?” from Gnossos, on his hands and knees.

“Tons,” said Youngblood. “Most of it since the letter this morning. You’ll be pleased to know, Oeuf reports a pink flag on most of Lairville.”

“Red predicted by the weekend,” added Agneau, taking off his glasses for emphasis.

“God, I wonder how they’re taking it over at the administration building?” from one of the debutantes in a denim skirt.

“Really,” said the other, also in denim, ‘I’ll bet old Pankhurst is crawling up the proverbial wall.”

“I called the dorm five times,” said Gnossos, “where the hell were you, baby?”

The phone rang and Youngblood hushed them with an air of importance. While he talked, Kristin briefed the others: “There seems to be some question at headquarters about the optimum time for direct action. We need a morning dead hour, when everyone’s at the Ramrod for coffee, but statistics aren’t clear on the number of students free between ten and noon.”

“I’d guess eleven,” said Agneau.

“Kill them,” said Rosenbloom.

“Will you answer my question, baby?”

“Shh!” commanded Youngblood, listening to the phone.

“What about instructors?” from Lumpers, lowering her voice.

“Most of them,” said Kristin, her fingers in a clutter of lists, “have agreed to dismiss their classes if we get a crowd into the arts quad. The idea is to make noise.”

One of the debutantes added: “God, it’s inspiring how the faculty are finally coming over. All their latent antagonism toward the administration is revealing itself.”

“Really,” said the other one, “their hitherto-unspoken opinions are bubbling to the proverbial surface.”

Unable to evoke response, Gnossos murmured, “Holy shit,” and made his way to the bathroom. He locked and bolted the door, took down the
Anatomy of Melancholy
from the commode bookshelf, and lit his joint. For fire he rolled up the letter on the front page of the
Sun
and started it with a match. There’s a time in the lives of men, came the thought, which taken at the tide you’re liable to fucking drown.

He had attempted to singe Kristin’s knee-socks with the temperature of a parting glance as he passed, but she failed to notice. Punish her with my absence. That Tampax story, man, got to get things a little bit clear, knowledge of the taut membrane ought to stay in front. Celebrate the passion with blood is where it’s at, closest they come to crucifixion, atonement for the old forbidden fruit. He purged the pockets of carbon dioxide in his lungs and sucked a little pure ambrosia, Mixture Sixty-nine, cut with the remains of a paregoric Pall Mall. All natural goodness, no carburetion. He kept it down until his temperature changed, a vague swelling at the temples. Then he stuffed his ears with Q-tips to keep away the outside world and read for an hour, not even rising when he sensed a pounding on the door.

Later he realized he’d been scanning the same paragraph two or three hundred times, so he stumbled into the kitchen and called Fitzgore. He was slightly higher than an Indian elephant’s eye.

“What’s the matter with you?” came Kristin’s voice. “Fitzgore’s been in the infirmary for weeks.” She was searching in the refrigerator for food, and everyone else had gone.

“Hey, Piglet, where you been?”

“Well, I couldn’t get into the goddamned bathroom, so I had to use the Rajamuttus’.”

“That’s not what I meant, man, where you been, anyway?” He teetered slightly and his lids were annoyingly heavy.

“Getting my thing. It always comes early when something exciting’s going on like this. Is there any of that Greek cheese?”

“Your
thing
, man?”

“My period.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Really sweet.”

“Am I supposed to apologize or something?”

“You signed out last night, man, what’s going on?”

She had taken off her knee-socks and was barefoot in a summer dress. “Who told you that?”

“Never mind, baby, just don’t put me on.”