Dreams That Burn In The Night (18 page)

"Not to mention
three obscene phone calls and the aluminum siding we bought," added the Koapa, handspringing into
a dial tone. "All in all, not a very encouraging situation."

"Then we must try
to establish the system that is next to the telephone in complexity and seek an immediate contact
with it."

"Which system would
that be?" asked the Koapa, putting him­self on hold.

"Plumbing."

"Plumbing?" said
the Koapa, so shocked he hung up on him­self.

"Certainly," said
the tour guide, smiling out of the four sides of his mouth. "Haven't you heard? This entire
civilization has gone down the drain."

"Must there be a
moral in everything I see?" complained the Koapa, forming itself into an advertising
council.

"Please!" said the
tour guide, becoming offended. "Are we sav­ages? In this not-experienced, timeless reality we can
afford ev­erything but the luxury of asking ignorant questions."

"And how, may I
ask," asked the Koapa, speaking as the chair­man of the ad council, "is my question ignorant? Are
you telling me not to be ignorant? If so, how am I expected to learn anything at all? Without the
confusion of ignorance, how would I have the courage to face the world? Where would I get my
enthusiasm?"

"We may be on
Earth," said the tour guide, "but now is not the time to go completely native. When I give a
negative command like 'Don't be ignorant,' I don't say 'Don't be ignorant' but rather 'May you
remain unactualized-ignorant'"

"Then it's all
right if I'm ignorant if taken at face value?" asked the Koapa, becoming legal tender.

"On Earth, it's the
standard disguise," said the tour guide. "What would you like to see next?"

"Nothing
whatsoever," said the Koapa, firmly making a lemon­ade stand. "At the moment, I am only
interested in finding out why my question was ignorant."

"Because you are
mistaking cause and effect. It is not a question of seeing a moral in everything. It is simply
that on Earth there is no reason why you should see a moral in
anything,
if you really
must know," snapped the tour guide.

"No morals!" said
the Koapa, squeezing his lemons in surprise. "I find that hard to believe. Somehow I have a
different idea of how Earth is."

"Have you been
sneaking out and mingling on your own?" The tour guide was angry. "Where do you get these crazy
ideas?"

The Koapa turned
into a sheep and looked sheepish. "Well, I did go out for an hour last night but I was very
careful."

"You idiot!"
screamed the tour guide, waving a tentacle in a crazy arc over his head. "I could lose my
license!"

"But I was
careful!" protested the Koapa. "I didn't vote in any local elections and I didn't try to buy
whiskey on Sunday! What could possibly go wrong after that?"

"I told you to stay
in the hotel room and watch television!" said the tour guide, wringing his tentacles nervously.
"Why couldn't you stay in like the rest of my charges?"

"Television,"
sneered the Koapa, "is chewing gum for the eyes. I wanted to see some real action!"

"I'm almost afraid
to ask where you went," said the tour guide, wiping a pint of sweat off his third
forehead.

"I went to a strip
joint. Where else would I see a moral in ev­erything? It was a topless and bottomless place,"
said the Koapa, becoming a top that was less.

"What a ghastly
thing to do! You are a barbarian at heart!" cried the tour guide. "And what, if anything, did you
learn from it?"

"Mostly religious
stuff," said the Koapa, becoming a statistical drop in sex crimes. "A bald-headed man with a
briefcase in his lap told me that God made sex for a joke but people took it seriously and made
it a sin."

"And you saw a
moral in that?" asked the tour guide.

"Yes," said the
Koapa. "I saw a moral in the absence of morals."

"I hope you had the
good sense not to point out that state of affairs to anybody. It wouldn't do to try to teach them
morals or the value of acquiring them."

"Oh, I tried," said
the Koapa, turning into a garbage truck with disgust. "I made a concentrated effort to convert
the bald-headed

man to morality but
it was impossible. He kept talking about things that had nothing to do with morality."

"Politics?" asked
the tour guide.

"No," said the
Koapa. "He thought I was talking about sex."

Above the Koapa's
head the poets in the balcony jeered drunken encouragement from the wine and the heat and other
things too. They embarrassed the Koapa, those motorcycle gang poets, using their boots as
tripods, mad and crazy they were, spit­ting angry poems over the railing, down among the people,
as if fired from slingshots. Clammy poems, beer can poems, wet poems, dank and musty menstrual
poems. All over the balcony.

The Koapa really
didn't mind. The used-condom poems fell in his hair and fell into his buttered popcorn but he
really didn't mind. He couldn't really eat the popcorn anyway and the hair, that awful stuff, it
was just glued on anyway.

The Koapa is an
alien. He's not real, so why should he care if a motorcycle gang poem falls on him? It is all a
part of the particu­lar cultural experience. Personally, he wouldn't miss it for the world. It's
so quaint.

The Koapa is an
alien. Don't be shocked. It is only by admit­ting it can his unique value be expressed. He is
from another time zone, for one thing. But I want you to know it is a time zone that communicates
importance instead of time, just as the gold of a painted halo is not really a color. He is
sitting in the audience to­night, quietly, circumspectly. Any minute the strippers are going to
come out replete with seed intuitions for all of humanity.

Strippers, a term
to be preferred over exotic dancers, create values in their actions. Values so unique that to
praise them is impossible. A striptease as a narrative, as a mosaic of human ex­perience, has its
parts arranged in terms of value estimations (as in medieval tapestries where the most important
saint is the big­gest one) and not in terms of consequence.

The Koapa is
sitting there quietly. The stage is lit, he is lit. His knees spark little heel marks against the
back of the bald-headed man in the seat in front of him. The bald-headed man's head wets with
anticipatory perspiration, as if a poem were on the verge of falling out of his lap. The
bald-headed man leans forward and makes a series of jerking motions. It is then that the Koapa
real­izes that this man, this fellow traveler, is confronting himself with
a rejection of the historical present. But then, the rooms
of Earth are always so cold. What surprised grammarian would ever admit that there is any
acceptable substitute for a hand warmer in the dark?

The alien,
comfortably entrenched in an anticipatory present, is sitting there quietly. He is disturbing no
one in the hope that someone, preferably from the theater stage, will soon disturb
him.

There is an
indifferent roll of the drums and the stage curtain parts. Out walks Earth's last hope, Lou Effie
Vavoom, sticker bumper and organ grinder. On Tuesdays, she went bottomless. With her chest, who
noticed?

The Koapa wiped the
sweat off his bald anus, now shining dimly in the soft theater lights because his wig has fallen
off into the next row behind him. The Koapa's dark glasses look like the black back doors of two
hearses connected by a frame.

Lou Effie Vavoom
prances to center stage. She does something to her top and it springs forward, seemingly out of
control. She does something to the left that throws something like we should hope to tell you you
wouldn't think anything could be thrown to the right. Fascinated, obsessed, the alien's four eyes
rivet on the movement. His head follows the incredible arc, his body tilts, wa­vers. He's lost
control, tries to check his swing, overcorrects, and falls sideways between the theater
seats.

The Koapa is stuck,
trapped between the seats, struggling like a pinned butterfly, a fat, disguised, helpless
butterfly with sunglasses and a business suit. When he fell between the seats he made a dull
thud.

What is the
significance of this? So long as the space between the two rows of theater seats remains a space
with a certain vol­ume, quietly reflecting the things around it, there is no life to it. To
assert itself as reality, a sound must come from it. The space then proves to be dynamic, to be
full of vitality, to be of significance to sentient beings.

When the fat Koapa
in the business suit falls into the space with a dull thud, the space becomes an object of
interest, of value.

It's the thud of
life that makes it worthwhile. In fact, it was this accident that made the entire experience real
to the Koapa. The stripper had ceased to exist even though, as promised in the ad­vertisements, a
man, certainly not beautiful, but positively nude,
had caught her on the bump of her bump and grind and had im­paled her in three-part
harmony center stage. It was copulation in the first degree. It was something like a
finale.

Nobody in the
theater noticed, however. Their eyes were on the alien. The act of sexual intercourse on the
stage lacked the nov­elty of an accident.

When the Koapa
returned to his mentor, he was confused. On a world so obviously obsessed with sex, the
inhabitants seemed extremely easy to distract.

"Why did they look
at me and not at that which they all seem to seek?" asked the Koapa, becoming the staple in a
Playboy
foldout.

The tour guide
shrugged his antennae expressively. "On Earth, there are two things. One is prayer, the other is
sex. Both are popular, both have the same motivations. And both are good any­where except on a
stage."

"And why is that?"
asked the Koapa, putting himself in a collection plate.

The tour guide
seemed reluctant to discuss it further.

"If we are going to
discuss indistinguishables like sex and religion," said the tour guide, "I would like to explain
to you that I am no longer the person to whom you are speaking."

"Can't you give me
a hint? Just a tiny inkling why copulation and prayer aren't good on stage?" persisted the Koapa,
crossing his own palms with silver.

"They both require
a resurrection of the flesh," said the tour guide with a sigh, having grown weary of the antics
of the Earthlings. "And what audience is going to believe it two times a night and once for the
matinee?"

(with Michael
Bishop)

"Well, what do you
want?" Jarmster asked Melyna. "An abo? A Norseman? A Cossack?"

"If I knew, I'd
say," the girl said. "You know I don't care much for the things anyway." Sometimes she had
trouble just car­ing for the other two members of her triad.

"You haven't asked
me," Zared, the third member of their six-month-old three-group, said from the circular ulterior
balcony.

Jarmster and Melyna
looked up. They were standing on a floor of Make-Me-Opaque Ambersea, at transparency stage 4.
Zared, looking down, could see the tenants in the bowlcove under theirs, all rippled and foggy,
making erotic motions with a new Zulu Androlacrum. That, of course, was what had probably started
the argument.

"All right, then,"
Jarmster said, peeling off the Roman nose he'd worn all morning and substituting his own
pugnacious pug one. "What do
you
want, Zared?"

"Something
indigenous," Zared said.

Melyna made the
Make-Me-Opaque floor opaque, smiled at Zared, and saw the Oriental woman upstairs leering at her
through the Ambersea floor above the interior balcony. Because the old woman couldn't abide
darkness, nine lamps shone down into their living area behind Rose Mashita's head. Outside, it
was always dark. Fifty or so years ago the authorities, for everyone's comfort, had polarized the
sky. Sometimes, Melyna thought, it was too bad you couldn't opaque the ceiling, but that was all
part of living in a bowlcove: only if you were a minnow in the bottommost bowl could you ink out
the fibrafoam above, as compen­sation for having no one below to leer at.

The Villa, Bowlcove
9 (only one from the top), on the Kansas-Oklahoma perimeter of Wichitopolis, Zared, Jarmster, and
Melyna's home.

Jarmster, puzzled,
said, "What?"

"Indigenous," Zared
responded.

"Again,
please."

"He means
'native,'" Melyna said, tweaking Jarmster's nose. Jarmster had to move it over a smidgen, to get
it right again.

"Zared's been
reading
again," Jarmster said, oozing distaste.

From the balcony:
"Hypnoscanning, is all."

"Well, what sort of
... native ... do you want?" Melyna asked, cupping her heartside breast for the benefit of Rose
Mashita hi Bowlcove 10. "A Mandan, an Arikara, a Meshi'ka, an Inca, a Yuchi, a Yamaha . . . ?"
Melyna began laughing. The woman upstairs had confused her, no doubt.