Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

I’d never heard Bilker do so much talking. Through his tirade, I held Caroline’s hand, pinning it to my knee under the tabletop. Then the club’s DJ spoke, and the sound system permitted his words to reverberate over our heads like an articulate siren:

“Welcome to another Fire Sine Friday at Sinusoid Disturbances, culture freaks! Comin’ atcha from his plastic cloud is Hotlanta’s answer to that silver-tongued sweetie in the White House, Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman! Ol’ Bitsy’s here to ease the strain ’twixt donkeys and heffalumps, honkies and cooler cats, menfolks and ladies fair, hetero and homo pairs, an’—Lawd have mercy, y’all!—’twixt your ever-lovin’ bodies and your ever-livin’ SOOOOOUULS!” This last word stretched out until it had five or six syllables and the pitch of a freight-train whistle.

The curtains on stage parted, and the Moog-warped melody of an old standard set to a fusion-rock beat surged back and forth through the bistro. Seven well-endowed young women in body stockings pranced into view, tossing their heads, rotating their arms, and trying very hard to unsocket their pelvises.

“Prepare yourselves, culture freaks,” cried Bitsy Vardeman from aloft, “for a little heartstoppin’ boola-boola from Ess Dee’s very own sultry and sensual ballet corps, the Impermanent Wave Dancers !” The Impermanent Wave Dancers did twenty minutes of gymnastic splits, leaps, and buttock-flinching to louder and louder rock music. Bilker watched with the same clinical aloofness with which a police officer might watch a fight between pit bulls. T. P. clapped his hands. Caroline’s attitude was harder to gauge: a distrustful kind of wonder, maybe.

RuthClaire shouted, “David hates this, but it always gets a Friday-night crowd to pay a three-dollar cover for an evening of performance art!”

Finally, after a raucous eternity, the dancers departed, and Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman announced, “Okay, babies, here tonight from Abraxas, Atlanta’s Hall of Miracles and Mirages, David Blau and the Blau Blau Rebellion! Give ’em a hand, culture freaks! I say now, Give ’em a hand !” Applause was sparse, and the darkness that had fallen after the dancers’ exit persisted. Some students near us began to grumble.

Eventually, though, David Blau’s voice spoke from behind the sequined curtain: “ Let there be light !” Obligingly, Vardeman spotlighted the curtain, which parted to reveal a huge black tarp suspended like a movie screen at the stage’s rear. Blau, in his house painter’s costume, walked forward from the back, stopped on the edge of the projecting runway, and stared soulfully out over the heads of his audience.

“And Adam knew Eve,” he declared in actorish tones. “And knew her, and knew her, and knew her. And so the generations of Adam evolved. They evolved, my friends, toward the many likenesses of God you see sitting at tables all around you.”

An unexpected blackout.

In this darkness, everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances could hear some hurried but efficient-sounding rolling noises. Then the footlights came on, and we could see a group of two-dimensional cardboard figures on wheels lined up in front of the tarp. Each cutout depicted a different representative of five early hominid species. The figures to the left looked noticeably more apelike than those to the right—although, anomalously, the figure in the middle had the most brutish physique. The oddest thing about the cutouts was that through holes corresponding to the figures’ mouths, there hung limp blue balloons. Suddenly, all five balloons inflated, obscuring the painted faces behind them, and each balloon jiggled against the head of its cutout as if yearning to escape skyward. Because of the frank frontal nudity of the five hominids, this was an especially ludicrous sight, and many of the kids around us sniggered.

A man of Oriental descent stepped out from behind the figure on the far left. “ Australopithecus afarensis ,” he said. As soon as he had spoken, he reached behind his cutout, and the balloon hiding its face floated straight up, four feet or so, and bobbed to a standstill on its string.

Pam Sorrells’s head appeared above that of the second figure in the line. “ Australopithecus africanus ,” she said. Its balloon also climbed ceilingward, halting about a foot above the balloon of the A. afarensis cutout.

Then David Blau peeked mischievously from behind the third figure. “ Australopithecus robustus ,” he said. The balloon attached to this cutout—the most massively built of the five—ascended barely over a foot. The incongruity of the balloon’s brief ascent, after the audience had been led to expect something else, provoked laughter—as did the creature’s resemblance to a squat, semi-naked gorilla.

Evelyn Blau popped up behind the fourth figure. This one bore an uncanny and obviously deliberate likeness to RuthClaire’s Adam. Said Evelyn distinctly, “ Homo habilis .” The helium-filled balloon in front of this cutout’s face rose to a height of six or seven feet.

A black man in painter’s coveralls—a young artist with a studio at Abraxas—stepped from behind the final cutout. He said, “ Homo erectus .” The balloon belonging to this creature, the tallest and most human-looking of the lot, floated upward a foot higher than the habiline’s, and the black man strolled to the stage’s apron, looked out, spread his arms, and haughtily said, “ Homo sapiens sapiens .” Man the wise the wise: the culmination of God’s evolutionary game plan.

From the pocket of his coveralls, this man took a pellet pistol, an act that prompted Bilker Moody to reach for the shoulder harness under his coat, but RuthClaire patted his wrist and shook her head. Meanwhile, the performance artist with the pellet gun turned toward the cutouts, aimed his weapon, and, squeezing off a shot, popped the balloon belonging to A. afarensis . The cutout’s human attendant rolled it off-stage. Then the nonchalant black man popped the balloons of the remaining hominid cutouts, giving the person behind each figure just enough time to push it into the wings before firing at the next balloon. When he finished, he pocketed his weapon, walked to the Homo erectus cutout, and, like a hotdog vendor pushing a cart in Manhattan, guided the last of the extinct hominids into the wings.

Blackout.

A bewildered silence gripped everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances. Someone—a football player from Tech?—shouted, “What the fuckin’ hell was that supposed to mean?” Others at their tables began to boo, a din that swept tidally from one end of the club to the other. Some of the art students near us, though, were on their feet applauding and shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!”

Bitsy Vardeman averted a donnybrook by spinning Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” a hit even before Adam’s appearance at Paradise Farm. Many in the audience clapped their hands, sang along, and boogied around their tables.

The lights in the club came up full, and all five members of the Blau Blau Rebellion were revealed on stage, each one clutching a bouquet of ten or fifteen lighter-than-air balloons. David, Evelyn, and their fellows handed the balloons to various people in the crowd, beckoning folks toward the stage or ambling out the runway to make the transfer. T. P. stood up in RuthClaire’s lap, his arm stretched out for a balloon. Pam Sorrells, I saw, was coming down the runway toward us, Sister Sledge continuing to chant the lyrics of their repetitive anthem and dozens upon dozens of people now surging forward to intercept Pam.

“Remember,” she cried over the music, “don’t take one unless you believe—”

“Believe what?” a male student shouted.