Thomas Disch - 334

My own confidence in the Army is undiminished, darling, but I think it wisest that I close the villa till the rumors have abated somewhat. I shall get Sylvan—whom else can I trust now?—to help me bury the plate and the bedposts and the three remaining jugs of Falernian somewhere quite secret (as we discussed the last time). The books, those that matter, I’ll bring with me. I wish there were even a morsel of good news. Except for being lonely, I am in good health and good spirits. I do wish you were not so many miles …

She crossed out “miles” and wrote “stadia.”

… stadia away.

For a moment in the mirror of art, for the blinking of an iris, Alex a witnessed her life the wrong way round. Instead of a modern house-wife fantasying herself in classical poses, the past stiffened and became actual and she thought she could see clearly, across the span of years, the other Alexa, the sad contemporary self she usually managed to avoid, a shrill woman in a silly dress who had been equal to the small demands neither of her marriage nor of her career. A failure or (which was possibly worse) a mediocrity.

“And yet,” she told herself.

And yet: didn’t the world, to keep on going, need just such people as she was? It had only been a moment. The question had restored a comfortable perspective, and she would end her epistle to Gargilius with some chilly, true-to-life endearment. She would write—

But her pen had disappeared. It was not on the desk, it was not on the rug, it was not in her pocket.

The upstairs noise had begun.

Two minutes to twelve. She might reasonably complain, but she didn’t know who lived in the apartment above, or even for certain that that was where the sound came from. “Cheng-cheng,” and then, after a pause, “Cheng-cheng.”

“Alexa?” She could not place the voice (a woman’s?) summoning her. There was no one in the room.

“Alexa.”

Tancred stood in the doorway, looking a perfect cupid with an old silky shawl knotted at his hips, lemon on chocolate.

“You startled me.”

Her left hand had lifted automatically to her lips, and there, lapsing back into existence, was the ballpoint.

“I couldn’t sleep. What time is it?”

He stepped toward the table soundlessly and stood with one hand resting on the arm of a chair, his shoulders level with hers, his eyes steady as a laser beam.

“Midnight.”

“Could we play a game of cards?”

“And what about tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’ll get up. I promise.”

G., when he begged a favor, always smiled; Tancred, a better tactician, remained perfectly solemn.

“Well, get out the cards. One game and then we both have to get to bed.”

While Tancred was out of the room, Alexa tore out her own pages from “What the Moon Means to Me.” A face clipped from a news magazine came unstuck and fluttered to the rug. She stooped and got it.

“What were you writing?” Tancred asked, beginning, neatly, to shuffle.

“Nothing. A poem.”

“I wrote a poem,” he admitted, excusing hers.

She cut. He began to deal.

She studied the newsprint face. It seemed oddly devoid of experience despite its years, like a very young actor got up as a very old man. The eyes regarded the camera lens with the equanimity of a star.

Finally she had to ask: “Who is this?”

“That! You don’t know who that is? Guess.”

“Some singer?” (Could it be Don Hershey? Already?)

“It’s the last astronaut. You know, the three who landed on the moon. the other two are both dead.” Tank took the scrap of paper from her and returned it to its place in his project. “Now he is too, I guess. You start.”

From Roman times until the closing years of the 20th Century the Bay of Morbihan on the southern coast of Brittany had been the source of the world’s most delectable seed oysters. Then in the late 80’s the oystermen of Locmariaquere were alarmed to notice that their seedlings sickened when they were transplanted and that soon even those that remained in their native waters had become unpalatable. Researchers hired by the departement of Morbihan eventually tracked down the source of infection to wastes dumped into the estuary of the Loire, some sixty miles down the coast. (Ironically, the polluter was a subsidiary branch of the pharmaceutical concern that had supplied the investigators.) By the time this was discovered, sad to say, the Morbihan oyster was extinct. However, in death the species bequeathed mankind its final inestimable gift, a monomolecular pearl, Morbehanine.

As synthesized by Pfizer, Morbehanine quickly became the most popular drug in all countries where it was not prohibited usually in some gentling combination with the traditional. Modified by narcotizing agents it was marketed as Oraline; with caffeine it became Koffee; with tranquilizers Fadeout. In its crude form it was used only by the half million or so members of the intellectual elite who practiced Historical Analysis. Unmodified Morbihanine induces a state of intensely experienced “daydreaming ” in which usual relationships of figure-to-field are reversed. During a common hallucinogenic high the self remains a constant while the environment, as in dreams, undergoes transformation. With Morbehanine the landscape that one inhabits, after the initial “fixing” period, is not much more malleable than our own everyday world, but one is aware of one’s slightest action in this landscape as a free, spontaneous, willed choice. It was possible to dream responsibly.

What determines the outlines of the alternate world is the subject’s sum knowledge of the period he chooses to fix during his first trips. Without continuous research one was apt to create a fantasy life as monotonous as the afternoon sex features. Most people, sensibly, preferred the mild, multidirectional zonk of Oraline, its euphoric illusion of freedom every which way.

For the few, however, the more strenuous pleasures of Pure Will were worth a greater effort. A century before the same people had covered themselves with useless degrees in the humanities, filling the graduate schools to overflowing. Now, with Morbihanine, there was a use for all the history history students are forever studying.

It had often been debated, among analysands, whether Historical Analysis was the best way to work out one’s problems or the best way to escape them. The elements of psychotherapy and of vicarious entertainment were inextricably knotted. The past became a kind of vast moral gymnasium in which some preferred a hard workout in the weight room of the French Revolution or the Conquest of Peru while others jiggled about lickerishly on the trampoline of Casanova’s Venice or Delmonico’s New York.

Once a particular stretch of time had been fixed, usually with the help of an expert in that era, one was no more at liberty to depart from it than one could walk away from the month of June. Alexa, for instance, was confined to a period of less than eighty years, from her birth in 334 (which was also, not coincidentally, the address of one of the buildings on East 11th Street for which she was responsible at the MODICUM office) up to the lovely pink evening when the twice-widowed Alexa, lately returned from a lifetime in the provinces, was to die of a stroke just a providential few days before the Sack of Rome. If she tried, during contact, to broach either barrier, 334 or 410, she experienced nothing more than a mild pastoral flickering—leaves, clouds, a blurry water-glass, sounds of troubled breathing, a smell of melons rotting—like the test-patterns of some sempiternal teevee network.

On Friday morning, despite the weather, Alexa took the malls downtown and arrived at Bernie’s office ten minutes early. A good-sized hole had been punched through the fiber panel of the outer door and the furniture inside was in a state of delirium. The couch had been sliced open, its innards garnishing the ruins.