Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

Squint as she might, Ricki could detect not a glimmer in the house. She bit her lip to keep from crying. “It's two-thirty,” she said sorrowfully, as if “two-thirty” were the name of a fatal disease. “It's two-thirty in the son-of-a-bitching morning.”

Were Ricki concerned with precise expression, and she was not, she might have added, “here,” for while it was indeed, two-thirty in Seattle, in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic. Still awake, Alobar lay upon his prison cot, practicing Bandaloop breath.

That's what he called it, what he and Kudra had called it all those years: Bandaloop breath. Of course, there was an absolute lack of evidence that the Bandaloop ever breathed in that manner. For that matter, there was precious little evidence that the Bandaloop ever existed. Absence of proof failed to faze Alobar, however, since, thanks to the Bandaloop, he had witnessed three hundred and eighty-five thousand, eight hundred and six sunrises in his life, and judging from the milky molluscan glow seeping through the barred window, was about to witness yet another.

Moreover, if he concentrated on his breathing, and the parole board soon ruled in his favor, he might go on witnessing sunrises indefinitely, despite the aging that worked in him now like naphthous bees in a leathery hive. That was his hope, although, considering his prospects, why he should want to go on — and on and on and on — was a question he could not easily answer. One thing was certain, he didn't intend to risk the Other Side without a splash of K23 , and he was starting to wonder if he shouldn't have gone ahead and given Wiggs Dannyboy the formula for it. Dr. Dannyboy could have had some made and smuggled it in to him. His intense secrecy about K23 , his long-standing refusal to tap its commercial potential, was a bit irrational, he must admit. But, then, were he a rational man, he would have been dead a thousand years. Ho.

Joints creaking like the lines of a storm-tossed ship, Alobar arose and hobbled to the window. He looked for his old benefactor, the morning star, but the window was tiny, and the only celestial light in the slice of sky available to his scrutiny was a blinking satellite circling the Earth. “The world is round-o, round-o,” he started to sing, but embarrassment shut him up. “If the parole board doesn't act soon, I'll send Dannyboy the formula,” he promised.

Alobar wasn't the only person thinking about a secret formula that morning (or night). Distracted by first one thing and then the other, Wiggs and Priscilla hadn't gotten around to it yet, but in New Orleans — time: four-thirty — Madame Devalier lay in her canopied bed, bejeweled hands crossed upon the vault of her belly, pondering a possible bottom note, mixing dozens, scores of ingredients in her mind's nose, not ever imagining how simple it could be; and not imagining, either, that in a cheap motel near the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where it was, yes, two-thirty, thank you, Ricki, V'lu Jackson slept with the answer — a drop or two of the answer — in an ancient bottle beneath her vinyl-wrapped, foam rubber pillow; and, of course, neither of them, Madame, awake, formulating, nor V'lu, dreaming, fist pressed against lonesome labia, could imagine that before they lay abed again, Bingo Pajama would be shot at their feet and that his little swarm of bees, masterless, would be frightening New Orleans half to. .

. . death. Arrgh! How Wiggs Dannyboy hated that word.

His reaction to “death” was neither terror nor resignation, avoidance nor morbid longing, shock nor denial, but, rather, fury. Controlled fury. Challenge, if you please. Combat. Wiggs was at war with death and had vowed never to surrender.

The declaration of war had been drawn up while he was in Concord State Prison. He had been transferred to Concord from a federal penitentiary in the Midwest at his own request after the incident in which a guard had poked out his right eye with a matchstick.

In the investigation that followed the blinding, it was revealed that Dr. Dannyboy had been subjected to almost continuous physical and mental harassment during his months in federal custody. The media, which, while it may have condemned Dannyboy's life-style and philosophy, had always found him good copy, fanned the story into a scandal. In addition, there was the threat of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. The government was hardly in a position to deny the request for transfer.

At Concord, Wiggs was near friends, mavericks who had managed to remain on the Harvard faculty or who had entered one or another of the “New Age” businesses that flourished in Cambridge and Boston. His pals kept him supplied with books from the university library and with the latest journals and papers in his fields of interest: anthropology, ethnobotany, mythology, and neuropharmacology. They paid him gossipy visits, monitored his health, and delivered his occasional contributions to The Psychedelic Review . They smuggled out the half-frozen dinner roll into which he had freshly ejaculated, rushing it to the parking lot where his ovulating wife (who was eventually to jilt him for a more available partner) received it and immediately did with it what she had to do: the origins of Huxley Anne.

It was, despite the many difficulties of prison life, a reasonably productive and stimulating period. There was plenty of time for contemplation, however, and Dr. Dannyboy used it to review what had been accomplished in the sixties, by himself and like-minded others. Then, he placed those accomplishments within the context of history, not merely the official history, with its emphasis on politics and economics, or the more pertinent history of the various ways that we have lived our daily lives since we first crawled out of the ooze or swung down from the foliage, but also the higher, more complex history of how our thought patterns, our nervous systems, our spiritual selfhoods have developed and changed.

This much Wiggs concluded: illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition; in every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals, living their lives upon the threshold, at the gateway of the next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization is probably still hundreds of years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of these elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole, thereby laying a significant patch of brick in the evolutionary road. He thought of the age of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. ("The Celts would have produced a major culture, too,” he told Priscilla, “if the Church hadn't got hold o' them first.") Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1971.

Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age, Wiggs admitted. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

Moreover, Wiggs believed that the American womb eventually would bear fruit. The United States was the logical location of the next enlightened civilization. And since the sixties phenomena had at least prepared the soil — many of the individuals who had successfully mutated during the sixties were carrying on, out of view of the public eye — the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away.