Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

“Fucking watch it, pal,” the elf said, back again. “You know I can feel that. It hurts.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t mean to make you nervous. You’ve still got a few months.”

“A few months?”

“That’s time enough. Why don’t you patch things up with Ramón?”

“I’ve got no problem with Ramón.”

“Besides the fact that you don’t talk to him.”

“He doesn’t talk to me.”

“It’s your business, I guess. But you’ve got to get out there and effect some goddamn evolution. Do me proud.”

“How do I do that?”

But Baltran was gone again. He’d left Gunderson to worry all alone. How was Gunderson going to complete his mission with these new time constraints? He’d have to throw some money at the problem. You couldn’t fix every problem by throwing money at it, but you couldn’t fix anything without also throwing money at it. But where would he find the papes?

Sure, money came to you as long as you didn’t covet it, but there was still the distinct possibility that the old Gunderson, that greedy moron, coveted on the down low, screwing them both. Maybe it was this vestigial Gunderson who’d cut off Ramón when the shaman started asking questions about the television deal. Probably just wanted a new roof for his hut. Well, unless Gunderson got the message out, Ramón wouldn’t need a roof. Nobody would. There just wasn’t time to waste working out the licensing on a prophecy.

Victoria was in Lisbon for a fado festival and Carlos was with his grandparents in Maine, so Gunderson had full run of the loft he’d traded in for penile liberation. Part of the excitement, the charge, of pending apocalypse, he understood, was knowing Victoria wouldn’t get to enjoy this square footage much longer.

Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy for other reasons. The treatise one of his acolytes at Oxford had just e-mailed him was dense going, especially in Victoria’s desktop’s antiquated text format. Here were Isaac Luria and Madame Blavatsky, there a text block of dingbats. Gunderson had barely skimmed his philosophy books in college. “I get the idea,” he would announce to his dorm suite after twenty minutes of deep study. “Pour me a drink.”

“Psychonaut” was a silly word (Baltran said only chumps uttered it), and Gunderson had detested most of the heavy trippers in college. He’d taken hallucinogens just a few times, passed those occasions frying flapjacks, staring at their scorched, porous skins. The only acid eater he could ever abide was Red Ned, a scrawny old Vietnam vet who appeared at most major burner parties and who, in return for some My Lai-ish confession and recitations from The Marx-Engels Reader , got free shrooms and beer.

Once, at a barbecue, Ned cornered Gunderson near the keg, stuck a bottle under the younger man’s nose, some filthy hooch he’d likely distilled in one of the bus station toilets.

“It’s absinthe,” said Ned. “The mighty wormwood. You will eat the devil’s pussy and suddenly know French.”

“Maybe later,” said Gunderson.

“Later.” Ned laughed. “Shit, kid, later? Later my platoon will be here. We’ll slit you at the collarbone, pour fire ants in. Then you’ll talk.”

“I’m happy to talk now, Ned.”

“You don’t have anything to tell me yet. You haven’t acquired the blind and pitiless truth. But I have a feeling about you. What do you think?”

“I just want to get laid.”

“I’m good to go,” said Ned, and gave Gunderson what might have been, during teethsome years, a toothsome smile. “You do tunnel rat zombie cock?”

“Got a rule against that.”

“Your loss, son.”

In short, until Gunderson had taken a magazine assignment, gone to Mexico to drink emetic potions with psychotropic turistas, his opinion of hallucinogens was that you had to worship jam bands, or believe the army had planted a chip in your head, to really enjoy them.

He’d flown to Oaxaca with a glib lede to that effect in his laptop. He returned a converso. The tales of Hofmann, the stern brain play of Huxley had never enticed him, but puking and shitting on a dirt floor while Ramón kicked him in the balls and, later, sobbing while his dead grandfather Gilbert hovered nearby in a beer-can cardigan and told Gunderson why he, Gunderson, had such a tough time being faithful to women (Gunderson’s mother had hugged him too much, and his father was always on his high horse, and there was something about Gil’s side of the family being related to Barry Goldwater) — all this, in aggregate, did the trick. Later he discovered the crotch kicks were not traditional, but Ramón’s twist on the ritual. Didn’t matter, Gunderson was hooked. A few more doses over the next several months and he knew his place in his family and his place in the infinite, at least provisionally.

He also had a vision of the world in a few years’ time if the current course was not corrected. More precisely, it was a vision of North America, oil starved, waterlogged, millions thronged on the soggy byways, fleeing the ghost sprawls of the republic. He saw his sister gang-raped in an abandoned Target outside Indianapolis. The local warlord, nicknamed Dee-Kay-En-Wye for the runes on his tattered hoodie, cackled as he watched his clan work. They’d lived in Home Appliances their entire lives. Strangest of all, Gunderson didn’t have a sister. This added urgency to his vision. It wasn’t just about him, or his sister.

When he’d recovered and told the shaman what he’d seen, Ramón led him to a stone hut at the edge of the village. A satellite jutted from the woven roof. Inside was a sleeping cot, a computer, a bookshelf full of French Symbolists. The shaman, who to Gunderson resembled one of those carved-down distance runners he’d watched train near his father’s house in Oregon, slid out a large cardboard box with copper hasps from beneath the cot. Inside was a crumbling facsimile of the storied codex. He showed Gunderson the jaguar, the sickle, the long, solstistic loops. He pointed to where the reeds ran out.

“I thought the Maya had the calendar,” said Gunderson.

“Fuck the Maya,” said Ramón.

* * *

Gunderson had never been much for the astronomy, the math. His colleagues, his rivals, could offer the proofs, the ellipticals, the galacticals. Most of them used the Maya Tzolkin, and Gunderson suspected that Ramón’s insistence on this Mixtec forecast was just an intellectual property maneuver, but he didn’t mind. He was trying to save the world, and that included not just the plants and the animals and the majestic rock formations but the people, those meat-world parasites who’d built pyramids and written concertos and enslaved their brothers and sisters and performed clitoridectomies and gone to the moon and gorged themselves on war and corn syrup. Gunderson was a people person. We just needed new kinds of people. We had to start making them right now.

The other thing that had to start being made right now was a serious offer from the TV people. Gunderson was back downtown at his favorite organic teahouse, e-mailing a fiery message to his network, hinting there might soon be an announcement about a new interpretation of the codex, a revised time frame for the Big Clambake. That would light up the boards. His people didn’t need much prompting. Many were lonely sorts pining for genuine human connection or, short of that, a flash mob.

So if the series division kept wavering, maybe Gunderson could get some grass roots going. Grass roots. That had been a big word with his father. Still was, Gunderson guessed. He hadn’t talked to the man in years. Why? Ask the Jaguar. Gunderson didn’t know, except that maybe it was hard for men to talk to each other, especially fathers and sons, at least in this dimension. Jim Gunderson was handsome, brave, beloved, righteous. How did you talk to a father like that, a legendary activist, a lawyer for the downtrodden, ask him to read your magazine profile of a sitcom star, a charismatic CFO? Of course, Gunderson’s hack days were behind him. Why didn’t he call now? Because Jim Gunderson fought for a better tomorrow while his son, despite all his talk of collective action and personal evolution, was maybe just another doom pimp betting on no tomorrow at all? No, it was probably just the father-son stuff. The new times would not be so burdened. We’d be too busy line dancing with alien life-forms for patriarchal agon. Gunderson glanced up, tracked the dreadlocked teen behind the counter.