Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

Do a little dance…

Make a little love…

Get down tonight…

Get down tonight…

He began to feel sleepy.

It’s so strange, he thought. All the tricks and games and lines and promises to get them into bed with you and you work so hard at it and nothing happens. And then someone like this comes along and you don’t try much of anything at all and then she’s the one you wake up next to.

It doesn’t make any sense at all, he thought sleepily… no sense at all. And the tune kept playing on and on in his mind — over and over again and again until he fell asleep.

Do a little dance…

Make a little love…

Get down tonight…

Get down tonight…

When Phædrus awoke he saw through the hatch that the sky had become less black. Dawn was coming.

Then he realized he wasn’t alone. In fact he was blocked physically from getting out of the bunk by a body between him and the boat’s passage way. This was Lila, he remembered.

He saw that with some careful maneuvering he could slink up through the open hatch and come around on deck and re-enter the cabin from the cockpit.

He lifted himself up carefully and then got through the hatch without disturbing her.

Nice work.

The cold deck on his bare feet really woke him up. He couldn’t feel any ice, but the fiberglass coachroof was the next thing to it. It helped to shake off all the alcohol fumes in his head. Nothing like walking around bare-naked on top of a freezing boat to wake you up for the day.

Everything was so quiet now. The dawn was still so early the turn of the creek in the distance was barely visible. Hard to believe what Rigel said: that around that turn a coal-barge could go all the way to the ocean.

He went over and checked the lines going over to Rigel’s boat. They were a little loose and he took up on one of the spring lines and then tightened all of them. He should have done that before he went to bed. He’d been too drunk to take care of details like that.

He looked around and, despite the cold, a dawn mystery took hold of him. Some other boats had come in since he had, and were rafted ahead and behind him. Possibly one of them was the boat Lila had come on. The harbor looked scuzzy and old in places but showed some signs of gentrification in others. Pseudo-Victorian, it looked like, but not bad. Off in the distance was a crane and other masts. The Hudson River was completely out of sight.

It felt good not to be related to this harbor in any way. He didn’t know what was above the banks of the river or behind the harbor buildings or where the roads led to or who the houses belonged to or what people would appear here today or what people they would meet. It was like a picture-book and he was a child, watching it, waiting for a page to be turned.

Shivering broke the spell. His skin was covered with goose-bumps. He went back to the stern of the boat, hung off the boom gallows with one arm and relieved into the creek. Then he stepped down to the cockpit, pushed the heavy teak hatch cover back and let himself down with the grace that came from a familiar motion. It was a grace he’d acquired the hard way. When he first got the boat he walked around like it was a house, slipped on some diesel oil, plunged head-first down the companionway ladder, and broke a collar bone. Now he’d learned to move like a spider monkey, particularly in storms when the whole boat rose and pitched and rolled like a flying trapeze.

In the cabin he felt his way to an overhead light and flicked it on. The darkness was filled instantly with familiar teak and mahogany.

He went forward into the deck forecabin and found his clothes in the bunk opposite Lila. She had evidently rolled over since he left. Her shadowy shape looked about the same from this side as it had from the other a few minutes ago.

He closed the forecabin door and went into the main cabin where he pulled open a wood bin-cover, took out his old heavy brown sweater and drew it over his head. When he pushed the cover shut, the snap of its catch disturbed the silence. He went back to the companionway ladder, put the hatch’s drop-boards in place, and slid the heavy hatch-cover shut.

This place needed some heat.

Next to the ladder, by the chart table, he found matches and alcohol. He carefully brought a little cupful of the alcohol to a small coal stove mounted on a bulkhead at the other end of the cabin and poured the alcohol over some charcoal briquets inside. On the picture-book shore out there everything was done by magic. They got their heat and electricity without even thinking about it. But in this little floating world, whatever you needed you had to get for yourself.

He lit a match, tossed it in and watched the alcohol go Pouf! and fill the stove with a pale, blue-purple flame. He was glad he’d loaded the stove yesterday. He wouldn’t want to have to do it now… Was that just yesterday? It seemed like a week…

He closed the stove door, watched it for a moment until out of the corner of his eye he saw an enormous suitcase that he had never seen before.

Where did that come from? he wondered.

It wasn’t his.

Lila must have brought it with her.

He thought about it as he struck another match at a gimballed brass kerosene lamp. He adjusted the wick until the flame seemed right. Then he turned off the overhead electric light and sat down on the berth under the lamp, his back against a rolled sleeping bag.

As far as he could figure he must have made some sort of deal with her to come on the boat or she wouldn’t have brought this suitcase.

Now the kerosene light glowed over all the wood and bronze and brass and fabric shapes of the cabin and another invisible glow of warmth came from the black coal stove that now made cricking heating noises. Soon it would heat everything enough to make it all comfortable.

Except for that suitcase. What was coming back to mind wasn’t making him comfortable at all. He remembered she’d dropped the suitcase on Rigel’s deck. Really hard. When they walked across to come aboard he’d turned and told her to keep it quiet. He remembered she shouted, Don’t you tell me to keep it quiet! in a voice you could hear all over the harbor.

It was all coming back: going over to her boat, waiting for her to pack, listening to her talk about that dirty double-crosser George and his whore, Debbie.

Oh-oh.

He guessed it couldn’t be so bad, though. Just a couple of days into Manhattan and then she would be gone. No harm done.

He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. They were for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-type trays was by an edge where it could fall off. That’s all he needed, he thought, about three thousand four-by-six slips of note pad paper all over the floor.

He got up and adjusted the sliding rest inside each tray so that it was tight against the slips and they couldn’t fall out. Then he carefully pushed the trays back into a safer place in the rear of the berth. Then he went back and sat down again.

It would actually be easier to lose the boat than it would be to lose those slips. There were about eleven thousand of them. They’d grown out of almost four years of organizing and reorganizing and reorganizing so many times he’d become dizzy trying to fit them all together. He’d just about given up.

Their overall subject he called a Metaphysics of Quality, or sometimes a Metaphysics of Value, or sometimes just MOQ to save time.

The buildings out there on shore were in one world and these slips were in another. This slip-world was quite a world and he’d almost lost it once because he hadn’t written any of it down and incidents came along that had destroyed his memory of it. Now he had reconstructed what seemed like most of it on these slips and he didn’t want to lose it again.