Element 79 (7 page)

“Yes, I admit I jumped at the chance. I’d jump again.”

“Is that intended as a compliment?”

“Yes, it is.”

The woman stopped the rapid-fire barrage and said slowly and pointedly, “Perhaps we should return to your academic friends, Professor. What exactly are you going to tell them?”

“I shall insist on a thorough investigation of the whole thing.”

“Would that be wise? Is there anything in this business that would profit from thorough investigation? How you purloined my diary in order to discover my condition on a certain day of the month? Would that make a favorable headline in the daily press, do you think?”

“I suppose it will give you great satisfaction to see me chucked out—wasn’t that the way you put it?”

“It will give me no satisfaction at all. Quite the contrary. You are not going to be chucked out, for the good and sufficient reason that we—Cynthia and I—have need of financial support.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Simply this. You will sign a statement admitting the paternity of Cynthia’s child. The statement will never be produced so long as your income is properly diverted to us, to Cynthia and me. And by your income, my dear John, I do not mean your academic salary. I also mean all the profitable little side lines. I mean your income as your accountant sees it.”

“Well, of all the bitches in creation, you’re just about the last!”

The woman smiled at the girl. “Didn’t I say I’d make him suffer?”

“What am I supposed to live on?” asked the man in furious indignation.

“Naturally you will live here with us. What else?”

“Think of the scandal, woman.”

“Scandal, yes. Scandal most horrible. But since it cannot be proved that Cynthia’s child is your child, the university will take no steps. You said so yourself.”

“But, good God, do you think I’m going to slave my guts out for a couple of women like you, together all the time, together and laughing in my face? I’ll clear out once and for all if you push me too far. I’m warning you, Helen.”

“Rubbish, hysterical nonsense. A few minutes ago you admitted to waiting ten years to make me—actually it was twelve years. If you tried to run away, I could bring you back, just by raising my little finger—like that!”

The woman held up a fist, but with the fifth finger extended. The man pondered the implications of this remark. Then he burst out again, “I’m not going to have the two of you going off…”

“Off to bed, is that what you mean? Leaving you to your own little solitary. What other prospect is there, my poor John, unless Cynthia or I should take pity on you? You see, with women like us, there is only one difficult problem, children. Happily, you have provided for us in this regard, just as you are going to provide for us financially speaking. Happily also, you will be able to help with the children, to wash them when they stagger about the house with appallingly dirty hands, the little dears you have imposed on us with such biological ferocity.”

The woman smiled from the couch on both the man and the girl. “Now, with all this unpleasantness settled and concluded, how shall we proceed to amuse ourselves? I believe television is offering one of its more popular domestic dramas.”

The author’s fingers were streaked with ink as he came to the end of his crass little story. He read it through from the beginning, a satisfied smile on his face. Coming along nicely, he thought to himself, although two of the characters, the man and the girl, still needed development. He’d better say what the man was a professor of. Best to choose something in the sciences, so as to put things on the right side of the two cultures.

The author left his desk to make himself a cup of coffee. While waiting for the kettle, it struck him like a thunderclap. He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, symbolically in the classical theatrical gesture. Obviously, oh, so obviously, this must be a play, not a story. How much easier to strengthen the professor on the stage, to strengthen him into a formidable bullish creature, merely stage business. He could lengthen out the initial dinner party. He’d have it strange and obscure, with a lot of oblique remarks. All the girl need do, right through, would be to look mysterious. The older woman would carry the show quite easily. He’d already got her well in hand. At the beginning he’d mislead everybody into thinking it was the usual triangle problem, with the man and woman married and with the man just on the point of running off with the young bit of stuff. He could keep it going this way right up to the end of the first act. How about bringing down the curtain by letting it out that
both
women were pregnant? A good dramatic punch, that. It would mislead an audience into thinking the play turned on the dilemma of whether the man could leave his wife, now she was pregnant.

In the second act he’d pull out all the stops, twisting things in a way nobody expected. My God, what a story it was, when he came to think about it dispassionately. Two Lesbians, both pregnant by the same man, with the delicious idea of one of them trading herself to him in order to get at the other. It had never been thought of before, not even by the great men, not even by Boccaccio, so far as he could remember, let alone by the ordinary run of modern writers. It was brilliant, even if he said it only to himself. Another thing, wasn’t it superb the way he needed only three characters? It should be possible for any theater to afford the hundred-and-fifty-a-week class. This would take a lot of the strain off, because actors and actresses in that class can make bricks out of straw, not that there need be much straw in this thing. It couldn’t miss, not with the sex craze in the theater running so strongly. He could see it just running and running, maybe five years?

In a fine frenzy, the author rushed back to his desk. On a new pad he began rapidly to sketch in the opening of his first act. It never occurred to him that his characters supplied a subconscious need for something to dominate. The writer interested in plot follows the path of structure and order. The writer interested in the pathological aspects of humanity has rarely anything of logic or of structure. He is seeking to satisfy the basic human instinct to dominate, if not real flesh and blood, well, at least the figments of his own imagination.

Dionysus was the first to awaken. It hadn’t been at all bad, the life of a god in ancient Greece. But when Rome took over, mere existence became a desperate bore. So the gods all retired to Olympus, to “sleep it out.” It was hoped things would be better after a few millennia had slipped away.

Dionysus was all agog to take a quick first look around. He decided on a complete circumnavigation of the world. His flight took him across the great waters to the west of the Pillars of Hercules, to the continent now known as America. Here he gorged himself in astonishment.

One afternoon, in a place called California, he thought he would try out for himself one of the amazing little boxes, constructed, it seemed, from glass and metal, in which the mortals were now everlastingly scurrying around. He could see them below him, moving in almost continuous streams along a vast network of roads. From above, it all looked utterly aimless, like a big mound of ants. But there must be something to it, to all this commotion, Dionysus supposed.

The god slid unobtrusively into the first empty automobile he could find. To make the thing move demanded more ingenuity than he had expected. When at last he had the trick of it, he drove at a moderate pace onto a nearby highway. He soon mastered the standard practice of directing the box between two of the lines marked on the road. So what? He couldn’t imagine why anybody, even a mortal, would want to behave in this fashion. He felt there had to be more zip in it somewhere. He must be missing something. But the best he could find to do was to press the pedal harder and harder, the pedal that made the box go faster and faster. Even so, it was tame stuff.

There came a great whining noise. In fact, the noise gave Dionysus quite an ungodlike start. It issued apparently from another moving box, one that had suddenly come up close behind. On top of this other box a red light flashed unceasingly. Howling like Cerberus, the watchdog of Hades, the box went past him and then began to slow down. So Dionysus in turn went past the flashing box, which then immediately picked up speed. It seemed the other box was intent on playing some kind of game, a strange game, it was true. Dionysus wondered if his box should also be displaying a flashing light and if there was some way in which it could be made to howl in this outrageous manner, A dozen times or more he went past the thing, his foot stamped flat on the pedal, the one that made his box go faster. Then the other box began to crowd him to the roadside. He thought about giving it a block which would send it in a great arc through the air. Then he thought there might be some interest in stopping, to find out what it was that could howl so long and so loud.

Unfortunately, just when he expected to get to the bottom of the business, the howling stopped, although the light went on flashing. Dionysus saw a man coming toward him and felt an intense wonderment. The man was wearing a huge hat, there were black patches over his eyes—to shield them from the Sun, it seemed—and his gait would have befitted the god of Insolence. “You aiming to fly?”

“Yes, I am intending to fly.”

“Well, you’re doing no more flying today. See here, Charlie, I’m arresting you right now. You can fly after you’ve talked to the judge. Your license, Mac.”

“License?”

“You’re going to get the book, sweetie, oh, how you’re going to get the book. Maybe you’ve got a name?”

“Dionysus.”

“Dionysus what?”

“Dionysus nothing.”

“Okay, Dionysus Q. Squirt, you’re coming with me. We’ll straighten out the car and the license afterward. Come on, Mr. Wise Guy, make it snappy.”

As Dionysus climbed from the car, the cop put a hand over his gun. The god had previously adjusted his height to fit the car. Now he adjusted it to fit this new situation. He stood a head taller than the cop. With a swoop, faster than lightning, he picked the man up, swung him over the front of the box, and fastened him securely there. Then he drove back onto the highway, leaving the prowl car with its flashing light abandoned by the roadside.

An hour later Dionysus found himself approaching a large airport. The road took him right into it. The many people thronging Los Angeles Airport were intrigued by the big man with a curly golden beard who walked majestically into one of the airline buildings, leaving his car triple-parked outside. They were intrigued by the big buck deer strapped across its front. The deer turned out to be alive. Unwisely, three porters released the animal, whereupon it raced after the bearded man, emitting a bellow that sounded uncannily like “Hi, Mac.” As the prancing deer spread the utmost confusion, everybody looked for the strange hunter with the golden beard, but Dionysus had slipped invisibly onto a plane just taking off for New York.

Once inside the plane, Dionysus became visible again. Nobody took any particular notice as he moved into an empty seat. A tinny, glutinous sound was coming from some place immediately above his head. Music he supposed it was, but of an utterly commonplace quality, so commonplace as to be scarcely credible. It was his first experience of actual physical nausea, for in the ordinary way of things gods are never sick. These appalling sounds made him feel as if he were going to throw up.

Mercifully, the music stopped once the plane had lifted off the ground, once, miraculously, they were flying. Mortals were flying, ordinary mortals. Dionysus thought he had never seen so many ordinary mortals. They were packed together like cattle, five in a row, row after row of the creatures. The mere sight of them all, sitting there like so many huge pumpkins, depressed him. He considered how things might be livened up a bit. He tried singing in a tremendous bass voice, but nobody noticed it. They were all staring at little flickering pictures, their ears plugged solid with some device or other. Dionysus tried it himself. He heard more music, this time distantly projected against the roar of the plane. It had the quality of a sludge pump.

Without warning, there was a harsh crackle above his head. A disembodied voice began, “Well, folks, this is your captain.” The volume was enormous, almost sufficient to shatter his eardrums. The voice went on to advise them to look out of the plane on the right-hand side. Dionysus gathered from the announcement that something quite stupendous was to be seen, so he tried to look out just as the captain had advised, found the window so small that almost nothing was visible.

The plane gave a little shake, a kind of shrug, like an animal settling itself more comfortably. A notice flashed up in front of the god’s nose: FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT.

One of the stewardesses paraded up and down the aisle, checking the instant obedience of the passengers. By now the plane had resumed its smooth ride.

“I want to go to the john,” a woman complained.

“Not while the seat-belt sign is on, please,” was the firm command. The stewardess came abreast of the god. She was a pretty little thing, trim and wiry, hardworking, but reduced by the system to a prissy schoolmarm. She pointed imperiously at the god’s midriff. “Fasten your belt. Your belt, please.”

Dionysus rose from his seat. He took hold of the girl and marched her back along the aisle to a little cubicle, a place where coats were normally kept. The girl protested loudly, but nobody heard. Individual T.V. had the whole planeload in thrall. The stewardess was astonished to find the cubicle no longer small. It had suddenly become amply large enough for the god’s purpose. The stewardess shrieked and fought, but the fuss was of no avail. Off came the uniform, off came the standardized starched shirt. The shrieks changed to laughter as wave after wave of tingling and wingling swept over the girl. She emerged from the cubicle ten minutes later, her face flushed and her eyes shining. Nobody noticed the change except the second stewardess. A frenzied whispered conversation between the girls made it clear to Dionysus that more of the same was needed. The second girl also proved quite defenseless against the jingling and wingling. She too soon emerged wide-eyed from the cubicle.