Slippage (3 page)

I awoke on Monday. I won't go into the horror details of no longer being in my cheery pre-surgery CICU, but lying there with tubes down my throat in a standard ICU cubicle, watching the hands of the huge high-school-study-hall-style clock mounted on the wall directly in front of me, I at last knew where Hell is housed. Do you remember how it took the minute hand several days to click over once? The agony? Remember?

"...In America, somehow, history turns into geology,

and...an artist is free of all mortgages except for

the ultimate one that forecloses on mountains."

Thomas B. Hess

I was back home by Friday the 19th. Susan, Joe Straczynski, and chicken soup had saved my life, but I won't expand on that part of it. I was back home, and now it is six weeks since everything fractured beneath me and I learned in the deepest part of my arrogant self just how tenuous is our grasp on the crumbling edge of the slide area.

The message that precedes all others—in art as well as life—is simple:

PAY ATTENTION

This might be my last book. After all these years, and all these words, and all those books, this might be the one that winds up faded by sunlight at the end of the shelf. I keep recalling a quotation, though I cannot remember the source: "Man always dies before he is fully born." I think now, as I never did before, about the end of the shelf.

The world seems precarious to me now. Everything changes so fast, and no one remembers anything. The known universe is tipped up at one end, and everything is sliding into electronic storage, where memory cannot find it, as one computer format after another becomes obsolescent. There is such unconscionable and hypocritical pandering to the youth demographic all around us, that anything older than a fortnight risks eternal oblivion. I sat at dinner in Chicago a year or so ago with a group of young people who were in publishing. Editors, publicists, designers. And I was, of course, the oldest one at the table by more than double the number of years of the second-oldest person seated there. And I made reference to a (I thought) cunning idea for a cover painting for an issue of the comic book that bears my name.

I said, "Picture Ronald Colman climbing back up the snow-covered mountains, trying to regain Shangri-La, with the wind whipping the white curtain across the frozen face of the massif... and he's wearing a fur parka and goggles, and he's down in the lower right of the cover painting, large in the foreground, looking out at us with a bewildered expression, because above him, near the summit of the great lost mountain, we see...McDonald's golden arches."

And I looked around, and it was an oil painting. There were perhaps eight or ten young people at that table, and each of them was
tabula rasa.
They hadn't a clue what I was gibbering about. My voice getting a trifle hysterical, I said, "Ronald Colman. You know,
Lost Horizon..
.Shangri-La...the James Hilton novel, big bestseller.. .the famous Frank Capra movie...black and white movie..."

And the key turned. Oh (they seemed to say), it was a
black and white
movie, an old movie. Oh, yeah, sure, cool. Who is this old fart, and what is he bombing on about?

Slippage.

Precariously poised, the world is not today the one in which I fell asleep last night. In the murky time when the birds sleep, the universe shifted over one notch. A new world I live in today, one in which things not only fall apart so that the center cannot hold, but the center now has a videotape available for $29.95 that offers us the opportunity to hear the center declare itself innocent of double murders or bad behavior or crass commercialism or even inept acting.

The English playwright David Hare has said, "The most dementing of all modern sins: the inability to distinguish excellence from success."

Mortality has been thrust on me by earthquakes and heart attacks, too close and too severe to ignore, within a brief time; and I equate the slippage of the universe beneath my sliding consciousness with the physical world betraying me at every turn. (You'll generously ignore my self-absorption...like you, I'm only human. Which may be an explanation, but I'm not sure it's an acceptable excuse.)

My body and the kindly Earth have set up shop against me. Time and memory were bad enough, but now not even mountains can be trusted, and no one is allowed to feel sorry for oneself when taught the lesson of one's own frangibility. It ain't seemly. Cry baby gets no sympathy. Of course you're going to eat dust ere long, you smartass.

So the unquestioned belief that I would have all the time in the world to complete all the stories I haven't written, to complete the projects that have been shunted aside because of blood moving too slowly for more years than I can know, the insensate belief that there was world enough and time...is no longer permitted. I am on the fault line. The deadline. And every day the tilt grows steeper, the slippage more acute.

There is no Shangri-La for the denizens who hang out at The Gap in the mall.

Nor is there patience in their hearts for anything more than a fortnight in age. Stravinsky is meat, Glenn Miller is dross, John Coltrane is cobwebs, and by Thursday Stevie Ray Vaughan will be a supermarket flier, a badly-printed handbill found under your windshield wiper, to be crumpled and tossed. And one dare not complain, because it only sounds like sour grapes and rotten tomatoes and old farts lamenting the passage of time.

And there isn't even any joy in knowing that their grip will loosen all too quickly, that most of them will slide on past as you watch. That in a year or two other, younger, drones will look at
them
with uncomprehending eyes when they mention Smashing Pumpkins. Life is not a comparison of chambers of horror; and as Gerald Kersh pointed out in 1956, "A sour soul will eat through the purest profile like acid through a paper bag, but a tiger could not mar a face animated by a good heart."

For those who have not yet begun the slide journey, I will tell you that Gerald Kersh is my favorite writer. I have long aspired to write at something like his level of excellence and originality.

Not one of Gerald Kersh's books is in print.

Buttonhole any two hundred people at random in the streets of any major city you choose, and I will buy you a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and crushed nuts if you find even one or two who have ever heard his name, or who can tell you what he did for the totality of his life.

Each book I have written seems to declare its own theme. I never know what that theme will be until the book is assembled.
This
time the theme is one of nervousness, of the ticking of the clock, of the unreliability of sweet earth beneath our feet and dear beating heart within our chest. The theme is: do it while you can. Slippage rules. Gravity ain't forgiving. The theme is: you never know when it's the last of the last. The theme is:            

PAY ATTENTION.

___

For some reason Charlotte’s infidelities didn’t unhinge me. Yes, I was pissed-off that she’d been flagrant in going to bed with Mike Wilson, Arthru C. Clarke’s scubadiving associate…having done the deed at a large New York convention, where everybody knew about it. But, apart from waking Arthur, and asking him if he know where Wilson was—heaven only knows what I thought I could do to a guy that size, that strapping—I handled it.

___

This is a story titled

The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore

LEVENDIS:
On Tuesday the 1st of October, improbably dressed as an Explorer Scout, with his great hairy legs protruding from his knee-pants, and his heavily festooned merit badge sash slantwise across his chest, he helped an old, arthritic black woman across the street at the jammed corner of Wilshire and Western. In fact, she didn't
want
to cross the street, but he half-pulled, half-dragged her, the old woman screaming at him, calling him a khaki-colored motherfucker every step of the way.

LEVENDIS:
On Wednesday the 2nd of October, he crossed his legs carefully as he sat in the Boston psychiatrist's office, making certain the creases of his pants—he was wearing the traditional morning coat and ambassadorially-striped pants—remained sharp, and he said to George Aspen Davenport, M.D., Ph.D., FAPA (who had studied with Ernst Kris
and
Anna Freud), "Yes, that's it, now you've got it." And Dr. Davenport made a note on his pad, lightly cleared his throat and phrased it differently: "Your mouth is...vanishing? That is to say, your mouth, the facial feature below your nose, it's uh disappearing?" The prospective patient nodded quickly, with a bright smile. "Exactly." Dr. Davenport made another note, continued to ulcerate the inside of his cheek, then tried a third time: "We're speaking now—heh heh, to maintain the idiom—we're speaking of your lips, or your tongue, or your palate, or your gums, or your teeth, or—" The other man sat forward, looking very serious, and replied, "We're talking
all
of it, Doctor. The whole, entire, complete aperture and everything around, over, under, and within. My
mouth,
the allness of my mouth. It's disappearing. What part of that is giving you a problem?" Davenport hmmm'd for a moment, said, "Let me check something," and he rose, went to the teak and glass bookcase against the far wall, beside the window that looked out on crowded, lively Boston Common, and he drew down a capacious volume. He flipped through it for a few minutes, and finally paused at a page on which he poked a finger. He turned to the elegant, gray-haired gentleman in the consultation chair, and he said, "Lipostomy." His prospective patient tilted his head to the side, like a dog listening for a clue, and arched his eyebrows expectantly, as if to ask
yes, and lipostomy is what?
The psychiatrist brought the book to him, leaned down and pointed to the definition. "Atrophy of the mouth." The gray-haired gentleman, who looked to be in his early sixties, but remarkably well-tended and handsomely turned-out, shook his head slowly as Dr. Davenport walked back around to sit behind his desk. "No, I don't think so. It doesn't seem to be withering, it's just, well, simply, I can't put it any other way, it's very simply disappearing. Like the Cheshire cat's grin. Fading away." Davenport closed the book and laid it on the desktop, folded his hands atop the volume, and smiled condescendingly. "Don't you think this might be a delusion on your part? I'm looking at your mouth right now, and it's right there, just as it was when you came into the office." His prospective patient rose, retrieved his homburg from the sofa, and started toward the door. "It's a good thing I can read lips," he said, placing the hat on his head, "because I certainly don't need to pay your sort of exorbitant fee to be ridiculed." And he moved to the office door, and opened it to leave, pausing for only a moment to readjust his homburg, which had slipped down, due to the absence of ears on his head.

LEVENDIS:
On Thursday the 3rd of October, he overloaded his grocery cart with okra and eggplant, giant bags of Kibbles 'n Bits 'n Bits 'n Bits, and jumbo boxes of Huggies. And as he wildly careened through the aisles of the Sentry Market in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he purposely engineered a collision between the carts of Kenneth Kulwin, a 47-year-old homosexual who had lived alone since the passing of his father thirteen years earlier, and Anne Gillen, a 35-year-old legal secretary who had been unable to find an escort to take her to her senior prom and whose social life had not improved in the decades since that death of hope. He began screaming at them, as if it had been
their
fault, thereby making allies of them. He was extremely rude, breathing muscatel breath on them, and finally stormed away, leaving them to sort out their groceries, leaving them to comment on his behavior, leaving them to take notice of each other. He went outside, smelling the Mississippi River, and he let the air out of Anne Gillen's tires. She would need a lift to the gas station. Kenneth Kulwin would tell her to call him "Kenny," and they would discover that their favorite movie was the 1945 romance,
The Enchanted Cottage,
starring Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young.

LEVENDIS:
On Friday the 4th of October, he found an interstate trucker dumping badly sealed cannisters of phenazine in an isolated picnic area outside Phillipsburg, Kansas; and he shot him three times in the head; and wedged the body into one of the large, nearly empty trash barrels near the picnic benches.

LEVENDIS:
On Saturday the 5th of October, he addressed two hundred and forty-four representatives of the country & western music industry in the Chattanooga Room just off the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. He said to them, "What's astonishing is not that there is so much ineptitude, slovenliness, mediocrity and downright bad taste in the world...what is unbelievable is that there is so much
good
art in the world. Everywhere." One of the attendees raised her hand and asked, "Are you good, or evil?" He thought about it for less than twenty seconds, smiled, and replied, "Good, of course! There's only one real evil in the world: mediocrity." They applauded sparsely, but politely. Nonetheless, later at the reception,
no one
touched the Swedish meatballs, or the rumaki.