So one young man climbed from the driver’s seat. The day was tropical, the afternoon sea-breeze was blowing hard from the nor’ east, and he was craggy and charged by the miraculous vision of a Charismatic school principal trying like the Devil to brandish a dribbling hose-pipe. He strode, striding, toward the marble steps of the South Steyne Municipal Library to enter the specious world of books; when, from out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a bird. A big bird, broad, and its wings were short and its legs likewise and it swooped from the direction of the theatre, catching the wind in its black mop top, glittering in the golden epaulettes of its plumage, swooping and dropping white feathers (which seemed surely to have been plucked viciously from seagulls), full-flexing, leaping, flapping onto the steps, giving off a peculiarly attractive, earthy scent, and the bird’s squawk was this: “Lies! . . . Lies! . . . Lies!” Eyes seeing ears. Ears hearing: “Lies!” And Bobby Allen Zimmerman is hurrying now, on his way to Columbia too.
Zimmerman
On December 2, 1960, as everyone knows, the wolfhounds Pcholka and Mushka plummeted to Earth, entered the atmosphere too sharply, and burned up. The next day, Chief Rocket Designer Korolev suffered a heart attack and was diagnosed as suffering from nephritis and pyelitis, common kidney ailments in survivors of the gulag. On such a Sea of Infinite Fertility anything was possible. . . . After all, was not Clark Gable dying quietly in his sleep, but close enough to Sylvia Pankhurst to prove that irony knows no frontier? Were not three young men about to read the same advertisement and so telephone an unknown impresario whose husband had died from an inopportune meeting with electricity and thereafter become lodgers in a house in which a young woman whose hair was diaphanous and floated feathery, who reminded everyone of Grace Kelly, but bigger, who bathed in the hottest sun and swam with fishes, became the subject of a remarkable pregnancy?
Overhead: a new moon. A new moon is a moon of considerable influence. In the streets there were cats and dogs, a contingent of surfers in rubber suits and Hogwinders in leather. Needless to say, a widow was sleeping and dreaming of . . . Deadset! Why not, to reveal that the Great Cheese had fallen to sleep for the first time in seven days and entered a dream which would prepare her for the changed world her new lodgers would bring to her. The world, that is, of uniqueness, of one and of many, of own things being done and space Man! space, of Chichester who sailed single-handedly and young Bobby Fischer who played a truly solitary game of chess, of a house empty but soon to be filled, of gardens barren but soon to be blossoming. The subject of the Great Cheese’s dream: Real Estate. Like generations of female impresarios before her, she was following in her husband’s footsteps. She dreamt of building new estates. Mare Fecunditatis or, more appropriately Lacus Somniorum, the Lake of Dreams. Meanwhile, Mr. Beckett, the dunnyman, is sleeping too and though his dreams cannot be recorded here—because they, like The Ginger Man’s wildest fantasies, the complaints of Portnoy and the Ten Tales of Boccaccio, are concerned with the posterior of happenings and the backside of appearance; because—Impossible to avoid it!—his dreams are filled with buttocks, bottoms, bums and sphincters in degrees of open and close; because his eyesight is bad and his hearing also, causing him to work mostly by instinct, traveling from the site of the deposit back to its origins which might not necessarily Ho ho! be the traditional location because he has detected of late, in his hazy-sighted way, that certain other orifices bear striking resemblance, that feet might be hands, that arms might be legs and, ipso facto, words might be . . . and because he has long exiled his sense of smell he cannot sniff out the difference between one and the other (customers lifting noses and calling, as they doo-doo: “Your charges are exorbitant!”)—and so his dreams cannot respectably be recorded, but their subject is one and the same as the subject of the dreams of Great Cheese and of lodgers one, two and three, namely: What about The Future?
. . . And now I must hurry on because my little ones are growing fidgety, picking at their bandages, plasters, poultices, and I can hear, from the other side of the door, their freaking mothers beckoning them back to the wards “Come! We know you’re . . . Come out! It’s time for bed!” and if everyone is sleeping there will be no one here to witness my conception.
. . . Because hey-ho! Tito Livio has finally got Siemens Roszak cornered and is soaring down from the top marble step of the municipal library, squawking as he swoops, “Why did you do it, hmmpf?,” and Dr pending Roszak who has, moments before, parked a DeSoto dusty from the Vale road in the Chief Engineer’s space, is struck down by guilt and sure that he has been found out and cries in return “I meant well! I did! Honestly, I did!” wondering How? Where? Who? and now their ruckus is raising faces from the pages of books and a librarian in pillbox and bangs is tapping on the long window opposite, mouthing a mantra of her very own PLEASE DO REFRAIN FROM SPEAKING, sunworshippers are noticing and lines of nippers waiting for snow cones, clerks in the office of births, deaths and marriages, a hot dog Johnny whose weenies and bunnies are covered in sand, Marshall Leacon who waits on his son, surfers in tepees and Hogwinders on motorcycles . . . and, my babaloos are asking, What happened next? To which I answer honestly: No one is sure.
“At some point,” the sunworshippers say, “the heavens opened up (It happens!) and though the shower lasted only a few minutes, it was as wild and as precipitous as any in the tropics. Norfolk pines (you’ve seen them) threw off their serrated fronds and these crashed down onto the paintwork of parked Holden cars, beach umbrellas spun rainbows, twirling, whirling onto The Corso, making wheels (With curly spikes!) and displaying colors as the sea heaved up and burst the walls, flooding the sea-pool where wrinklies had been floating.”
They say: “A whirligig in John Macarthur Park spun and creaked until the rust in the mechanism caused it to grind and crack and it toppled right over to one side and (Go ahead, take a look for yourself!) it hasn’t moved to this day. Sand genies, flibbertigibbets, brine; fronds, leaves, twinkie packets, twine . . . in moments the beach was deserted empty! there was thunder and lightning (this detail added hurriedly in response to a freaking boy’s But what else on the day I was conceiv . . . ? What else?).
“In any case,” say the sunworshippers, “when it was all over your lodgers, Tito and that doctor who was pending, were drenched through, their tempers were softened, and they were responsive to reasonable negotiation.”
But reports differ. Johnny Dogs, for one, recalls the law of diminishing returns. “Ruination!” he claims, “That day was a shambles!” because he knows in the minds of sunworshippers that the afternoon was always “Bad Weather!,” hungers were gone, skins were red and the bathers left to repair in the cool linoleum kitchens of Fairlight. . . . From the news agent Marshall Leacon, a lapsed memory: “As if you could call Alek a paper boy! Fact is, he was not yet back. Why was he not selling selling selling? Was he sentimental?