Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (19 page)

There was also a Negro in his host’s living room, a man perhaps thirty-five, a big and handsome Black man with an Afro haircut of short length, the moderation of the cut there to hint that he still lived in a White man’s clearing, even if it was on the very edge of the clearing. He was not undistinguished, this Negro, he was a professor at an Ivy League college; Aquarius had met him one night the previous year after visiting the campus. The Negro had been much admired in the college. He had an impressive voice and the deliberate manner of a leader. How could the admiration of faculty wives be restrained? But this Black professor was also a focus of definition for Black students in the college—they took some of the measure of their militancy from his advice. It was a responsible position. The students were in the college on one of those specific programs which had begun in many a university that year—students from slum backgrounds, students without full
qualification were being accepted on the reasonable if much embattled assumption that boys from slums were easily bright enough to be salvaged for academic life if special pains were taken. Aquarius had met enough of such students to think the program was modest. The education of the streets gave substantial polish in Black ghettos—some of the boys had knowledge at seventeen Aquarius would not be certain of acquiring by seventy. They had the toughness of fiber of the twenty-times tested. This night on the campus, having a simple discussion back and forth, needling back and forth, even to even—so Aquarius had thought—a Black student suddenly said to him, “You’re an old man. Your hair is gray. An old man like you wants to keep talking like that, you may have to go outside with me.” The student gave an evil smile. “You’re too old to keep up with me. I’ll whomp your ass.”

It had been a glum moment for Aquarius. It was late at night, he was tired, he had been drinking with students for hours. As usual he was overweight. The boy was smaller than him, but not at all overweight, fast. Over the years Aquarius had lost more standards than he cared to remember. But he still held on to the medieval stricture that one should never back out of a direct invitation to fight. So he said with no happiness, “Well, there are so many waiting on line, it might as well be you,” and he stood up.

The Black boy had been playing with him. The Black boy grinned. He assured Aquarius there was no need to go outside. They could talk now. And did. But what actors were the Blacks! What a sense of honor! What a sense of the gulch! Seeing the Black professor in this living room in Houston brought back the memory of the student who had decided to run a simulation through the character of Aquarius’ nerve. It was in the handshake of both men as they looked at each other now, Aquarius still feeling the rash of the encounter, the other still amused at the memory. God knows how the student had imitated his rise from the chair. There had been a sly curl in the Black man’s voice whenever they came across each other at a New York party.

Tonight, however, was different. He almost did not recognize
the professor. The large eyes were bloodshot, and his slow deliberate speech had become twice-heavy, almost sluggish. Aquarius realized the man had been drinking. It was not a matter of a few shots before this evening, no, there was a sense of somebody pickling himself through three days of booze, four days of booze, five, not even drunk, just the heavy taking of the heaviest medicine, a direct search for thickening, as if he were looking to coagulate some floor between the pit of his feelings at boil and the grave courtesies of his heavy Black manner. By now it showed. He was normally so elegant a man that it was impossible to conceive of how he would make a crude move—now, you could know. Something raucous and jeering was still withheld, but the sourness of his stomach had gotten into the sourness of his face. His collar was a hint wilted.

He had a woman with him, a sweet and wispy blond, half plain, still half attractive, for she emitted a distant echo of Marilyn Monroe long gone. But she was not his equal, not in size, presence, qualifications—by the cruel European measure of this richly endowed room, she was simply not an adequate woman for a man of his ambitions. At least that was the measure Aquarius took. It was hard not to recognize that whatever had brought them together, very little was now sustaining the project. The Black man was obviously tired of her, and she was still obviously in love with him. Since they were here enforcedly together, that was enough to keep a man drinking for more than a day. Besides—if he was a comfortable house guest of these fine Europeans, he might nonetheless wish to leave the grounds. Being seen with her on Houston streets would not calm his nerves.

But there were other reasons for drinking as well. America had put two White men on the moon, and lifted them off. A triumph of White men was being celebrated in the streets of this city. It was even worse than that. For the developed abilities of these White men, their production, their flight skills, their engineering feats, were the most successful part of that White superstructure which had been strangling the possibilities of his own Black people for
years. The professor was an academic with no mean knowledge of colonial struggles of colored peoples. He was also a militant. If the degree of his militancy was not precisely defined, still its presence was not denied. His skin was dark. If he were to say, “Black is beautiful” with a cultivated smile, nonetheless he was still saying it. Aquarius had never been invited to enter this Black man’s vision, but it was no great mystery the Black believed his people were possessed of a potential genius which was greater than Whites. Kept in incubation for two millennia, they would be all the more powerful when they prevailed. It was nothing less than a great civilization they were prepared to create. Aquarius could not picture the details of that civilization in the Black professor’s mind, but they had talked enough to know they agreed that this potential greatness of the Black people was not to be found in technology. Whites might need the radio to become tribal but Blacks would have another communion. From the depth of one consciousness they could be ready to speak to the depth of another; by telepathy might they send their word. That was the logic implicit in CPT. If CPT was one of the jokes by which Blacks admitted Whites to the threshold of their view, it was a relief to learn that CPT stood for Colored People’s Time. When a Black friend said he would arrive at 8
P.M
. and came after midnight, there was still logic in his move. He was traveling on CPT. The vibrations he received at 8
P.M
. were not sufficiently interesting to make him travel toward you—all that was hurt were the host’s undue expectations. The real logic of CPT was that when there was trouble or happiness the brothers would come on the wave.

Well, White technology was not built on telepathy, it was built on electromagnetic circuits of transmission and reception, it was built on factory workers pressing their button or monitoring their function according to firm and bound stations of the clock. The time of a rocket mission was Ground Elapsed Time, GET. Every sequence of the flight was tied into the pure numbers of the time-line. So the flight to the moon was a victory for GET, and the first heats of the triumph suggested that the fundamental notion of
Black superiority might be incorrect: in this hour, it would no longer be as easy for a militant Black to say that Whitey had built a palace on numbers, and numbers killed a man, and numbers would kill Whitey’s civilization before all was through. Yesterday, Whitey with his numbers had taken a first step to the stars, taken it ahead of Black men. How that had to burn in the ducts of this Black man’s stomach, in the vats of his liver. Aquarius thought again of the lunar air of technologists. Like the moon, they traveled without a personal atmosphere. No wonder Blacks had distaste for numbers, and found trouble studying. It was not because they came—as liberals necessarily would have it—from wrecked homes and slum conditions, from drug-pushing streets, no, that kind of violence and disruption could be the pain of a people so rich in awareness they could not bear the deadening jolts of civilization on each of their senses. Blacks had distaste for numbers not because they were stupid or deprived, but because numbers were abstracted from the senses, numbers made you ignore the taste of the apple for the amount in the box, and so the use of numbers shrunk the protective envelope of human atmosphere, eroded that extrasensory aura which gave awareness, grace, the ability to move one’s body and excel at sports and dance and war, or be able to travel on an inner space of sound. Blacks were not the only ones who hated numbers—how many attractive women could not bear to add a column or calculate a cost? Numbers were a pestilence to beauty.

Of course this particular Black man, this professor, was in torture, for he lived half in the world of numbers, and half in the wrappings of the aura. So did Aquarius. It was just that Aquarius was White and the other Black—so Aquarius could not conceal altogether his pleasure in the feat. A little part of him, indefatigably White, felt as mean as a Wasp. There was something to be said after all for arriving on time. CPT was excellent for the nervous system if you were the one to amble in at midnight, but Aquarius had played the host too often.

“You know,” said the professor, “there are no Black astronauts.”

“Of course not.”

“Any Jewish astronauts?”

“I doubt it.”

The Black man grunted. They would not need to mention Mexicans or Puerto Ricans. Say, there might not even be any Italians.

“Did you want them,” asked Aquarius, “to send a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew to the moon?”

“Look,” said the Black professor, “do they have any awareness of how the money they spent could have been used?”

“They have a very good argument: they say if you stopped space tomorrow, only a token of the funds would go to poverty.”

“I’d like to be in a position to argue about that,” said the Black. He sipped at his drink. It trickled into his system like the inching of glucose from a bottle down a rubber tube. “Damn,” he said, “are they still on the moon?”

“They took off already,” said Aquarius.

“No trouble?”

“None.”

If the Blacks yet built a civilization, magic would be at its heart. For they lived with the wonders of magic as the Whites lived with technology. How many Blacks had made a move or inhibited it because the emanations of the full moon might affect their cause. Now Whitey had walked the moon, put his feet on it. The moon presumably had not spoken. Or had it, and Richard Nixon received the favor and Teddy Kennedy the curse? Was there no magic to combat technology? Then the strength of Black culture was stricken. There would not be a future Black civilization, merely an adjunct to the White. What lava in the raw membranes of the belly. The Black professor had cause to drink. The moon shot had smashed more than one oncoming superiority of the Black.

That night Aquarius had trouble falling asleep, as if the unrest of the Black professor at the passage of men’s steps on the moon had now passed over to him. Nothing in the future might ever be the same—that was cause for unrest—nor could the future even be seen until one could answer the obsessive question: was our venture into space noble or insane, was it part of a search for the good, or the agent of diabolisms yet unglimpsed? It was as if we had begun to turn the pocket of the universe inside out.

He had had at the end a curious discussion with the Black professor. “It’s all in the remission of sin,” the Black man had said. “Technology begins when men are ready to believe that the sins of the fathers are not visited on the sons. Remission of sin—that’s what it’s all about,” he said in his Black slow voice.

Yes, if the sons were not punished, then the father might dare, as no primitive father had dared, to smash through a taboo. If the father was in error, or if he failed, the sons would be spared. Only the father would suffer. So men were thereby more ready to dare the gods. So that love on the cross which had requested that the sons not pay for the sins of the fathers had opened a hairline split which would finally crack the walls of taboo. And the windowless walls of technology came through the gap. Back to Sören the Dane. You could not know if you were a monster or a saint of the deep.

In the Nineteenth Century, they had ignored Kierkegaard. A middle-class White man, living on the rise of Nineteenth Century technology, was able to feel his society as an eminence from which he could make expeditions, if he wished, into the depths. He would know all the while that his security was still up on the surface, a ship—if you will—to which he was attached by a line. In the Twentieth Century, the White man had suddenly learned what the Black man might have told him—that there was no ship unless it was a slave ship. There was no security. Everybody was underwater, and even the good sons of the middle class could panic
in those depths, for if there were no surface, there was no guide. Anyone could lose his soul. That recognition offered a sensation best described as bottomless. So the Twentieth Century was a century which looked to explain the psychology of the dream, and instead entered the topography of the dream. The real had become more fantastic than the imagined. And might yet possess more of the nightmare.

Lying there, unable to sleep, lost in the caverns of questions whose answers never came (Mr. Answer Man, what is the existential equivalent of infinity?—Why insomnia, Sandy, good old insomnia) Aquarius knew for the first time in years that he no longer had the remotest idea of what he knew. It was the end of the decade, and the fashion was rising in New York literary lakes to inquire after the nature of the decade to come. He had been a poor prophet of the Sixties, but it was not a century for prophets—poor as he had been, he had still been one of the few who had some sense of what was coming. He had known that marijuana was on its way, and Hip, and the Kennedys, and a time of upheaval, and in the center of the Establishment: loss of belief. Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies. He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision. When he conducted interviews with himself on the subject, it was not despair he felt, or fear—it was anesthesia. He had no intimations of what was to come and that was conceivably worse than any sentiment of dread, for a sense of the future, no matter how melancholy, was preferable to none—it spoke of some sense of continuation in the projects of one’s life. He was adrift. If he tried to conceive of a likely perspective in the decade before him, he saw not one structure to society but two: if the social world did not break down into revolutions and counterrevolutions, into police and military rules of order with sabotage, guerrilla war and enclaves of resistance, if none of this occurred, then there would certainly be a society of reason, but its reason would be the logic of the computer. In that society, legally accepted drugs would become a necessity for accelerated
cerebration, there would be inchings toward nuclear installation, a monotony of architectures, a pollution of nature which would arouse technologies of decontamination odious as deodorants, and transplanted hearts monitored like spaceships—the patients might be obliged to live in a compound reminiscent of a Mission Control Center where technicians could monitor on consoles the beatings of a thousand transplanted hearts. But in the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living in space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor. So of course there would be another society, an irrational society of the dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.