Stalking the Nightmare (9 page)

But this time there was no doggie, and there was no suit, and Akisimov wanted the girl dead in any event. He might have made some slip, might have mumbled something about where “out there” he was heading. But whether he had or had not, dead witnesses were the only safe witnesses.

“Snap the ship,” he snarled at her, aiming the blaster.

“I’m unsuited,” she replied.

“Snap, damn your lousy psi hide! Snap damn you, and pray the cops on our trail will get to you before you conk out What is it, seven seconds you can survive in space? Ten? Whatever it is, it’s more of a chance than if I burn your head off!” He indicated with a sweep of his slim hand the console port where the bips that were sykop ships were narrowing up at them.

“You don’t want to do this,” the girl tried again.

Akisimov blasted. The gun leaped in his palm, and the stench of burned-away flesh filled the cabin. The girl stared dumbly at the cauterized stump that had been her left arm. A scream started to her mouth, but he silenced her with the point of the blaster.

She nodded acquiescence.

She snapped. Though she could not explain what was going on in her mind, she knew what she was doing, and she concentrated to do it this time … though just a bit differently … just a bit specially. She drew down her brows and concentrated, and …

blank…

The ship was gone, she was in space, whirling, senseless, as the bulk of a ship loomed around her, hauling her in.

She was safe. She would live. With one arm.

As the charcoal-caped sykops dragged her in, lay her in a mesh webbing, they could not contain their anxiety.

“Akisimov? Gone?”

They read her thoughts, so the girl said nothing. She nodded slowly, the pain in her stump shooting up to drive needles into the base of her brain. She moaned, then said, “He didn’t get away. He thought the worst was a term on Io; he’s wrong; he’s being punished.”

They stared at her, as her thoughts swirled unreadably. They stared unknowing, wondering, but damning their own inefficiency. Akisimov had gotten away.

They were wrong.

blank .

The ship popped into inverspace.

blank . • .

The ship popped out …

In the center of a white-hot dwarf star. The sun burned the ship to molten slag, and Akisimov died horribly, flamingly, charringly, agonizingly, burningly as the slag vaporized.

Just at the instant of death …

blank…

The ship popped into inverspace.

blank …

The ship popped out …

In the center of a white-hot dwarf star. The sun burned the ship to molten slag, and Akisimov died horribly, flamingly, charringly, agonizingly, burningly as the slag vaporized.

Just at the instant of death …

blank …

The ship popped into inverspace.

blank …

The ship popped out …

Over and over and over again, till the ends of Time, till Eternity was a remote forgotten nothing, till death had no meaning, and life was something for humanity. The Driver had exacted her revenge. She had set the ship in a moebius whirl, in and out and in and out and in again from inverspace to out, right at that instant of blanking, right at that instant of death, so that Forever would be spent by Rike Amadeus Akisimov in one horrible way—ten billion times one thousand years. One horrible way, forever and ever and ever.

Dying, dying, dying. Over and over and over again, without end to torment, without end to horror.

blank …

THE 3 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE

I’ve looked everywhere, and I’ll be damned if I can find it, but I
know
I read that passage .somewhere; I think in Kerouac; but I can’t locate it now, so you’ll just have to go along with me that it’s there.

Would I lie to you?

It’s a scene in which a young supplicant, an aspiring poet, somebody like that, seeks out this knowledgeable old philosopher —kind of a Bukowski or Henry Miller figure—in Paris or New York or somesuch bustling metropolitan situs … and the kid comes to the old guru in his ratty apartment, and he sorta kinda asks him that old saw about the meaning of life. Correction: LIFE. He squats there and says to the old man, “What’s it all about? What’s it mean? Huh?”

And the old man purses his lips and beetles his brow; he perceives the kid is really serious about this; it’s not just jerk-off time. So he nods sagely, and clasps his hands behind his back, and he walks to the window and stares out at the deep city for a while, just sorta kinda ponders for a while. And finally, he turns to the kid and he says, with core seriousness, “You know, there’s a lotta bastards out there.”

Now that’s pretty significant. I think. On the other hand, I have never made my residence in a stalactite-festooned cave high up on the northern massif of
Chomolungma
(Everest to you). I have never been sought out by fawning sycophants, whimpering to abase themselves before my wisdom, hungering to prostrate themselves and to offer oblations at the altar of my Delphic insights. In short, unlike the Great Thinkers of Our Time who appear regularly on talk-shows—Merv Griffin, Debbie Boone, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jim Nabors leap instantly to mind—I doubt that the Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will ever crib from my notes.

Nonetheless, having become something of an ingroup cult figure among those with a high death-wish profile and a taste for cheap thrills, I am often asked, “What’s the big secret, Ellison?” At college lectures, for instance, bright-eyed young people, the great hope of our society, come up to me and murmur in reverential tones, “Wanna buy a lid of tough Filipino Scarlet?”

Naturally I try to demonstrate a certain humility in the face of such trust and innocence. I try to explain that Life is Real, Life is Earnest. In my own toe-scufiling fashion I attempt to encapsulate in three or four apocryphal phrases the Ethical Structure of the Universe. The better to aid these fine young people as they set out to change the world.

And from this long, terrifically fascinating life of encounters and adventures, I have selected three examples of what I think are the most important things in life. Notes should be taken; this will count as sixty per cent of your grade.

I could have started with one of the more esoteric of the three, but I know your attention-span is short and, in lieu of playing
The Saints Go Marching In,
I decided it was best to catch your notice with instant sleaze.

Sex is one of the most important things in life. It comes built into the machine. Understanding sex is real important, y’know. And it’s not enough just to say, “All men are shits,” or “What the fuck do women
want?”
That’s good for openers, but one must press on to deeper insights. As an aid to your greater search, I offer the following anecdote from my own humble experience: an only-minimally exaggerated retelling of the single kinkiest sexual encounter I ever had.

When I got to Los Angeles in 1962, I was well into terminal destitution. Poverty would have been, for me, a sharp jump into a higher-income bracket. Consequently, I wasn’t getting laid much. More astute observers than I have charted the correlations between one’s D&B rating and one’s attraction for members of the same or opposite sex.

Anyhow, I met this young woman at Stats Charbroiler one afternoon, and somehow conned her into accepting a date. It has been fifteen years since that encounter, but I remember her name today as clearly as if it had been intaglio’d on my brain with a jackhammer. Brenda.

A substantially constructed female person, honey blonde of hair, amber of eye, insouciant of manner and expansive of bosom. We exchanged pleasantries, I explained that I was new to L.A. and was, in fact, a published author.

She went for it.

I took her phone number and address, and promised to pick her up the following Saturday night around 8:00 for a rollicking evening of camaraderie and good times, cleverly scaled to my nonexistent finances. Long walks in the bracing night air, that kind of thing.

Came Saturday, and I hand-washed the wretched 1951 Ford that had brought me to California from Chicago and New York. I dressed as spiffily as I could manage, aware at all times of the fact that having postponed a good number of meals had dropped my weight to about ninety pounds and I was beginning to take on the appearance of a card-carrying rickets case.

I drove to her home, which was in the posh Brentwood section of Beverly Hills. I walked to the ornate apartment door of the garden lanai, and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I waited and rang again. Nothing happened. Minutes passed, and I began thinking unworthy thoughts about Brenda’s ethics. Finally, I heard footsteps from within, and the door was flung open.

There stood Brenda in her slip, with machines in her hair. “Come in, come in,” she said huffily, as if I had interrupted her at the precise moment when she had been decoding the DNA molecule or something equally as significant. “I’m running a little late. I have to finish doing my hair. Well, come in already.”

I stepped into the foyer, standing on a ribbed plastic runner that stretched out into the distance. As she closed the door behind me, I began to take a step off the plastic stripping so the door wouldn’t hit me. My foot was poised in mid-step as she let out a shriek. “Aaarghh! Not on the carpet! Mama had the
schvarize
in today!” I spun, widdershins, barely managing to balance myself on one leg like a flamingo. I steadied myself on the plastic runner and looked to my right, the direction my errant foot would have carried me.

There, stretching off to the distant horizon, flooring a living room only slightly smaller than Bosnia and/or Herzogovina, lay the pluperfect lunatic symbol of the upwardly-mobile,
nouveau-riche
household: a white carpet, deepest pile, a veritable Sargasso Sea of insane white carpet-who but nutcases would carpet a room in which human beings are supposed to relax in
white,
fer chrissakes?—with the nap pathologically lying all in one direction, clearly having been carpet-swept by Nubian slave labor so it was anal retentively flowing in one unbroken tide. Hours had been spent making sure each bloody fiber lay in that north by northwest direction.

“Stay on the runner. I won’t be long,” Brenda commanded.

“I’ve got to stay on the runner?”

“Sure. Just stand there. I’ll be out in a minute.”

And she vanished. Back into the bowels of that cyclopean domicile, leaving me standing frozen and tremulous in my baggy pants while she went off to complete her toilette. The plastic runner extended out beneath my feet, back into the dim and vaulted interior. To my left a closed door. To my right the inviolate expanse of white carpeting and a living room in which Xerxes could easily have assembled his armies for an attack on the Hot Gates.

I stood there, shifting from one foot to the other like a grade school troublemaker waiting for his audience with the Principal. And time went by. Slowly. I waited and waited, and heard nothing from the back of the residence. The living room looked invitingly comfortable with all those massive sofas and the huge baby grand piano. But I had been denied entrance. I felt like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon standing at the doorway to the antechamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb, faunching to enter a space unvisited for three thousand years, but fearing the terrible wrath of
Beware all ye who violate this sacred place …

Now I don’t know about you, friends, but if you leave me all alone someplace, with nothing to amuse me, for any extended period of time, I will sure as shit get in trouble.

And so, possessed by some devil-demon from my childhood, I became obsessed by the purity of that goddam carpet. I stared at its unblemished white expanse, that sea of bleached grass rippling away to forever. And finally, when it was either
do
something or go bugfuck, I stepped to the edge of the plastic runner, crouched, and jumped as far out into the carpet as I could. There was no way of knowing where I had come from. My footprints just magically appeared
out there.

I hesitated only a moment, and then, scuffling my feet to produce impressions in the carpet, I began spelling out the classic Chaucerian PHUQUE. In letters four feet high. In virginal white carpet.

And I was just putting the . on the ! when I heard a strangled, “Aaaaarghhh!” behind me. I turned, and there stood the missing Brenda, looking really pretty terrific, but with this, how shall I put it, uh,
green
expression on her face. “OhjeezusOhmiGodOhshit! My mother’U
kiiiill
me!” And she ran off, leaving me standing there rather shamefaced, wondering just which mental gargoyle had taken possession of the cathedral of my mind, knowing that there was
no way
I was gonna get laid.

Then, in a moment, here she came, schlepping a carpet sweeper, not a vacuum cleaner, just one of your basic hand-pushed carpet sweepers, and she starts
sweeping the nap back north by northwest!

And I watched this demented scene for about thirty seconds until it got more than I could handle, and I yelled at her, “This is nuts! How the hell can you be a slave to a fuckin’
carpet?”
But she was in the grip of more powerful forces than my charisma. She was under the unbreakable spell of toilet training, and if the Apocalypse had come along just then she’d
still
have finished laying that nap back.