The Planet on the Table (12 page)

Brian laughs. “How could anyone get into something like that? Especially on a peak you can just walk right up to.” He laughs again.

“I suppose I should try to recover as many as I can,” Joe says dubiously, looking down the steep side of the peak.

“What for? It’s not going to erase their experience.”

“You never know,” says Joe, laughing to himself. “It very well might. Just think, all over the United States the memory of this peak has popped right out of twenty people’s heads.” He waves to the east. “Bye-bye…”

They sit in silence. Wind blows. Clouds pass by. The sun closes on the horizon. Joe talks in short bursts, waves his arms. Brian listens, watches the clouds. At one point he says. “You’re a new being, Joseph.” Joe cocks his head at this.

Then they just sit and watch. It gets cold.

“Hawk,” says Brian in a quiet voice. They watch the black dot soar on the updraft of the range.

“It’s the goat,” says Joe. “It’s a shapechanger.”

“Nab, Doesn’t even move the same.”

“I say it is.”

The dot turns in the wind and rises, circling higher and higher above the world, coasting along the updraft with minute wing adjustments, until it hovers over the giant, angular knotpeak. Suddenly it plummets toward the peaks, stooping faster than objects fall. It disappears behind the jagged black teeth. “Hawk,” Joe breathes. “Hawuck divvve.”

They look at each other.

Brian says, “That’s where we’ll go tomorrow.”

Glissading down the snow expanse, skidding five or ten feet with each stiff-legged step, the two of them make rapid progress back to camp. The walking is dreamlike as they pump left… right… left… right down the slope.

“So what about that goat” says Joe “I never did see any prints.”

“Maybe we shared a hallucination,” says Brian. “What do they call that?”

“A folie à deux.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” A pause while they skid down a steep bank of snow, straight-legged as if they are skiing. “I hope Pete got a fire going. Damn cold up here,”

“A feature of the psychic landscape,” Joe says, talking to himself again. “Sure, why not? It looks about like what I’d expect, I’ll tell you that. No wonder I’m getting things confused. What you saw was probably a fugitive thought of mine, escaping off across the waste. Bighorn sheep, sure.”

After a while they can see the saddle where they left Peter, far below them in the rocky expanse. There is a spark of yellow. They howl and shout. “Fire! FIRE!’

In the sandy camp, situated in a dip between slabs of granite, they greet Pete and root through their packs with the speed of hungry men. Joe takes his pot, jams it with snow, puts it on the fire. He sits down beside Peter.

“You guys were gone a long time,” Peter says. “Did you find that goat?”

Joe shakes his head. “It turned into a hawk.” He moves his pot to a bigger flame. “Sure am glad you got this fire going,” he says. “It must have been a bitch to start in this wind.” He starts to pull off his boots.

“There wasn’t much wood, either,” Pete says. “But I found a dead tree down there a ways.”

Joe prods a burning branch, frowns. “Juniper,” he says with satisfaction. “Good wood.”

Brian appears, dressed in down jacket, down pants, and down booties. Pete falls silent. Glancing at Pete, Joe notices this, and frowns again. He gets up stiffly to go to his pack and get his own down booties. He returns to the fire, finishes taking off his boots. His feet are white and wrinkled, with red blisters.

“Those look sore.” says Pete.

“Nah.” Joe gulps down the melted snow in his pot, starts melting more. He puts his booties on.

They watch the fire in silence.

Joe says, “Remember that time you guys wrestled in the living room of our apartment?”

“Yeah, we got all those carpet burns.”

“And broke the lamp that never worked anyway—”

“And then you went berserk!” Brian laughs. “You went berserk and tried to bite my ear off!” They all laugh, and Pete nods, grinning with embarrassed pride.

“Pete won that one,” Joe says.

“That’s right,” says Brian. “Put my shoulders to the mat, or to the carpet in that case. A victory for maniacs everywhere.”

Ponderously Peter nods, imitating official approval. “But I couldn’t beat you tonight,” he admits. “I’m exhausted. I guess I’m not up to this snow camping.”

“You were strong in those days,” Brian tells him. “But you hiked a radical trail with us today, I’ll tell you. I don’t know too many people who would have come with us, actually.”

“What about Joe here? He was on his back most of last year.”

“Yeah, but he’s crazy now.”

“I was crazy before!” Joe protests, and they laugh. Brian pours macaroni into his pot, shifts to a rock seat beside Peter so he can tend the pot better. They begin to talk about the days when they all lived together as students. Joe grins to hear them. He nearly overturns his pot, and they call out at him. Pete says, “The black thing is the pot, Joseph, the yellow stuff is fire—try to remember that.” Joe grins. Steam rises from the pots and is whipped east by the evening breeze.

*   *   *

Three men sitting round a fire. Joe gets up, very slowly, and steps carefully to his pack. He unrolls his groundcloth, pulls out his sleeping bag. He straightens up. The evening star hangs in the west. It’s getting darker. Behind him his old friends laugh at something Pete has said.

In the east there are stars. Part of the sky is still a light velvet blue. The wind whistles softly. Joe picks up a rock, looks at it closely. “Rock” he says. He clenches the rock in his fist, shakes it at the evening star, lofts it skyward. “Rock!” A tear gleams in his eyes. He looks down the range:
black dragon back breaking out of blue-white
, like consciousness from chaos, an unbroken range of peaks—

“Hey, Joseph! You lamebrain!”

“Space case!”

“—come take care of your pot before it puts the fire out.”

Joe walks to the woodpile grinning, puts more wood on the fire, until it blazes up yellow in the dusk.

—1975/1977/1983

pulled open the theater door and stuck my foot against it to keep the wind that swirled in the street from slamming it shut. I swung my duffel bag through the doorway and followed it inside. The door closed with a forced hiss and the bright lights of the street were replaced by dim greys. The air was still.

My eyes adjusted, and slowly, as if candles were being lit, I perceived the narrow high room which was the foyer of the Rose Theatre. I crossed the room and peered in the ticket window. A thin young man, with eye sockets blacked, and white hair cropped close to his head, looked up at me I dropped my bag, pulled my card from my pocket and handed it to him.

“Pallio,” I said.

“Very good,” he said, and looked at the card. “Now when Velasquo arrives we’ll have everyone.” He picked up a cast list and put a check beside my name. After slotting my card into the register, he touched some keys, and the square of plastic disappeared. “The charge is twelve percent higher now,” be murmured. “They’re trying to tax us to death.” The card reappeared and he handed it back to me. “Let me take you to your room.”

I picked up my bag. The cashier appeared through a doorway beside the window and led me down the hail, looking back over his shoulder to talk: “I don’t trust this
Guise
play, I think that whole Aylesbury Collection is a Collier forgery…” I ignored him and watched the footprints he left in the thick blue-black carpet. Dull bronze-flake wallpaper shattered the light from a half-dozen gas jets. The Rose was in its full Regency splendor, for the first time in months. The halls felt as subterranean as before, however; the Rose occupied only a few bottom floors in the Barnard Tower, an eighty-story complex.

The cashier stopped at one of a series of doors and opened it for me. Light flooded over us. We went in and were on a different set; snapping Jacob’s ladders and colored liquids bubbling up tubes made me look for a mad scientist. But it was only a white-coated technician, at the computer terminal. He turned around, revealing a scrubbed, precisely shaved face. “Whom have you brought us?” he said.

“Pallio,” replied the cashier. I dropped my bag.

“We’re ready to give you your part,” the technician said.

The chair was dressed up like a chrome-and-glass version of the table Frankenstein’s monster was born on. “Does Bloomsman have to do this,” I said.

“You know our director.”

“Last time I was here it was a dentist’s chair.”

“Not many liked chat one, as I recall.”

I got into the chair while he tapped keys at the terminal, calling up from the artificial mind a detailed description of my brain’s structure. When he was done he wrapped the pharmaceutical band around my neck. “Ready?” he asked. He tapped a key on the chair’s console and I felt the odd sensation, like flexing a stiff muscle, of the injection—a tiny witch’s brew of L-dopa. bufotenine, and norepinephrine. As always my heart began hammering immediately: not because of the introduced chemicals, but because of my own adrenaline, flooding through me to combat the imagined danger of a primal violation.

We waited. The room enlarged and flattened out into a painted cylinder. “Now for the hood,” said the technician, his voice like tin. The hood descended and it was dark. The goggles were cold against my face, and my scalp prickled as filaments touched it.

“Time for the implant,” the technician said. “Let’s have alpha waves if you please.” I started the stillness behind my nose. “Fine. Here we go.”

In my vision a blue field flickered at around ten cycles per second, and voices chattered in both ears, creating counter-points of blank verse. In those connected clumps known as the limbic system, scattered across the bottom of my cerebral cortex, new neural activity began. Electrical charges skipped through the precise network of neurons until they reached the edge of the familiar; synapses tired in new directions, and were forever changed. I was growing. I felt none of it.

Memories came before me in confusing abundance, passing before I could fix on them. An afternoon by the window in an Essex library, watching green hills become invisible in the grey rain. In the colony off Jamaica just after the earthquake, when everyone was silent, feeling the pressure of the hundred fathoms of water above. The run of basses in the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth. A strong smell of disinfectant—hospital smell—and the voice of Carlos, droning quietly: “It was in the fourth act of
Hamlet
, when I as Claudius was on my knees, attempting to pray. Hamlet was above and to one side, on the balcony, and in my peripheral vision his face distorted into a mask of fang and snout. As he finished his soliloquy he turned away from the balustrade, but his head stayed fixed, twisted entirely over one shoulder, and he continued to glare down at me. My memory flooded. The moment I understood he was the Hieronomo, he jumped the balustrade, and I leaped to my feet only to meet the falling épée blade directly in the chest. I heard the cries of shock, but nothing more..”

Blackness. Then the suction pulling at my eyes as the eyepieces withdrew. The hood rose and the white room reappeared. I twisted my head back and forth.

“Got it?” asked the technician. I paused and thought. Pallio… yes. A series of exclamations marked his entrance in the first scene, a conference with Velasquo. I knew only my first few lines, plus cue lines, and Bloomsman’s laconic blocking, appropriate to the improvisational nature of the art: “Confront Velasquo center stage.” The rest of my part would come to me throughout the course of the play, irregularly, recalled by unknown cues. This was the minimum script that Bloomsman allowed one to receive; it was the preferred preparation among seasoned actors.

“Backstage is that way,” the technician said. He helped me up. I swayed unsteadily. “Break a leg,” he said brightly, and returned to his terminal. I picked up my costume bag and left the room.

The hall expanded near the gas jets and contracted in the dimmer sections. I stopped and leaned against the wall, concentrating to recover from the dissociation of the implant. The wallpaper was not actually flake—it had once been a smooth sheen, but had cracked and peeled away into thousands of bronze shavings. Chips broke off under me and floated to the carpet. I strode down the hall, uncertain how long I had stopped. My sense of estrangement was stronger than usual, as if I had learned more than a play.