Still Life with Woodpecker Read online

  “Jesus! The Woodpecker. Bernard Wrangle. I should have guessed.”

  His cocky smile was finally gone. If smiles had addresses, Bernard’s would have been General Delivery, the Moon. He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet. Still, there was genuine tenderness and longing.

  “This is too much for me to deal with right now,” said Leigh-Cheri. Despite the heat waves that hootchy-kootchied all around her, she trembled. Why had she come to the boat in the first place? She could have just sent the police. “I’m due back at the Care Fest.” Indeed, the panel discussion on birth control was scheduled to begin in seven minutes.

  He attempted to help her onto the dock, but she spurned his hand. Hustling away, the tattered parasol flapping like a werewolf’s shirttail, she called back, “They’re going to get you again, you know.”

  Bernard’s smile came partway home. “They never got me, and they never will. The outlaw is someone who cannot be gotten. He can only be punished by other people’s attitudes. Just as your attitudes are punishing me now.”

  36

  WHEN THE ORGANIZERS of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest announced their intentions, they were blizzarded by applications from manufacturers and salespeople of “ecologically sound” stuff who wished concessions to peddle their New Age wares—teas and herbs, sleeping bags and hot tubs, tipis and windmills, water distillers and air purifiers, wood stoves and frozen yogurt, arts and crafts, books and kits, bio-magnetic underwear and carob chip cookies—on the premises. The organizers refused. They had no complaint against ecology fairs or the cosmic profits to be reaped from them. It was just that their Care Fest was conceived to traffic, as they put it, “in ideas not objects.”

  Now, the line that separates objects from ideas can be pretty twiggy, but let’s not unzip that pair of pants. Galileo was right to drop objects rather than ideas off of his tower, and the Care Fest might have been wise to stick with objects, as well. Within the normal range of perception, the behavior of objects can be measured and predicted. Ignoring the possibility that in the wrong hands almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial; ignoring, for the moment, the far more interesting possibility that every object might lead a secret life, it is still safe to say that objects, as we understand them, are relatively stable, whereas ideas are definitely unstable, they not only can be misused, they invite misuse—and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless.

  The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

  There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

  That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister clichés of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.” That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

  The foregoing sermonette was brought to you by the Essential Insanities Dept. at Outlaw College. It was delivered in the hope that it might explain how the Care Fest, with so many masters on the roster, so many juicy ideas on the grill, went haywire.

  At the Wednesday morning session, Dr. John Lilly had no sooner completed his lecture on sea mammal intelligence, ending with the idea that “a continuing dialogue with cetaceans could transform our view of all living species and the planet we share,” than he was challenged by a segment of the audience that considered it a waste of time and money to try to communicate with animals when we couldn’t communicate with each other. “What about human communication?” they demanded. “My ex-husband,” said one, “couldn’t understand a word I said. Do you think he could understand a porpoise?” “Is any big fish,” asked another, “gonna get my people outta the ghetto and onto the payroll? If not, I ain’t wasting my breath on the sucka.”

  Tunnel vision.

  Leigh-Cheri thought the questions made some sense, although the questioners were rude. She felt embarrassed for Dr. Lilly and was cheered when he handled the antagonists with grace. Actually, the morning session went as slick as dolphin sweat compared to the turmoil of the afternoon.

  Because the Care Fest was running two days behind schedule, thanks to that birdbrained son-of-a-bitch Woodpecker, some doubling up was necessary. (If one must double up, then Hawaii, home of mahi mahi and loma loma, was the place to do it.) The panel on birth control had been combined with the panel on childcare. The platform beneath the banyan boughs was end-to-end with experts, facts and figures forming at their lips like froth. The discussion was scarcely underway before a prevailing philosophy was established. It was this: if babies aren’t brought by storks, they ought to be, and maybe the storks could be trained to rear them, as well.

  To be sure, this viewpoint was proffered by only a couple of panel members, but a large and loud contingent in the audience supported it with such volume and menace that it carried. “We don’t want birth control, we want prick control!” shouted a female in the third row. The applause that followed drowned out the woman who was lecturing on, yes, carrot seeds as an oral contraceptive. “Oh, dear,” thought Leigh-Cheri. “I wonder if that isn’t overstating the case?”

  Things were getting a trifle rowdy. The sun didn’t help. Several people left for a dunk or a drink. Gulietta looked as if she wished to join them. Leigh-Cheri dangled from the stalk of her parasol, an easy target for bullets of brain Jello.

  On stage, a magazine editor from New York, a chic executive of whom it had been said, “She has a mind like a steel trap—and a mouth, heart, and vagina to match,” was attempting a summation. She said, first of all, that childcare began with conception and claimed that it was egregiously unfair to expect women to babysit for nine months, night and day, without relief or assistance. In a voice that reminded Leigh-Cheri of a jackhammer at work on a string of pearls, the editor described to the conference the latest techniques for obstetrics, maintaining that women would not begin to realize their personal or societal potential until artificial insemination and controlled out-of-body gestation became routine practice around the globe. The editor hadn’t stopped at virgin birth. Once born, our babies must inherit the advantages of collective professionalism, she said, and urged the Care Fest to adopt a resolution petitioning the federal government to make funds immediately available for the subsidization of day-care centers where experts would insure standardized improvement for the young and independence for the parents.

  The Princess was feeding th
is through her computer to determine how many shares she would buy when a poet, an aging humorist who’d been placed on the panel to provide a “different perspective,” did. He told the editor that her notions were a sift of sulfur on the roses of the race. The poet was snockered, but that has never been considered a handicap by those in his profession.

  “What kind of babies will those be who are made of the formula instead of the fuck?” asked the poet. “No doubt they’ll possess two eyes each, and the recommended number of toes, but can the heat of their will be hot enough, can their imagination have all of its fingers, can their souls be expected to fully connect to the unraveling spool of the natural universe and not to the gunk in the bottom of the test tube? Will the infant pulled at the timer’s bell from a plastic womb where it has been deprived of rhythm, mother-bond, and the jostlings of everyday life not have some small space between its eyes filled with synthetic fluid, not bear, if nowhere else, in the core of its heart, the android’s mark?”

  The editor shared with the audience her long look of practiced exasperation. “Are you afraid,” she asked the writer, “that a child not conceived in the old way won’t understand your jokes?”

  From the audience, someone yelled, “Can the mystical bullshit!” at the poet, who, too determined or too drunk to heed, went on to say, “And those children reared under the watch of the state, burped by automats, tickled by technicians, comforted by recorded messages from network psychologists—what kind of society do you think those children will produce upon their maturity? Do you imagine for one moment that humans indoctrinated from birth by the government will be other than tools of that government, will not reside in and preside over a totalitarian police nation exceeding in tyrannical control the harshest nightmares of …”

  By then the booing and catcalling had become so loud that the poet couldn’t be heard past the first few rows. He produced a gin bottle and spoke into it. Softly. The New York editor was smirking. Numerous accusations and at least one ripe papaya were lobbed at the podium. There followed an extended general exchange familiar to all who lived in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Women said the men had eaten the cherries out of the chocolates. Men said the women were peeing in the pool.

  A teacher from the Delphian School in Sheridan, Oregon, got the mike for an instant. “It seems to me that in the midst of this bickering we are forgetting the children. When we neglect the children, we neglect the future, the future this conference is designed to serve.” He wore the mildly triumphant look of a man who has led a return to reason. Someone slapped him in the face with a bloody Kotex. “Existentialist!” the teacher cried.

  “If you like babies so much,” a woman yelled, “have them yourself.”

  “Right on, sister!” encouraged a young man in her vicinity. The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

  In an attempt to restore order, a well-known yogi, a Care Fest delegate, strolled onto the platform. He assumed the lotus position. He beamed. Serenely, meticulously, he took a cobweb apart, then put it back together. (There were no parts left over.) He swallowed three butterflies, then burped them up unharmed. Only that portion of the crowd that was already orderly was impressed. The yogi had the stink of eternity about him, and in many circles eternity was simply no longer fashionable.

  The situation became increasingly unsavory. Also, tedious. You’ll be spared the details. Enough is enough. A banyan sends its adventitious roots to the ground, sometimes causing it to spread over a wide area. Under proper conditions, it bears figs. Thomas Jefferson was fond of figs. It was Jefferson’s genius that kept the American Revolution from being sucked into the tunnel faster than it was. Jefferson had red hair. Nothing is implied here. Except the possibility that everything is connected.

  With the debate on the verge of violence—or worse, of being turned over to committee—Leigh-Cheri fled the park. The palm trees she passed, the romantic palms of Hawaii, were covering their ears with their fronds. Her sentiments exactly. “Jesus,” she swore. She felt like the gourmet who was goosed in Strasbourg. “It’s my pâte, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

  In the Pioneer’s bar, she sat under one of the whaling harpoons that decorated the walls. She asked for a mai tai, then switched her order to tequila. Outside, the ocean banged its head against the jetty. She empathized completely. Inside, a different tide—young men with buzzing glands—swirled around her. From its eddy the news leaped like a sailfish: the police had finally solved the Lahaina bombing case. “Made da bust ’bout da hour ago,” she overheard a kamaaina say.

  37

  ACROSS THE WAVES, in Seattle, it continued to rain. Late at night the rain would harden into snow drops, but by the time the morning shift of engineers, coffee thermoses in hand, sloshed up to the security gate at Boeing Aircraft, there was plain rain again and plenty of it. A gelid wind, Alaska decals on every piece of its luggage, lingered in the rain without a sneeze, muscled through the blackberry brambles without a scratch, called upon the King and Queen without an invitation.

  “Little wonder the CIA has so many leaks,” said Max. He was bundled against the drafts. “It knows nothing about insulation.”

  Chuck wrote this down in his spy book. King Max watched him laboring over the spelling. “I—n—s—u—l—a—t—i—o—n,” said Max helpfully. If the King was aware of the insurrection afoot in his homeland, he kept it well hidden.

  “He ain’t fooling me,” said Chuck. Using the kitchen extension, Chuck eavesdropped on a telephone conversation that Max had had with one A’ben Fizel.

  “There’s some kind of deal on with the Arabs,” Chuck reported to the CIA.

  “Was there any mention of arms?” asked Chuck’s connection.

  “Talk of jet planes and missiles, I believe.”

  Max had arranged for A’ben Fizel to meet Princess Leigh-Cheri when she returned from Hawaii. Chaperoned, of course. Tilli and Max would accompany their daughter and Fizel to a basketball game. Seattle Supersonics versus the Houston Rockets. In the Kingdome.

  “Said something about battle in the kingdom.”

  “I’ll be damned,” swore the agent. He whistled. “This is bigger than we thought.”

  To her Chihuahua, whose shivering little frame she had dressed in a purple wool sweater with fur at the collar, Queen Tilli complained. “Baskeetboll. Baskeetboll. You might haf known no Arab vud vant to attend zee opera.”

  38

  “YOU’RE CRYING.”

  “I am not.”

  “My mistake. You aren’t crying. You aren’t out of breath, either. That’s fortunate because this club doesn’t admit women with pants. Is that a pun in my pocket, or am I just glad to see you? Something’s wrong.”

  Leigh-Cheri merely sniffed. “Have you got a tissue?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll find you something. Come on in.”

  Leigh-Cheri stooped and entered the cabin. She ripped a length of toilet paper from the roll that Bernard fetched from the head. She blew her nose, a signal for all tears to return to their homes and families.

  “Well, I see you’re still here.”

  “I am definitely here. But that’s no reason to cry.”

  “I wasn’t crying. I’ve had a bad day. Another one. One in a series of bad days. I’m not complaining. Bad days are my bag. They’re time-consuming, however, and I’m a busy girl. I only stopped by here because I understood you’d been busted.”

  “Oh? You turned me in?”

  “No, damn you, I didn’t. Cops have busted somebody for bombing the Pioneer. Just a stab in the dark, a wild guess, I know, but I thought it might be you.”

  “I’m hurt that you’d think such a thing but delighted that you came by to check. It is my privilege to report that if being uncaged is being free, then I am as the birdies in the blue.”

  “Then who did the police arrest, I wonder?”

  “I fear that there’s been an international, or rather, a
n interplanetary incident. The police have seen fit to incarcerate our guests from the faraway world of Argon.”

  “No kidding? Really? How did it happen, I mean, why them?”

  “Because an anonymous caller tipped off the cops, who subsequently found two sticks of dynamite in their rented Toyota. Hmmm …”

  “Bernard!”

  “Shhh. I’m trying to imagine what an Argonian driver’s license looks like. One of them would have had to have a driver’s license in order to rent a car.”

  “Bernard, that was your dynamite.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “But two sticks. You had three.”

  “Go ahead, tell me I’m selfish. Call me a bum Christian. I can’t help it. I couldn’t bring myself to give it all away. One never knows when one might need some.”

  She tried to respond as if he’d made a perfectly ordinary remark. She took a slow, calming breath. “What are you trying to say? With your dynamite, I mean?”

  “Say? Dynamite didn’t come here to teach. It came to awaken.”

  “Do you think dynamite can make the world a better place?”

  “A better place than what? Argon?”

  “You evasive bastard. I’m trying to understand you, and you won’t give me a straight answer.” Her small sunburned fist, in frustration, crumpled the soiled toilet paper with which she’d dabbed her eyes and blown her nose.

  “Maybe you’re not asking the right questions. If all you’re interested in is making the world a better place, go back to your Care Fest and question Ralph Nader—”

  “I fully intend to go hear Ralph. Ralph Nader, I mean.” She blushed, feeling, perhaps, that she’d betrayed a secret onanistic intimacy.