In the late sixties, Tom Disch, along with John Sladek, was, in a I sense, the U.S. Ambassador to the British New Wave movement. His novel Camp Concentration, written in that period, should be on every reading list of classic sf.
Over the years Disch has been, besides a great novelist in and out of sf, a poet, playwright, critic, children's author (his Brave Little Toaster was even Disney-ized), teacher, and, of course, short-story writer.
I've considered him a mentor for more than twenty-five years and am proud to present his latest fiction, which recalls a bit his New Wave days.
In Xanadu
thomas M. disch
In memory of John Sladek, who died March 10, 2000
And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PART ONE
xanadu
H
is awareness was quite limited during the first so-long. A popup screen said WELCOME TO XANADU, [Cook, Fran]. YOUR AFTERLIFE BEGINS NOW! BROUGHT TO YOU BY DISNEY-MITSUBISHI PRODUCTIONS of quebec! a votre sante toujours! Then there was a choice of buttons to click on, Okay or Cancel. He didn't have an actual physical mouse, but there was an equivalent in his mind, in much the way that amputees have ghostly limbs, but when he clicked on Okay with his mental mouse there was a dull Dong! and nothing happened. When he clicked on Cancel there was a trembling and the smallest flicker of darkness and then the pop-up screen greeted him with the original message.
This went on for an unknowable amount of time, there being no means by which elapsed time could be measured. After he'd Dong!ed on Okay enough times, he stopped bothering. The part of him that would have been motivated, back when, to express impatience or to feel resentment or to worry just wasn't connected. He felt an almost supernatural
passivity. Maybe this is what people were after when they took up meditation. Or maybe it was supernatural, though it seemed more likely, from the few clues he'd been given, that it was cybernetic in some way. He had become lodged (he theorized) in a faulty software program, like a monad in a game of JezzBall banging around inside its little square cage, ricocheting off the same four points on the same four walls forever. Or as they say in Quebec, toujours.
And oddly enough that was Okay. If he were just a molecule bouncing about, a lifer rattling his bars, there was a kind of comfort in doing so, each bounce a proof of the mass and motion of the molecule, each rattle an SOS dispatched to someone who might think, Ah-ha, there's someone there!
state pleasure-dome 1
And then—or, as it might be, once upon a time—Cancel produced a different result than it had on countless earlier trials, and he found himself back in some kind of real world. There was theme music ("Wichita Lineman") and scudding clouds high overhead and the smell of leaf mold, as though he'd been doing push-ups out behind the garage, with his nose grazing the dirt. He had his old body back, and it seemed reasonably trim. Better than he'd left it, certainly.
"Welcome," said his new neighbor, a blond woman in a blouse of blue polka dots on a silvery rayonlike ground. "My name is Debora. You must be Fran Cook. We've been expecting you."
He suspected that Debora was a construct of some sort, and it occurred to him that he might be another. But whatever she was, she seemed to expect a response from him beyond his stare of mild surmise. "You'll have to fill me in a little more, Debora. I don't really know where we are."
"This is Xanadu," she said with a smile that literally flashed, like the light on top of a police car, with distinct, pointed sparkles.
"But does Xanadu exist anywhere except in the poem?"
This yielded a blank look but then another dazzling smile. "You could ask the same of us."
"Okay. To be blunt: Am I dead? Are you?"
Her smile diminished, as though connected to a rheostat. "I think that might be the case, but I don't know for sure. There's a sign at the entrance to the pleasure-dome that says 'Welcome to Eternity.' But there's no one to ask, there or anywhere else. No one who knows anything. Different people have different ideas. I don't have any recollection of dying, myself. Do you?"
"I have no recollections, period," he admitted. "Or none that occur to me at this moment. Maybe if I tried to remember something in particular ..."
"It's the same with me. I can remember the plots of a few movies. And the odd quotation. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' "
"Eisenhower?" he hazarded.
"I guess. It's all pretty fuzzy. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention back then. Or it gets erased when you come here. I think there's a myth to that effect. Or maybe it's so blurry because it never happened in the first place. Which makes me wonder, are we really people here, or what? And where is here? This isn't anyone's idea of heaven that I ever heard of. It's kind of like Disney World, only there's no food, no rides, no movies. Nothing to do, really. You can meet people, talk to them, like with us, but that's about it. Don't think I'm complaining. They don't call it a pleasure-dome for nothing. That part's okay, though it's not any big deal. More like those Magic Finger beds in old motels."
He knew just what she meant, though he couldn't remember ever having been to an old motel or lain down on a Magic Fingers bed. When he tried to reach for a memory of his earlier life, any detail he could use as an ID tag, it was like drawing a blank to a clue in a crossword. Some very simple word that just wouldn't come into focus.
Then there was a fade to black and a final, abject Dong! that didn't leave time for a single further thought.
alph
"I'm sorry," Debora said, with a silvery shimmer of rayon, "that was my fault for having doubted. Doubt's the last thing either of us needs right now. I love the little dimple in your chin."
"I'm not aware that I had a dimple in my chin."
"Well, you do now, and it's right—" She traced a line up the center of his chin with her finger, digging into the flesh with the enamaled tip as it reached. "—here."
"Was I conked out long?"
She flipped her hair as though to rid herself of a fly, and smiled in a forgiving way, and placed her hand atop his. At that touch he felt a strange lassitude steal over him, a deep calm tinged somehow with mirth, as though he'd remembered some sweet, dumb joke from his vanished childhood. Not the joke itself but the laughter that had greeted it, the laughter of children captured on a home video, silvery and chill.
"If we suppose," she said thoughtfully, tracing the line of a vein on the back of his hand with her red fingertip, "that our senses can deceive
us, then what is there that can't?" She raised her eyebrows italic-wise. "I mean," she insisted, "my body might be an illusion, and the world I think surrounds me might be another. But what of that 'I think'? The very act of doubting is a proof of existence, right? I think therefore I am."
"Descartes," he footnoted.
She nodded. "And who would ever have supposed that that old doorstop would be relevant to real life, so-called? Except I think it would be just as true with any other verb: I love therefore I am." "Why not?" he agreed.
She squirmed closer to him until she could let the weight of her upper body rest on his as he lay there sprawled on the lawn, or the illusion of a lawn. The theme music had segued, unnoticed, to a sinuous trill of clarinets and viola that might have served for the orchestration of a Strauss opera, and the landscape was its visual correlative, a perfect Pu-vis de Chavannes—the same chalky pastels in thick impasto blocks and splotches, but never with too painterly panache. There were no visible brush strokes. The only tactile element was the light pressure of her fingers across his skin, making each least hair in its follicle an antenna to register pleasure.
A pleasure that need never, could never cloy, a temperate pleasure suited to its pastoral source, a woodwind pleasure, a fruity wine. Lavender, canary yellow. The green of distant mountains. The ripple of the river.
caverns measureless to man
The water that buoyed the little skiff was luminescent, and so their progress through the cave was not a matter of mere conjecture or kines-thesia. They could see where they were going. Even so, their speed could only be guessed at, for the water's inward light was not enough to illumine either the ice high overhead or either shore of the river. They were borne along into some more unfathomable darkness far ahead as though across an ideal frictionless plane, and it made him think of spaceships doing the same thing, or of his favorite screen saver, which simulated the white swirl-by of snowflakes when driving through a blizzard. One is reduced at such moments (he was now) to an elemental condition, as near to being a particle in physics as a clumsy, complex mammal will ever come.
"I shall call you Dynamo," she confided in a throaty whisper. "Would you like that as a nickname? The Dynamo of Xanadu."
"You're too kind," he said unthinkingly. He had become careless in
their conversations. Not a conjugal carelessness: he had not talked with her so very often that all her riffs and vamps were second nature to him. This was the plain unadorned carelessness of not caring.
"I used to think," she said, "that we were all heading for hell in a handbasket. Is that how the saying goes?"
"Meaning, hastening to extinction?"
"Yes, meaning that. It wasn't my original idea. I guess everyone has their own vision of the end. Some people take it straight from the Bible, which is sweet and pastoral, but maybe a little dumb, though one oughtn't to say so, not where they are likely to overhear you. Because is that really so different from worrying about the hole in the ozone layer? That was my apocalypse of choice, how we'd all get terrible sunburns and cancer, and then the sea level would rise, and everyone in Calcutta would drown."
"You think this is Calcutta?"
"Can't you ever be serious?"
"So, what's your point, Debora?" When he wanted to be nice, he would use her name, but she never used his. She would invent nicknames for him, and then forget them and have to invent others.
It was thanks to such idiosyncrasies that he'd come to believe in her objective existence as something other than his mental mirror. If she were no more than the forest pool in which Narcissus gazed adoringly, their minds would malfunction in similar ways. Were they mere mirror constructs, he would have known by now.
"It's not," she went on, "that I worry that the end is near. I suppose the end is always near. Relative to Eternity. And it's not that I'm terribly curious how it will end. I suppose we'll hurtle over the edge of some immense waterfall, like Columbus and his crew."
"Listen!" he said, breaking in. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"The music. It's the score for Koyaanisqatsi. God, I used to watch the tape of that over and over."
...
widez2