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Yet to look at him now, in the twilit living room, gliding like a large bird in an updraft toward the sweating shakerful of booze, smiling out of his fat vortex ring’s center, you’d think all was flat calm, gold, serene.
“We still need a hundred-and-fourth for the bridge.” Chuckled aridly. The bridge, die Brücke, being his pet name for the experiment he was helping the community hospital run on effects of LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin, and related drugs on a large sample of surburban housewives. The bridge inward. “When can you let us fit you into our schedule.” “No,”
But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.
Huh?
At some point she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t. She had a moment of nearly pure terror. Then remembered that the mirror had broken and fallen in the sink.
“Seven years’ bad luck,” she said aloud. “I’ll be 35.”
The Courier’s Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger,
DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare.
“dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.
She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright.
“There is a face,” Hilarius said, “that I can make. One you haven’t seen; no one in this country has. I have only made it once in my life, and perhaps today in central Europe there still lives, in whatever vegetable ruin, the young man who saw it. He would be, now, about your age. Hopelessly insane. His name was Zvi. Will you tell the ‘police,’ or whatever they are calling themselves tonight, that I can make that face again? That it has an effective radius of a hundred yards and drives anyone unlucky enough to see it down forever into the darkened oubliette, among the terrible shapes, and
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There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we’re finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are. Perhaps that is why you also refused to participate, Mrs. Maas?”
“You think,” said Oedipa, “then, that they’re trying to bring you back to Israel, to stand trial, like they did Eichmann?” The shrink kept nodding. “Why? What did you do at Buchenwald?” “I worked,” Hilarius told her, “on experimentally-induced insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane.”
Hilarius had been put in charge of faces.
“His E string,” Mucho said, “it’s a few cycles sharp. He can’t be a studio musician. Do you think somebody could do the dinosaur bone bit with that one string, Oed? With just his set of notes on that cut. Figure out what his ear is like, and then the musculature of his hands and arms, and eventually the entire man. God, wouldn’t that be wonderful.” “Why should you want to?” “He was real. That wasn’t synthetic. They could dispense with live musicians if they wanted. Put together all the right overtones at the right power levels so it’d come out like a violin. Like I . . .” he hesitated before
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Like a human FFT++
“Is this what Funch means when he says you’re coming on like a whole roomful of people?” “That’s what I am,” said Mucho, “right. Everybody is.”
Grace looked surprised. “There’s a certain harassed style,” she said, “you get to recognize. I thought only kids caused it. I guess not.”
