More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
His laboratory was a sensational mess, however, where a clumsy stranger could die in a thousand different ways, depending on where he stumbled.
Yes, and Indianapolis, which had once had a way of speaking English all its own, and jokes and legends and poets and villains and heroes all its own, and galleries for its own artists, had itself become an interchangeable part in the American machine.
I will guess, too, that it was loneliness as much as it was a dread of alcoholic poisoning which shepherded him into A. A. As his relatives died off or wandered away, or simply became interchangeable parts in the American machine, he went looking for new brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts, and so on, which he found in A. A.
We were a couple of nice old Andy Gumps.
I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing. I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: “Dear Kurt—I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.” We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.
It was Eliza who sensed that there was something cockeyed about the dimensions of some of the mansion’s rooms and corridors. And it was I who did the methodical work of taking actual measurements, and then probing the paneling and parquetry with screwdrivers and kitchen knives, seeking doors to an alternate universe, which we found.
Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern power sources and tools. We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddledy winks with huge chunks of stone. We supposed that it might even be abnormal on earth for gravity to be stable for long periods of time. We predicted that at any moment gravity might become as capricious as winds and heat and cold, as blizzards and rainstorms again.
Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect.
could have amused ourselves with our ever-increasing wisdom, caring nothing for its possible usefulness.
ELIZA AND I were of course not allowed to return to consolations of idiocy.
“In case nobody has told you,” she said, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else—where everybody learns to make his or her own way.
If he were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are fair to good.”
The People’s Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses—by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newtown’s or William Shakespeare’s, say.
OUR POOR PARENTS had first believed that we were idiots. They had tried to adapt to that. Then they believed that we were geniuses. They had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.
“They dazzle us with facts and quotations and foreign words and so on, whereas the truth is that they know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose is to detect such people—so that society can be protected from them, and so they can be protected from themselves.
“Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior,” she said.
“But it sure helps a hell of a lot more than your expressions of guilt, I must say. Those are just boasts about your own wonderful sensibilities.”
“How could we know when we were children something not known even today to the Chinese?” I said. “Luck,” he said.
I appeared here in New York only once during that campaign. I spoke from the steps of the Public Library at Forty-second and Fifth. This island was by then a sleepy seaside resort. It had never recovered from that first jolt of gravity, which had stripped its buildings of their elevators, and had flooded its tunnels, and had buckled all but one bridge, which was the Brooklyn Bridge.
Somewhere over on Madison Avenue, perhaps, there was a small explosion. The island’s useless skyscrapers were being quarried.
The reason that we ourselves did not die of The Green Death, by the way, was that we took an antidote which was discovered by accident by Isadore’s family, the Raspberries. We had only to withhold the antidote from a troublemaker, or from an army of troublemakers, for that matter, and he or she or they would be exiled quickly to the afterlife, to The Turkey Farm.
“Yes,” I said. “If our descendents don’t study our times closely, they will find that they have again exhausted the planet’s fossil fuels, that they have again died by the millions of influenza and The Green Death, that the sky has again been turned yellow by the propellants for underarm deodorants, that they have again elected a senile President two meters tall, and that they are yet again the intellectual and spiritual inferiors of teeny-weeny Chinese.”
And the Hooligan was itself a ghost, in a way, since the particle-accelerator had been dead for a long time, for want of electricity, for want of enthusiasts for all it could do.
