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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Act JJJ, Scene 3
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Copyright
To Professor BERNARD M. WAGNER of Georgetown University
“… I hope this is true; I make things up, you know.”
JAMES THURBER,
The Thirteen Clocks
Act JJJ, Scene 3
HIGH, HIGH atop the wild blue vault of space, while silver wings sun-danced where never lark nor even eagle flew, John Goldfarb reached out his hand and touched the face of his altimeter. It appeared to be malfunctioning.
“Nothing works,” gruffed the flame-haired aviator; “nothing ever works.” And Fate, who was his copilot, nodded agreement.
The altimeter spun to 53,000.
“Machines hate me.”
… 50,000.
“They are an alien intelligence from the distant stars.”
The star of Earth flared into Goldfarb’s cockpit from two o’clock high, and he dipped a wing to eight for a visual check of his position. “You are all under suspicion!” he informed his instrument panel sweepingly and, peering below, glimpsed conspiracy: snickering clouds veiled his landmarks.
The compass jiggled erratically and Goldfarb eyed it with malevolence. “Fink!” he accused with feeling, and the compass, baffled by the epithet, emitted faint ionic snits as it thoughtfully turned the word end over end with delicate electronic membranes, pondering the extent of the insult. Then it parried with a slashing thrust: the plane’s engine exploded. Stars fell on Alabama, a mandrake root was got with child, and the aircraft shuddered, keening, spinning dizzy, dizzy, downward, falling, falling.… John Goldfarb, inhaling his doom like Macbeth putting harness on his back one fine October morning with the forest doing squad drill, depressed a yellow button, then a bright blue one, and was exploded into space. “It’s a mad, mad world,” he gasped as the sky wrenched him into oblivion. A red parachute blossomed in the void.
* * *
Like Raggedy Ann in a space suit, like Raggedy Ann forsaken, John Goldfarb sprawled limp and disjointed on scorching wasteland. Sand, wind-whipped in gentle flurries, slid whispering across his face. Sun burned his neck, hot, hot, and the tangled skein of parachute lines cut rawly into his clenched hand. He stirred. His eyelids creaked open. And he gaped. Look, look, Sally! See the mirage! See the meshuge mirage?
In the near distance, undulating in heat haze, loomed a familiar-looking golden dome. And a football field. And a white-swathed figure emerging from the top of a minaret, cupping brown hands to his mouth. “Mafi Allah illah Allah…”; the nasal, singsong chant floated above the goal posts, hovered briefly over tackling dummies, and then drifted aimlessly into an end zone where a cluster of camels stood beige and impassive like hunchbacked dates. And everywhere Arabs in sneakers and blazers, carrying books and looking wise, paused silently and bowed toward Mecca.
Bare brown feet erased Goldfarb’s view. He looked up.
Shimmering above him, staring deep into his eyes, floated a red-robed Arab. From his left hand, clutched by a shaggy ear, dangled a stuffed terrier with emerald-green ears. And stamped across its rump were the words “NOTRE DAME.”
“Sweet Jesus!” croaked Goldfarb.
The grinning ghost of Daedalus looked down upon the scene. “See?” he clucked, nudging his son with an elbow. “He flew too near the sun!”
Icarus, dripping wet, muttered an incoherent obscenity.
“What?” challenged his father.
“I said ‘Wait till CIA hears about it.’”
It all began with a man who had no neck.…
Chapter One
THE CRUNCH of cleats against concrete bit angrily into the depraved May morning air with a rhythmic, chewing insistence, the yellowed teeth of its echoes rattling heavenward to ineffectually fang the brownish, bloated salami of smog that brooded moodily over the campus of Subliminal University in Los Angeles. The crisp reverberations startled a whimper of pigeons from the DeMille Memorial, where they had been softly nuzzling a graven image of the great producer contemplating the Seven Last Words of Charlton Heston; they probed uninvited into darkened classrooms where sandal- and Bermuda shorts-clad students held clicking séance with teaching machines; and they drifted, at last, into a second-story window of the Sredni Vashtar Memorial Student Dormitory where Ashley Yookoomian, a senior majoring in comparative religions, raised his head at the sound and instinctively fingered the inscription on the medal around his neck:
I AM A BUDDHIST—IN CASE OF ACCIDENT, CALL A LAMA.
Ashley’s glittering blue gaze swooped out across the campus, sifting shaded walks, fraternity houses, and a muttering professor angrily shaking his fist at a reckless student bicyclist whizzing to a class in Hamster Vivisection. The cleats vibrated with a steely urgency that stirred Ashley to karmic foreboding. Not that he was encrusted in his Buddhism. It was merely his wont to plunge headlong into the swirling waters of each new doctrine taken up in the course of his studies. Buddhism was his Religion of the Month.
The cleats pounded closer. What was their meaning?
Ashley’s piercing gaze gave it up and rested beamishly on the campus chapel. It was an astounding edifice. When its construction had first been proposed, the Sub U. board of trustees had bestirred itself to preserve a “total separation of campus and church,” and promulgated University Bull No. 406, which commanded the School of Architecture to create a chapel design that would “eschew even the remotest suggestion of forms or symbolisms associated with any particular creed or persuasion.” But the dean of architecture, after ex
perimenting with various novel angles and arcs, experienced an urgent compulsion to hurl himself, chest bared, upon the sharp end of a flying buttress. For the bull’s mandate seemed incapable of fulfillment; every conceivable design hinted at a corresponding Weltanschauung: spires were Gothic and Thomistic; squares Aristotelian; circles Confucian; and triangles clearly insinuated a Star of David. Even ellipses were out, for one of the trustees, who fancied himself a whiz at Rorschachs, had espied in them an irresistible link to Holy Rollerism.
The harried dean went into fasting, subsisting for a number of days on wheat germ and panther’s milk. Then one morning he announced that “in a dream Leonardo da Vinci put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Irving, do you mind?…’” And at the prompting of this “vision,” the architect appealed to Nucleic Walloon, dean of the School of Chemistry. He was well rewarded for his bleatings; for with the help of the chemists, the architects were able to design the chapel as a scale enlargement of an uncrystallized crystal—i.e., an actual amorphous mass. “It can offend no one!” crowed the trustees. And truly, it was a marvel of ambiguity. Unfortunately, however, no one had ever been able to find the entrance—except, of course, for the original planners and designers, who were last seen entering it two days prior to its formal opening and had yet to emerge. Like ancient Egyptian tomb builders, they were permanently sealed in, and the School of Chemistry was now being petitioned to do something about the smell.…
“Where’s No-Neck?”
Adrift in a poppy field of reverie, Ashley had not heard the cleats pounding to a halt beneath his window. His gaze flicked lightly downward.
Clip Markhoff, weasel-eyed coach of the Sub U. football squad, was staring up at him, the vivid scar across his left cheek pulsating angrily. “I said——”
“‘Those who know, do not speak,’” quoted Ashley. “‘Those who speak, do not know.’”
“What?” bellowed Markhoff.
“Lao-tzu,” explained Ashley.
Markhoff spat expressively, glowering up from beneath thick cashmere eyebrows. “Freaking fag,” he rumbled. Then he hulked away, his cleats grating out an obscene tattoo along winding paths and fading to indistinct, remembered scrapings as he rounded a corner out of sight. Ashley gazed fondly at the chapel again, and his smirk softened into the dark, delphic smile of some large-nosed, Armenian Mona Lisa. He wondered where his roommate No-Neck was.
* * *
The ominous approach of cleats surged over the tinkling of teacups in the campus International House, and Heinous Overreach, president of Sub U., cocked his head like a nervous terrier hearing an alien footfall on the back porch.
“More tea, Mr. Overreach?”
His automatic smile breast-stroked winningly over his half-bitten macaroon. “Thank you, no, Mrs. Borgia.”
“Wasn’t the demonstration ex-ot-ic!” simpered the International House hostess, shifting her teapot and her massive girth to a sari-clad Indian couple on Overreach’s left. Wednesdays at eleven the foreign-exchange students clotted here for tea, cakes, and intercultural symposia. Faithful attendance plus participation in one of the weekly “entertainments” earned two semester credits in Ethnic Empathy. Today the Venezuelans had staged a demonstration of “Techniques for Spitting on Visiting Foreign Dignitaries Riding in Open Cars.” Vast quantities of tea had been consumed, far more than usual, and in the demonstration area a softly cursing charwoman was mopping up. She could remember nothing worse since the Yemenites had endeavored to roast a sheep.
From across the room a dark, moon-faced young man in gray slacks and blue sportcoat caught Overreach’s eye, smiled, and drifted toward him. Overreach looked away. The lad was a simple-minded bore. True, he was a prince, the eldest son of the fabulously wealthy King Fawz of Fawzi Arabia. But Overreach’s background was politics, and the Arab vote in America was less clearly defined than the spoor of Judge Crater.
“Hallo.”
Overreach sniffed attar of roses, turned his head, and smiled broadly. Oh well, there was no predicting when a prince might come in handy. Cultivate the few but offend no one. Look interested. Look wise. Who knew where Alan Funt might turn up?
“Well, Your Highness; you’ve enjoyed your freshman year?”
Flashing white teeth grinned idiotically through lips of burnt umber. “Nice, nice.”
Overreach smiled again, his facial muscles weary with the effort, but he relaxed as Mrs. Borgia ballooned once more unto the breach. “More tea, Your Highness?”
“Yes, yes.”
Overreach watched as the prince dolloped a fourth, and then a fifth heaping teaspoon of sugar into his cup. “You’ll be back with us next year?” he asked abstractedly.
The prince looked apologetic. “Sorry. Next year I go Noter Dam.”
Mrs. Borgia hove seaward.
“Sorry,” repeated the prince, mistaking Overreach’s uffish thoughtfulness for pique. “Maybe some my brother come here.”
Overreach was listening to the cleats.
“Maybe two?”
Overreach made no response.
“T’ree?” probed the prince, aching to appease him.
Overreach gazed deep into the prince’s eyes, groping for the thread in labyrinthine undersea caverns where giant weeds undulated in the murk. Then suddenly his ears quivered. The pounding of the cleats was loud, louder, and there had been a sudden shift in their timbre. The stiff, bloodless fingers of a ghastly premonition fumbled for the Sub U. president’s throat and instantly his eyes widened with horror. God Almighty! Markhoff had burst in amongst the teacups, chewing up the oaken floor with his cleats.
“Overreach!” bellowed the coach as heads turned wildly.
Overreach rushed to intercept him. “Not here, dammit, not here!” he whispered hoarsely, and he hustled the burbling Markhoff outside into the lobby.
“He flunked!” raved Markhoff.
“Do you have to wear those cleats! The season is over!”
“Your fag profs got their poolroom, right? Well, cleats is my fringe benefit!”
“I will not tolerate your——!”
Overreach withdrew his warning finger as he saw some deans come and go, talking of loyalty oaths and Michelangelo and, grasping Markhoff’s iron arm, he hustled him into the men’s room across the hall. It was empty.
“Get into a stall and keep your voice down!” husked the Sub U. president.
He entered the stall nearest to hand, then abruptly turned, horrified, on hearing Markhoff’s cleats right behind him. He pressed a vigorous hand against the coach’s chest and shoved violently. “Not the same stall, you idiot!”
Markhoff’s profane mutterings were garbled by the scraping of cleats against tile as he bulled into the next stall. “No-Neck flunked!” he spat. “Big man; I thought you was gonna fix it!”
Fresh blotches of outrage crimsoned Overreach’s cheeks as vivid noises from Markhoff’s stall plainly announced that he was brazenly relieving himself during a presidential conference. “The examinations are graded by a two-million-dollar electronic brain,” Overreach huffed piously. “You cannot ‘fix’ a Smedley IV computer!”
“Bullcrap,” muttered the coach. Overreach decided to ignore this latest insolence and fixed his desperate gaze on some rather interesting inscriptions scrawled on the stall’s aluminum partitions in several languages.
“What did he flunk?”
“What did he flunk?” mimicked Markhoff. “Shakespeare!” he roared. “Didn’t I tell you to cancel that freaking course?”
“Markhoff!” rasped Overreach. “We cannot structure syllabi around the deficiencies of a single student, no matter how exceptional! We cannot——”
The Sub U. president abruptly purpled as Markhoff deliberately drowned out his rhetoric with the gurgling of a toilet flush accompanied by a triumphant tape-recorded rendition of the “Marseillaise.” The recording was one of the unique features of International House. Each stall was dedicated to a particular nation and equipped with cl
osed-circuit stereo components geared to render the appropriate national anthem at the precise moment of flush. It was all done with chemicals.
Markhoff’s stall door banged open. “Shakespeare! Another flying fag!”
“Where are you going?” demanded Overreach over the stirring blare of the French anthem.
“Find No-Neck!” bellowed the coach. “He’s liable ta do somethin’ horrible!”
Overreach shuddered. During his last fit of mild pique, No-Neck had hurled a tackling dummy fifty-five yards into a window of the Egyptology room, where it had knocked the unweeting curator headfirst into an enormous vase, according him temporary but instant urn burial.
“He could sprain his wrist or somethin’,” added Markhoff from the door.
“Yes,” muttered Overreach bleakly, examining a provocative series of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“I told ya before,” sneered the departing coach, “No-Neck’s the greatest prospect since Wrong-Way Goldfarb! And if he don’t play, we’re juiced—I promise you!”
The door puffed open, closed with a pneumatic sigh.
Overreach exhaled heavily. Had it come to this? Was he really posturing foolishly in a men’s room, moist with the insolence of an untutored Yahoo? Were his fortunes actually intertwined with those of a shimmering ox named No-Neck? The obscene hieroglyphs melted, whirled beneath his stunned gaze, sucking his consciousness into a tumbling, stifling vortex where it grappled for air with stiff-legged priestesses bearing shafts, and the violin-scored strains of the Liberian national anthem wafted delicately over the stall tops, subtly heralding another urgent presence. Overreach heard no music.
Heinous Overreach, “boy wonder.” Army colonel at twenty-five, congressman at thirty; presidential candidate at thirty-five. He’d almost won it, the big one. And now, at forty, a briefer but ever green political garland hovered tantalizingly above his receding hairline, issuing vague aromas of promise. In two years he would run for the governorship of California. Think of it! In two——
He thought of No-Neck and the garland withered. No-Neck. No-Neck Palomides. His position was fullback and his origin the north woods, where an enterprising Sub U. scout named Weed had discovered him lumberjacking for his father, Spyros Palomides. It was No-Neck’s unique system of directing a given tree’s path of fall that had first mesmerized the scout. Lacking the wit to place his cuts scientifically, No-Neck would press his forearms against his chest, elbows jutting outward in the classic football lineman’s stance, and then lean against the tree, shoving in the chosen direction. Weed, who had wept openly with admiration upon witnessing this tour de force, signed the boy instanter. To Spyros Palomides, he advanced a down payment on a restaurant, and to the boy he promised free room, board, books and tuition, plus a monthly stipend, a whip that cried “Slash!” and the prospect of being “laid regular by starlets.”