Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, Saucer Wisdom Read online

  Suddenly, finally, Bo Diddley and his band were out on the stage, red sequined tuxes and all. Conrad dragged Dee back to their seats. Diddley struck up a steady chicken-scratch on his git-box and began trading insults with his drummer.

  “Hey.”

  “What dat.”

  “I heard yo’ daddy’s a lightbu’b eater.”

  “He don’t eat no lightbulb.”

  “Sho’ ‘nuff.”

  “Whaah?”

  “I heard every time he turn off the light, he eat a little piece!”

  Conrad howled, and the man behind them stood up and slapped his dick against his leg again. Dee began looking around to see if anyone else from her class was here.

  “Isn’t that Francie Shields down there?”

  “Shhh.”

  Now the band was blasting an old tune called “‘Deed and ‘Deed and ‘Deed I Do,” with the incredible Diddley sex-beat, and over it, the soaring alienation of Bo’s strange, homemade guitar. Bo Diddley, the man, right there, in the flesh, black as they come, sweating and screaming—for a few minutes, Conrad forgot himself entirely.

  Bo Diddley was the last act before intermission, and Conrad hurried down behind the stage to get a closer look at his hero. Incredibly, Bo Diddley was right there, standing around talking to some black women. He was shorter than he looked on the stage, and uglier.

  “Are you Bo Diddley?” blurted Conrad, pushing his way forward.

  “Yeah. I’ll do autographs after the show.”

  “Can I shake your hand?”

  “All right.”

  They shook briefly. It was incredible, to be touching the actual meat-body, the actual living person that made the music Conrad loved so well. During the moment he touched Diddley, everything seemed to make sense. And then the moment was over, as usual, every moment over, over and over again. Conrad mumbled his thanks and wandered off, a bit dazed, looking for Dee.

  He found her with Francie Shields and Hank Larsen. Conrad had known Hank was coming but had decided not to double-date, since Hank and Dee didn’t like each other, although right now, Dee was glad to see Hank. It seemed like he was the only other white boy here who wasn’t a tough yokel soldier from Fort Knox. Hank, for his part, was drunk.

  “Turd-rad,” he called genially. “How is your wretched ass?”

  “Cool it, Hank. I just shook hands with Bo Diddley. What are you doing for our generation?”

  “Feeling pretty good,” said Hank. “Around the edges. You want a belt, Conrad? Let me see that hand.”

  Conrad had meant not to drink tonight, but he heard himself asking Hank, “Where’s the bottle?”

  “Francie’s purse.”

  Hank and Francie and Dee had all gone to the regular public high school together. Hank had been voted most handsome, and Francie had starred in the senior play. She was a bit overweight, but pretty in a straight-mouth-straight-nose-straight-hair way. Her voice was a lovely, purring lisp.

  “Conwad. Do you like it heyuw?”

  “It’s communion,” answered Conrad. “You know? We’re all people, and Bo Diddley’s a person, too. Let’s go over in those dark bleachers and have a drink.”

  “Well, Conwad, I just saw Sue Pohlboggen and Jackie Pweston. Dee and I can wait with them.” Francie liked to stir up trouble. It seemed like everyone in town knew about Conrad’s gross prom date with Sue.

  Hank took a half-full pint of gin out of Francie’s purse and stuck it under his untucked shirt. “Let’s roll, Paunch.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Dee. “I’ll get drunk, too.”

  “Fine,” said Conrad. “It’s existential.”

  They went halfway up the dark bleachers behind the stage and passed the bottle around. For some reason, Conrad was feeling a little desperate. He sucked hard at the bottle, forcing down four or five big slugs in a row. As always, the hot poison set his face-holes to running—he leaned over a railing and retched some spit. Dee took a few sips, Hank some more, and then Conrad finished the bottle.

  “Listen,” he told Dee, as they started back down to the main floor. “The incredible thing is that I’m not drunk yet, but by the time I get down there, I will be. Can you feel it, too? With each step—” He paused to retch again, and Hank started talking. He was all worked up.

  “Bo Diddley is right here, and all these crazy blacks are having a good time. Jesus! The sixties have begun! Why should we be all white at college and learn stuff to be faceless Joe bureaucrat with kids like us? I want this summer to last forever! Are you on the Larsen bandwagon, folks?” Hank trumpeted briefly with his lips. “I want to be black, I want to go hood!” Just then he tripped and fell down the last few steps.

  “Do you feel it yet?” Conrad asked Dee. Everything was hot and roaring. Another band had started up.

  “Yes,” said Dee. “I do.”

  They stood there for a few minutes, leaning on a railing, Conrad staring upward, mouth open, staring up at the spot high overhead where he’d once seen the acrobats, the spot where, in his dreams, the flame-people always flexed and flickered, showing Conrad, telling him what he’d need to know during his long mission, know to forget, in search of the Secret, the Answer to a Question unnamed, the Question whose annihilation is, in some measure, the Answer, for a time at least, though, no matter what, the Question always returns, making a mockery of yesterday’s Answer, but just here and now, at the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, July 5, 1963, wiped-out, drooling, and staring, Conrad has it, Conrad knows…

  Chapter 7: Wednesday, September 11, 1963

  Zzt-bing-boinggg. “And now the WAKY weather report, September 11, 1963. Carol?” Rrrrwwaaafzz. “Thank you, Chuck. We’re expecting more of the same today, with late-evening thundershowers and possible—”

  Conrad turned off the clock-radio and sat up. It was barely light out. Five A.M. No time to lose. He got dressed and took the cream pie off the kitchen counter. It had defrosted nicely overnight. Hank was leaving today. High school was all over.

  Hank was out in his backyard, by his ham-radio antenna, waiting for Conrad. He had his pie ready, too. The idea had been that instead of saying goodbye, they’d push pies into each other’s faces. But now, at five in the morning, they just stood there, the two of them, holding their sad, flat frozen pies.

  “Have fun at Columbia, Hank. Look out for the dipshits.”

  “You think you’ll make it down here at Christmas?”

  “I hope so.” Conrad’s parents were about to move to northern Virginia. Moving and college, this was really the end. “It’s been great, Hank, all these years.”

  “Right.” Hank’s face was stiff and tight, the way it always got when he was upset. “Goodbye, Conrad buddy. I’ll never forget any of it.”

  Conrad took his pie home and threw it in the garbage. It was all over. He’d always known the end was coming, but now it was here. Dee gone, Hank gone, his family about to move, and four years of hard college work coming up—hard work to be followed by marriage and a real job. No slack, no slack in sight. If only he could learn to control his powers of levitation. The only time he was really sure he’d flown was the time he’d wrecked his mother’s car.

  Just yesterday, he and Hank had had a last talk about it. Hank was half-inclined to believe his old friend’s claims—the problem was why Conrad was not, in fact, able to give a demonstration. “Maybe it’s a kind of vestigial survival mechanism,” Hank had suggested, drawing on their common store of science-fiction wisdom. “Maybe, in ancient times, some races could fly, but it was eventually bred out. Say that the flying-genes happened to crop up again for you, Conrad, but you can only be sure of flying when it’s a matter of life and death. We could test it by going downtown and having you jump off the Heyburn Building!”

  Instead of that, they’d settled for having Conrad jump out of a tree, but the catch was that unless there was a real
chance of dying, then the power wouldn’t necessarily cut in—and Conrad wasn’t willing to take a real chance at dying. After a while they’d given up on the project and gone to a movie instead.

  And now it was over, and Hank was gone, and Conrad’s parents were moving, and he had to go college, and… He went back to bed and slept till his mother woke him by coming in and shaking his foot.

  “Get up, lazybones. It’s twelve o’clock!”

  “Aw, Mom…”

  “You have to help get ready for the movers. Your closet is a rats’ nest.” Conrad’s mother always used idioms like “rats’ nest” with a special gusto. She thought language was funny, especially English. She’d grown up in Germany.

  “I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to do anything.”

  “Poor Conrad. Aren’t you glad to be going to Swarthmore next week?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Eat something and you’ll feel better.” Another shake of his foot. “And then I want you to go through your junk and decide what to keep. I have a cardboard box for you.”

  After some milk and a bologna sandwich, Conrad got to work sorting his stuff: the shell collection, the butterfly collection, the fossil collection—all worthless garbage now—the school papers (going back to sixth grade), his recent poems, the letters from girls (Linda, Dee, and even Sue Pohlboggen), the model rockets, the photographs, the Gilbert chemistry set, the Electroman electricity set, the Geniac computer set, the Walt Disney comics, the old schoolbooks with their enigmatic graffiti, the lenses and knives and coins and combs and pencils and matchbooks and pieces of wax. Too much. He drifted down to the basement to paunch out.

  His big brother Caldwell’s room was down here. Caldwell had been off in the army since last summer. He’d gotten kicked out of college after freshman year, and Big Caldwell had made him join the army. He was stationed in Germany.

  Caldwell’s empty basement pad was a pleasant place on a hot day. He had interesting college books, and a full two years’ run of the Evergreen Review. Conrad picked up an issue and turned to a sex-poem he remembered seeing: two lovers sleeping, with spit-out watermelon seeds on the floor, and “the mixed fluids slowly drying on their skin.” The mixed fluids. Conrad jacked off on that, and then started going through Caldwell’s desk.

  In the bottom drawer, he found a flat wood case with two little dueling pistols. He’d seen them before, but he’d forgotten about them. Caldwell had traded one of his drunk college friends a record player for the guns.

  Conrad took out one of the little pistols and looked it over. It was a one-shot .22 caliber derringer, with a fat, short barrel, and a nicely rounded little wooden stock. There were bullets in the case as well. On an impulse, Conrad pocketed the pistol and a bunch of bullets. In case anyone gives me a hard time.

  He had a date that night, with an eleventh-grader called Taffy Sinclair. They’d met about a week after Dee left town and had been going out ever since. Taffy’s father was a psychiatrist. He didn’t like Conrad.

  On the way to pick up Taffy, Conrad stopped by Tad’s Liquor Store and got a half-pint of gin. If Tad was in the right mood, he’d sell to anyone. Gordon’s gin, with that red boar’s head on the yellow label.

  It was still a little early to pick up Taffy. Conrad took a back road down to the river, to play with Caldwell’s pistol. You had to load it one bullet at a time. Conrad fired it out over the water, missed seeing the bullet splash, and tried again. There, right out in the middle, halfway to Indiana. He reloaded and shot a tree trunk from point-blank range. The little bullet bored right in.

  Imagine shooting yourself, Conrad thought. He took out the empty cartridge, made double-sure the gun was empty, and put it to his head. What if I were going to kill myself right now? He psyched himself up into half believing it and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The dry little sound made Conrad shudder. I don’t want that. I may be miserable, but at least I’m alive. But with the click had come a sudden feeling like a muscle unclenching at the center of his brain. He could fly. He’d tricked his survival mechanism! Right now, for the first time, he was going to be able to fly as well as he wanted!

  Conrad pocketed Caldwell’s gun and angled out over the river. Twenty feet, thirty… He was out over the real current now, looking back at his VW on shore. Somehow it felt very natural.

  But then, all at once, the power was gone. Conrad plummeted into the brown Ohio. It took a few minutes of real struggle to get back to shore. Good thing he hadn’t flown up higher—though if he’d been higher, then maybe the power wouldn’t have dared to cut off.

  Fortunately, Conrad’s mother had left a load of clothes for the cleaners in the backseat. Conrad got into a dry outfit and sat there thinking. Why me? What makes me so special?

  He wondered if he should open up the gin. Better not yet. Mr. Sinclair would meet him at Taffy’s door and try to smell his breath. A few weeks ago, Conrad had made the mistake of trying to talk to Mr. Sinclair when he was drunk. “Everything’s meaningless,” Conrad had slobbered. “God is dead.” The line usually went over great with girls, but Mr. Sinclair took it too seriously. “You’re suffering from extreme depression, Conrad.” Conrad was lucky that Taffy was still allowed to go out with him.

  Tonight they were going downtown to see To Kill a Mockingbird. Taffy looked great, tan and blonde in a spaghetti-strap blue dress. She had a solid little figure and pink bubblegum lips. She liked to talk about her horse, Tabor. Thinking about his plunge into the river, Conrad hardly knew what he was saying.

  “Do you ever get hot, Taffy, bouncing on that horse?”

  “Oh, Conrad.”

  There was a weird preacher outside the movie theater. A pale brown, wild-eyed mad with big freckles splotched on his papery skin. He had some red-and-yellow signboards about the end of the world, and he was passing out gospel tracts. Conrad stood in front of him for a minute, soaking it up, and thinking, I can fly.

  “You be lookin’ for meaning and the words fall away! The Son don’t come in time till time run out. These are the last times, my friend.”

  Conrad took a tract and let Taffy drag him into the theater. He’d brought along his unopened half-pint of Gordon’s. Once he’d gotten popcorn and settled down with Taffy, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. I can fly.

  He sat down in a stall and sucked down a third of the bottle. Just like at the Bo Diddley concert. The buzzing started. He drew the wild man’s tract out of his pocket and studied it. It was dull bullshit—a straight pitch for getting saved by Jesus—with none of the weird resonances that the actual preacher had. Conrad took another slug and squinted to see who’d printed the pamphlet. “Gospel Tract Society, Shoals, Indiana.” No good.

  After the movie, Conrad stopped to talk to the preacher. “What do you mean, ‘the words fall away’? How do you make it happen?”

  “You hide it to find it,” said the man, smiling. He was glad to answer questions. That’s what he was here for.

  “Conrad, come on,” urged Taffy. This evening wasn’t working out properly.

  “How can you hand out crap lies like this?” demanded Conrad, gesturing at the tracts. “Who pays you?”

  “I tell you,” said the preacher, putting his hand on Conrad’s shoulder and drawing him close. “The world take care of the world. And you a fallen angel.”

  All at once, Conrad felt dizzy from the red-and-yellow Gordon’s and the preacher’s red-and-yellow signs. His head was roaring and it was as if everything were bathed in flames. Flame-people. Flying wing.

  In the car, Taffy was really angry. “Just take me home, Conrad. I don’t want to go to our make-out spot tonight. You can kiss me in the driveway.”

  “Thank you, Taffy. I’m sorry I’m acting crazy. I love you. I can fly.”

  “You can what?”

  “Fly. On the way to pick you up, I flew out o
ver the Ohio River. I think maybe I’m not human.”

  “My father’s right, Conrad. You really are crazy.” Her voice was cold as ice.

  On the drive back to his house from Taffy’s, Conrad opened all the windows, hoping the air would wash the gin fumes away. The bottle was on the seat next to him, not quite empty. He felt really strange.

  Just then a car full of hoods pulled around him as if to pass. Little greasers, all worked up. Instead of passing, they locked speed and began yelling curses and giving him the finger. Two cars speeding along side by side, the kids on the left yelling at Conrad.

  With one swift gesture, Conrad snatched up his bottle and flung it into the other car’s windshield. There was a lot of noise. He stepped on the gas and sped the rest of the way home. The hoods were behind him, he could see their lights following him.

  Conrad zipped up the Bungers’ long dark driveway, loaded the little derringer, and went partway back up the driveway on foot. The other kids had stopped at the end, scared of an ambush. They were yelling things. It was too dark to see. Conrad leveled the pistol at the sound and paused.

  He was just drunk enough to consider shooting. That would show them. And if the cops came—well, he could just fly away and…

  As Conrad deliberated, the whole dark world began to flame and shudder. A voice was running in his head, a memory tape. If you misuse your powers, you will discorporate, said the voice. Remember why you are here!

  Slowly he lowered the gun to his side. The car full of hoods was driving off.

  “Why I’m here,” murmured Conrad. “To find the secret of life.”

  He unloaded the gun and went to bed. It was time to go to college.

  Part II

  That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: The proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense.