Who am I and where am I going?
Who he was : uncounted billions of atoms, pulled apart and whirled away from there, down a golden tunnel bored in saffron space and ochre time.
Where he was going:
Joe Bob Hickey awoke and the first sensation of many that cascaded in on him was one of swaying. On a tideless tide, in air, perhaps water, swinging, back and forth, a pendulum movement that made him feel nauseous. Golden light filtered in behind his closed lids. And sounds. High musical sounds that seemed to cut off before he had heard them fully to the last vibrating tremolo. He opened his eyes and he was lying on his back, on a soft surface that conformed to the shape of his body. He turned his head and saw the bullhorn and rucksack lying nearby. The squirt gun was gone. Then he turned his bead back, and looked straight up. He had seen bars. Golden bars reaching in arcs toward a joining overhead. A cathedral effect, above him.
Slowly, he got to his knees, rolling tides of nausea moving in him. They were bars.
He stood up and felt the swaying more distinctly. He took three steps and found himself at the edge of the soft place. Set flush into the floor, it was a gray-toned surface, a huge circular shape. He stepped off, onto the solid floor of the...of the cage.
It was a cage.
He walked to the bars and looked out.
Fifty feet below was a street. A golden street on which great bulb-bodied creatures moved, driving before them smaller periwinkle blue humans, whipping them to push-and-pull the sitting carts on which the golden bulb creatures rode. He stood watching for a long time.
Then Joe Bob Hickey went back to the circular mattress and lay down. He closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.
In the days that followed, he was fed well, and learned that the weather was controlled. If it rained, an energy bubble-he didn't understand, but it was invisible-would cover his cage. The heat was never too great, nor was he ever cold in the night. His clothes were taken away and brought back very quickly... changed. After that, they were always fresh and clean.
H e was someplace else. They let him know that much. The golden bulb-creatures were the ruling class, and the smaller blue people-sorts were their workers. He was very someplace else.
Joe Bob Hickey watched the streets from his great swaying cage, suspended fifty feet above the moving streets. In his cage he could see it all. He could see the golden bulb rulers as they drove the pitiful blue servants and he never saw the face of one of the smaller folk, for their eyes were constantly turned toward their feet.
He had no idea why he was there.
And he was certain he would stay there forever.
Whatever purpose they had borne in mind, to pluck him away from his time and place, they felt no need to impart to him. He was a thing in a cage, swinging free, in prison, high above a golden street.
Soon after he realized this was where he would spend the remainder of his life, he was bathed in a deep yellow light. It washed over him and warmed him, and he fell asleep for a while. When he awoke, he felt better than he had in years. The sharp pains the shrapnel wound had given him regularly, had ceased. The wound had healed over completely. Though he ate the strange, simple foods he found in his cage, he never felt the need to urinate or void his bowels. He lived quietly, wanting for nothing, because he wanted nothing.
Get up, for God's sake. Look at yourself.
I'm just fine. I'm tired, let me alone.
He stood and walked to the bars. Down in the street, a golden bulb-creature's rolling cart had stopped, almost directly under the cage. He watched as the blue people fell in the traces, and he watched as the golden bulb thing beat them. For the first time, somehow, he saw it as he had seen things before he had been brought to this place. He felt anger at the injustice of it; he felt the blood hammering in his neck; he began screaming. The golden creature did not stop. Joe Bob looked for something to hurl. He grabbed the bullhorn and turned it on and began screaming, cursing, threatening the monster with the whip. The creature looked up and its many silver eyes fastened on Joe Bob Hickey. Tyrant, killer, filth! he screamed.
He could not stop. He screamed all the things he had screamed for years. And the creature stopped whipping the little blue people, and they slowly got to their feet and pulled the cart away, the creature following. When they were well away, the creature rolled once more onto the platform of the cart, and whipped them away.
“Rise up, you toadstools! Strike a blow for freedom!”
He screamed all that day, the bullhorn throwing his voice away to shatter against the sides of the windowless golden buildings.
“Grab their whips away from them! Is this what you deserve?! There's still time! As long as one of you isn't all the way beaten, there's a chance. You are not alone! We are a large, organized resistance movement...”
They aren't listening.
They'll hear.
Never. They don't care.
Yes! Yes, they do. Look! See?
And he was right. Down in the street, carts were pulling up and as they came within the sounds of his voice the golden bulb creatures began wailing in terrible strident bug voices, and they beat themselves with the whips...and the carts started up again, pulled away...and the creatures beat their blue servants out of sight.
In front of him, they wailed and beat themselves, trying to atone for their cruelty. Beyond him, they resumed their lives.
It did not take him long to understand.
I'm their conscience.
You were the last they could find, and they took you, and now you hang up here and pillory them and they beat their breasts and wail mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and they purge themselves; then they go on as before.
Ineffectual.
Totem.
Clown, I'm a clown.
But they had selected well. He could do no other.
As he had always been a silent voice, screaming words that needed to be screamed, but never heard, so he was still a silent voice. Day after day they came below him, and wailed their guilt; and having done it, were free to go on.
The deep yellow light, do you know what it did to you?
Yes.
Do you know how long you'll live, how long you'll tell them what filth they are, how long you'll sway here in this cage?
Yes.
But you'll still do it.
Yes.
Why? Do you like being pointless?
It isn't pointless.
Why not, you said it was. Why?
Because if I do it forever, maybe at the end of forever they'll let me die.
(The Black-headed Gonolek is the most predatory of the African bush shrikes. Ornithologically, the vanga-shrikes occupy somewhat the same position among the passerines that the hawks and owls do among the nonpasserines. Because they impale their prey on thorns, they have earned the ruthless name “butcherbird.” Like many predators, shrikes often kill more than they can eat, and when opportunity presents itself seem to kill for the joy of killing.)
All was golden light and awareness.
(It is not uncommon to find a thorn tree or barbed-wire fence decorated with a dozen or more grasshoppers, locusts, mice or small birds. That the shrike establish such larders in times of plenty against future need has been questioned. They often fail to return, and the carcasses slowly shrivel or rot.)
Joe Bob Hickey, prey of his world, impaled on a thorn of light by the shrike, and brother to the shrike himself.
(Most bush shrikes have loud, melodious voices and reveal their presence by distinctive calls.)
He turned back to the street, putting the bullhorn to his mouth and, alone as always, he screamed, “Jefferson said-”
From the golden street came the sounds of insect wailing.
Los Angeles, California/1971
EROTOPHOBIA
It began with my mother, Nate Kleiser said, hating every word of it. The ignominy of it, oh. Not only here in a psychiatrist's office, not only lying on a forest green Naugahyde chaise, not only suffering every literate man's embarrassment at speaking lines Roth had portnoyzed into the ground, but to be speaking those lines to a female shrink, to be speaking them with choked-up emotion, to have started with mother…