She shrugged and emitted a doltish grin. “I don’t know. What does it matter? Names aren’t important as long as you love everybody. Why can’t we just be? La la la, life is so simple.” Someone nearby handed her something from his fingertips to hers. She put it in her mouth and inhaled, then held it out to Nathan. “Want to smoke a Mary Jean cigarette?”
Banden took it with the fascination, dread, and morbid curiosity he would have felt had it been a loaded gun. He knew what this contraband substance was, but it had never occurred to him that the opportunity actually to sample it would ever present itself in the circles in which he moved. Internally committing himself to whatever dangers lay before him, he put the cigarette to his lips and drew in sharply. The smoke plunging into his chest caused his throat to clench and loosed a spasm of coughing, at which Angel Human laughed merrily.
“Your first time, huh? Far away. Not so much this time. Here.”
As she held the cigarette up to his lips and he took a puff, he became transfixed by her eyes. They were large, brown, and guileless—so different from his former lover’s ice-blue eyes, with their sparks of intelligence, their glint of calculation, their burning awareness of existence as the ground of all phenomena. It would be nice, Nathan felt, to be absorbed by these eyes, to receive from their untroubled placidity a sanction for the cessation of striving, of pushing, of achieving, and instead merely to exist in the here and now, like an animal or a rock. He took another puff as she smiled softly at him.
“Hey,” she said. “Wanna dance?”
He was about to protest that he didn’t know how, when she summarily began shifting and gyrating in place, more or less in rhythm with the throbbing wail of the popular music blaring from loudspeakers across the room. She pulled on the cigarette and held it up for him. He drew on it again. She then passed it to someone nearby and, with a luxuriant toss of her head, exhaled the smoke directly at him as her hair rippled on either side of her smooth, child-like face. “You’re cute,” she said.
“So are you,” he said.
“Hey, let’s engage in heavy petting.”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure I should.”
“Oh, man, don’t make me trip over a bum,” she said, rolling her large, liquid eyes with exasperation. “Hang up on society and call up freedom long-distance! Don’t let the square world drag you down. Because what if they threw a war and nobody caught it? Did you know that the Earth is like ninety percent water? It’s our home and it’s water, okay? The Earth is our home and we live here, man, covered in water. It’s like a big aquarium and we’re all fish. Fish don’t make bombs. Fish don’t declare war on other people just because they’re different. They live for today because tomorrow is just today that hasn’t come yet. That’s why this is the dawning of the age of aquariums. Everybody should do what fish do—stay in the school, get in the swim, and enjoy Nature.”
It was a nonsensical fit of verbal hysteria, an ignorant mélange of colloquial expressions, simplistic metaphors, and crude piscine symbolism, but Banden listened to it in a state of transfixed fascination. It articulated a view of the world, a set of values, a code, which he never knew existed. Compared to this, Dragnie’s comments about mind, will, and rationality seemed simply too difficult to confront and too demanding to live up to. The simplicity of Angel’s expression, the fluidity and grace with which she carried herself, the guileless directness of her manner of interaction, and of course her physical attractiveness, proved convincing evidence to Banden of the correctness of her views, however nonsensical they were in reality.
“You’re right,” he said dazedly.
“Come on.”
It took ten minutes by cab to reach her apartment, a small studio in an old apartment building in a quaint residential part of the city, where poets and painters of previous eras had lived, but which was now occupied by the children of the privileged while they attended university, where they spent the days protesting its curricula and policies and the nights engaging in lurid escapades involving mentally-disorienting drugs and sexual activities devoid of metaphysical dimensions.
As she unlocked her front door he thought, Do you see this, Dragnie? Here is a place to which you cannot gain admission. It is the place of today’s stylish and hip-most young people, who have something to say to society and want the whole world to jibe on their now message. His voice tremulous with hope, he said, “Is what we’re going to do a thing?”
She smiled. “Definitely,” she said. “It’s a thing and we’re going to hang it out.”
“It sounds like it will have many grooves.”
“It already does,” she said, and pulled him into the apartment.
Chapter 5
When You Are Hot You Are Hot.
When You Are Not You Are Not.
On the morning of the third day of her convalescence, Dragnie was sitting up in bed in Doc Hastings’s clinic, reading with ruthless literacy the freight manifests and other railroad documents sent to Glatt’s Gorge by her assistants in New York, when John Glatt appeared in the doorway. As always, his face bore no outward sign of his inner state of being, apart from a slight narrowing of the eyes signaling an absolute love of existence and a barely-perceptible wiggling of the ears manifesting a withering contempt for reality.
“Hello, John,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“I’ve just been speaking to Fritz,” Glatt said.
“Our loyal chauffeur? On the telephone?”
“Yes. Nathan has been compelling Fritz to drive him to various social engagements the past several evenings.”
“Oh, is that all?” Dragnie said, chuckling.
“No,” Glatt said, not chuckling. “Nathan has been accompanied in these nightly outings by a young lady—the same young lady, every night—who, Fritz said, is physically attractive in a girlish, lissome way said to be appealing to the masses of men for whom, according to the latest fashionable magazines, such an appearance and manner are widely considered to be pleasing.”
“I see. And she is how old?”
“Approximately eighteen. At the end of each evening Nathan requests that Fritz deposit both of them at the girl’s dwelling, a squalid little apartment in the disreputable section of Greenwich Village frequented by bohemians and non-conformists. And now excuse me. I’ve got work to do in my secret laboratory, dedicating all of my intelligence and energy to the creation of an invention thus far unseen by the eyes of men.”
Glatt left. Dragnie pondered what course of action would best honor her highest code of values and conduct. After a few moments of pitiless concentration and dispassionate analysis, it became clear that the optimal course of action for her would be to return to New York, initiate a discussion with Nathan A. Banden and, at a precise moment the arrival of which she would identify by a combination of innate instinct and objective calculation, shriek emasculating insults at him and, if feasible, repeatedly slap his face as hard as she could. He would, she felt with the confidence of certitude, recoil from this expression of her displeasure. But she did not doubt her ability to pursue him both verbally and physically, whether in the apartment, around the corridors of the world-famous Johnsonwood Building, or up and down the street. She would do so until, having delivered a sufficient quantity of slaps and, if a propitious opportunity presented itself for such actions, punches, he acknowledged her theme and accepted its premise. Its premise was that she accepted full responsibility for how old she was. Its premise was that if he had begun to experience her age as a “bring-off” and a “turn-down” he need only have said something, and she would have prevailed on John Glatt to invent something to make her younger. Its premise was, thus, inescapably, that it was his fault that she was old, that she was compelled, by a reasonable assessment of her self-interest, to slap him and yell her values at him, and that she was now forced to wonder if she—she; Dragnie Tagbord—were not enough for him.