“Whoa,” she said.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she beheld with startling clarity the image of a blond-bearded man wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a peaked officer’s cap. His face was distended with fury; beside him loomed a gray cylindrical form that might have been a periscope. Alison opened her eyes quickly and saw the porpoise blithely coursing the walls of its tank.
“But that’s not love or life or anything,” she sobbed. “That’s just cruelty.”
“Alison, baby, don’t you know it’s all the same? Without cruelty you can’t have love. If you’re not ready to destroy someone, then you’re not ready to love them. Because if you’ve got the knowledge — you know, like if you really have it — then if you do what you have to do that’s just everybody’s karma. If you have to waste somebody because the universe wills it, then it’s just like the bad part of yourself that you’re wasting. It’s an act of love.”
In the next instant, she saw the bearded man again. His drawn, evil face was bathed in a sinister, submarine light, reflected from God knew what fiendish instruments of death.
“I know what you are,” Alison called out in horror: “You’re a fascist!”
When the beast spoke once more, the softness had vanished from its voice.
“Your civilization has afforded us many moments of amusement. Unfortunately, it must now be irrevocably destroyed.”
“Fascist!” Alison whimpered in a strangled voice. “Nazi!”
“Peace,” the porpoise intoned, and the music behind him turned tranquil and low. “Here is the knowledge. You must say it daily.”
Enraged now, she could detect the mocking hypocrisy in his false, mellow tones:
Surrender to the Notion
Of the Motion of the Ocean.
As soon as she received the words, they occupied every fraction of her inner space, reverberating moronically, over and over. She put her hands over her ears.
“Horseshit!” she cried. “What kind of cheapo routine is that?”
The voice, she suspected suddenly, might not be that of a porpoise. It might be the man in the turtleneck.
But where? Hovering at the mouth of a celestial black hole, secure within the adjoining dimension? A few miles off Sausalito at periscope depth? Or — more monstrous — ingeniously reduced in size and concealed within the dolphin?
“Help,” Alison called softly.
At the risk of permanent damage, she desperately engaged her linear perception. Someone might have to know.
“I’m caught up in this plot,” she reported. “Either porpoises are trying to reach me with this fascist message or there’s some kind of super-Nazi submarine offshore.”
Exhausted, she rummaged through her knit bag for a cigarette, found one and lit it. A momentary warp, she assured herself, inhaling deeply. A trifling skull pop, perhaps an air bubble. She smoked and trembled, avoiding the sight of the tank.
In the next moment, she became aware that the tall young man she had seen earlier had made a circuit of the hall and was standing beside her.
“Fish are groovy,” the young man said.
“Wait a minute,” Alison demanded. “Just wait a minute here. Was that…?”
The young man displayed a woodchuck smile.
“You were really tripping on those fish, right? Are you stoned?”
He carried a camera case on a strap round his shoulder and a black cape slung over one arm.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alison said. She was suddenly consumed with loathing.
“No? ‘Cause you look really spaced out.”
“Well, I’m not,” Alison said firmly. She saw Io advancing from the bench.
The young man stood by as Io clutched her mother’s floor-length skirt.
“I want to go outside now,” Io said.
His pink smile expanded and he descended quickly to his haunches to address Io at her own level.
“Hiya, baby. My name’s Andy.”
Io had a look at Andy and attempted flight. Alison was holding one of her hands; Andy made her fast by the other.
“I been taking pictures,” he told hen “Pictures of the fishies.” He pursued Io to a point behind Alison’s knees. Alison pulled on Io’s free hand and found herself staring down into the camera case.
“You like the fishies?” Andy insisted. “You think they’re groovy?”
There were two Nikon lenses side by side in the case. Alison let Io’s hand go, thrust her own into the case and plucked out a lens. While Andy was asking Io if she was shy, Alison dropped the lens into her knit bag. As Andy started up, she seized the second lens and pressed it hard against her skirt.
Back on his feet, Andy was slightly breathless.
“You wanna go smoke some dope?” he asked Alison. “I’m goin’ over to the art museum and sneak some shots over there. You wanna come?”
“Actually,” Alison told him, “I have a luncheon engagement.”
Andy blinked. “Far out.”
“Far out?” Alison asked. “I’ll tell you something far out, Andy. There is a lot of really repulsive shit in this aquarium, Andy. There are some very low-level animals here and they’re very frightening and unreal. But there isn’t one thing in this place that is as repulsive and unreal as you are, Andy.”
She heard the laughter echo and realized that it was her own. She clenched her teeth to stop it.
“You should have a tank of your own, Andy.”
As she led Io toward the door; she cupped the hand that held the second lens against her hip, like a mannequin. At the end of the hall, she glanced back and saw Andy looking into the dolphin’s tank. The smile on his face was dreadful.
“I like the fish,” Io said as they descended the pompous stone steps outside the entrance. “I like the lights in the fish places.”
Recognizing them, Buck rushed forward on his chain, his tongue dripping. Alison untied him as quickly and calmly as she could.
“We’ll come back, sweetie,” she said. “We’ll come back lots of times.”
“Tomorrow?” the child asked.
In the parking lot, Alison looked over her shoulder. The steps were empty; there were no alarums or pursuits.
When they were in the car, she felt cold. Columns of fog were moving in from the bay. She sat motionless for a while, blew her nose and wrapped a spare sweater that was lying on the seat around Io’s shoulders.
“Mama’s deluded,” she explained.
BEAR AND HIS DAUGHTER
IT WAS AN old Mafia lodge on the north shore of the lake that went back to the 1940s. During the years of its construction casino managements had not yet discovered the necessity of isolating their patrons from time and daylight, so the main bar had a huge picture window fronting on the lambent water and the towering sierra beyond it. The sun had already disappeared behind the mountains and the lake was purple with dusk. Smart, the bearded poet, stood with a double Scotch and water in his hand, his stool turned to the window.
“Wine-dark!” he exclaimed to the bartender.
The bartender, a foxy-faced young man, had a short, military-style haircut but his manner was slack in the extreme.
“Say again, señor?”
“Wine-dark,” Smart repeated, gesturing toward the lake.
The young bartender seemed virtually floored by the assault of sudden illumination.
“Wine-dark? The lake? You see it as like ‘wine-dark’?”
“Not really an original conceit,” Smart explained. “Actually…”
“Wine-fucking-dark.” He gave a little half-dazzled toss of his narrow head. “Whoa.” They had been alone at the bar but shortly a cocktail waitress with reddish-blond bangs arrived to collect an order.
“Señor here,” the bartender told her; “sees the lake as ‘wine-dark.’”