Not that he hadn't enjoyed himself already. He'd had more fun than an electric eel in a public bath, and, prison or no prison, eye patch or no eye patch, doom or no doom, he was confident the joy wasn't over yet. (As Wiggs related this sentiment to Priscilla, he patted her bare bottom for emphasis.) What's more, he didn't classify himself as a greedy fellow. It was simply that aging was so rapid and death so final that ultimately they robbed life of any meaning.
PHYSICAL PLEASURE
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
ARTISTIC MASTERPIECES
SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT
TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS
even
LOVING RELATIONSHIPS
or even
SPIRITUAL ECSTASY
Could any or all of these balance the dark weight? The certainty that the most gifted, the most beautiful, the most wise, the most virtuous of us must grow old and die?
“It was then and there, wallowin' on me cot in Concord Prison, that I decided to do somethin' about it,” Wiggs said.
“Because every bloody thing else is secondary to the creepin' chill o' personal extinction.
“Death is the fly in everybody's ointment.
“Death has never been acceptable to humanity, and 'tis less so today.
“To the religious chap, I say, if God loves ye, he wouldn't sicken ye and then murder ye. To the rational fellow, and to the hedonist, as well, I say, death makes a mockery of your logic and your pleasure, alike.
“Folks can never be truly happy, or truly free, or even truly sane as long as they got to be expectin' the vigor to decline and the swatter to fall.
“So, darlin', I pushed aside everything else, cleared me jail cell o' professional journals and scholarly books and, yes, girlie magazines, too, although Alobar was to teach me that was a mistake, and I vowed to dedicate me every erg o' energy to this modest pursuit: the eradication o' death.”
Priscilla looked at him with respectful disbelief. “Well, frankly,” she said, “I've got to classify that under the label of beating the old head against the old brick wall.”
“Indeed?”
“Why, yes, Wiggs. Of course. Everything that's alive was born, and everything that was born has got to die. There's no getting around it. It's the law of the universe.”
Nude though he was, Dr. Dannyboy drew himself up like a bank president. He tapped his patch portentiously, like a master of ceremonies testing a microphone. Then, in a surprisingly soft and even tone, he said:
“The universe does not have laws.
“It has habits.
“And habits can be broken.”
Above Seattle, the many-buttocked sky continued to grind. It taxed the wipers, ragged and lame, that limped, complaining every step of the way, back and forth across Ricki's windshield; first plangent, then lambent, then plangent again, it addressed the tarpaper roof of V'lu's motel, adding an extra dimension to her dreams; it stacked its liquid telegrams against the windowpanes of the Last Laugh Foundation.
Ricki pulled the VW into the driveway of her duplex, killed the engine (a mercy killing), and dashed for her door. She ran not to minimize rain-soak but in order to catch the ring of the telephone should Pris be on the line.
A horned man with the haunches of a goat forced his way into V'lu's dream. The dreamscape was lit by a yellow flame, and there was a suck suck sound as the creature, advancing on her, pulled his hooves in and out of soupy mud. V'lu was awakened by the pounding of her own heart. She was surprised and disturbed to find her pussy quite wet. Realizing that the man in the dream and the man on the bottle were the same, she wisely removed the bottle from under her pillow and buried it beneath the neatly folded clothes in her suitcase. In the darkness, tinted slightly by a seepage of NO VACANCY neon, she walked to the window. Although it was permanently sealed, through it she could smell the rain. Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain, thought V'lu. She was right. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.
Except to the extent that it enhanced the coziness of their fireside chat, Priscilla and Wiggs were oblivious to the rain. It was simply there in the background, like the feeble fire in the grate. In the foreground were hormones, questions, and wild ideas.
Priscilla was willing to accept Dr. Dannyboy's notion that mortality was the principal source of misery for the human race. She might, moreover, sympathize with his painful conclusion that his previous philosophy had been a sham because it had been friendly to death, accommodating it, making excuses for it, even celebrating our vulnerability to it. But his apparently sincere conviction that he could snatch the mouse hair and remove the scimitar struck her as the kind of high-pitched delusion that can shatter a man's mind like a cut-glass punching bag.
“Wiggs,” she said, “all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and Amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically, uh, barbecued your brain?”
“Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.”
At that, even the rain backed away.
Things were quiet for a while, what with the slack in the weather and a conversational pause. After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Boing! The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism. Pris was beginning to experience a resurgence of powerful urges in her loins when all at once there was a thumping noise from the floor above them.
“What's that?” she asked.
Wiggs spat out the nipple. “Morgenstern. I hope he doesn't wake Huxley Anne.”
“What's he doing up there?”
“Oh, 'tis a dance that he does, a dance against dying.”
“Wiggs, what is going on in this nuthouse? I mean, you don't have a laboratory on the whole blessed premises, but you've got a Nobel chemist dancing with himself at three in the morning — or is he dancing with a full-grown kangaroo? It sounds like it — and do you actually believe you're going to live forever? Tell me you don't believe it. Please.”
“I don't believe it.”
“You don't?” She sounded relieved.
“No, I don't believe that Wiggs Dannyboy will be livin' forever, but future generations will, Huxley Anne quite likely will, and even so, I expect to outlast me detractors. I could see me hundred-and-twentieth birthday, I could easily.”
“But how? And why? Is this some sort of grandiose and rococo midlife crisis? Are you that afraid of getting old? Aging is the most natural thing in the world.”
He snorted. “Sure and there's where you're bloody mistaken, me darlin'. There's where you're as wrong as garters on a nun.” He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip. “Agin' is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a hell of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. 'Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust.”