The copper bosses killed you,
Joe I never died, said he
"Oh, Dad," Simon said aloud. "Why did you have to die, before I ever knew how much I loved you?" And suddenly he was all alone in an empty living room, weeping like an old man whose family and friends were all dead, holding his Social Security check and wondering: Where is the Federal bureau in charge of distributing love?
Which was absurd: Simon had lots of friends, and he was just being morbid.
"Oh, Dad"-he sniffed one more time-"I miss you."
And then he stopped crying and went and put the Fugs' record of "Rameses the Second Is Dead, My Love" on the stereo. And floated with the music and the hash into a Country-and-Western Egyptian paradise:
He's walking the fields where the Blessed live
He's gone from Memphis to Heeeeaav-en!
* * *
"Well?" Mary Margaret Wildeblood prompted, a bit impatiently. She was naked on Williams's bed and had been Lourding herself, not vigorously, just gently, very gently, not getting too excited yet, merely trying to get him excited.
"Just a minute just a minute," Williams said, sitting in his drawers on the side of the bed, one sock in his hand. It wasn't the transsex thing that was delaying him; he was still struggling with the New Idea she had given him back at the Three Lions. "It isn't just poisoning," he said absently. "Anything that shocks the whole neuroendocrine system might do it. Yes, of course. Artificially induced imprint vulnerability."
Mary Margaret seized his hand and placed it firmly between her thighs. "Imprint that," she said coyly.
"Yes, yes," he said, caressing her absently. "But just listen a minute. Orgasm does it um I think. No, just the first orgasm. Right? You keep repeating the pattern of the first orgasm…"
"/ don't," Mary Margaret said. "Just up there a bit, on my Atkinson there, there, ah Christ."
"Yes yes you don't and a lot of people I know don't," he said. "Yes. Um? But the people whose sexual patterns keep changing are a minority, certainly. They've changed their imprints somehow. Um. Yes, yes. Oh, my God!"
"What is it?" Mary Margaret was becoming cross; his hand had stopped moving entirely.
"Sorry," he said, resuming the gentle stimulation on her Atkinson and the outer lips of her Feinstein. "I just realized some people keep changing their ideas too. They've loosened the semantic imprints. My God, that's why conditioning theory is inadequate. Don't you see the conditioned reflexes are built onto the imprints…"
"God God God oh sweet Jesus God"
"It's a shock to the whole system. People who've had near-death or clinical death experiences. Shipwrecked sailors. And oh Jesus I call myself an anthropologist and I never got it before, rites of initiation of course that's what they're all about of course making new imprints…"
"Oh God oh God darling darling"
"Yes yes, I love you, new imprints of course, yes yes are you coming on my little darling"
"God God GOD!!!"
"Ah sweet little darling was it good? Ah yes you look so sweet now there's nothing as lovely as that post-Millett expression but about those imprint circuits-"
"Shut up and Briggs me please darling"
And so, still reflecting on shock and imprint vulnerability and the changing of sexual-semantic imprints, Blake Williams began Briggsing a person who had been masculine for almost all the years they had known each other, wondering just how queer this was, really.
"Incidentally," Dr. Dashwood asked, "what do you think the Hammerklavier is all about?"
Bertha Van Ation and he were sitting at the kitchen table now, sipping a little peach brandy he had found still remaining in the cabinet, and munching Ritz crackers.
Dr. Van Ation brushed some auburn hairs back from her forehead. "The Black Hole," she said promptly.
"Ah you mean he was feeling dragged down into something he couldn't escape?" Dr. Dashwood suddenly remembered he wanted to look up Jan (or was it Hans?) Zelenka.
"No, not that aspect of it." Bertha munched and frowned thoughtfully. "The suspension of all the cosmological laws. The end of space. The end of time. The end of causality."
Dashwood smiled. "Some people thought it was the end of music when it was first performed," he said. "You might be on the right track."
"Why thank you sir said she." Bertha grinned. "You really think I'm dragging my own astronomy into the music department."
"You have every right to," he said. "We all see and hear through our own filters. To me, the Hammerklavier sounds like an unsuccessful attempt at Tantric sex. And the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies sound like monumentally successful attempts. That's me dragging my own speciality into the music department."
"You are a doll."
"And you're a living doll."
"Isn't sex great?"
"If God invented anything better," Dashwood said, quoting an old proverb and adapting it to the Feminist age, "She kept it to Herself."
"And how did I score on your scale?"
"Ten Spelvins of Sincerity, Sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness. No, make that eight Havens. You went off the scale."
In Hollywood, Carol Christmas, the Blond Goddess of everybody's fantasies, was sleeping alone for once.
She was still involved in 250,000,000 sex acts every hour.
The quantum perturbations pulsed gently through her atoms, stimulating her molecules, rejuvenating her cells, providing a very satisfactory Trip for her whole neuroen-docrine system, and enriching her dreams vastly.
It was perfect Tantric sex, and she wasn't even consciously aware of it.
This was happening to her, and had been happening to her since the release of Deep Mongolian Steinem Job, because she was the Blond Goddess in so many fantasies.
All over the world, as she slept and even while she was awake in the daytime, the quantum inseparability principie (QUIP) stimulated her gently, because all over the world, every hour, 250,000,000 lonely men were Lourding themselves while looking at photographs of her.
Back in New York, Polly Esther Doubleknit was wandering around her apartment stark-naked.
Her lover of the evening was sound asleep in the bedroom, but Polly Esther was wakeful and thinking of twenty dozen things at once, like the Second Oswald in Hong Kong and whether fish ever get seasick and how splendidly heavenly it had felt when her lover's tongue was up inside her Feinstein and what was the name of the third Andrews Sister-Maxine and Laverne and who?-and Silent Tristero's Empire and why so many things come in threes, not just Maxine and Laverne and what's-her-name but Curly and Larry and Moe; and Tom, Dick, and Harry; and Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet; and Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and Past, Present, and Future; and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner; and the three witches in Macbeth; and the three brothers who start on the same quest in all the old fairy tales; and the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary; and of course the Big Three, Pops, J.C., and Smokey; and maybe she should cut down on those diet pills; it was absurd to be wandering around at three in the morning thinking in threes.