We all have this trouble. Not remembering — our memories stick like graffiti — but placing events in their proper sequence. I have to compile notes and diaries because I worry about this. I’m the baby of the Group and I’m still trying to train myself to develop an organic filing system. I’ve often wondered how Sam Pepys manages. He’s the Group historian and diarist and he tries to explain his system to me. It’s perfectly simple for Sam. Like: .A 1/4 + (1/2B)2 = The breakfast I ate on Sept. 16, 1936, and Good Luck to Sam.
I’ve only been around since Krakatoa blew up in 1883. All the others have been on the scene much longer. Beau Brummel survived the Calcutta earthquake of 1737 in which 300,000 were killed. Beau says nobody back then would ever believe the mortality figures, and he’s still sore because the honkies didn’t give a damn about how many quote niggers unquote died. I’m with him on that. He — Oh, I’d better esplain about our names.
The famous names I mention aren’t the realsies. We have to move on and change our names so often — the Shorties begin to wonder about us — that nobody can keep track. So we stay with our nicknames in the Group, and we pinch them from real people. They reflect our crotchets and main interests. I’ve mentioned H.G. Wells and his time-dingbat. There’s Tosca, an actress type; Beau, the epitome of the beautiful people; Sam Pepys, the historian; the Greek Syndicate, our financier; Bathsheba, the femme fatale; und so weiter. I’m nicknamed Grand Guignol, Guig for short, and I don’t like it. I don’t think of myself as a Theater of Horrors. I’m sincerely trying to do good, through horror, yes, but it’s a small price to pay for what I’m offering. Wouldn’t you pay an hour of agony for eternal life?
But about our ages: Oliver Cromwell was buried alive in a mass grave during the Black Death and still doesn’t want to talk about it. He says dying by suffocation is something to forget forever. Scented Song escaped the sack of Tientsin by the Mongols when they piled 100,000 severed heads into pyramids. Her description makes Dachau sound like a picnic. The Wandering Jew is Christ, of course. You can pick up the clue in Luke 24:3. A writer — D.H. Lawrence, I think — smelled the truth when he met Jacy in 1900 and turned it into a fantastic story about how Jacy might have lived a normal life if he’d only balled a bod. He didn’t know Jace. We call Christ Jacy because if you use his real name it sounds like you’re swearing.
There are many others whom you’ll meet later on. The oldest, by far, is Hic-Haec-Hoc. He got that nickname because that’s what his grunts sound like; he’s never learned to speak any language although he can unnerstan simple signs. We think Hic may be from the late Pleistocene or early Holocene and got his charge in some cataclysm that was dramatic enough to make a Neanderthal aware. Who knows? Maybe he got clobbered by a meteor or trampled by a Hairy Mastodon.
We don’t see much of Hic these days; people scare him and he’s always pulling back from the edge of civilization. We used to wonder how he was going to adapt to the population explosion but the space explosion solved that. He’s probably homesteading in a crater on Mars, Mother of Men; a Moleman can live on anything except nothing. Pepys, who keeps track of all of us, like Celebrity Service, claims that Hic was spotted once, mousing around the snows of the Himalayas, and he swears that Hic started the legend of the Abominable Snowman.
I use the word “charge” advisedly when I try to esplain our immortality. They call it “nerve-firing” nowadays. As near as I’ve researched, we all underwent identical traumas which destroyed or discharged the lethal secretions that are the crux of old age and death. If your cells accumulate lethal secretions you’re not forever for this world, and all creatures have been endowed with this metabolic suicide. Maybe that’s nature’s way of wiping the slate clean and trying again. I’m intensely anthropomorphic and I can see nature getting disgusted and closing the show on the road.
But our Group has proven that death doesn’t have to be inevitable. Of course we did it the hard way. Each of us knew we were going to die and received a psychogalvanic shock that wiped out our lethal cell products and turned us into Molecular Men; Molemen for short. I’ll explain that later. It’s a sort of updating of Cuvier’s “Catastrophism” theory of evolution. In case you’ve forgotten, he argued that periodic catastrophes destroyed all life and God started it all over again on a higher level. He was wrong about the God bit, of course, but catastrophes do alter creatures.
As described in each case (with the exception of Hic-Haec-Hoc, who can’t describe anything) the circumstances were almost identical. We were trapped in some natural or man-made catastrophe that gave us no chance of survival; we were aware of it; a psychogalvanic charge ripped through us as we toppled into extinction; then some miracle aborted the death and so here the Group is forever. The odds against this sort of freak are fantastic, but the Greek Syndicate says that even the longest odds are bound to come in sooner or later. The Greek ought to know. He’s been a professional gambler ever since Aristotle kicked him out of the Peripatetic School in Athens.
Jacy often describes the wild surprise of death that shocked through him on the cross when he finally realized that he was not going to be rescued by the U.S. Marines. He wonders why the same thing didn’t happen to the two thieves who were busted along with him on Golgotha. I keep telling him, “Because they weren’t epileptics, Jacy,” and he keeps answering, “Oh, hush. You’re obsessed with that epileptic delusion, Guig. I wish you’d take a lifetime off and learn to respect the mysteries of God.”
He may be right. I am obsessed with the belief that our Group is epileptic-prone and that there’s an historic linkage between epilepsy and the unique. I suffer from it myself, and when that aura hits me I can encompass the universe. That’s why we scream and spasm; it’s too magnificent for the microcosm to endure. I’ve trained myself to recognize the epileptic type and every time I spot one I try to recruit him (or her) for the Group by killing them horribly, which is why they call me Grand Guignol. Bathsheba always sends me a Christmas card with a picture of an Iron Maiden.
That’s not fair. I torture and kill from the best of motives, and if I describe my own experience with death you may understand. Back in 1883 I was an export factor, it says here, on Krakatoa, a volcanic island in the Sunda Straight. Krakatoa was listed officially as uninhabited and that was the swindle. I’d been established there secretly by a San Francisco firm in an attempt to muscle in on the Dutch trading monopoly. Did they say “muscle” back then? Wait a minute; I’ll ask my goddamn diary.
TERMINAL. READY?
READY. ENTER PROGRAM NUMBER.
001
SLANG PROGRAM HAS BEEN LOADED.
LOC. + NAME. START COUNT 2000 N.P.
SLANG HAS FINISHED RUN.
MCS, PRINT. W. H. END.
NO.
So all right, they didn’t say “muscle” back then, and happy birthday to IBM.
Now only an idiot would have taken the job, but I was a twenty-year-old kid intoxicated by the Discovery Mystique and mad to make a name for myself. Headline: NED CURZON DISCOVERS NORTH POLE!!! Like it was missing. Or, NED CURZON, THE AFRICAN EXPLORER. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Only M’bantu says Stanley never said that, and I take M’bantu’s word; he was there with a bindle on his head. Bindle? Bundle? McBee was there with a crate of four-buckle arctics on his head.
I was alone on the island in a bamboo warehouse with nothing but a terrier for company, but the locals sailed over to trade. They asked for the damndest things and offered me the damndest things, including their women, who would bounce into bed for a gill of trade whiskey. Ah! Those fabulous tropical beauties immortalized by Stanley! Not Sir Henry Morton Stanley of Africa; Darryl F. Stanley of Hollywood. Their skins were crocodiled with ceremonial scars and they cackled when you balled them, displaying teeth blackened by betel nut. Bring back Dorothy Lamour.