Rudy Rucker
The Secret of Life
The quotations at the head of each part are taken fromNausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, New Directions Books, Norfolk, Connecticut, 1959.
La Nausee was first published in 1938 by Librairie Gallimard.
For Niles Schoening
Part I
“I was just thinking,” I tell him, laughing, “that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea
Chapter 1:
Monday, December 31, 1962 Conrad Bunger was sixteen when it first hit him:Someday you’ll be dead.
The coat racks were at the foot of the stairs leading down to the bathrooms. Conrad made his way there and patted down the overcoats, feeling for the happy tumor of a hidden pint. It was easy; the bottles grew as thick as autumn fruit. Conrad drew out a pint of Old Crow and gulped at the strange liquid, vile and volatile stuff that evaporated almost before he could swallow.
With flushed skin, buzzing ears, and the sudden conviction thathe was cool , Conrad fumbled the bottle back into its velvet-collared overcoat. A brief wave of sickness. He made for the men’s room, eyes and mouth streaming, and drank some water from the sink.
The bathroom was empty, all light and white tile. Mirrors, a stack of clean-smelling linen towels by the sinks, and the urinals across the room. “I’m here by the sinks,” thought Conrad, “and it seems impossible that I will ever be over there by the urinals.” He began to walk. “Now I am moving through space, and time is going on, and now ...” He unzipped and began to piss. “Now, although it seemed inconceivable before, I am on the other side of the room.” His mind felt unbelievably clear. “Last year I never thought I’d be drunk at a dance, yet here I am, just as surely as I’ve crossed this tile floor.”
As he started back toward the dance floor, the wider implications hit him. “I can’t conceive of being in college, but that will come, too, and when it comes it will feel likenow . I will go to college, and marry, and have children, and all the time it will be me doing it, me doing it in some mysteriously movingnow .
And then I’ll die. It seems impossible, but someday I will really die.”
Linda wasn’t interested in all this; Linda was a tennis player. She and Conrad had gone steady for almost a year, and now all of a sudden at the New Year’s Eve dance he was interested in the problem of death.
Babbling about it on the dance floor, Conrad wore a heavy, glazed expression that made Linda suspicious.
“Are you drunk? You’re acting funny.”
“What difference does it make? What difference does anything make? Oh, beautiful Linda, why don’t you sleep with me before we die.”
“That is just alittle out-of-the-question, Conrad. Maybe you should sit down.”
Instead he dug back into the coat racks. There were some older boys down there now, but, hell, everyone was drinking, why should they care if he took a little?
“Get out of here, Bunger. What are you, a pickpocket or something?” It was Preston, a party-boy with cratered skin and a black burr-haircut. He was sipping from the very same pint that Conrad had sampled earlier.
Conrad attempted a smile. Suddenly he wasn’t cool anymore. “Happy New Year, Preston. Can I have a slug?”
“Christ, and give me syphilis? Get your own!”
It was still only 10:30, and those few gulps of whiskey were wearing off fast. The boys in the cloakroom glared at Conrad. He found his way back upstairs.
The answer came to him as the song ended.Steal some wine from the St. John’s sacristy! He told Linda he’d be back in a few minutes and hurried out into the hall.
There were some younger boys without dates out there, smoking and horsing around. Right now they were having a belching contest, bouncing the gurpy sounds off the oaken walls. One of them, Jim Ardmore, was a pretty good friend of Conrad’s. They belonged to the same high-school fraternity, a club called the Chevalier Literary Society. Some of the Chevalier members were fairly cool—though Conrad himself had been initiated primarily because his big brother Caldwell had been a member before going off to college and the army.
“Hey, Jim,” cried Conrad. “You want to help me steal some wine?”
“How decadent,” said young Ardmore, his mouth twisting. He was skinny, with a heavy shock of dry black hair hanging into his sallow face. “Decadent” was his favorite word, though right now he was using it with a certain irony. “Are we going to rob a liquor store?”
“No, no. Just come with me. We’ll gettwo bottles.”
The other boys cheered, and Ardmore went on outside with Conrad. Conrad’s mother had lent him her new blue Volkswagen. It shook a lot in first gear. They drove along River Road for a while, then up a long hill to St. John’s. It wasn’t far.
Just two years earlier, Conrad’s father had suddenly taken it into his head to be ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. He worked as an assistant at St. John’s, and Conrad was a regular acolyte.
Sometimes Conrad would light and extinguish the candles, and sometimes he would be in charge of getting out the bread and wine. As a result, he knew (1) where the locked closet with the communion wine was and (2) where to find the key. The church itself was always unlocked. Conrad’s father felt very strongly about leaving churches unlocked—he made a point of leaving a note saying,“A locked door, an unfaithful act,” on any locked church door he encountered.
Conrad and Ardmore hurried in, got the liquor closet unlocked, and gazed down at a full case of cheap California port. High high-school laughs. They each took a bottle and tumbled back into the VW.
Conrad was a little leery of bringing stolen church wine into the party, so he and Ardmore drove around for an hour, chugging at the stuff. Lights swept past, stores and cars, and the evening began to break into patches. Conrad could hear himself talking, louder and more eloquently than ever before.
“We’re going todie , Jim, can you believe that? It’s really going to stop some day, all of it, and you’re dead then, you know? It’s going to happen to you personally just like when I was at the dance and walking across the bathroom, how at the sink I thought I’d never be at the urinals, and then I was there anyway. I can’t stand it, I don’t want to die, time keeps passing.”
Ardmore laughed and laughed, never having seen Conrad so animated. They realized they weren’t going to be able to finish even the first bottle and headed back to the dance. Linda met Conrad in the hall.
“Wherehave you been? You stood me up!” It was past midnight, and people were slow-dancing inside.
Conrad was eager to share his new wisdom.
“Conrad, if you ever want to go out with me again ...”
“But I don’t!” brayed Conrad, realizing somewhere inside himself that this was true. “I don’t want to go out with you anymore, Linda, because you don’t understand death.”
A few onlookers had gathered. For the first time in Conrad’s life, people were looking at him with interest. He’d been a weenie long enough. Get drunk and talk about philosophy! That was the ticket! He groped for a concept.
“God is dead!” he shouted, suddenly understanding the dry phrase. “All is permitted!” With a whoop of laughter, Conrad threw the ashtray into the air and watched it shatter on the marble floor.
Next came a darkness, voices, and rough motion.
“Take it easy, Bunger, you’ve got puke all over yourself. Is this your house?”
“Uh, uuuuuh.”
“Yeah, that’s his house. Park his car, ring the doorbell, and let’s get out of here. Be sure to get that other bottle of wine.”
“Right.”
The dark forms disappeared, the house door opened, and there was Conrad’s father in his bathrobe.