“What do you mean?”
“I told everyone I was Conrad Bunger, too. And so did Izzy and Chuckie and Platter—that’s going to be like the big campus joke this week: ‘I’m really Conrad Bunger.’ You know: ‘Bird lives!’ ‘James Dean is disfigured and in hiding!’ All those people last night thought you were just a silly middle-aged guy pathetically imitating us students. ‘I am Conrad Bunger,’ indeed. Have you looked in a mirror lately, Dr.
Bulber?”
“Oh, Ace.”
“I know, you don’t deserve a friend like me. What are you going to do with all this Acapulco Gold?” The bagful of mixed money and marijuana had spilled out onto the kitchen floor. Big bills, big buds, gold and green.
“I’m sure as hell not going to hand it out at Collection. I mean, then I’d have to change my face again, and who knows if I could find another niche as perfect as this. I’ll stay away from the students, and start learning science. I really always wanted to be a physicist anyway. I guess I’ll freeze the dope. Or why don’t I divide it in five, and each of us takes one section, and in return you guys really really forget about this whole thing.”
“It might work. But why don’t you want to go back to the saucer, Conrad? Isn’t it fun out there?”
“I ... I really don’t know. I don’t remember that much about it. You know the story. They set me down here when I was ten, with fake memories, and it all came out more or less by accident. I only really saw another flame-person once ... that was the one who tried to get me in the graveyard. He seemed OK; when we touched it was like talking. But I could pick up a real feeling of envy off him. Life on Earth is a lot more interesting than being an energy-pattern in a flying saucer. I’m kind of in a position like a conscripted sailor who jumps ship to live on a tropical island. Or like a spy who defects and begins to believe in his cover.”
“But what about back on the homeworld? Maybe it’s real nice there. Do you know where it is?”
“No. I don’t even know whatkind of world it is. Your guess is as good as mine.” Conrad was moving around the kitchen now, straightening up. “I’ll tell you why I want to stay here. It’s simple. I want to stay on Earth because I’m in love with Audrey Hayes. That’s the secret of life, man. Love. I want to live out a normal human life here; I want to live a nice long life with Audrey. Maybe she’ll marry me and move into this house!”
“Far-out! And I thought you were going to hand it all out at Collection.”
“No, no,” said Conrad quickly. “I’ve decided to go for the long haul. Low-profile. I don’t need to talk to Collection at all.”
“But listen! I was just at the Student Council meeting. After that big party last night, everyone wants you to speak. We scheduled you for September 22, and the college already approved it! You can talk on the secret of life!”
Chapter 27:
Sunday, September 18, 1966 Conrad kept to himself for the next week and a half. Giving a speech on the secret of life was something he’d always wanted to do—and he hoped to be ready for it. Dee’s simple summation, “All is One,”
seemed like the core of it, but the problem was that sometimes the phrase was ... just empty words.
“All is One,” Conrad would repeat to himself, jogging along the route that Ace had showed him through the Crum. Sometimes it would click, and sometimes it wouldn’t.
Odd things kept happening at Mr. Bulber’s house. Sometimes Conrad would come back, and it would look as if someone had been there, moving things around. Paranoia or truth? Other days, there’d be a car with strangers parked across the street. Scary, but what could he do? Nothing except hope that, when the heavy shit came down, he’d have another power up his sleeve. Meanwhile, Conrad kept on thinking, thinking about the secret of life.
He got a lot of books out of the Swarthmore library: Einstein’s essays, Wittgenstein’sTractatus , good oldNausea , and Kerouac and Suzuki and Eddington and Daumal. There was still so much to learn. He’d really wasted his three years here so far—he didn’t know much of anything, and the books were hard to understand. They were just marks on paper. Most days, hungry for reality, he’d wander off into the Crum woods.
He’d go down the hill behind Bulber’s, say, and smoke a joint and sit there, staring at bugs on a rock.
The bugs were alive, people were alive, the flamers were alive—butwhat was it all for? When he was high enough, he thought he knew; he’d have that fine merged feeling he’d had that day with Dee, and everything would fit together.
Another day—it was Sunday the eighteenth—Conrad sat all afternoon gazing at Crum Creek ...
wondering at the way a given bulge in the water could always be there, yet always be made up of different molecules of water. The bulge was a definite form, anobject , yet it was utterly insubstantial.
There was no molecule you could point to and say, “This is an essential part of the bulge.” On a longer time-scale, Conrad mused, human bodies were just as insubstantial—eat and shit, cough and breathe—the atoms come and go. But his flame-stick ... what wasit made of?
Focusing inward, Conrad could sort of feel the rod of light running down his spine. The flame was something other than ordinary matter, or it wouldn’t fit inside his flesh so easily. Plasma, ether, hypermatter? Try as he might, Conrad couldn’t pull it out as he had in the Z.T. graveyard. He needed the crystal to get the flame out; the crystal was an essential part of him. Crystal and flame, projector and image, body and mind, log and fire. That wasone direction; what was the other? What did the flame do for the crystal?
When Conrad got back to Mr. Bulber’s that evening, he found that all his preliminary notes for his speech had been stolen. The FBI was onto him for sure. He picked up the phone and listened. It gave off a tinny echo. Bugged? He’d resisted using the phone so far. But, hell, if the feds were onto him so bad they were going through his papers, then what difference did anything make anymore? He decided to go ahead and call up his parents. They’d be worried about him. His father answered.
“Hello?”
“Dad? This is Conrad.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I wish you’d leave us alone. We’ve been through enough.”
“No, Dad, it really is Conrad. I’ve been hiding out. Remember how you used to lie in the wading pool and call me Sausage?”
“It’s Sausage!” old Caldwell called to his wife. “Pick up the extension, Lucy!”
“Conrad?” came his mother’s voice then. “Is it really you? Where are you?”
“I better not say. I’m OK, though. I’m in disguise.”
“Is all this business about the flying saucers true?”
“I think it is. I think they sent me down here to find out what people are like. But I’m scared that the police are going to kill me.”
“Why can’t you turn yourself in peacefully?” asked his mother.
“Don’t do that,” put in Conrad’s father. “I think they really might kill you. They’ve been by here a lot—the FBI and the Secret Service. Those fellows mean business.”
“I’m still your son anyway,” blurted Conrad.
“We know that,” said his mother. “And we still love you.”
“I think my phone is tapped, Conrad,” said his father. “So we better keep it short. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“One thing, Dad. What’s the secret of life? What does it all mean? What are we here for?”
There was momentary silence. Crackles on the phone line. “Damned if I know,” his father said finally.
“Nobody knows. It’s just ... Here we are, and we have to take care of each other the best we can.”
Pause. “Does there have to be a reason?” “Thanks, Dad.” Again the fleeting feeling of understanding it all. “Thanks a lot. I guess I better hang up now.”
“Take care, Conrad,” said his mother. “Please try and find some way to straighten all this out.”