Harvey Jacobs, who is just about half as old as Jorge Luis Borges, but who broke into (English-language, fiction-category) print only two years later than Borges—and who is also appearing for the first time in any sort of s-f collection—has a not even remotely similar story, which also happens to be about dreams, gods, and the act of creation.
THE GIRL WHO DREW THE GODS
HARVEY JACOBS
My name is Oliver August.
I am friendly, a Moose. I try to believe in disarmament. I cook for a hobby. Every seven years my cells change. But each new cell sings of health and well-being. No matter how often I am replaced, I remain formidable.
Compare me with the rest.
In my city, in my time, half the people I meet live in their own suburbs, far from the energy of heart and the steam of bowel. The other half, with pinched lips, breathe their own smoke.
Am I apart, the only one with balance? If so, why so?
Look into my eyes: rain puddles rich with life. My story should be told.
When Oliver August, formerly passive, girded his valuable loins they charged like a unicorn, there was cause.
The cause was war.
War is a time for attack. But I did not rattle my sabre at the common enemy. I had a private skirmish.
The war I speak of was a small war. Not World War II, which moved millions, and which I missed by a whisker of time—the Korean War, a bubble of violence off to the left of the world’s population centers.
I was out of college less than a year when the Koreans stopped sharing rice. My full time job was soul searching. I was taking the internal grand tour. I resented interruption.
Suddenly the leisure of self-discovery drained away. Because of someone else’s history, the focus of my life was blurred.
My parents talked sense to me. They suggested that I go back to school. They regarded this move as wise and patriotic. The whole idea has firm roots in tradition.
It is considered a richer experience to give blood if a boy has his master’s degree.
After hesitation I agreed. My reasons were personal. I had just finished four hundred dollars worth of dental work. My mouth was a wet Fort Knox. In dreams I saw Communists mining my head for gold.
So, not eager to break goalposts, I entered a Convenient University. I readied for conflict in the department of philosophy.
The Department of Philosophy was a great, protecting bird. Under her thick wings small groups huddled together.
English literature was my major. Myself and others like me were assigned a place near the bird’s big chest. We took comfort in the regular blood thumps. The hot juices of scholarship kept each feather warm.
At first it was not so bad. After half a year of job hunting and the look of deep fear in my parents’ eyes, campus life was pleasant. College was as good a place as any to wait for my war.
I was deeply involved in a thesis on Chaucer’s symbolic animals for exactly one month. The news from Asia got worse. I worried with Douglas MacArthur. Chanticleer, the old cock, laid eggs of anxiety.
The thing is, I was overly concerned with my own symbols. Every night, my book by my bed, I dreamed about inlays, crowns, and unnatural bridges. With the equipment I used for chewing, a family in Peking could live like Mandarins.
Oliver August grew restless, logy, irregular, ill at ease. My courses lost magnetism. Most of the day I spent sitting in the library smoking room, which is a huge rancid lung. When you open the door to that chamber of gas, blue ooze filters out. I am sure that smoke from students long dead is still imprisoned there.
I sat, hour after hour, pooling my gray breath with the rest. I tried to read classics, but the words were wooden. For the first time in my life I grew jumpy. My belly housed an imp who churned and cursed fate. My palms gave salty sweat. There was weakness in my knees and tightness around my frontal lobes.
To pull myself together, I shopped for new involvements. Desperately, I looked for some subject to lure my response. The eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s minor plays, James Joyce, John Donne, the seventeenth century, art in the modern world, the middle ages—name it, I was there. I listened. I heard. I heard. I heard soldiers marching. I heard the lap of the Yalu River. I heard Oriental dentists sharpening their burrs.
Finally, thank god, something caught my attention. The course that won me the minute I read its abridged description was know the navaho II.
Why?
I have since learned that many eminent persons, to keep their sanity, involve with a universe far from their daily experience. They become experts on the Civil War, on Henry Adams, on the Latvian Uprising of 1236. It is not too different from collecting stamps or coins. I needed something to keep my brain intact. I needed Navahos, and I needed them badly.
There was a problem. I should explain here that the University was divided genitally into a Brother and Sister school. Usually students were not permitted to cross this simple sexual barrier. But exceptions were made in cases of hardship.
know the navaho II was given Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten. I read about it on Wednesday. By Thursday at nine, I was waiting at the proper room, signed dispensations in hand.
At nine-thirty the instructor came. Her name was Miss Sydney Luptik. According to her biography in the catalogue, Miss Luptik had lived for years among assorted Indians. She was the author of two books, Arrows in the Sun and The Laughing Waters, and she served as an advisor to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Miss Luptik walked along the narrow corridor, a thin, dynamic soul who accomplished motion in a barrage of baby steps. It was easy to see her talking right up to a Geronimo or the Great White Father himself.
We met head-on outside her classroom. I told her how much I wanted to audit her. She refused me. She refused me the way she would have refused the Union Pacific permission to build its track over her grazing land. She refused me for the logical reason that I had not had proper preparation.
“Without know the navaho i,” Miss Luptik said, “how could you expect to jump into know the navaho ii? My course builds. You wouldn’t understand subtleties. It would not be fair to you, Mr. August. Come back in September.”
I swore I would bone up. I promised to devote myself. She could not be moved.
“Look,” I said, “by September I’ll probably be in the U. S. Army, and remembering back to the way I played stickball and ring-a-levio, I’ll most likely be dead on an alien shore. Give me my chance.”
Miss Luptik considered my unusual circumstances.
“Welcome to the tribe,” she said.
The course itself was beautiful. It was everything I hoped for. Even the classroom was exactly right.
We met in the basement of a building whose first female students were rebels against the tarantella. The walls were tooth-yellow, stained with brown. The blackboard was cracked down the center. The wooden chairs, which had had flat seats, were actually worn down into small valleys through the attrition of thousands of ripe, impatient rumps.
Each chair had one fat arm for book resting. The arms were covered with initials, dates and names. The place was full of nostalgia. Only a bank of fluorescent lights intruded, and a sprinkler system.
As might be expected, Miss Luptik had triumphed over her environment. She made it her own. Everywhere there were pictures of Indians at work and at play. A table near the window held a jar of seeds, samples of wampum, a necklace of clay, arrowheads, a drum, a pipe, a feathered hat, and a tiny model of a village complete with inch-high figurines.