lickhaven

[What is this, and why am I beleaguering you with anything of such length? 

[It is the opening chapter of what was planned to be my first and perhaps only novel, back in the mid 1960s. The attempt soon degenerated into confusing shit, but bits and pieces still live to haunt me. Some of those were stitched together as the Rylla profiles I plugged in here some months back. 

[Well, see what you think of this, and tell me if you’d like to read some of those other bits, or whether you printed it out to wrap your celery so it wouldn’t stick to the fridge shelf.]

Though young, Roswald had the aspect of a much older man. He took steps short and precise, each a small excursion forward and to the side, out, around and back again, into himself. Worse for him, he knew this and would go on periodic bouts of upheaval, trying to force his soul into some new form which might give his life direction and dimension. He wished, on some level, to be mighty-spirited, to leap the chasm which separates man from man, logic  from emotion, science from art, religion from common sense. He would alter his restrictive gait every six months or so, going into long, loping strides of bouncy, pogo-stick motions, only to find that at the end of three or four weeks he had returned to the out-around-back of his closed circle. His feet, he came to realize, knew the Truth and the Way, and it was a way of sorrow.

The day of his realization was, in a sense, a beginning for him, but a beginning steeped in a corrosive sadness which spread upwards through his legs, spleen and shallow-breathing lungs, arriving at last in the church pew of his consciousness, where it settled in for what promised to be a lifelong sermon on the errors of his ways.

His place in life reflected the melding of his inner place and his inflated aspirations with remarkable fidelity. He was an messenger boy of high governmental order, a go-between who, on a practical level, did bridge gaps (through hand-delivered communications), but who nevertheless need not show external evidence of a personal existence and must not, as a function of his position, have either a point of view of the ability to exert an influence over others.

Indeed, it was almost an anomaly that he was a human being at all–partly a matter of convenience to those who used him, partly a matter of not trusting those channels of communication which can be bugged, partly an anachronistic attachment to the Old Ways. He could, had his utilizes known the full spectrum of 1963 technology, have been replaced by any of three virtually bug-proof systems which had been introduced during the past five years. 

Now here is the strange thing: Roswald did get bugged, possibly the first human being to be fully wired for espionage purposes without his knowledge. The buggers chose him because they understood enough of psychology to realize that Roswald would be given to a streak of undeveloped hypochondria which could easily be primed to explode into full-blown hysterical symptoms.

As their emissary, they chose an outgoing, pleasant sort named Gerald Kloan, who befriended Roswald during the latter’s visits to Philadelphia to smooth the flow of information between GE Aerospace and the National Science Foundation (who, if anyone, should have known of more reliable communications systems but did not). Since Kloan was a junior exec with GE, it was natural that he should strike up the sort of amorphous friendship which leads to luncheon dates. At one of these luncheons, Kloan had a stroke of good fortune which set the operation in motion.

The seafood lunchroom was crowded with diverse sorts arranged around communal wood trestle tables, and the walls were decorated with row on row of oyster places and similar fishy implements. Roswald bit down on a small stone hiding somewhere in his oyster. The ensuing pain gave him a rare moment of clarity, raising him out of himself long enough to wonder why he had agreed to eat lunch with Kloan and why he had agreed to eat raw oysters, which he equated with swallowing someone else’s tongue.

Why had fate placed him here, now, why had his circular steps paced him into this strange corner to be assaulted by the deep? He felt a mild elation that somehow the sea hated him, that a whole bast body of water knew of his existence and took issue with it. But as the pain ebbed, the illusion of saline importance receded like a polluted tide, and Roswald was left only a diner with a sore molar.

Kloan clucked the usual friendly commiseration, then settled into an uncharacteristic posture of silence, flicking occasional worried glances across the table. It took several minutes for this ploy to register with Roswald, who had retreated once more to his insularity. Once he had noticed, it took a like period for his companion’s behavior to take on meaning.

“What is it?”

“What’s what, Rossie?” Kloan’s choice of this nickname was neat as a surgeon’s incision, dropping formality yet refraining from trespassing on the private property of Roswald’s given name.

“You keep looking at me like something is wrong.”

“Well. . . I don’t think anything is wrong.” He jabbed another oyster to underscore his provisional certainty.

“What could be wrong?” Roswald was annoyed, unused to attention and personally directed hypotheses.

“How’s your tooth?”

“Fine. It hurts. I must have hit a filling.”

“It doesn’t feel . . . strange?” Kloan poised an oyster before his mouth like an omen.

“No . . . just sore. What do you mean, exactly?”

“Nothing much, I guess. I just have kind of brittle teeth. See this back here”–he opened his mouth and pointed into the shadowed cavern which released no secrets in the dim light of the restaurant– “I bit down on a stone or something once and three days later a whole damn cusp came off. I must have gone back to the dentist six or eight times. Kept losing little pieces until he had to cap it. But I think it’s just brittle teeth with me.”

“I didn’t know you could have brittle teeth.” Roswald had stopped chewing, conscious of how he was avoiding the right side of his jaw.

“That’s just what they call it. maybe it’s the same with everybody.” Kloan looked quickly apologetic for the slip. “I mean, I don’t think your teeth are going to fall apart or anything. Your teeth look very sound.” He chewed vigorously for emphasis.

Roswald explored the aggrieved tooth with tentative tongue, checking all the familiar slips and fissures for evidence of a fresh fault. He found none, but the look on Kloan’s face was plain — at any moment the dental façade of that molar might be rent asunder, to lie on the highway of his tongue as so many slivers of devastated bone.

By the end of the meal, Kloan had given him the name of a little-known but trusted dentist who could ferret out the most minute discrepancy in the sturdiest of teeth.

Three weeks later, Roswald was knocked out with a general anesthetic. The entire inside of his molar was removed and replaced with temporary packing. Two more trips, and Roswald was the possessor of an ingenious miniature microphone based on bone-induction, much like a high-quality hearing aid, but destined to lead to other ears than his.

The installation of a sufficiently accurate transmitter stretched Kloan’s limited manipulative abilities to their utmost, but soon Roswald was relieved to know that his heart, rated weak and erratic on the EKG of a Washington specialist recommended by Kloan, was pumping right along under the direction of the latest in atomic-powered pacemakers. And indeed, the apparatus he carried would have passed muster for the genuine article under the most careful scrutiny (short of slitting Roswald like a hog).

The physical effects of these intrusions on Roswald were nil, but the influence they came to have on his mind was odd and (in all fairness to the someone directing Kloan) unpredictable. The sermon in his head was not so much one of words but of a pointing finger, directed, more often than not, at his never-changing circular pace.

Lately, however, it pointed as frequently to the ignominious mechanism delivering rhythmic pulses (or so he thought) to his heart. The finger ticked back and form between the realms, bringing them to a common focus until Roswald had come to equate the two. After a time he even became aware of the heartbeat itself, a living repetition which tided him over from one second to the next. It began as an echo or an overtone, but in time it thumped more and more to the forefront of his consciousness, until it came to dominate his external being.

He strolled along in time to the call of his ventricles, his pace varying with the degree of tension he felt, but on the whole slowing and lengthening in just the manner he had tried unsuccessfully to promulgate over the years. Soon the heart and the feet became opposing metronomes, a simply but efficient feedback mechanism which promoted the well-being of his body in their stately progression. His blood pressure dropped slightly, the nagging pains disappeared from his calves and he no longer had headaches. Even the sadness itself, which had enveloped him in layers of protective insulation, lightened to a sense of mild disquiet and, finally, to something approaching ease.

Roswald barely noticed this at first, for he had become so consumed with the rhythm that its side-effects were but a blur in the corner of his mind’s eye. But his superiors (and everyone he dealt with was his superior in bureaucratic power) did notice — at first with amusement, later with chagrin, then with vague suspicion. One’s instrument does not take on a personality without becoming a source of concern. So it was that, while Roswald remained ignorant of his status as a broadcast station, he nonetheless managed to draw down on himself precisely the sort of unfocused distrust that Kloan and his cohorts had congratulated themselves on having bypassed.

“I don’t understand it,” groused Swivel, a long-faced engineer with a preposterous cowlick. “The guy’s supposed to be a complete potato. He’s never done anything in his life that would draw attention. I don’t think he’s even capable of falling down in a public place. Now they’re sniffing all over him. Why?”

“Are you sure there’s noting in that broadcast pack that could alert them?” Kloan asked. “A power leak or something?”

“Not a damn thing. The transmission is so weak I have to use three boosters to get it up to half-decent. Even then you have to know where to listen for it and you have to be able to unscramble the signal before you know there’s anything to listen to. If they were that far along they’d have him ripped wide open. No, they’re reacting to him.”

Swivel was playing with a transistor. He was almost always playing with a transistor. His whole posture was in the “aw shucks” tradition of American invention, from the cowlick to the holes in his shoes to the nonchalance with which he scraped dirt from beneath his nails. Kloan might have thought to dislike him intensely if he hadn’t been too busy keeping his best face turned outward at all times, like the moon circling the earth.

The cumulative effects of such chronic dishonesty often lead to physical manifestations, even in the most amoral of us. With Kloan it was button-twisting. At the moment he was worrying the last button from the cuff of his left jacket sleeve, and it would soon join the others in a plastic snuggle in his breast pocket. Half his lunch hours were consumed in trips to the tailor, who harbored the notion that Kloan was somehow involved with monkeys. But in truth he was involved only with Getting Ahead, a process that requires a great deal of motion on one’s personal periphery, because the center of being is not consulted.

Roswald, meanwhile, was moving closer to the center of his being, a place he had carefully avoided for fear it might prove untenanted. He now viewed everything in relation to the new rhythm and a new sense of meaningfulness forming inside. For the first time, he saw the possibility that he might be part of some larger mechanism, the outlines of which were hazy but beginning to take, if not shape, at least extension.

Roswald the cog, the unit, was becoming part of the world.

It must be, he thought, because he was so near Death that Life had become so important to him (revelations tend to present themselves in simplistic terms). Not only had gracefulness slipped into his motions, but he also found that he could turn his mind to a multitude of subjects with increasing facility. The images of dampness and rot began to fade, Spanish moss on longer hung just behind his eyes. There remained a giant step between himself and gladness, but as his stride grew longer, that internal step grew shorter. He wished fervently, for the first time in his existence, that that existence might be prolonged indefinitely. He did not want to be defective. He did not want to die.

He decided that pacemakers, as trustworthy as they were reputed to be, might not be the ultimate in security for him. He would rather trade a chronic treatment for health, so he made his way to a cardiologist all his own choice who told him that his heart was as sound as a dollar. Others, in further consultation, agreed.

Roswald was elated but puzzled. How could the original diagnosis, the consensus of technology and medical expertise, have gone so awry? He confronted the installer of his pacemaker and observed an inexplicable confusion and blustering, underlaid by what looked to a layman’s eye like panic. Why so much fuss over a botched diagnosis? It seemed to go beyond fear of being sued.

He left the office scratching idly at his memory for fleas of the past and recalled odd scenes and table talk, most of it centered on the boyish earnestness of Kloan. An image came to him of the Assaulting Oyster and, in a flash of insight that would have been impossible for the Roswald of a few months before, he realized that he had been had.

As a loyal servant, he turned in his body as evidence. On November 21, 1963, he was poked, prodded, sliced, sewed and relieved of one molar. His superiors — some so superior that he had never before seen their faces — rushed in individually and in packs to congratulate him on his acumen, his patriotism and his fine teeth. He received an immediate promotion, indicating that they could no longer put trust in their loyal servant to carry messengers when, for all they knew, his very shit might be wired for sound. Nor, based on his past performance, could they think of much of anything else that he could do.

He was given an office, a title, a secretary, and left to wait for any mail that might be routed his way in error. The hours were long and, in those days following Kennedy’s assassination, particularly empty. For that brief period the government behaved as a person, sad and waiting.

It was the perfect time and place for Roswald’s incubation, for he too, no longer sad, was also waiting. It was one of those rare times when something new can begin or something old increase in tempo and be driven to a merciless conclusion.