Los Angeles_ A.D. 2017 Philip Wylie

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

He nodded, wordless, still. Then he crossed to the panel and ordered two double Jack
Daniels with double Aphrons and anything else the answering voice might deem appropriate
for refreshment and an extended evening, as Glenn euphemistically put it.
The drinks came minutes before the girl.
Leandra arrived in an all-transparent gownlike costume, faintly blue, diaphanous and
shimmering. He once more opened his door with a prepared embrace but this time he carried
it out. She whispered, Darling. . . !
He whispered the same word at the same moment.
It was almost an hour before they even touched the two waiting drinks. All the next
day she stayed with him. His guided tour was enjoyed at home though in its way much was a
novel journey, expertly conducted.
After that Leandra was assigned to Glenn as his erotic companion as well as the
replacement for other types. They spent a week on the rest of his educational trips in the
city. Before then they d agreed they had fallen in love on first sight.
Glenn thought of the idyll as a honeymoon and one that would last into a distant or an
endless future. For, even though his antipathy for the new culture increased with every
passing day, he did not relate it to his relationship with Leandra. She, of course, knew how
brief and tentative their shared love would be. But for a time, because it was genuine love on
her part as on his, she suppressed her knowledge of reality and let herself feel, think, act and
be the woman he now imagined her to be. She was, in truth, her real self then discarding the
outer facts and rules and customs from her consciousness and expressing in ways and to
degrees he had not imagined possible their mated unity as if it could be forever maintained.
The crack came all too soon and in a manner she had not expected.
Leandra took him, one evening, to see an aspect of life in this city about which she
had explained nothing.
Hand in hand they tramped the dismal streets until, rounding a corner, they faced the
marquee of what seemed a run-down movie theatre. Over its entrance was a large, painted
sign that said:
MEL S MINIMAL MUSIC:
THE MELLOW MORTICIANS
She bought two tickets and they went through the dim lobby, passing between brass
standards and their burden of slack silk ropes to a heavy, flaked, rose-hued door where Glenn
could sense rather than hear a beat of hard music that might have been called, half a century
earlier, acid rock. When Leandra pushed the tickets into a slot the door yawned and they
were almost knocked down by the belting music.
She put her hands to her ears. Her expression was blank but her head-movement
showed that he was to follow. They entered and the sound damping portal shut. It was a
murky place but slowly he made out a dance hall with a bar and tables on one side and at the
opposite end a platform where eight Mellow Morticians played what Glenn felt was,
indeed, minimal music. It consisted of two notes, one a half-tone higher than the first, and
nothing more save that the pair of tones sometimes was played at a different octave and,
even, though infrequently, at other points in the same key.
But that was just Glenn s first observation. His greater, his overwhelming impression
took time.
The dancers and there were perhaps a hundred couples were performing the same
dance that had been all but universal in 1971. They were, he thought, frugging. Their long
hair flew, male and female hair, their hips slashed and oscillated, their heads jerked and they
faced each other without touching, faces inane, involuted, each one dancing only with
himself or herself, even turning to new partners with a look which seemed to mean they
either did not know they d switched or did not care.
For a moment in which his eyes adjusted to the swirling, psychedelic lights, he
thought it was just as it had been among the under-thirties in Glenn s period. Then the
single exception hit him. Every dancer here was elderly. The long beards and locks of the
men were white, or gray, and often thin; and some were bald though these, he realized, were
few, and bald only because in their solo concentration on jerking and writhing they had lost
shabby wigs: several were being heedlessly trampled and kicked aside in this stylized and
unconscious frenzy. The women were as old crones, fat droolers who flopped pendulous
breasts like flippers, and scrawny females, without teeth. White locks shook out dandruff like
flour prostheses glinted and banged; canes and crutches kept time; glass eyes were lost and
crushed. But these aged freaks danced on, some sweating in runnels, others too aged and dry
to ooze; all, hard-breathing, winded, yet, relentlessly obeying the beat.
These, then, were people who had gone on from their politicized or radicalized youth,
their hair dangling rebellion, their uniform and their rituals gone on with this same dance,
frugging into old age, their late sixties, their eighties, without change. They were still unclean
and the chamber reeked of their bad breath and whole-body bromodrosis. Over that rotted
armpit odor were smells of cigarette smoke, of sweetly acrid pot, coiling wreaths of tobacco,
marijuana which seemed to flinch and thrust as the waves of sound, amplified to a pitch that
informed the skulls of the stone deaf among them, shook the air and the walls, the horrid
people.
As soon as he could manage, he took Leandra out And when his ears stopped ringing,
when he had somewhat cleared his lungs with deep drafts of the even-temperatured, clean
(but lifeless) air of the city, he said, My God! What is that for?
A lesson, she replied, looking at him attentively.
In what?
Irrelevance, she answered.
She said nothing more about the scene. She did not need to for Glenn s insight Here
was the cruelest mockery imaginable. Here, those youths in the Sixties and Seventies who
had found science, hence, all provable knowledge, irrelevant and history, too the people
who had set themselves apart from ail others over thirty, were seen in that same interval
which they had been utterly contemptuous of in spite of its inevitability, given time. Here was
that arrogant, vain new youth culture carried on near fifty years, unchanged and by that,
revealed for what it had been: nothingness, a rebellion without aim, nihilism itself, a road that
was no road because it began and ended where the groupies and hippies, yippies, new leftists,
SDS monsters and others stood. A road, they said, when it was only a length of walled-in
pavement, a prison yard that had no direction, started nowhere, ended where it could
accommodate them all, at another noplace. It was, as they had said a short while ago, as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Podobne