The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [69]
It was a cosmic barroom brawl. Like most it had something to do with religion. My team was fighting for minority plank No. 234: Everyone gets saved. Fighting against notions of chosen people. Trying to convince everyone that no one really knew much. For sure no one had come even close to putting it all together. So the best we could do was present a united front of ignorance rather than our pathetic fragmented pretensions.
I was the clock. As long as I could keep breathing, there was still time. We were badly behind and needed all the time we could get. One of our key strategies was to find out what everyone knew or thought they knew and then publish-broadcast-ESP it to everyone. And all the time thinking that what I was thinking was absurd and very unlikely but a bet that had to be covered.
Suddenly Sy was shaking me by the shoulders, looking very unfriendly. He must have been frustrated to the point of tears.
Fuck shit if my crazy hunch didn’t turn out to be right. Here’s a Jew who wants to stop the clock. Well, if it comes down to one on one, me vs. Sy, no sweat. I’m not in the greatest shape but he couldn’t do much damage. Besides, wasn’t he into pacifism, peace-love, etc.?
Boomzapplewomp! Wow! Where the hell did he learn how to throw a punch?I never saw it coming, which didn’t mean that much. There was lots of stuff I wasn’t seeing. He was slugging my chest. It was hard to tell the heartbeats from the punches. It all just rolled together. I was having a heart attack. Sy hit me a few more times. I went down hard.
Sy was making me get up. Someone had slashed my temples with razors. There was blood. Something had something to do with Maharishi, with my old girl friend, Betsy, in Houston with Harry Reasoner and mission control and gay bars, and watching on TV something called Operation Jack-in-the-Box battling against some acid-freak mutant from the year two thousand, into time travel, trying to have things his way. I wasn’t sure which side he was on, but he had a thing about black people and electroshock and Thomas Edison and heroin and being wired to the fact that my father, besides being wanted by Israeli zealots, wasn’t able to give up smoking. And someone making me hold on to the refrigerator door handle and not being able to move a muscle. And André, where the hell were those French when you needed them, came in saying something about Paris burning and telling Sy to let up on me and that he’d be in pretty rough shape too if he’d had my dose of bad news. And I cried and cried and cried, begging Sy to just give me a little time. Maybe if I had paid more attention to Bucky Fuller. “I’ll adjust better. Please, another chance. I’ll pay better attention. Please, another chance.”
After a while a reasonable routine for dealing with me was worked out. A twenty-four-hour watch was set, sharp and dangerous objects were put away, and things calmed down a little. There was some talk about hospitals but Simon held fast to his promise to me. There was a lot of telephoning. The Barnstable house, which was the only number I could remember, still never answered. Simon somehow managed to get my sister Edie in N.Y.C. on the line.
“Mark?”
“Don’t worry, Edie, I won’t tell them a thing,” and I slammed the receiver down.
Many hours were taken up trying to decode my ravings, in hopes that if they knew more about what was going on in my mind they could snap me out of it. Most of the time I was honestly trying to be as informative and straightforward as possible, but there was so much to tell and things kept getting more and more confusing and it was so hard to understand what they were saying or make my own voice and words act right. But things seemed to be working out all right.
HELLO. I am here. I am Mark Vonnegut and all that that entails. That’s Simon there and Sy there and André there and Sankara there. We all went to Swarthmore. We are