But then the word “I” grew goosefeet. It emptied. “I” was just a mark, a convenience of thought, vacuous outside the quote marks.
The voices of Shaman?I’m you!?of Sarvaduhka, Lila Kodzi, the sound and light show?upbeat, mendacious?all merged in a current without source or destination. The moan of the wind, an atom bomb, nostalgia, the planet Mars, the number three, oneself, the South of France, all lines all gone!
DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.
Place went. Sequence went. Time was ungetatable. No thought to think and not a thing to think it. “I” kept diving. “I” allowed “myself” to be swallowed further until, dissolving, “I” melted into a dark, pliable mass one could only call the bottom. Sea creatures here, murky, inchoate, that altered as one’s gaze changed, inseparable from one’s gaze.
A stirring here, continually! Not the blank void of the mystics! Call it an urge, call it Der Wille Zur Macht, call it Tao or Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, impelling the contractile world back out of its own navel:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute,
says Lao Tze of this foetal state.
“I” had unwittingly performed an epochй, and this was its crux. “I” had found the fulcrum. “I” was utterly free. “I” could do anything.
I broke wind.
All at once, the goosefeet fell away. Iwas there, little me and big me, as before: Mel and Abu al-Hawl, the one space-bound in a helpless stupor, the other grounded in a strange galaxy, both on account of Shaman. Yes, Shaman existed and Gypsy and Nora in the Magellanic Stream, Izzy in his lockup, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi holding their noses, the camels huffing and turning away, the tourists . . . oblivious.
I had glimpsed my fulcrum. Used it even. I had witnessed the birth of a world ex nihilo, with me in the middle. Epochй. Incomprehensible! I would bide my time and wait to see what it meant.
Some things were a bit different. I was aware somehow, as information, as something casually read or heard, that Gamal Abdel Nasser was dead. (He had been alive before the epochй.) Also, the Vietnam War was still going on, with American soldiers heavily invested.
And Eugene McCarthy wasn’t president. My epochй had shifted a sweaty upper lip into the Oval Office. There it had been, for a hundredth of a second, hovering above a swivel chair, just the lip, a little damp skin above it, and the barest hint of nostril. Then, due to a principle the Magellanics call “Causal Recovery,” in order to preserve the causal chain locally, a human being congealed around it, complete with his past, present and future, grade school teachers, mortician, the lot: a guy name of Richard Nixon. Some other things changed as well. The American flag was now red white and blue (and now, it always had been!).
Nobody but me would know the difference, for my new universe came complete with history?retroactively?and memories in synch. Nobody, I suspected, but Izzy.
There was one other change I was immediately aware of. A guy in cowboy boots with spurs, wearing a ten-gallon hat and carrying a guitar case under his arm, was striding into the Sphinx enclosure where Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi grimaced: “Feh! Feh! Feh!”
“Mel?” he was saying. “Is that you, son? Is it really, truly you?”
“Gone Joe! Dad!” I said?somehow.
Somehow, he heard me. Effluvium despite, he galloped to my rock butt and embraced the cooling, rough stone, pressing into me with all his might, kissing me and weeping for joy.
30. Passport Photo
“Are you the authentic Johnny Abilene?” Lila Kodzi said. “I have all your records. I love your music.”
Sarvaduhka was trembling, hysterically trying to piece together how Johnny Abilene had appeared on the scene. Sarvaduhka’s Causal Recovery, apparently, had been incomplete. He pulled Lila violently away. “Take me back to Cairo. This is all Izzy said to do. The sound and light show is almost over, and I don’t want to be caught back here when they start cleaning up. . . . It still stinks?what was that?”
She pushed him back. “And what about Number Three?”
Sarvaduhka slapped his head. “I forgot! The photograph. The passport photograph. Give me the Kodak.”