wasting house down the street.
Another commuter train roared on tracks parallel to Al’s own and a just few feet away. An instant eclipse closed and darkened his world, followed immediately by the batting of shadows and light, the zoetropic blur of faces flitting by on the other train. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the adjacent train passed. The sound faded to its earlier level, the air pressure dropped. Steady, unbroken sunlight reasserted itself and the visual horizon beyond his window expanded from two feet to a view across the street to a row of bungalows. It occurred to Albert that this violent and yet innocent passage must be something like the sensation of being born. He remembered a documentary film about childbirth he had once watched. He remembered the scene of a newborn shooting from its mother’s womb. It slid in a gush out of the uterus and plopped into the waiting physician’s hands. Stunned and blinking, the infant churned its fists and feet at the air, then expelled its first breath and realized that in this strange new medium it could make noise. The baby cried, and Al supposed the cry meant something like I’m here. But where am I?
3
After work, homeward bound, Al found himself still abuzz with the news about the repeal of the National Anti-Natal law. His was not a lone excitement. The repeal put subs in a condition to celebrate. And the drop in beer prices, starting tomorrow, meant that beverage budgets would stretch further this week. Weary with himself and the haunted, aching mood that had gripped him since the other night’s dream about Val, Albert joined the parade of peers who marched off the train stop straight down the block into the Dog and Duck Inn. In the subs’ neighborhoods, licensed taverns were allowed access to electricity four nights a week. The Dog and Duck was one of those, attracting customers not only for conviviality but for bright respite from the otherwise pitch-black night.
Ensconced at the bar, Al nursed a couple of lagers before he determined he would stay awhile. He ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and a D & D Iced Tea (the house specialty was bourbon-enhanced). He joshed with a neighbor and Uncle Eddie, the bartender, about whether or not he should settle in for the entire evening. Abcess Excess, a leading Old Chicago–area purveyor of celibate porn punk, was scheduled for its first set around 9:30 or 10.
Pretty soon Uncle Eddie brought Al’s sandwich, along with a sweating, ice-gorged pitcher to top off his drink. Four or five young constituents entered the Inn and took a table directly behind Albert’s barstool. They betrayed their slumming, alien status by their overly rowdy conduct—they were trying too hard to act as if they comfortably belonged. On top of that, they were unusually and immaculately garbed, especially one in the orange, billowing robes of a Tibetan monk. Al had an immediate idea what they were up to. They fell into noisy conversation about Abcess Excess.
One started, “This band’s music . . .”
“If music it can be called,” Uncle Eddie mock-whispered across the bar to Al. The constituents heard but missed only a beat or two.
The first speaker sounded from beneath a bushy beard and a Castro cap. “This band’s music,” he resumed his declamation, “represents the proletariat’s refusal to let its sexual vigor be tamed and co-opted by capitalism. It revels in sexuality but refuses to reproduce wage slaves for the exploitation of the owner-class.”
A second speaker, dressed in a vested suit with a watch-chain and brandishing a huge cigar, demurred. “From my psychoanalytic perspective, celibate porn punk is a denial of sexuality,” he said. “Like frightened grade-schoolers, Abcess Excess likes to talk about—or scream about—something it only vaguely understands and never experiences. People who will not copulate resist the biological imperative of reproduction. They are afraid of reproduction because it is untidy and unpredictable.”
“On the contrary,” bushy-beard parried, “celibate porn punk channels sexual energy into agitation for revolution. And revolution requires the ultimate courage.”
“Pferd hoden!” spat back the cigar-fondler. “Celibate porn punkers fear having children because it reminds them they will die. Sex and death are always conjoined. Together they make the original two-backed monster, from which the likes of this band flees as if it was Frankenstein on a rampage.”
Bushy-beard smiled in spite of himself. Albert was confirmed in his guess that the tablemates were playing hypocricket, a game recently popular with re-educated constituents just beyond their teens. In it callow nihilists impersonated proponents of various ideologies. The object was to stay in character all evening, or sometimes for weeks. Some devotees of the game argued that the true master of hypocricket was one who could switch from the imposture of one faith to another rapidly and serially, like a quick-change artist of the soul. Others insisted the real master of hypocricket was one immersed in character so long and so profoundly that loved ones began to despair that their original friend or family member might never re-emerge.
At this juncture the monkishly clad constituent intoned, “Sex and politics are both illusions. True salvation lies in detachment.”
“Salvation lies in getting out of here!” a fourth and new speaker shouted, as if hysteria confirmed the veracity of his statement. He slammed a Bible the size of a paving stone on the tabletop. “Whatever porn punk is, it is straight from the devil!”
The tablemates lurched into momentary silence. “Sheesh,” said the pseudo-Viennese, tossing his cigar down beside the Bible. “You are so pitiful at this . . .”
“Well,” the Bible-bearer whined, “why do I always have to be the fundamentalist?”
Their game derailed, the hypocrickets abandoned their characters. Just as people gathered over a mediocre meal resort to conversation comparing other, superior meals and restaurants, the deflated contestants turned to talk of exemplary games they had played on other occasions. This led to argument about who was the best hypocricket player in the game’s history, which naturally complicated itself with debates concerning the criteria for determining the master player. The tablemates rehearsed the merits of quick-change hypocricket versus those of long-term, immersive hypocricket. The blazing orange constituent, whose costume made him look as if he might be the source of a thickening layer of cigarette smoke now hovering across the room, recalled an acquaintance who dressed and acted like a radical feminist for three months, then apparently came to believe the ideology she was parodying. It seemed to her that gender divisions invariably did empower males and subjugate females. She told her boyfriend that all male-female sex was rape, by definition, and kicked him out of her apartment. “The question is, was she still playing hypocricket any longer?” said the would-be Tibetan holy man. “If she came to believe the role she was playing, and even to live it out—I mean, she and Walt had been together for a couple of years—isn’t she now really a radical feminist, instead of a hypocricket?”
The Bible-banger, who was much less excitable after being relieved of his fundamentalist impersonation, spoke pensively: “It shows you that hypocricket can be a dangerous game even if you’re not playing a gangster or a Nazi spy. If you concentrate on it and keep at it, you might become the part you play.” He shuddered.
“Then again,” he brightened, “maybe she didn’t really become a radical feminist. Maybe she really is a super, super dedicated player of the game. And maybe in a year or two she’ll say, ‘Just kidding! Fooled you all!’”
“And invite Walt back home?” bushy-beard muttered sarcastically. There was some tentative laughter around the table.
“Seriously,” said the cigar-fondler, who now held a cigarette with a constant blue smokestream sucked upward into the Inn’s pervasive cloud. “Seriously, he has a point. The greatest, the supreme player of immersive hypocricket, would be someone who assumed a role for years, for decades even. For a lifetime . . .”
