Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  I checked up on Nicholas every day. One day when I showed up at his apartment I found him seated with several bottles of vitamins, including an enormous plastic container of vitamin C.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked him.

  Seated there pale and worried, Nicholas explained that he was attempting in his own way to flush the toxin out of his system; water-soluble vitamins, he had learned from his reference books, acted on the system as a diuretic; he hoped, by taking enough of them, he could rid himself of the flashing wheels of jagged, colored fire that plagued him at night or when he blinked.

  “Are you sleeping?” I asked him.

  “No,” he admitted. “Not at all.” He had tried leaving his bedside radio on to mild bubble-gum rock, but, he said, after a few hours the music assumed an ominous, menacing sound; the lyrics underwent a grotesque change, and he had to shut the radio off.

  The doctor thought it might be blood pressure problems. He also alluded to the possibility of drugs. But Nicholas wasn’t on anything; I was certain of that.

  “And if I do get to sleep,” Nicholas said shakily. “I have dreadful nightmares.”

  He told me one of them. In the dream he was shut in a tiny cage under the Colosseum in ancient Rome; in the sky overhead, huge winged lizards were searching for him. All at once the flying lizards detected his presence under the Colosseum; they swept down and in an instant were tearing open the door of his cage. Trapped, with death at hand, all Nicholas could do was hiss at the lizards; evidently he was a small mammal of some kind. Rachel woke him from that dream, and partially awake, he had extended his tongue and continued his hissing in a furious, inhuman way, even though, she told me, his eyes were wide open. After that he had come to and had told her a rambling story about walking toward the cave in which he lived, guided by his cat, Charley. Looking around their bedroom, Nicholas had begun to lament in fear that Charley was missing; how could he find his way, now, without the cat, seeing as how he was blind?

  After that he kept the radio on playing bubble-gum rock. Until one night he heard the radio talking to him. Talking in a foul, malevolent way.

  “Nick the prick,” the radio was saying, in imitation of the voice of a popular vocalist whose latest record had just been featured. “Listen, Nick the prick. You’re worthless and you’re going to die. You misfit! You prick, Nick! Die, die, die!!”

  He sat up, heard it while fully awake. Yes, the radio was saying ‘Nick the prick’ all right, and the voice did resemble that of the well-known singer; but, he realized with horror, it was only an imitation. It was too cruel, too metallic, too artificial. It was a mechanical travesty of her voice, and anyhow she would not be saying that, and if she had said it the station would not have aired it. And it was addressed directly to him.

  After that he never turned on the radio again.

  During the day he took greater and greater quantities of the water-soluble vitamins, in particular C, and at night he lay wide awake, his thoughts racing in fear, the jagged, wildly colored buzz saws spinning before his eyes, completely obscuring the door. What if an emergency occurred at night? he asked himself. What if Johnny got sick? There was no way Nicholas could possibly drive him to the hospital; in fact, if the apartment building caught fire it was unlikely that Nicholas could even find his way out. One evening the girl across the hall had asked him downstairs to look at the master circuit-breaker box; he had accompanied her down the outside stairs all right but then later when she ran up again to answer the phone he had floundered around blindly in the dark, in overwhelming panic and confusion, until at last Rachel came down and rescued him.

  Eventually he found his way to a psychiatrist, for the first time. The psychiatrist diagnosed him as manic and gave him a course of lithium carbonate to take. So now he was dropping tablets of lithium carbonate as well as his vitamins. Shaking and frightened, not knowing what was happening to him, he withdrew into his bedroom, not wishing—not able—to see anyone.

  The next tragedy that struck was an abscessed and impacted wisdom tooth. Nicholas had no choice but to make an immediate appointment with Dr. Kosh, the best oral surgeon in central Orange County.

  The Sodium Pentothal was a great relief to him; probably it was the first time in three weeks he had become completely unconscious. He returned home in good spirits—until the procaine wore off and pain flashed through his stitched-up jaw. The rest of the day he lay tossing and turning; all that night the pain was so great that he forgot the whirling buzz saws; the next day he phoned Dr. Kosh and pleaded for oral pain medication.

  “Didn’t I give you a prescription?” Dr. Kosh said, absentmindedly. “I’ll phone the pharmacy and have them send it right out. I’m prescribing Darvon-N for you; that tooth had grown down into the jawbone; we had to sort of—well, crack the jawbone to get the pieces of tooth out.”

  Nicholas sat with a moist teabag between his jaws as he waited for the pharmacy delivery boy to ring the doorbell.

  The doorbell rang at last.

  Still woozy from the pain, Nicholas made his way to the door and opened it. A girl stood there with heavy black hair, hair so black that the coils of it seemed almost blue. She wore an absolutely white uniform. Around her neck he saw a gold necklace, with a gold fish suspended between links of golden chain. Fascinated, staring at the necklace in a hypnoidal twilight state, Nicholas could not speak.

  “Eight forty-two,” the girl said.

  Nicholas, as he handed her a ten, said. “What—is that necklace?”

  “An ancient sign,” the girl said, raising her left hand to point to the golden fish. “Used by the early Christians.”

  He stood holding the bag of medication, watching her go. He was still there when Rachel came to tap him and rouse him to full consciousness.

  The medication helped the pain, and in a few days Nicholas seemed okay. But he was, of course, under the weather from the oral surgery and stayed in bed resting. The buzz saws, mercifully, were now gone; he had not seen them since visiting Dr. Kosh.

  “I have a favor to ask,” he said to Rachel one day as she was getting ready to go shop at Alpha Beta. “Could you get me a few votive candles and a glass candleholder? The candleholder has to be white and the candles have to be white.”

  “What’s a votive candle?” Rachel asked, puzzled.

  “One of those little short fat candles,” Nicholas said. “Like you see burning in Catholic churches.”

  “Why do you want them?”

  Truthfully, Nicholas said. “I don’t know. For—I guess healing. I need to get well.” He was calmer these days, but very weak from the surgery. Anyhow, he seemed unfrightened; the fear and disorientation, the franticness we had seen on his face, was at last gone.

  “How’s your eyesight?” I asked him that night when I dropped over.

  “Fine.” Nicholas lay on his back in his bed, fully dressed; on the table beside him a white votive candle burned.

  After I had shut the bedroom door Nicholas said, staring at the ceiling. “Phil, I really heard the radio saying that. ‘Nick the prick, Nick the prick’ over and over again.” I was the only one he had told about it. “And I know,” he said. “I know equally that it could not have been saying that. I can still hear the voice in my mind. Speaking very slowly, very insistently. Like when someone is trying to program you. You understand? Programming me to die. A demon voice. It wasn’t human. I wonder how many times I’ve heard it in my sleep and not remembered it. If I hadn’t had insomnia—”

  “Like you say,” I said, “it isn’t possible.”

  “There are technical possibilities. They do exist. Such—as electronic signal override, by a small gain transmitter located very nearby, say in the next apartment. That way it wouldn’t affect any other receivers. Just mine. Or from a satellite passing overhead.”

  “A what?”

  “There’s a lot of illicit satellite override of U.S. radio and TV stations,” Nicholas said. “Usually the material is subliminal. I must have someho
w transliminated it, which I wasn’t supposed to do. They fouled up somehow in their transmission. It sure as hell woke me thoroughly up, and that’s exactly what it was not supposed to do.”

  “Who’d do that?”

  Nicholas said. “I don’t know. I have no theory. Some branch of the government, I suppose. Or the Soviets. There are a lot of secret Soviet transmitters overhead these days, beaming down to populated areas like this. Broadcasting filth and garbage and kinky suggestions, God knows what.”

  “But your name.”

  “Maybe everyone listening heard his own name,” Nicholas said. “‘Pete, you beat your meat.’ Or, ‘Mike, you’re a dike.’ I don’t know. I’m exhausted from trying to figure it out.” He pointed to the slightly flickering votive candle.

  “So that’s why you want that burning all the time,” I said, understanding. “To drive—”

  “To keep me sane,” Nicholas interrupted.

  “Nick,” I said, “you’re going to come out of this just fine. I have a theory. The whirling pinwheels of fire, they were due to poisons, toxins, from your infected wisdom tooth. So was what you heard on the radio. You were highly toxic without knowing it. Now that the oral surgery’s done, you’ll cease to be toxic and be okay. That’s why you’re better already.”

  “Except,” he said, “what about the golden necklace the girl wore? And what she said?”

  “How does that fit in?”

  Nicholas said. “I’ve been expecting her at the door all my life. I recognized her when I saw her. There she was, and wearing what I knew she’d be wearing. I had to ask her what it was; there was no way I could keep from it. Phil, I was programmed to ask that question. It was my destiny.”

  “But that wasn’t bad, like the buzz saws and what you heard from the radio.”

  “No,” Nick agreed. “That was the most important experience I ever had, like a glimpse of—”He was silent for a time. “You don’t know what it’s like to wait year after year, wondering if it, if she, is ever going to show up, and at the same time knowing she is. Eventually. And then when you least expect it, but when you need it most—” He smiled up at me.

  Most of his stress had departed, but, he told me, he still saw colors at night. Not the jagged pinwheels but rather vague patches, simply drifting. The colors seemed to change according to his thoughts; there was a direct connection. When he thought, in the long hypnagogic states preceding sleep, about erotic topics, the patches of fog-like color turned red. Once he thought he saw Aphrodite, naked and lovely and huge-breasted. When he thought about holy topics, the colored patches turned pure pale white.

  It reminded me of what I’d read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol existence after death occurs. The soul moves along encountering different-colored lights; each color represents a different kind of womb, a different type of rebirth. It is the job of the departed soul to avoid all bad wombs and come at last to the clear white light. I decided not to tell Nicholas this; he was screwed-up enough already.

  “Phil,” he said to me, “as I move along through these different-colored patches of light, I feel—it’s very strange. I feel as if I’m dying. Maybe the oral surgery did something fatal to me. But I’m not scared. It seems…you know: natural.”

  It was anything but that.

  “You are on strange trips, Nick,” I said.

  He nodded. “But something is happening. Something good. I think I’m past the worst part. The radio voice mocking me and insulting me in that gross way, and the whirling jagged buzz saws that were nearly blinding me—that was the worst part. I feel better with this candle.” He pointed to the small narrow candle flame beside his bed. “It’s strange… I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘votive’ meant; I don’t remember ever using it before. It just came to me, as the proper word. This was the kind of holy candle I wanted, and I knew how to ask for it.”

  “When are you going back to work?” I said.

  “Monday. Officially I’m on leave, on my own time. Not on sick leave any longer. It was awful to be nearly blind, and so goddamn dizzy. I was afraid it would last forever. But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign—you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600 B.C., they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they’d tell him, ‘You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth.’ It’s interesting: ‘Of starry heaven.’”

  “And the person would remember?”

  “He was supposed to. I don’t know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it. Anamnesis, it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block. There’s a Christian anamnesis, too: memory of Christ, of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion; in Christian anamnesis those events are remembered in the same way, as a real memory. It’s the sacred inner miracle of Christian worship; it’s what the bread and wine cause, ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ and you do it, and you remember Jesus all at once. As if you had known him but had forgotten. The bread and wine, partaking of them, bring it back.”

  “Well,” I said, “the girl told you the fish, the golden necklace sign, was an ancient Christian sign, so if you experience what you said—anamnesis, whatever—you’ll remember Christ.”

  “Guess so.”

  “I have a feeling,” I said, “a theory, actually, that you have seen that dark-haired girl with the fish necklace before. She was delivering medication from the pharmacy; don’t you sometimes have them deliver? Couldn’t she have come by before? Or you could have seen her at the pharmacy. Delivery people hang around a pharmacy when they aren’t delivering; sometimes they even double as clerks. That would explain the shock of recognition, with you still half stoned from the Sodium Pentothal; déjà vu, I mean, occurring during great pain and under the lingering haze of the—”

  “The pharmacy he called,” Nicholas broke in, “is near his office, which is in Anaheim. I’ve never been there before; I never got anything from that pharmacy in my life. My pharmacy is in Fullerton, by my doctor’s office.”

  Silence.

  “Guess that shoots that,” I said. “But you did fixate on what she wore because of the pain and stress and the residual haze of the Pentothal. It acted as a hypnotically fixating object, like a moving watch. Or like this candle flame.” I pointed at the votive candle. “And the mention of ‘early Christians’ suggested to you to get a votive candle. You’ve been highly suggestive, almost in a hypnotic trance, since your surgery. It always happens.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well it seems logical.”

  Nicholas said. “I had the uncanny feeling, God help me—I had the incredible experience, Phil, for a few minutes after I saw her necklace, that I was back in early Rome, in the first century A.D. So help me. She said that, and all at once it was real, completely real. The present world—Placentia, Orange County, the USA—it was all gone. But then it returned.”

  “Hypnotic suggestion,” I said.

  After a pause, Nicholas said, “If I’m dying—”

  “You’re not dying,” I said.

  “If I die,” Nicholas continued, “who or what is going to run my body for the next forty years? It’s my mind that’s dying, Phil, not my body. I’m leaving. Something has got to take my place. Something will; I’m sure of it.”

  Into the bedroom walked Nicholas’s sheeplike cat, Pinky. The big tomcat hopped up onto the bed and kneaded with his paws, purring; he gazed affectionately at Nicholas.

  “That’s a strange-looking cat you have there,” I said.

  “You notice the change in him? He’s beginning to change. I don’t know why; I don’t know in what direction.”

  Bending down I petted the cat. He seemed less wild than usual, more sheeplike, less catlike. The carnivore qualities seemed to be leaving him.

  “Charley,” I said, referring to Nicholas’s dream.


  “No, Charley is gone,” Nicholas said, and then at once caught himself. “Charley never existed,” he amended.

  “Not for a while, anyhow,” I said.

  “Charley was very different from Pinky,” Nicholas said. “But they both served as my guide. In different ways. Charley knew the forest. He was more like a totem cat, the kind an Indian would have.” Half to himself, Nicholas murmured “I really don’t understand what’s happening to Pinky. He won’t eat meat any longer. When we feed him meat he. starts trembling. As if there’s something wrong about eating meat; as if he’s been hit.”

  “Wasn’t he gone for a while?”

  “He recently came back,” Nicholas said vaguely. He did not elaborate. “Phil,” he said presently, “this cat began to change the same day I first saw the buzz saws and you had to lead me home. After you left I was lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes, and Pinky got up as if he understood there was something wrong with me. He began searching for it. He wanted to locate it and heal it, make me okay. He kept walking over me and on me and around me, searching and searching. I could sense it about him, his concern, his love. He never found it. Finally he lay down on my stomach, and he stayed there until I got up. Even with my eyes shut I could sense him there still trying to locate the problem. But with that small a brain…cats have really small brains.”

  Pinky had lain down on the bed near Nicholas’s shoulder, purring, gazing at him intently.

  “If they could talk,” Nicholas murmured.

  I said. “It looks as if he’s trying to communicate with you.”

  To the cat, Nicholas said. “What is it? What do you want to say?”

  The cat continued to gaze up into his face with the same intentness; I had never seen such an expression on an animal’s face before, not even a dog’s.

  “He was never like this before,” Nicholas said. “Before the change. The buzz saws, I mean; that day.”