Radio Free Albemuth Read online

“That strange day,” I said. The day, I thought, when everything began to become different for Nicholas, leaving him weak and passive, as he was now: ready to accept whatever came. “They say,” I said, “that in the final days, in the Parousia, there will be a change in the animals. They’ll all become tame.”

  “Who says that?”

  “The Jehovah’s Witnesses say it. I was shown a book they peddle; there was a picture, and it showed all the various wild animals lying around together, no longer wild. It reminds me of your cat here.”

  “‘No longer wild,’” Nicholas murmured.

  “You seem to be the same way yourself,” I said. “As if all your fangs had been pulled… Well, I guess there’s a reason for that.” I laughed.

  “Earlier today,” Nicholas said. “I fell into a half-sleep and I dreamed I was back in the past, on the Greek island of Lemnos. There was a gold and black vase on a three-legged table, and a lovely couch… It was the year 842 B.C. What happened in the year 842? That was during the Mycenaean period, when Crete was such a great power.”

  “Eight forty-two,” I said, “was the price you paid for your pain pills. It’s a sum, not a date. Money.”

  He blinked. “Yes there were gold coins too.”

  “The girl said to you, ‘Eight forty-two.’” I was trying to get him to focus, to become alert again. “Remember?” To myself I thought, Come back, Nicholas. To this world. The present. From whatever other world you’re drifting away to from pain and fear—fear of the authorities, fear of what lies ahead for all of us in this country. We’ve got to put up one last fight. “Nick,” I said, “you’ve got to fight.”

  “What’s happening to me is not bad. It’s strange, and it started out terrible, but it isn’t now. I think this is what I was expecting.”

  “They’re sure putting you through the wringer,” I said. “I’d resent it.”

  “Maybe it’s the only way it can be done. What do we know about processes of this sort? Nothing at all. Who of us has ever seen one take place? I think they used to take place a long time ago, but not any more. Except for me.”

  I left him that evening feeling worried. Nicholas had decided to succumb and that was that. No one could tell him otherwise, including me. Like a boat launched without paddles into a current, he was moving along without control, going wherever it took him, into the indiscriminate darkness beyond.

  I guess it was a way of getting away from the presence of Ferris F. Fremont and all he represented. Too bad I couldn’t do likewise; then I could forget my worries about FAPers breaking down the door with warrants, dope hidden in my house, Vivian Kaplan going to the District Attorney on a trumped-up complaint of some sort.

  When Nicholas went to bed that night he found, as usual, that he could not sleep. His thoughts raced faster and faster, and with them the external patches of color projected by his head into the semi-gloom of his bedroom. Finally he got up and padded barefoot into the kitchen for some vitamin C.

  That was when he made a discovery of importance. He had assumed from the start that the capsules in his great bottle were, as in the previous bottle, one hundred milligrams. However, these were time-release vitamin C, and each capsule contained not one hundred milligrams but five hundred. Nicholas was therefore taking five times the amount of vitamin C he had supposed. Making a quick tally he discovered that he was taking in excess of seven grams per day, plus the other vitamins. At first this scared him, but then he reasoned to himself that it meant nothing; since vitamin C was water-soluble, it was excreted from his system every twenty-four hours and so did not build up. However, seven grams a day certainly was a large quantity. Seven thousand milligrams or more! He had really saturated his system. Well, he said to himself, that ought to wash out everything bonded at a cellular level, including the lithium carbonate, it’s going out as fast as it comes in.

  He returned to bed, a little frightened now, lay on his back, and pulled the covers up. The votive candle burned on the table to his right. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw the floating patches of color, but they were receding from him faster and faster as his thoughts—manic, the psychiatrist had said—matched their velocity. They’re escaping, he thought, and so is my head; my mind is going along with them.

  There was no sound. To his left, Rachel…

  Part II

  NICHOLAS

  15…SLEPT on and on, unaware that anything was happening. Pinky dozed, somewhere off in the living room, probably in his special place on the couch, and in his nursery Johnny was sound asleep in the single bed we had gotten him to replace his crib. The apartment was totally silent, except for the faint whirr of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  My God, I thought, the colors are receding faster and faster as if achieving escape velocity; as if they are being sucked out of the universe itself. They must have reached the edge of the world and are vanishing beyond. And my thoughts with them? The universe, I realized, was being turned inside out—reversed. It was an eerie feeling, and I felt terrible fear. Something was happening to me, and there was no one to tell it to.

  For some reason it did not occur to me to wake up my wife. I simply continued to lie there, staring at the patches of foglike color.

  And then, winking on abruptly, a square of particolors appeared directly above me. Violent phosphene activity, I realized; and now the idea came to me that somehow the immense doses of vitamin C I was taking had set this off. I was responsible for all this myself, in my efforts to heal myself.

  The exaggerated particolored square shimmered and altered at the direct center of my field of vision. It resembled a modern abstract painting; I could almost name the artist, but not quite. Rapidly, at the terrific rate of permutation which in the TV field they call flash-cutting, the frame of balanced, proportioned colors gave way to another frame, equally attractive. Within a few given seconds I had seen no less than twenty of them; as each frame, each abstract, appeared, it at once gave way to another. The overall effect was dazzling. Paul Klee, I said to myself excitedly. I am seeing a whole lot of Paul Klee prints—or, rather, the actual pictures themselves, an entire gallery display! It was, in many respects, the most wonderful and astonishing sight I had ever seen. Scared as I was, puzzled as I was to account for this, I made the decision to lie there and enjoy it. Certainly no such experience had ever come my way before; this was an extraordinary—in fact, unique—opportunity.

  The dazzling presentation of modern abstract graphics continued all through the night, with Paul Klee giving way to Marc Chagall, and Chagall to Kandinsky, and Kandinsky to an artist whose style I did not recognize. There were literally tens of thousands of graphics by each master artist in turn…which caused a peculiar thought to enter my mind after two hours had passed. These great artists had never produced so many works; it was patently impossible for them to have done so. Of the Klees alone I had now seen more than fifty thousand, although admittedly they had gone so rapidly that I had not been able to glimpse any distinct details, but rather only the general impression of fluctuating balance points in the various pictures, changing proportions of dark and light colors, adroit black strokes of the brush that gave harmony to what would otherwise have been less than high art.

  I had the intense impression that this was a telepathic contact of some sort from a very remote point, that a TV camera was sweeping out the various displays of pictures in a museum somewhere; I recalled, presently, that the Leningrad Museum was said to possess an extraordinary collection of French abstracts, and it came to me that a Soviet TV crew was sweeping out the displays over and over again and then transmitting them at enormous velocity, six thousand miles across space, to me. But that was so unlikely I could not accept it. More likely, the Soviets were conducting a telepathic experiment, using their museum of modern abstracts as material to be sent to a target person somewhere, and for reasons unknown I was overhearing—whatever the verb—this experiment, tuning in on it by accident. The sender was not sending with me in mind; nonetheless I was seei
ng this marvelous display of modern graphics, the entire collection at Leningrad.

  All night I lay happily awake tuned in on this Soviet show or whatever it was; when the sun came up I was still flat on my back, fully awake, not frightened, not worried, having been bathed in the intense fluctuations of brilliant colors for over eight hours. Rachel got up, grumbling, to feed Johnny. I found, as I myself got out of bed, that I could see all right, except when I shut my eyes. When I shut my eyes I saw a perfectly stable, unchanging phosphene representation of what I had just been looking at: my bedroom, and then a moment later the living room with its bookcases and record cases, lamp, TV set, furniture. There was even a reverse-color Pinky, sound asleep in his special spot on the far end of the couch, next to a reverse-color New Yorker magazine.

  I thought, I have a new kind of vision. A new sight. As if, up to now, I have been blind. But I don’t understand it.

  Usually I buttonholed my wife and narrated to her in great detail my nocturnal experiences, but not this time. It was too—puzzling. Where had the telepathic transmission come from? Was there anything I should do in the way of response? Write to Leningrad somehow and say I’d received them?

  Maybe the vitamin C affected the metabolism of my brain, I conjectured. After all, it’s highly acid; such quantities in the system would produce a highly acid brain. Mentation, neural firing, improves under conditions of acidity. Perhaps the vivid phosphene activity, the multicolored graphics, had been projections of rapid synchronous neural firing along never-before-used circuits. In that case Leningrad had nothing to do with it; everything was a function and an activity within my head.

  GABA fluid, I suddenly realized. What I saw was the effect of a vast drop in GABA fluid. There was new neural firing, along otherwise inhibited circuits. Good thing I haven’t written Leningrad yet.

  I wonder what kind of neural circuits they are, I asked myself. Probably I will find out, in time.

  I stayed home from work that day. Toward noon the mail came; I walked unsteadily down the outside stairs to the row of metal mailboxes, retrieved the mail, and came back in.

  As I laid the letters and ads out on the coffee table in the living room, an acute impression came over me and I said to Rachel. “A letter will be coming the day after tomorrow, from New York. It is highly dangerous. I want to be here to get it, as soon as it comes.” I felt this overwhelmingly.

  “A letter from who?” Rachel said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Will…you recognize it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  No mail at all came the next day. But the day after that seven letters arrived. Most of them were from aspiring young artists, the letters forwarded to me from Progressive. After I had glanced at the envelopes without opening them, I turned to one last remaining letter; my name and address were on it, but no return address at all.

  “That’s the one,” I said to Rachel.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “No,” I said. I was trying to think what I was supposed to do with the letter.

  “I’ll open it,” Rachel said, and did so. “It’s just a printed ad,” she said, laying the contents out on the coffee table; instinctively, for reasons not known to me, I turned my head so as not to see it. “For shoes,” she said. “Mail-order shoes. Something called ‘Real World Shoes.’ With a special sole so that—”

  “It’s not an ad,” I said. “Turn it over.”

  She did so. “Somebody’s jotted their name and address on the back,” she said. “A woman. Her name is—”

  “Don’t read it aloud,” I said sharply. “I don’t want to know her name; if you read it to me I’ll remember it. It’ll go into my memory banks.”

  “She must be the distributor,” Rachel said. “But Nick, this isn’t anything; it’s just shoes.”

  “Get me a pen and about three sheets of typing paper,” I said, “and I’ll show you.” Meanwhile I was still trying to introspect and come up with the answer as to what to do about this—with it and about it. Acute dread hung over me as I sat at the table with this shoe ad, as Rachel got the pen and paper.

  I had to read it to decode it. Superimposed on the black type, in a liquid, bright red, I saw certain words of the ad as if embossed. Rapidly, I copied them onto a separate piece of paper and then, when I had finished, handed it to Rachel. “Read it,” I said. “But just to yourself, not to me.”

  Rachel said falteringly. “It’s a message to you. Your name is in it.”

  “What does it tell me to do?”

  “Something about recording certain—it has to do with your job, Nick. Something about Party members who—I can’t make sense out of it. Your handwriting is—”

  “But it is to me,” I said. “And it does have to do with Progressive and my job there, and recording Party members.”

  “How can it be?” Rachel said. “In a printed ad for shoes? I saw you with my own eyes get this message out of it, by picking words here and there…the words are really in it; I can see them myself now, when I look at the ad. But how did you know which words to pick?”

  “Different in color,” I said. “They’re in color and the other words are ordinary black, without color.”

  “All of the ad is black!” Rachel protested.

  “Not to me,” I said. I was still deep in heavy fearful thought. “Code from the Party,” I said. “Instructions and the name of my—whatever she is—my boss; it’s written in her hand on the back. My official contact.”

  “Nick,” Rachel whispered, “this is awful. Are you—”

  “I’m not a Communist,” I said truthfully.

  “But you knew this was coming. And you knew how to decode it. You were waiting for it.” She stared at me wide-eyed.

  I picked up the shoe ad, for the first time, turned it over, and as I did so a voice spoke inside my head. A transforming of my own thought processes, to confer on me a message.

  “The authorities.”

  Just those two words—the authorities—as I held the piece of paper. This had not come from a KGB agent operating out of New York, as it appeared to have. It was not instructions from the Party. It was a forgery. The thing operated on three levels: on the surface, to Rachel’s eyes, it was an ordinary ad. For some reason, unexplained, I had been able to penetrate to the encoded information within the meaningless data. Never mind why, I thought; all that matters is that I did, I had been able to, readily. On the third and deepest level it was a fake, a plant by the police. And here I sat with it in the living room of my own apartment: prime evidence of my treasonable activities. Enough to send me to jail for life and completely ruin me and my family.

  I have to get rid of this, I realized. Burn it. But what good will that do? There will be more like this coming to me in the mail. Until they have me.

  The voice inside my head spoke again. I identified it now. The sibyl’s voice, as I had heard her in my visionary dreams.

  “Phone FAP in LA. I will talk for you.”

  Getting the phone book I looked up the emergency number of the main FAP headquarters for Southern California, located in Los Angeles.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel said apprehensively, following me. “You’re going to call—FAP? But why? Good lord, Nick, you’re going to destroy yourself. Burn the thing!”

  I dialed.

  “Friends of the American People.”

  Inside my mind the sibyl stirred, and at once I lost power over my own vocal apparatus; I was struck dumb. And then she began to speak for me, using my voice. Calmly, implacably, she spoke to the FAP agent on the other end of the line.

  “I wish to report,” my voice said, in a measured way not at all resembling my own cadences, “that I am being threatened by the Communist Party. For months they have been attempting to obtain my cooperation in a business matter and I have refused. They now are attempting to get their wish by coercion, force, and intimidation. Today I received a coded message from them in the mail, telling me what I mu
st do for them. I will not do it, even if they murder me. I would like to turn this coded message over to you.”

  After a pause the FAP agent on the other end said. “Just a moment, please.” A few clicks, then silence.

  “Time is of the essence,” I said to Rachel.

  “Hello,” a different voice said, older in sound. “Would you repeat what you just told the operator?”

  “The Communist Party,” I said, “is blackmailing me to force me to cooperate with them in a business matter. I’ve refused.”

  “What kind of business matter?”

  “I’m an executive at a recording firm,” I said. “We record folk artists. The Party wants to compel me to record pro-Communist singers so their message, including coded messages, will be played on American radios.”

  “Your name.”

  I gave him my name, address, and telephone number. Rachel stricken, merely gazed mutely at me. She could not believe I was doing what I was doing. Neither could I.

  “How are they blackmailing you, Mr. Brady?” the voice asked.

  “I’m beginning to receive hit mail from them,” I said.

  “‘Hit mail’?”

  I said. “Mail designed to provoke a reaction out of fear of reprisal. In code. I can’t read all the code, but—”

  “We’ll send someone over. Hang on to the written material you have in your possession. We will want to see it.”

  I said, or rather my voice uttered. “They’ve given me the name of someone back east to contact.”

  “Don’t contact them. Don’t leave your residence. Just wait until our representative comes by. You’ll be instructed how to proceed. And thank you for contacting us, Mr. Brady. It was very patriotic.” The man at the other end clicked off.

  “I did it,” I said to Rachel; I felt flooded with relief. “What I did,” I said, “is I got out of the noose. This apartment would probably have been raided within the next hour. Certainly within the next day.” Now it didn’t matter even if they hit us; I had made the right call. The emergency was over, thanks not to me or any solution of mine but to the sibyl.