Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  “Are you engaged in political activity, Mr. Brady?” the agent with the greater double chin asked him. He had a notebook before him and a fountain pen. The two agents had propped one of their briefcases between Nicholas and them; he saw a square object bulging within it and knew he was being taped.

  “No,” Nicholas said, truthfully. All he did was listen to exotic rare foreign vocal records, especially those of Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, and Gerhard Husch.

  “Would you like to be?” the lesser agent asked.

  “Um,” Nicholas said.

  “You’re familiar with the International People’s Party,” the greater agent said. “Had you ever considered attending meetings of it? They hold them about a block from here, on the other side of San Pablo Avenue.”

  “We could use someone in there at the local group meeting,” the lesser agent said. “Are you interested?”

  “We can finance you,” his colleague added.

  Nicholas blinked, gulped, and then gave the first speech of his life. The agents were not pleased, but they listened.

  Later on that day, after the agents had left, Rachel arrived home, loaded down with textbooks and looking cross.

  “Guess who was here today looking for you,” Nicholas said. He told her who.

  “Bastards!” Rachel cried out. “Bastards!”

  It was two nights later that Nicholas had his mystical experience.

  He and Rachel lay in bed, asleep. Nicholas was on the left, nearer the door of their bedroom. Still disturbed by the recent visit of the FBI agents, he slept lightly, tossing a lot, having vague dreams of an unpleasant nature. Toward dawn, just when the first false white light was beginning to fill the room, he lay back on a nerve, awoke from the pain, and opened his eyes.

  A figure stood silently beside the bed, gazing down at him. The figure and Nicholas regarded each other; Nicholas grunted in amazement and sat up. At once Rachel awoke and began to scream

  “Ich bin’s!” Nicholas told her reassuringly (he had taken German in high school). What he meant to tell her was that the figure was himself. “Ich bin’s” being the German idiom for that. However, in his excitement he did not realize he was speaking a foreign language, albeit one Mrs. Altecca had taught him in the twelfth grade. Rachel could not understand him. Nicholas began to pat her, but he kept on repeating himself in German. Rachel was confused and frightened. She kept on screaming. Meanwhile, the figure disappeared.

  Later on, when she was fully awake, Rachel was uncertain whether or not she had seen the figure or just reacted to his start of surprise. It had all been so sudden.

  “It was myself,” Nicholas said, “standing beside the bed gazing down at me. I recognized myself.”

  “What was it doing there?” Rachel said.

  “Guarding me,” Nicholas said. He knew it. He could tell from having seen the expression on the figure’s face. So there was nothing to be afraid of. He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make certain that he, his prior self, was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and strong and he could not rid himself of it.

  Going into the living room, he got his German dictionary and checked the idiom that he had used. Sure enough, it was correct. It meant, literally. “I am it.”

  He and Rachel sat together in the living room, drinking instant coffee, in their pajamas.

  “I wish I was sure if I saw it,” Rachel kept repeating. “Something sure scared me. Did you hear me scream? I didn’t know I could scream like that. I don’t think I ever screamed like that before in my life. I wonder if the neighbors heard. I hope they don’t call the police. I’ll bet I woke them up. What time is it? It’s getting light; it must be dawn.”

  “I never had anything like that happen before in my life,” Nicholas said. “Boy, was I surprised, opening my eyes like I did and seeing it—me—standing there. What a shock. I wonder if anybody else ever had that happen to them. Boy.”

  “We’re so near the neighbors,” Rachel said. “I hope I didn’t wake them.”

  The next day Nicholas came around to my place to tell me about his mystical experience and get my opinion. He was not exactly candid about it, however; initially he told it to me not as a personal experience but as a science fiction idea for a story. That was so if it sounded nutty the onus wouldn’t be on him.

  “I thought,” he said, “as a science fiction writer you could explain it. Was it time travel? Is there such a thing as time travel? Or maybe an alternate universe.”

  I told him it was himself from an alternate universe. The proof was that he recognized himself. Had it been a future self he would not have recognized it, since it would have been altered from the features he saw in the mirror. No one could ever recognize his own future self. I had written about that in a story, once. In the story the man’s future self came back to warn him just as he, the protagonist, was about to do something foolish. The protagonist, not recognizing his future self, had killed it. I had yet to market the story, but my hopes were good. My agent, Scott Meredith, had sold everything else I had written.

  “Can you use the idea?” Nicholas asked.

  “No,” I told him. “It’s too ordinary.”

  “Ordinary!” He looked upset. “It didn’t seem ordinary to me that night. I think it had a message for me, and it was beaming the message at me telepathically, but I woke up and that ended the transmission.”

  I explained to him that if you encountered your self from an alternate universe—or from the future, for that matter—you would hardly need to employ telepathy. That wasn’t logical, since there would be no linguistic barrier. Telepathy was used when contact between members of different races, such as from other star systems, took place.

  “Oh,” Nicholas said, nodding.

  “It was benign?” I asked.

  “Sure it was; it was me. I’m benign. You know, Phil, in some ways my whole life is a waste. What am I doing at my age, working as a clerk in a record shop? Look what you’re doing—you’re a full-time writer. Why the hell can’t I do something like that? Something meaningful. I’m a clerk! The lowest of the low! And Rachel is going to be a full professor some day, when she’s through school. I should never have dropped out; I should have gotten my B.A.”

  I said. “You sacrificed your academic career for a noble cause, your opposition to war.”

  “I broke my gun. There was no cause; I was just inept the day we had to take apart our gun and put it back together. I lost the trigger down inside the works. That’s all.”

  I explained to him how his subconscious was wiser than his conscious mind, and how he ought to take credit for its vision, its sense of higher values. After all, it was part of him.

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” Nicholas said. “I’m not sure what I believe any more. Not since those two FBI agents came by and rousted me. They wanted me to spy-on my wife! I think that’s what they were really after. They get people to spy on each other, like in 1984, and destroy the whole society. What does my life add up to, Phil, in comparison to yours, say? In comparison to anyone’s? I’m going to Alaska. I was over the other day talking to the man at Southern Pacific; they have connections to Alaska through a yacht that goes up there three times a year. I could go on that. I think that’s what my self from the future or an alternate universe was there to tell me, the other night, that my life doesn’t add up to anything and I better do something drastic. I probably was about to find out what I was supposed to do, only I wrecked it all by waking up and opening my eyes. Actually it was Rachel who scared it off by screaming; that’s when it left. If it wasn’t for her I’d know how to organize my future, whereas as it stands I know nothing, I’m doing nothing, I have no hopes or prospects except checking in the goddamn Victor shipment that’s up there at the shop waiting for me, forty big cartons—the whole fall line they pushed on us, that even Herb went for. Because of the ten percent discount.” He lapsed into
gloomy silence.

  “What did the FBI agents look like?” I asked, never having seen one. Everybody in Berkeley was scared of just such a visit as Nicholas had received, myself included. It was the times.

  “They have fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck into dough. And they watch you all the time. They never take their eyes off you. They had faint but detectable southern accents. They said they’d be back to talk to both of us. They’ll probably be by to talk to you too. About your writing. Are your stories left-wing?”

  I asked. “Haven’t you read them?”

  “I don’t read science fiction,” Nicholas said. “I just read serious writers like Proust and Joyce and Kafka. When science fiction has something serious to say, I’ll read it.” He began, then, to talk up the virtues of Finnegans Wake, in particular the final part, which he compared to the final part of Ulysses. It was his belief that no one but himself had either read it or understood it.

  “Science fiction is the literature of the future,” I told him, when he paused. “In a few decades they’ll be visiting the moon.”

  “Oh, no,” Nicholas said vigorously. “They’ll never visit the moon. You’re living in a fantasy world.”

  “Is that what your future self told you?” I said. “Or your self from another universe, whatever it was?”

  It seemed to me that it was Nicholas who was living in a fantasy world, working in the record store as a clerk, meanwhile always lost in great literature of a sort divorced from his own reality. He had read so much James Joyce that Dublin was more real to him than Berkeley. And yet even to me Berkeley was not quite real but lost, as Nicholas was, in fantasy; all of Berkeley dreamed a political dream separate from the rest of America, a dream soon to be crushed, as reaction flowed deeper and deeper and spread out wider. A person like Nicholas Brady could never go to Alaska; he was a product of Berkeley and could only survive in the radical student milieu of Berkeley. What did he know of the rest of the United States? I had driven across the country; I had visited Kansas and Utah and Kentucky, and I knew the isolation of the Berkeley radicals. They might affect America a little with their views, but in the long run it would be solid conservative America, the Midwest, which would win out. And when Berkeley fell, Nicholas Brady would fall with it.

  Of course this was a long time ago, before President Kennedy was assassinated, before President Ferris Fremont and the New American Way. Before the darkness closed over us completely.

  3BEING politically oriented, Nicholas had already noted the budding career of the junior senator from California, Ferris F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952 from Orange County, far to the south of us, .an area so reactionary that to us in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real—more real than if they had been composed of solid reality. Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley’s opposite; if Berkeley lay in the thrall of illusion, of detachment from reality, it was Orange County which had pushed it there. Within one universe the two could never coexist.

  It was as if Ferris Fremont stood amid the deserts of Orange County and imagined, at the north end of the state, the unreal thralldom of Berkeley and shuddered and said to himself something on the order of That must go. If the two men, Nicholas Brady in the north and Ferris Fremont in the south, could have looked across the six-hundred-mile distance between them and confronted each other, both would have been appalled as he read in the Berkeley Daily Gazette about the rise to political power of the publisher from Oceanside who had gotten his chance in the Senate by defaming his Democratic rival, Margaret Burger Greyson, as a homosexual.

  As a matter of record, Margaret Burger Greyson was a routine senator, but the defamatory charges had formed the basis of Fremont’s victory, not her voting record. Fremont had used his newspaper in Oceanside to blast Mrs. Greyson, and, financed by unknown sources, he had plastered the southern part of the state with billboards darkly alluding to Mrs. Greyson’s sex life.

  CALIFORNIA NEEDS A STRAIGHT CANDIDATE!

  DON’T YOU THINK THERE’S SOMETHING QUEER ABOUT GREYSON?

  That kind of thing. It was based on a supposedly actual incident in Mrs. Greyson’s life, but no one really knew. Mrs. Greyson fought back but never sued. After her defeat she vanished into obscurity, or maybe, as Republicans joked, into the gay bars of San Diego. Mrs. Greyson, needless to say, had been a liberal. In the McCarthy days there wasn’t that much difference in the public’s view between communism and homosexuality, so Fremont had little difficulty winning, once his smear campaign began.

  At that time Fremont was a callow lout, fat-cheeked and sullen, with beetle brows and pasted-down black hair that looked greased into place; he wore a pinstripe suit and loud tie and two-tone shoes, and it was said that he had hair on his knuckles. He was frequently photographed at the target range, guns being his hobby. He liked to wear a Stetson hat. Mrs. Greyson’s only rejoinder to him that ever received any favor was a bitter remark, made after the returns had come in, that Fremont certainly was no straight shooter, straight or not. Anyhow, Mrs. Greyson’s political career was ended, Ferris F. Fremont’s begun. He flew at once to Washington, DC, in search of a house for himself, his wife, Candy, and their two bulbous sons, Amos and Don.

  Now, you should have seen the effects in Berkeley of all this shit. Berkeley did not take it well. The radical student milieu resented a campaign’s being won on such a basis, and they resented Fremont’s showing up in Washington even more. They did not so much care for Mrs. Greyson as they resented the winner; for one thing, as Republicans pointed out, there were many gays in Berkeley, and there certainly were many pinkos: Berkeley was the pinko capital of the world.

  The pinko capital of the world was not surprised when Senator Fremont was named to a committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn’t surprised when the senator nailed several prominent liberals as Communist Party members. But it was surprised when Senator Fremont made the Aramchek accusation.

  Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator Fremont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed the nature of Aramchek, and that from this document it was evident that the CP-USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself merely a front, one among many, cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason, Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly or privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United States. You’d have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it.

  At that time I knew a girl who belonged to the Communist Party. She had always seemed strange, even before she joined, and after she joined she was insufferable. She wore bloomers and informed me that the sex act was an exploitation of women, and one time, in anger at my choice of friends, she dropped her cigarette in my cup of coffee at Larry Blake’s restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. My friends were Trotskyists. I had introduced her to two of them in public, without telling her their political affiliations. You never did that in Berkeley. Liz came by my table the next day at Larry Blake’s, not speaking; I think it got her in trouble with the Party. Anyhow one time kiddingly I asked her if she also belonged to Aramchek as well as to the Party.

  “What a crock,” she said. “What a fascist lie. There is no Aramchek. I would know.”

  “If it existed,” I asked, “would you join it?”

  “It would depend on what it does.”

  “It overthrows America,” I said.

  “Don’t you think monopoly capitalism with its suppression of the working class and its financing of imperialist wars through puppet regimes should be ove
rthrown?” Liz said.

  “You’d join it,” I said.

  But even Liz couldn’t join Aramchek if it didn’t exist. I never saw her after she dropped her cigarette in my coffee at Larry Blake’s; the Party had told her not to talk to me again, and she did what it said. Still, I don’t believe she ever managed to rise high in the Communist Party; she was a typical low-echelon type, devoted to following orders but never really getting them right. Ever since, I’ve wondered what happened to her. I doubt if she ever wondered what happened to me; after the Party pronounced the ban on me I ceased to exist, as far as she was concerned.

  One night I had dinner with Nicholas and Rachel where the topic of Aramchek came up. The Socialist Workers Party had passed a resolution denouncing both Senator Fremont and Aramchek: one the arm of U.S. imperialism, the other the arm of militant Moscow.

  “That’s covering both bases,” Nicholas commented. “You SWP are certainly opportunists.”

  Rachel smiled the superior sneering smile of a Berkeley poly sci girl.

  “Are you still seeing that guy?” Nicholas said, meaning the SWP organizer that his wife had a crush on.

  “Are you still in love with your boss’s wife?” Rachel demanded.

  “Well,” Nicholas muttered, fooling with his coffee cup.

  “I think Fremont has a great concept there,” I said. “Denouncing an organization that doesn’t even exist—one Fremont made up and says it’s taking over America. Obviously no one can destroy it. No one’s safe from it. No one knows where it’ll turn up next.”

  “In Berkeley,” Nicholas said.

  “In Kansas City,” I said. “In the heartland. In Salt Lake City—anywhere. Fremont can form anti-Aramchek cadres, youth groups on the right dedicated to fighting it wherever it manifests itself, armed uniformed bands of kids ever vigilant. It’ll get Fremont into the White House.” I was kidding. But, as we all know, I turned out to be right. After the death of John Kennedy, and his brother’s death, and the death of virtually every other major political figure in the United States, it took only a few years.