ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 29
corner of his eye how Jim's arms whirled like the wings of a dying hummingbird and his
pipe stabbed the air as if to kill something nesting there that bothered him intensely.
Brendon felt himself shaking nervously for some reason and his thoughts moved in rapid
succession, a series of disconnected slides on a broken projector. The wind blew softly
through his hair and annoyed him in some unexplainable way. A man in a crisp blue suit
and striped necktie passed him in a blur, then a woman wearing a wicker hat with a green
ribbon. Then a child wearing plaid shorts sped by on a skateboard which scraped the
sidewalk like fingernails scraping windowglass. A distressingly ludicrous parade.
" ... And socjety doesn't want certain primates to replicate so they either expose
them to high doses of a special kind of radiation or put them in secret concentration
camps ... you think they're not actually using the neutron bomb on certain populations?
Ah, you don ' t think they just shove that kind of genetical dichotometrical technology in
a file somewhere do you? No, I mean we're talking here about a ver-y heav-y socially
implicated concept, a ver-y heav-y du-ty con-cept ... "
Brendon had picked up a book from Vince's backpack and thumbed through it.
T.S. Eliot. Poems Written in Early Youth. Although Jim's monologue had evolved into
a highly erratic whisper, Brendon had to make an effort to block it out. He again wished
he were home, felt nailed to the chair. He scanned the poems, saw a small lyric his mother
had sung to him when he was very young. "Song," it was entitled. Reading those words
suddenly quelled the bizarre confusion that had been growing in Brendon, partly because
he was able to focus his full attention there.
"Socially, industrially, pseudomorphically and telesexually ... " Jim droned on.
Brendon immersed himself in the words of the poem, tried to lose himself again.
"When we came home across the hill..."
" ... And the public works administration is all tied up in this thing too, if you know
what I mean, and certain respected members of the Roman Catholic Church who've got
direct lines on practcally every goddamn home computer .. . "
" .. No leaves werefallenfrom the trees ..."
" ... And they're setting up this complecticated network."
" .. .The gentle fingers of the breeze ..."
"Now, ah, are you beginning to relate to what I'm getting at here: systems and
industrialized cerebralism."
" .. Had torn no quivering cobweb down .. ."
Jim was twisting his cheek and looking intently at Vince, who was nodding
automatically as if he had become a branch of the tree they were sitting under bobbing
in the wind.
"Just imagine a huge mechano-organic factory superstructure that just will not
leave you alone .. . ever!"
" .. .The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still..."
15