Mishkin wandered through the Festival and ate cotton candy and thought bittersweet thoughts of his youth, just like everyone else. He smiled politely and disdainfully, just like everybody else. But this was no real indication of his true attitude. Mishkin was a secret pilgrim. He wanted out of his bag, out of repetition-compulsion, out of confusion, out of tedious novelty. Just like everybody else.

When does the ecstasy begin?

37. Magus Reveals Secrets

Q. The approach to enlightenment involves an apparent contradiction, which is exemplified in the dual personality of the con-man sage. The problem is always the same: Why did the leader betray us? Did he find us unworthy? Or was the betrayal a secret act of love done in order to let us work out the final stage of our destinies on our own? Or did the leader's powers fail? Or could it be that he never had any power at all?

Which story are we stuck in?

A. Perhaps it's a case of divine ambiguities: the complications pile up, everything modifies everything else, vagueness is king. Would you like that story? Or how about ambiguity for fun and profit — the magus. He is putting you on. You're doing numbers over the divine spirituality of it all, and he's laughing up his embroidered sleeve, not very nice. Is thatthe story you'd prefer?

Q. What's going on around here? Why isn't anything working out?

A. Should I take you by the hand? Very well, but where will I lead you? Of course, I could put it all in order, and we could dance a minuet. I do want to amuse you, but really, there's a limit. Do you really want a guided tour through the formal gardens promised in the prospectus? Maybe that would be OK for you, but how about me? I'm supposed to have some fun, too. But now I'm starting to sound like a reform rabbi, and I notice that Mishkin has just gotten himself into a sort of interesting situation, so let's look into the house on Willow Road and see what is happening.

38

"But Professor Mackintosh, how do you know it is Earth that we have finally returned to?"

The professor smiled softly and pointed with his cane. Do you see that flower over there? It is Hemerocallis fulva,known as the day lily, and common throughout much of the United States. Those orange-coloured blossoms open but for a single day, you know — not proof positive, but rather good circumstantial evidence — like a trout in the milk, as Thoreau said."

39

Mishkin clung to the outer edges of the face, which began to melt, the nose flattening and segueing into the cheek, the eyes bleeding into the hair, the mouth softening and blurring, the handholds pulling out of the silly putty, and Mishkin slid away through obligatory swallow song, and long, still Ohio nights with the crickets raucous in the box-berry hedges, and the telephone lines black against the sky like a diagram of your whole life.

It was like that, but it wasn't exactly like that. It was more like those hushed summer nights in the old frame house in Rushmore, Mississippi, when an intolerable sweetness clung to the moist denim stretched over a young girl's sleeping buttocks, and you realized, young though you were, that things were going to happen to you, and you would live by them and lose by them, but always, somewhere, the river would wind, dark and sinuous, sweet mother of the past, companion of the present, mourner of the irretrievable future.

40. The Mishkin Museum

A slingshot. With this weapon Mishkin shot his way through innumerable fantasies.

Later, he exchanged his slingshot for an M-1 and shot his way through the same fantasies.

An empty butter wrapper. Mishkin once ate an entire pound of butter at a single sitting, washing it down with a quart of ice-cold milk. Now he lives away from home and picks at his food like a bird.

An Indian war club. Mishkin made this at camp. He also made Mary Lou Watkins at the same camp but not all the way. Later on Mishkin made a lot of people all the way. Now he travels.

A page of sheet music entitled "Old Black Joe". Mishkin didn't think about Negroes when he was a boy. Now, a man, he doesn't think about blacks. But he talks about them and dreams about them.

A snapshot of Mishkin's mother at the age of twenty-three. Mishkin thinks he doesn't care very much about his mother. Mishkin also thinks he doesn't con himself very much.

A Sanskrit grammar. Mishkin once planned to learn Sanskrit in order to read The Upanishadsin the original. Now he doesn't even read them in English.

41

Mishkin ascended to heaven on a fiery chariot and there he met the Lord God of Hosts, and Mishkin prostrated himself before the Deity and said, "Lord, Lord, I have sinned," which seemed a pretty good thing to say under the circumstances.

But God smiled and raised Mishkin up and said, "Rather, Mishkin, say that I have sinned; for what are your sins but the deficiencies that I caused to be put into you in order to test you and give you grievous trials and a dark night of the soul, the point being that you should overcome them. This may seem a kind of weird way of operating, but it is unreservedly recommended on page 102 of the best seller, This Business of Being God,written by a symposium of Parisian intellectuals and American hippies, and published by the Godhead Institution with offices in New York, London, Paris, Ibiza, and Katmandu, and with a foreword by Yours Truly."

"I have failed the crucial tests," Mishkin said. "I am mean, nasty, greedy, selfish, and uncaring."

"Don't get into a masochism number," said God. "Just as there is love which surpasseth understanding, so there is understanding which surpasseth love. For have I not written, the last shall be the first?"

"You are kind," Mishkin said. "But I don't really understand."

"Understanding is a down," God said. "Be comforted, Mishkin, for your vibrations are OK, and I think right now I need a vacation."

42

"I think," Mishkin said, "that it is time for a bit of static description. And then a bit of action." The space fleet came thundering in on fiery jets. Somewhere, a tree was crying.

Mishkin's father said, "Maybe I don't know what I like, but I sure as shooting know what I don't like." The people next door were a mystery, according to Angela. "Take nothing into account."

"But what do you mean, a mystery?" Claire couldn't explain, but she felt it was time for a bit of static description, and then a bit of action. "It doesn't really workthat way." Mishkin knew that it was true and untrue, and he loved her and hated her for it. It was a complicated world, but so what?

Mishkin liked a bit of complication: "Excuse me, Captain, the pusher beam trigger mechanism seems to have broken down." But not too much. He liked story lines that you could follow while thinking of other things. "Spare me that avant-garde stuff," Alice said, "besides, it's not your thing." Not my thing? Then why bother building palaces out of frying pans, why look for a jewel on the forehead of a toad? Subjects and verbs must agree, everyone agreed, but not on anything else.

Mishkin wondered what a spaceship looked like. What could you compare a spaceship to? Itself? "The spaceship looked utterly like itself." Jane shook her head. Mishkin's father shook his head. Mishkin tried to play the flute. His skin itched. He wished he could think of something a spaceship looked like. Not itself. He decided to buy a toy spaceship and describe that.