Fractal Paisleys Read online

  Lennon Spex

  i am walking down lower broadway, not far from Canal Jeans, when I see the weirdest peddler dude.

  Now, when you consider that the wide sidewalk is jammed with enterprising urban riffraff—Africans with their carved monkeywood animals; Farrakhanized Black Muslims with their oils and incense; young white punks with their hand-screened semi-obscene T-shirts; sleazy old white guys with their weasel-skin Gucci bags and smeary Hermes scarves; Vietnamese with their earrings and pantyhose and pirated tapes—and when you also realize that I, Zildjian, am totally inured to this spectacle through long habituation, then you realize that this guy must be incredibly weird.

  Except he isn’t. Weird, that is. Not bizarre. I guess it’s more that he’s incongruous, like.

  He appears to be a Zen monk. Japanese or Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese, it’s hard to figure. His head is shaven, he wears a golden robe and straw sandals, and he looks serener than a Park Avenue matron after her first Valium of the day. His age could be anywhere from a year short of a legal drink to a year over early retirement.

  The monk is apparently selling secondhand prescription eyeglasses. He has a TV tray with a meager selection neatly arrayed thereon. I see no handy-dandy lens-grinding equipment, so I assume there is no customizing. This gives new meaning to the term “cut-rate rip-off.”

  I stop in front of the monk. He bows. I am forced to bow back. Uncomfortable, I fall to examining his stock.

  Tucked away behind the assorted cat’s-eye, filigreed, tortise-shell old lady spex lies one special pair of glasses, their stems neatly folded like ballerina legs, as incongruous among their companions as the monk among his.

  I pick these glasses up and examine them.

  They are a pair of simple gold wire-rims with transparent, perfectly circular lenses. The stems extend from the middle of the outer circumference on each lens; the bridge is higher, about two-thirds of the way up along the inside. The spectacles feature no adornments.

  Suddenly, I realize that these are what we would have called, more years ago than I care to ponder, “Lennon glasses.” First popularized by Beatle John in the Sgt. Pepper album photos, later shown shattered on a posthumous jacket, they remain forever associated with his image, though he was to switch in later years to various aviator-style frames, undoubtedly seeking to harmonize his face with Yoko’s in marital solidarity.

  I do not suffer from near- nor far-sightedness; I have no intention of buying the frames and replacing the lenses with polarized ones, since I believe in the utility of unmediated sunlight. Yet something compels me to ask if I can try them on.

  “Can I, uh, try these on?” I ask the monk.

  He smiles. (A smile from one of his disciples was how the Buddha knew his message was getting through.) “You bet.”

  I unfold the stems. It is then that I notice a blot of what appears to be fresh blood on one stem. Maybe it’s ketchup from some strolling patron’s chilidog. Never squeamish, I lick my thumb and attempt to wipe it off. The blot temporarily disappears under my rubbing, then rematerializes.

  The monk has noticed my actions. “Not to worry,” he says. “Just a small stain from the shooting. Will most definitely not affect utility of the glasses. Please, try.”

  So I slip them on.

  The rowboat is painted in psychedelic day-glo swirls of color; the wide rippled water which cradles it is purple. I am sitting on the middle bench, drifting downstream without oars.

  On either shore, tangerine trees are interspersed with cellophane flowers of yellow and green that grow so incredibly high. The sky— you guessed it—is marmalade. With actual flecks of orange peel and English muffin clouds. A complete nutritious breakfast.

  “Holy Salvador Dali,” I whimper. I dip my hands into the purple water, stirring a scent of grape juice, and frantically try to divert the boat to shore.

  “Zildjian,” calls someone above me. I answer quite slowly: “Yuh-yeah?”

  “Stop paddling and look up.”

  The floating girl has kaleidoscope eyes and wears a lot of shiny gems, but not much else.

  “You’re being given a gift, Zildjian. There’s no need to panic.”

  “Oh, man, I’m not sure—”

  The boat is rocking. No, it’s not. I’m sitting astride a centaur. Only instead of hooves, he’s got bentwood rockers. He’s propelling himself across a field, while eating a Scooter pie.

  Lucy is beside me on another rocking horse person. “Calm down, Zildjian. We don’t invite many people here. You’re the first in years and years. Trust me.”

  “What happened to the last guy who trusted you?”

  Lucy pouts. “That was humanity’s fault, not ours.”

  She opens the door of a taxi for me. It’s made of old Washington Posts and New York Times with headlines about Vietnam. When I climb inside, my head goes through the newspaper roof and into the clouds. Lucy’s too. As we cut through the moist vapor like wheeled giraffes, I find myself mesmerised by the sun reflected in Lucy’s eyes.

  She’s leading me into the train station. “Just try them for a while. What have you got to lose? Here, see how good they look on you.”

  She summons over a porter made of modeling clay who resembles Gumby. His tie is formed of mirror shards pressed into his chest. I study my reflection in the looking-glass tie. The glasses don’t look half-bad.…

  The turnstile bumps my crotch and squeaks, “Sorry!”

  “Have fun,” says Lucy, and pushes me through.

  I am clutching a streetlight on Broadway. I recognize it because it is the one that still bears a tattered remnant of a poster protesting the most recent war, on which someone has scrawled a particularly clever slogan: “Real eyes realize real lies.”

  Looking up, I anticipate the worst.

  But no. The world—seen through what surely must be nonprescription lenses—is normal.

  Except for the people.

  Every last person is crowned, like Medusa, with a nest of tendrils.

  From the skull of each person exit innumerable organic-looking extrusions which terminate about eighteen inches away from their heads. The tendrils are all colors, thicknesses and textures. Their ends are sheared off flat, and they do not droop. It is as if they enter another dimension a foot-and-a-half away from the individual.

  The people look rather like rainbow dandelions gone to seed.

  A dog stops to pee on my pole. Its head too is studded with worms, but not as many as the humans’.

  A nasty thought occurs to me. I release my grip on the pole and slowly raise my hands to my own head.

  I too am wearing a snakey turban. I can feel the velvety/rubbery/slimy/scratchy hoses rooted to my cranium.

  I rip off the Lennon glasses.

  Everyone’s head-snakes are gone. Mine too, by touch.

  Trepidatiously, I put the glasses back on. The snakes come back.

  I sense someone by my side. It’s the peddler monk.

  He alone of everyone in my sight has but one tendril coming from his head. It’s golden like his robe and, emerging from the exact center of his crown, rises vertically up.

  The monk smiles again and lifts one hand to his golden carousel-horse pole.

  “Goes straight to Buddha,” he says, and laughs. “Use glasses wisely. Goodbye.”

  He vanishes into the mass of pedestrians.

  Still wearing the glasses, I wearily sit myself down on a stoop.

  Man, how can all these people be oblivious to the spaghetti coming out of their heads? Why don’t they feel its weight? Come to think of it, why don’t I feel the weight of mine? I reach up and find the offending objects still tangible. How can something be perceptible to the touch yet weigh nothing? Or is that we’re just used to the weight…?

  The mutt that nearly peed on my foot comes over to keep me company. I offer my hand and it starts to lick it. As it slobbers, I watch its doggy head in horror.

  A new tendril is emerging from its skull! And it is questing like a c
obra toward me!

  Suddenly into my field of vision from above a matching tendril of my own pokes, heading toward the canine feeler!

  I jerk my hand away. The dog snarls, and its tentative tendril changes color and texture, as does mine. But now they seem less eager to meet.

  Nobody ever called me Carl Sagan. But I am a fairly quick study. And you would have to be as dumb as a Georgia Senator not to figure out what is going on with these worms.

  These tendrils coming out of everyone’s head represent emotional attachments, bonds, links of feeling and karma. All the connections we pick up in life. Strings of love and hate, just like some bad pop song.

  The dog has stopped snarling and is licking itself. As an experiment I extend my hand again. It sniffs tentatively, then gently strops my fingers.

  This time, I let our feelers connect and fuse.

  I love this dog! Good dog! It’s practically in my lap, giving my face a tongue-bath. It loves me too. Aw, poor street-critter. I’m really ashamed of what I’m going to do next.

  I grab hold of the seamless cable connecting our heads and yank it out of the dog’s skull. Better to experiment with his head than mine. There’s a slight resistance, then the connection comes away with a subliminal pop!

  The dog yelps, then apathetically climbs off me and goes to sleep.

  The cable in my hand, now anchored only at my end, is squirming, trying to reattach itself to the dog. I don’t let it, and within seconds it just sort of withers up and vanishes like a naked hard-on in a blizzard. I can feel a ghostly patch fading on my skull. The cable, I realize, wasn’t that strong to begin with, pink and thin as a pencil, and didn’t put up much of a fight to survive.

  Armed with this new insight into the nature of the head-spaghetti, I watch the people around me more closely.

  Everyone, I now notice, is continually extruding new feelers every few seconds. In fact, if I focus my vision through the Lennon glasses in some nameless way, I see close to people’s scalps a haze of movement rather like the waving of polyps and corals in some undersea forest.

  The vast majority of these embryonic attachments are transient, dying as fast as they are born. F’rinstance:

  A woman pauses before the window of a clothing store. She casts a line out like a fly-fisherman toward an outfit on a mannequin. Passing right through the plate glass, it connects for a moment, and then she reels it back in and strides off.

  Of course. You can have serious attachments to non-living things too.

  And as if to repeat the lesson, a guy pulls his Jaguar up to a miraculously empty space, parks and gets out. The cable connecting him and the car is thick as your wrist. But that doesn’t stop him from flicking out a feeler toward a passing Mercedes. Your cheatin’ heart.… Or head, as the case may be.

  A delivery guy sends out a probe aimed at a classy babe in furs, which, needless to say, is not reciprocated.

  An old woman with a walker whips out a feeler toward a young doctor-type.

  A girl whom I half know, an architecture student at NYU, shoots out an extension just like one of Spiderman’s webs to an elaborately carved cornice that catches her eye.

  A dude and his babe stop at a corner, kiss and part. The connection between them is thick and strong. As they get further apart, beyond the combined three-foot extension of their bond, it hazes out at its midpoint, entering whatever extradimensional continuum allows individuals to remain connected to distant people and things.

  I’ve seen enough.

  It’s time for me to go home and learn more.

  Standing in front of my bathroom mirror, I begin to pull the cables out of my head, one at a time.

  Out comes this gnarly grey vine. What resistance.… Whoops, suddenly I don’t feel anything for my folks! Mom, Dad, what are parents good for anyhow? It’s spooky. There’s just a big blank spot where there used to be filial fondness. I don’t like this. Better plug this one back in.…

  What this thin slick red-white-and-blue-striped one? Yank it. Patriotism? Whodda thought I had one of those? Wonder what it connects to on the other end? The White House? The Lincoln Memorial? Plymouth Rock? Different for everyone maybe.…

  Here’s a little slippery green eel of a thing. Tweak it out. Holy shit, that gameshow hostess! I never even knew on a conscious level that I had the hots for her! Mega-gross. Man, I’m killing this one. I hold it one side till it crumbles away. Can’t be too careful about where you put your feelings.

  Like a mad oldtime switchboard operator, I spend the next couple of hours pulling cables, memorizing which ones channel what feelings. (Once I yank too many simultaneously and get kind of spacey feeling, as if adrift in the cosmos, spinning aimlessly across the universe.) I soon learn how to tell the difference between one-way connections, such as those to inanimate objects or unresponsive fellow humans (Sherry Gottlieb, a high-school crush), and two-way ones, such as those to another person who feels for you too. There’s a different kind of pulse in each, a unidirectional flow in the former, an alternating current in the latter.

  Since I basically like myself as I am, I plug nearly all of my attachments back in, although I do eliminate the ones for Twinkies and cigarettes.

  A sudden inspiration dawns on me like sunrise on Mercury. I could get rich from these glasses! All I have to do is open an aversion-therapy center. I’ll practice some mumbo-jumbo, yank people’s addictive connections—assuming, and I think it’s a safe bet, that everyone’s cables resemble mine—and presto, you’re looking at the next pre-bankruptcy Donald Trump (only without the bad taste).

  But then I remember the parting words of the monk who gave me the glasses: “Use them wisely.” And how about that single connection he had? “Straight up to Buddha…?”

  I take off the glasses and look at the ineradicable spot of blood on the frames. I think about John Lennon.

  What did he do with these glasses? I imagine a little devil popping into being on my left shoulder. He’s leaning on a pitchfork, wearing a derby and smoking a cigar. He blows smoke into my ear and say, “He got rich, you schmuck!” An angel appears on my right shoulder. Wings emerging from his black leather jacket, he’s holding an electric guitar in place of a harp. “But that’s not all he did, Zildjian. He made a lot of people happy. He contributed to progress. He improved the culture.”

  “He laid a lot of dames,” says the devil.

  “Yes, but always sought to express a philosophy of life, to illuminate people.”

  “Nothing gets a babe illuminated hotter than a dose of philosophy.”

  The angel flies over my head and lands next to the devil. “You cynical philistine!”

  “Hey, back off!” The devil brandishes his pitchfork, puffing on his cigar till the coal glows. The angel hefts his guitar like a club and takes a swipe at his opponent. They both tumble off my shoulder, locked in that eternal pro-wrestling match of the spirit.

  Their arguments have helped me make up my mind. I will use the glasses to feather my personal nest a little. But I will also do something very good for humanity with them.

  But while the personal options are quite clear to me, the larger ones persist in staying somewhat hazy.

  I let them remain so. The first thing I want to do is head over to Cynthia’s apartment.

  Cynthia and I broke up for what we both correctly surmised was the last time just a week ago. The cause was my telling her that this hunky actor she admired reminded me of an ambulatory roast beef, and probably had as much brains. From the nature of this tiff, you can probably gather that our relationship was not all that deep.

  But I am still attached to her. I know, because I found the tendril. But it turns out to be strictly a one-way hookup, all the emotion flowing out of me and hitting a barrier on her end like a sperm hitting a diaphragm.

  Now I am going to change that.

  Cynthia is home. She is getting ready for her waitress job. I find her very attractive in the cowgirl boots and short skirt with tail feathers featured on the h
elp at Drumsticks ’n’ Hot Licks, the fried-chicken country-western club, and I tell her so.

  “Yeah, great,” Cynthia replies rather coldly. She keeps her back to me, adjusting her strawberry-blonde coiffure in the mirror. I am amazed that she can get her brush through all the karma-cords, which apparently offer no resistance.

  Cynthia eyes me in the looking-glass, and I am briefly reminded of the Plasticine porter’s tie. It’s hard to believe that she cannot see all my tendrils, including the one leading to her, but it is true. Then she notices my spectacles.

  “Since when did you start wearing glasses?”

  “Since I met a Buddhist street vendor who sent me on a trip to another dimension.”

  “Yeah, right. You’ll never change, Zil. What do you want? I assume you didn’t come over here just to compliment me. Come on, out with it. No mind games, either. And make it fast, ’cause I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Cynthia, we need to talk,” I begin, laying down some sensitive-type patter just to distract her. She has turned away from the mirror and is bent forward, rummaging thorough her purse. Meanwhile, I am inching closer, within reach of her personal emotional attachments.

  I zero in on one which is a livid purple and resembles in some strange indefinable way my own connection to the gameshow hostess. I deftly grab it and unplug it from Cynthia’s head.

  She twitches and says, “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Just admiring the scent of your hair.”

  “Well, quit it. You’re creeping me out.”

  I push the connection into my own head. Just as I thought! It goes straight to that hambone actor who was the cause of our breakup. I am suddenly overwhelmed with impure thoughts about his bod. Yuck! This is not for me. I pop the tendril out and jack it into Cynthia again.

  Then I do something I haven’t attempted before.

  I pull on the cable in the other direction, trying to yank it out of the actor, where I doubt it’s heavily anchored. My physical effort is apparently transmitted successfully along the cable through the extraspatial dimension it traverses, for it suddenly comes loose.