A
trap,
see? It sucks you in, one day is so much like the next; there’s no place to dig your heels in. You don’t hear the trap closing, in fact you don’t even know it’s there until you’re in it. No day says, This is where you get off. Even your old uniform still fits… almost. And hope, hope is all around. Soon as this is over I’ll take a couple weeks off and get back in shape. Because you’re always so busy, see? You’re
doing
things.
Ah yes. And pretty soon—“What, boy?” “Yeah, that’s Uncle Tip, isn’t he marvelous?” Oopsy daisy, time for beddy-by. “What?”
So here comes the next split, the different ways people go. Maybe it’s the same split all over again.
Some of us go gentle into that good night. The sheep, the golden yearsies; stoic, flat, puzzled voices interminably pointing out the missing limbs, the hospital horrors. The Winnebago trailers trundling at 35 mph, the wallet full of grandchildren, the gardens, and handicrafts. The pills. The comfy void.
Or you have the fighters. You see them—the ones that
do
get back in shape. The ones that play tennis through their forties and marry new women in their fifties and crack up their planes in their sixties and go on talk shows in their seventies and marry teenagers in their eighties.
Think young.
Rage, rage against the falling of the night. Dean Martin.
Only… they
talk
about it. Oh god do they. Ever hear a twenty-year-old boast about playing three sets of tennis? At fifty they do. They make whooshing backhand gestures and tell about the old serve. (I won’t even go into their sex-talk bag, no.) And that’s damn all they talk about, the ones that Think Young.
Pathetic.
Man, there has to be another way.
Of course there is one other way, the people so interested in something outside themselves that they don’t even notice the scythe cutting them. I just saw an old plant-hybridizer, his legs won’t work and his retinas are falling out so he can only see a pinhole, but he crawls, crawls over
fifteen acres
of seedling rows, weeding and feeding and squinting at the new ones every year and breeding more. Some biologists and artists are like that. Tiptree Sr. was sort of like that too, maybe I’ll be.
But I think there’s another way still.
I don’t know exactly what it could be, but years ago I got a hint out of Gandhi’s autobiography. The idea of stages beyond stages of life. New, interesting stages, I mean. The first ones aren’t new, of course. Youth: the gonad time, the exploding time. Fucking and loving and running around experiencing the world and rebellious theories; maybe brilliant in science. Next comes full-body middle age, full energy drive, adrenaline, skills, strong-loving-but-wary ego. Building time. Building family, movements, anything. Money/power/status time. (Christ was thirty-two, remember?) The thrill
of I can.
Full involvement. Goes on awhile. Nothing new yet.
But the next stage, that’s new. In our culture there is no next stage. No map, no idea beyond holding on, repeating what you did. (I have a friend in his seventies starting his
fourth
family.)
But suppose there is a last metamorphosis: not holding on, letting go. Migrating inside yourself into some last power center, where you never really lived before. Changing forward one last time.
You can, you know. Even if your first stages came to nothing, even if sex was a puddle and status was a joke, that’s all over now. Time to move on. How? Well, I don’t really know how but here’s what I think.
Turn in your buttons. Say good-bye. Take up the holy beggar’s bowl and go. Out. Free. Alone, literally or mentally. Go out… in search of something. Call it the Bo tree, call it the invisible landscape of reality, or wisdom, or union with the cosmos. Or yourself.
Because you’re different, you know. When you’re old enough you really are
free.
Your energy is not only less, it is different. It’s in—if you’ve done it right—a different place. Your last, hottest organ.
That old force that drove your gonads first, that spread out to power your muscles and hands and appetite and will—where is its last fortress? In your brain. Let me explain.
Your brain really is hot, you know. The hot under the belt is tepid compared to the hot between your ears. It uses 24 percent of your oxygen in every breath. And it’s working every minute, changing, packing and adding, cramming itself full.
You’ve been using it, of course. Nobody drives his brain faster than an eighteen-year-old mathematician. But it’s an
empty
brain—that’s why the geniuses of the empty sciences are so young: They can twist that thin brain into fantastic patterns. Physics, for example, requires complex patterns of relatively few data. Other sciences require more data, but the patterns get simpler: That’s why good anthropology and psychology tends to come from older people. At forty the brain is getting packed with data, but it’s still a
driven
brain. It’s harnessed to life goals: winning a campaign, running a farm.
By the time you get sixty (I think) the brain is a place of incredible resonances. It’s packed full of life, histories, processes, patterns, half-glimpsed analogies between a myriad levels—a Ballard crystal world place. One reason old people reply slowly is because every word and cue wakes a thousand references.
What if you could
free
that, open it?
Let go of ego and status,
let everything go and smell the wind, feel with your dimming senses for what’s out there, growing. Let your resonances merge and play and come back changed… telling you new things. Maybe you could find a way to grow, to change once more inside… even if the outside of you is saying, “What, what?” and your teeth smell.
But to do it you have to get ready, years ahead. Get ready to let go and migrate in and up into your strongest keep, your last window out. Pack for your magic terminal trip, pack your brain, ready it. Fear no truth. Load up like a river steamboat for the big last race when you go downriver burning it all up, not caring, throwing in the furniture, the cabin, the decks right down to the water line, caring only for that fire carrying you where you’ve never been before.
Maybe… somehow… one could.
—July 8, 1973
This was apparently written for the Science Fiction Writers of America, but so far as I know it was never published by them or anyone else. If it has been, it was under a different title. The manuscript shows signs of heavy revision, but is untitled.
People ask me what it’s like to live next to a large intelligence agency. Well, to begin with, I don’t live next to the CIA, they live next to me. Frankly, intelligence agencies have been living next to me since about 1943 when they were called the OSS.
The first thing is that the food in the local markets gets upgraded. In the middle of desolate racks of Pop-up Sugar Waffles there appears Swiss Fructifort, real pumpernickel shows up among the Wonder bread, and the butcher suddenly displays a resentful knowledge of Savoy and kidney cuts. The liquor merchants start wedging vodka and brandy in between the red-eye bourbon. The drugstores develop a rash of chess sets and the paperbacks sprout Galbraith and Mailer among the nurse porno. It becomes possible to buy
The New York Times.
The local welding shop acquires a Saturday waiting line of harassed ex-anthropology professors clasping ten-speed bikes and busted lawn mowers. So far so good; all these things happened in the farming crossroads called McLean when The Campus went up.
What is not good, of course, is the goddam new roads and the doubly damned developers bulldozing every bloody tree under—that not only happened to me in McLean, it happened in Foggy Bottom when I lived next to the Tile Factory there. But that isn’t what you want to hear about. What you want is the creepies.
Ah, the creepies. Well now. Washington, you see, is a
small
town. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Everybody knows, for instance, that when types like Howard Hunt are “made available” to the White House it is 99 to 1 that nobody could figure out how else to fire them. (Firing kooks is the single greatest headache of everybody in the Feds from branch chief up—you
can’t.)
Everybody also knows that the CIA is a den of effete Eastern liberalism that can’t be relied on to back up the Pentagon’s perfectly natural urge to bomb the Reds; I mean, people in the CIA actually speak foreign languages, so you can’t trust ‘em. Funny anecdote about that: A local moviehouse ran an ad in Russian offering free tickets for a correct translation. On opening night, there was a three-block line down McArthur Boulevard featuring the entire linguistic staffs of the CIA, NSA, USIA, State, and a few others. All the opposition had to do was walk down the street looking under snap brims.
But they didn’t need to. You see, in D.C. there really is one good intelligence agency. I refer, of course, to the Commercial Credit Corporation. They know—man, do they know. In the old days when the CIA insisted on its employees saying they worked “for the U.S. government” there was a true tale of the wife of a newly arrived CIA bigwig who toddled down to Woodies’ to set up a charge. “And where does your husband work?” “Oh, for the U.S. government.” The lady was not out of the door before Woodies’ credit office had verified by phoning the CIA on her husband’s
new correct unlisted extension.
If you don’t happen to have credit sources, all you have to do is ask the nearest cabby—or for that matter, the nearest PTA member, plumber, VW garage, cop, or garbageman.
Everybody
knows. But there is one little complication.
You see, children, there was once a time when people thought it was glamorous to say they worked for the CIA. (Among other things, you could get laid.) So what you had was about 100,000 people who said they worked for the CIA and didn’t. And then there was another ten thousand who said they worked for the U.S. government. That was simple. But then—after countless ridiculous incidents like the above—Big Brother decided it was okay to say where you worked, as long as you didn’t say what you did (like clipping
The New York Times).
So now you still have about fifty thousand hopefully horny losers claiming they work for the CIA while hustling real estate, plus the ten thousand liberated who say diffidently that they work for CIA and do. How do you tell ‘em apart?
Well, as a fast rule of thumb, if they have five kids, a PhD, and a wife who worked for McGovern, you’ve probably got your spy.
Because I meant it about that “effete Eastern liberal” crack. One of the things I learned living next to the creeps was a healthy relish for the political prejudices of most of them—they coincide with mine. There were more Stevenson stickers in the CIA parking lot than flag decals in Dallas. Now this is not absolute. Why? Because in the time of the Dulleses, the CIA acquired an unwanted posse of cowboy-type activists who would do the dirty things John Foster shoved off on brother Allen. These people—and this outlook—were about as desired by the old-line pure-information-philosophy boys as a skunk in a baby buggy. Intelligence, if you look at it right, should be just that: simple disinterested
information.
NOT DIRTY TRICKS. (If you want paramilitary, give it to the Pentagon—and then abolish it.) Most of this element went down in the Bay of Pigs, I hear. Good. But what about the old cloak-and-cyanide bag, you ask, what about agent nets and blackmailing peoples’ relatives into spying for you, etc., etc., et-James-Bond-cetera?
Well, it may come as a shock to the romantic, but all that is largely out. And good riddance too. I had a taste of it in World War II to last me. What is in is relatively clean: plain, ordinary long-range photos. Sensing. Science stuff. No beating people up in safe houses, no paying off flocks of dirty-necked triple pros. Just looking and listening. In my opinion, this is a great improvement. I mean, we look, they look, everybody sees what’s there.
I don’t think you can call that dirty—unless you’re prepared to jail the next housewife looking over her neighbor’s fence.
And since no agent can tell you what’s on Brezhnev’s mind, and you can’t mount a major attack without moving stuff all across the landscape—it’s a hell of a lot safer for us. Also very irritating to some people. Because, as most people in D.C. know, in the old bad Cold War days the Pentagon’s spies used to peddle hot-eyed rumors weekly—BIG SOVIET BUILD-UP, ATTACK LOOMS! And then the early U-2 boys would tak^ a look and say, Sorry, those big new atomic installations your agents arfe selling you are three thousand acres of winter wheat. End flap—uni il next week. Irritating… .
Well, now I must pack my duffle to return to the land of
vodka and
pumpernickel and
The New York Times.
And what do you think I’ll tell my cabby at National Airport? “Drive out past CIA, I’ll tell you from there.” Because he
knows,
see? And in case he’s just come to town, here’s one last tidbit. When Big Brother moved the Campus out to McLean they hid it real good—in among some woods behind the Bureau of Public Roads. Which used to be their road sign until this year, when they finally admitted they’re there. But they forgot one thing: Towering over the whole shebang is a gigantic screaming red-and-white
water tower
visible for ten miles in any direction. It used to be known as Dulles’s Bladder.
—October 20, 1973
There were two final “20-Mile Zone” travel columns published, all without titles. The one now called “Harvesting the Sea” appeared in
Kyben
9 (September 1974).The last one was in Khatru 6, April 1977, and consisted of “More Travels,
or,
Heaven Is Northwest of You” (Tip’s title, which I omitted at the time), Tip’s response to my comment that the piece “is almost straight reporting, facts, no opinions or impressions,” and part of a letter explaining why he wasn’t writing his annual Maya column (here titled “Quintana Roo: No Travelog This Trip”).
The annual rite of sending you a cockroach-laden message from the mangrove swamps is now under way, with the added attraction that this year my type seems to be Mexican duplicator tape that runs when I spray it. If you can read this it probably means I didn’t spray
hard,
so for God’s sake be warned. The
cucarachas
have developed a new generation of weapons systems down here. If you step on one, it carries you two yards before you can jump off.