They hid some of their magical beliefs as a sort of scholarship: they deiced to write down the words and practices of a group of older and even wilder magicians the zawgyi. Their scholarship was a window to the more obscure civilizations and peoples of Burma.
After his sixth book, Dr. Corman had begun the re-translation of a seventh-century Ari Buddhist named U Pao. He was a master alchemist and a devotee of a powerful Nat, Yog-Sothoth. U Pao wrote a Pali sutra in praise of Him “Who orders the planes and angles of existence.” The so-called
Black Sutra
had been translated by a German Indologist in the nineteenth century, but great strides in comparative Indo-European linguistics had taken place since then. And the University of Texas is the hotbed of Indo-European linguistics. Dr. Corman began his translation in 1972, about the time his son came back in a body bag.
His next book,
Alchemy East and West,
was slightly controversial. He theorized that the medieval Indian Siddha Alchemy tradition, the Burmese zawgyi tradition, and the European alchemical tradition were in fact a single multicultural scholarly/scientific endeavor. He named it the “White College”—apparently deriving the name from some Welsh alchemists, Cur-Gwen (*Cur = College, Gwen = White as in Guiniviere), whose name eventually became “Curwen.” In an obscure footnote toward the end of the book he noted that the name had variants: Curwin, Korman, and Corman.
Then his wife died.
He couldn’t find a scholarly house for his
Glimpses of Immortality,
but as a popular occult book it brought him serious coin. He suggested that the purification by fire motif in alchemy might actually work. He suggested that some of the long-lived alchemist like Count St. Germain or Ludvig Prinn might have discovered the real process. A trio of popular books followed. Dr. Corman became big man on the New Age lecture circuit—and, since he gave his hefty fees to antiwar charities, became something of a saint to some.
Then the year he hired the actor, he had to find an even less stringent publisher. His remaining books became collections of odd events and Fortean moments suggesting that alchemists know how to be immortal and they work for some ultramundane group of powers that want to change the consciousness of the world, one “endarkenment” at a time. The books are full of standard New Age tropes—the hundredth monkey, morphic fields, pyramid power, ancient astronauts. His employers at the University were not amused. However, he scarcely seemed to mind.
I spoke with some people in the anthropology department. Dr. Corman became neglectful of dress and hygiene. He browsed the personal papers of Aleister Crowley, which are part of the University of Texas HRC collection. He may have bought drugs from students. He may have
sold
drugs to students. However, tenure doth protect the odd and odder.
He finally went too far. His class “The Alchemical Tradition: East and West” met one night in the middle of the football stadium to “Open a Gateway to the Gatekeeper.” Nude coeds and a goat were said to be involved. You can risk your reputation as a scholar, but you can never risk the reputation of football. The apparently risqué sexual magic (or perhaps I should write “magick”) was enough for the Regents to ask Dr. Corman never to return. The next year one of the physics professors went off the deep end and shot some students from the infamous clocktower. Some uncharitable types speculated on a connection between the two rogue faculty members.
His last books degenerated into collections of speculation and paranormal incidents. Lovecraft’s agent Julius Schwartz points out a freakish bird death to Eric Frank Russell, and the latter writes
Sinister Barrier.
A researcher vanishes from dolphin studies, a peculiar clown festival in Miroclaw, Fortean happenings in the Sesqua Valley. He randomly gives fragments of spells and sections from outlandishly named grimoires. I made a note of a phrase of recognition between Yog-Sothoth followers; I felt it might come in handy.
When the Fourth rolled around again I bought a very powerful LED flashlight. I wanted to meet the man on the hill. I realized this was a dangerous idea, but I have always been attracted to danger. Dangerous drugs and dangerous women, fireworks and mountain climbing, interviewing gang members and extreme religious types. I was not the sensible one in my family. I lit the four- and five-inch shells and lit one of the finale racks, which launch eighty three-inch shells in less than a minute. You light it, run, and fall backwards to see the red, lilac, white, silver, and gold you have painted the sky with. Sharon told me the news I wanted to hear. There had been a dud, one of the four-inch shells. I told everybody that I was climbing Beacon Hill to look for it. I moved quickly before anyone could realize that might not be the smartest idea.
It had been a wearingly hot day, and the dry smoky air was thick with the smell of gunpowder. Ragan and Clyde were putting out a little grass fire. Clyde’s sons were looking for the dud nearer the firing line (i.e., in the logical place). I grabbed a bucket (to put the dud in), a big glass of sweet tea, and my flashlight.
The hill proved easy to climb, and I came to a three-strand barbed-wire fence after I had gone about twenty feet into the sparse oak. Using the weight of my bucket, I pushed down the top strand and stepped over. I had been getting over barbed wire since I was ten. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas, where barbed had been invented, for Christ’s sake. Now logically the weather on either side of a barbed-wire fence should be the same, but logic didn’t hold near the Corman place. The air turned steamy and smelled of animals, like the reptile area of a zoo. Mist hung near the ground like milk, and I could hear jungle birds. I had never been in the jungles of Vietnam save through the miracle of movies, but I felt as though I had crossed to that place. I could hear tropical birds, and the base of the billboards looked like the creeper covered pylons of Angkor Wat.
I pointed the light at my face. I wanted him to see I was white. I was an American, although that knowledge hadn’t seemed to help with his girlfriend. The jungle grew thick. It took me twenty minutes to go up another fifty or so feet. I couldn’t hear anything from the firing line, as though a three-strand fence were effective soundproofing. I was unprepared for the loudness of the burst of machine fire. A small bright comet flashed above and to the left of me; bark exploded off a nearby trunk. My ears rang. Machine guns are much louder than exploding firework shells; then I realized that I had taken my earplugs out. I knew the solider was playing with me. He could have literally cut me in two at this range. I yelled the recognition phrase, “Kyron Yog-Sothoth Bolon Yokte’ K’uh!”
I expected the counter-sign of “Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin!” Instead, a solider stepped out from behind a live oak. He raised his machine gun and shot three rounds in the air. “That would impress my dad, but it’s not the password, Sarge,” he said. I turned my flashlight on him. I recognized Randall Hiram Corman from his yearbook picture. He was still nineteen. At first I thought he had put black greasepaint around his left eye, but I saw that a thick and wiry
fur
surrounded the eye. The pupil of the left eye was a vertical slit. “Well, Sarge, we have a problem, you and me, because of time.”
“Randy?” I asked.
“Private First Class Randall Corman, sir!”
I saw that his arm was in a green sling. The fur around his eye moved. It seemed to be a mass of feelers. “Not the handsome son of a bitch that you were expecting,” Private Corman remarked. There was a fallen log between us; with his free hand he motioned me to sit. I expected that the gunfire would bring the sheriff soon. Maybe I wasn’t in real danger. I hated the brilliance of my flashlight; I didn’t really want to see his eye.
I sat, and he sat next to me. Private Corman said, “I think I may have talked to other people since being stationed here. Sometimes my mind works a little. Didn’t you say you knew my dad? He teaches at UT.”
“Randy, do you know what year this is?”
“I saw the fireworks, so it’s July 4, 1973. I didn’t think I would last this long at Ngoc Linh. How’d they get fireworks? USO?”
“Randy, what did your father do to you?”
“He’s an old zawgyi these days. You want to know something funny? He could end war now. He knows all the angles. He knows how to eliminate the problem of humanity. Think he will?”
“Randy, we’re in the twenty-first century now. Do you know what your father did to your ashes?”
“‘After calcinations, the essential salts may be reassembled if the One-in-All Re-Members the being. Care must be exercised for the purity of the salts, lest Otherness seep in.’ You know, I haven’t got a letter from Momma since I been here. I hate ’Nam. It’s Disneyland in reverse.”
“Randy, do you remember Jeanie Mae?”
“I’ve got her picture.”
He moved to lay down the M16. I saw what the cloth hid. He and the rifle were grown together like a Giger painting. Human, insect, gunmetal—all fused. He seemed confused that he couldn’t release the rifle. Finally he grabbed at his pocket with his free left hand. There was a mildewed wallet. He couldn’t open the wallet, which had mildewed shut. Finally he threw the thing away from him. He was crying. He stood up quickly and fired his machine gun at the wallet. I thought he was going to fire at me.
“You know I can’t point this thing at myself.”
He demonstrated his inability to point the weapon at himself. “The worst part is sometimes I think Their thoughts. Dad didn’t know that. What year did you say this was? 1976, I bet. Were those Bicentennial fireworks? Did we make it to the Bicentennial?”
“Yes. Randy. It was the Bicentennial.”
“Damn war has gone on too long.”
“It sure has, soldier.”
“You know, I can’t die. I tried once in Tokyo. Dad just starts me over. Can you tell Momma I’m OK? She’s back in Texas. My little town there is called Flapjack—can you believe that, Sarge?”
“I believe you, Randy.”
“Sarge, you don’t want to think Their thoughts. It makes the nights too long.”
“I bet it does, Randy.”
“Tell my dad just to end. He can end it all. My daddy is the most powerful man in the universe.” He sounded just like the eight-year-old blond boy he once was.
“I’ve got to move on, solider.”
“The password is
Kung Fu.
You ever watch that show, Sarge? I saw it on R-n-R.”
“Best show on TV,” I said.
“No,” said Private Corman. “The best show is
M*A*S*H.”
I saw that the shadow Randy Corman cast by my LED flashlight was much less human in shape than he seemed to be. I turned off the light because I didn’t really want to see it clearly. I knew that I didn’t want to remember this Fourth.
“I got to go now, son.” I said.
“Don’t let your meat loaf, Sarge.”
I stood up and headed down the hill. Just before I passed over the barbed wire I heard more gunfire. I wondered if he was shooting at me. I wondered if he was shooting at anything that existed in my world.
When I got to the firing line, Clyde’s sons had found the dud. Nobody said anything about gunfire. Of course, tonight of all nights gunfire might not be correctly identified. I helped finish the cleanup, digging up the rest of the cannons. Sharon asked me what had become of my bucket. I said I had dropped it in the dark and couldn’t find it. I looked up Beacon Hill, I thought I saw some lights flicker around the base of one of the billboards.
We drove home.
But I can’t quite
believe
in home anymore. I wonder if Randy’s father can end it all. The problem of humanity. I wonder if he understands the special hell he has made for his son. I wonder what Their thoughts are like, and some nights I wonder so long and hard that I think I might start to know.
(
For Walt DeBill
)
Slowness
Dr. Alberto Balsamo was a short man with a silver beard and an easy smile. But his smile left his face when Walter, the department secretary, told him “that man” was waiting for him in his office. He had been avoiding the too-earnest physician from Massachusetts for weeks. One does not reach old age without learning that there are people too full of life, whose very rapidity makes them a danger to others. However, one likewise learns that sometimes you have to face the music. Dr. Balsamo took a deep breath and walked into his own office. The doctor was standing by the bookcase reading the titles.
“Are you a Dante scholar, Dr. West?”
“I am afraid I have little time for the fine arts,” said Dr. Herbert West.
“That is a pity. What is life without art? Art slows life down—turns the great fire of time into a slow burn.”
“But doesn’t everything in the twentieth century urge us to increase the speed at which that fire burns?”
“You are no doubt correct about that, Dr. West. I am afraid I am somewhat the enemy of all things modern. Give me my Dante and my cats and my old brandy and I am a happy man.”
“But such great things are in the air! True, we saw the horror of the Great War, but Banting just synthesized insulin, Eddington verified General Relativity late this May. The world is expanding a thousandfold!”
“The Germans are fighting the Ruhr Reds, Mexico’s streets run red with revolution, Jews and Arabs are killing one another in Jerusalem, and what do we get?
Over the Hill to the Poorhouse
and
Way Down East.
”
“
Well, Doctor Balsamo, we also got
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
I regret to say I went and saw
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
four times when it showed in Arkham. I find I have a weakness for Dr. Jekyll.” The blond-haired doctor smiled.
“And also Dr. Caligari, my good doctor. The world has not been made better by mad physicians, I fear.”
“Well, I hope my visit will be brief and my madness excusable. I think you can give me a good deal of help in a current piece of research. Perhaps I have something to offer you as well.”