Gaudeamus Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ALSO BY JOHN BARNES FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  ASHLEY GRAYSON,

  AND TO

  PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN,

  WHO WAITED SUCH A LONG TIME

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the thirty years I’ve known Travis Bismarck, since my second day at college, he has never driven himself if he could beg some poor fool into driving him. I’ve often been the fool. So at five-fifteen one morning not long before the turn of the millennium, he rang my doorbell to talk me into giving him a ride to Denver, and fool that I am, I opened the door and welcomed him in and said yes.

  I hadn’t seen Travis in five years. When the bell rang, I thought it was going to be my neighbor, Ben, looking for some company to shovel walks with and then grab some coffee after.

  Most of that year, I got up really early. I had taken a year off without pay from teaching, trying to finish a scholarly book, expecting a quiet year, and then stuff had happened non-stop. The novel that was supposed to finance the whole year took far too long to finish, and then the British publisher who had commissioned it stiffed me. Kara, to whom I was married at the time, went through some very scary surgery and they put her on a strange cocktail of drugs with odd side effects. An old friend’s wife died, he lost his house, and he ended up sleeping on my couch for a couple months before writing a screenplay, becoming wealthy overnight, and moving to Idaho to marry a high school girl. Just one of those years we all have now and then, but I was having it right then, and it sucked.

  Anyway, I was in serious need of money, and I have shitty getting-rich instincts but great stay-eating instincts, so all the bells in my head were ringing “get to work, get to work, get to work” and I had books to finish. My eyes would slam open like a garage door coming unstuck at four-thirty every morning.

  Well, meanwhile, back at the start of the story: I was down in my office in the basement, at five-fifteen in the morning, with a cup of the thick heavy black coffee I prefer when I’m writing regularly. I had Jagged Little Pill on the Walkman, big fuzzy Where the Wild Things Are slippers on my feet, and my usual writing outfit of an Anderson’s of Maumee (a grain elevator company near my hometown) sweatshirt and gesso-spattered black sweatpants. I had been there since about 4:40, allowing for time to trip off the coffeemaker and take a leak before sitting down. I was just on the point of promising myself that, now that I had written the one page I wrote before doing anything else, checked email, and found all the hidden icons in that day’s Gaudeamus, I would actually do some work. If I was a good boy and got ten pages by seven A.M., I was going to treat myself to a swim at the college and follow it up with breakfast at the Quarter Circle.

  At that point I was working on the redraft of the novel I’d been stiffed on, so my agent could go out and peddle it to American publishers. I was staring at a page of research, trying to make myself want to type the next three sentences, which needed to be about daisite. Daisite is a thermite—nasty evil stuff even for a thermite, invented by the French for use on natives and Germans. It sets fires that are almost impossible to put out and burns human beings in a distinctive, horrible way. I needed to mention that without going into details just yet because the complete gross-out scene wasn’t supposed to happen for another fifteen pages or so.

  When I heard the doorbell, I thought it was Ben, and I should be ashamed how glad I was, considering how many better things I should have been doing than shoveling snow.

  It’s a rare fall in Gunnison when you don’t see some serious snow in October. I hadn’t yet looked out the window that morning but if snow had fallen, then Ben, who looks after that neighborhood like a building super with OCD, would be by, shovel in his hand, big happy grin on his face.

  The fall after I bought that house, I had discovered that Ben shoveled everyone’s front walk as soon as it snowed; he did mine that first day.

  I had said, “Aw, Ben, don’t do that.”

  “It’s easier to shovel while it’s fresh-fallen, before anybody’s walked on it.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you shouldn’t have to shovel my walk.”

  “It’s not that I have to. It just needs to be done, and I happen to be out here when it’s easiest to do it, so it’s easier for the whole world, on the average, if I do it.”

  “Well,” I said, Calvinist guilt gripping me like a vise, “uh, hey.” Stupidly forgetting that in the rural West, people expect you to keep your word, I had added, “In that case, it’ll be easier if you have help. So next time, if you see my office light on—the second window from the back on the north side of my basement—ring my bell, and let me come on out and help.”

  Three days after that my bell rang at four forty-five and I broke from a gruesome decapitation scene to spend three hours throwing snow with Ben. We got both sides of the whole block and all the walks up to the porches. The sun was just coming up as we walked down Colorado Street to Daylight Donuts for a whacking dose of sugar and caffeine.

  It was better exercise than swimming, with more company. I had even admitted that I enjoyed it, so it didn’t even feel very virtuous anymore.

  So the bell rang. Okay, here I am at the start of the story again. The bell rang. Now, this time, I’m really going on.

  I was just thinking about how to explain that all thermites release molten metal, usually iron or copper, and that adding sulfur to a thermite makes it spatter molten metal around, and the molten metal carries the sulfur right through flesh to give deep disfiguring horrible burns, and I was already bored.

  I thought I heard the bell through Alanis Morissette wailing in the headphones, and charged up the steps, eager for something to do that wasn’t writing.

  It wasn’t Ben, it was Travis. Who I’ve known for thirty years and given so many rides to.

  The contrast between Ben whom I expected and Travis whom I didn’t won’t mean anything unless I also explain who Travis Bismarck was. And is. He’s still alive, despite the efforts of some people who come into the story later. There’s going to be some violence. Sex too. Stick around.

  I first met Travis Bismarck in August of 1975 in Rubelmann Dorm at Washington University in St. Louis, where we were both freshmen on the same floor. He was twenty-two, old enough to be a senior, but he’d done four years in the Army first. He was immediately interested in me because I was one of the few
freshmen with a car; I’d come to St. Louis in June, and taken a job selling radio ads, and you really need a car for that.

  Trav was an anomaly. In 1975 at Wash U, freshman dorm floors were jammed with frustrated long-haired free spirits. They had missed everything: already, Nixon had resigned, Saigon had fallen, and most of the bands had broken up. My fellow students, who were all set for it to be 1968 again, didn’t have any way to know how good the times actually were: the drinking age was eighteen, pot was as tolerated as it ever got, you could dance to disco as opposed to having a hippie spaz attack, punk and wave were coming in, and it was post-Pill and pre-AIDS.

  Trav tried to fit in, letting his hair grow out, wearing those silly loose-fitting three musketeers shirts, and so forth. But he was muscular, his posture reeked of sergeant, and he didn’t have the Holden Caulfield upper class there is nothing here I need to give a shit about drawl that most of the other kids had. In the vague and scrawny seventies (when only jocks and gays lifted, Alan Alda was a model of masculinity, and forty-year-old men were trying to teach themselves to begin every sentence with “uh, like”) he stood out like a racehorse in a herd of sheep.

  Most people called him “GI Joe” and avoided him. He tried to explain that he had spent most of his time at “Fort Nowhere, East Dakota. I cleaned my rifle, shined my boots, and smoked dope most of the time. I did half a year in Cheapundgoodbiersburg in West Germany, too, where I cleaned my rifle, shined my boots, and went out with fat blonde girls that couldn’t speak English but had good pot. Yeah, I went in while there was still fighting in Vietnam, but by the time I was out of Basic you had to volunteer to go, and Mama Bismarck didn’t raise no idiots, at least not no idiots idiotic enough to volunteer their way into ’Nam.”

  Somewhere during the following spring I realized that Travis’s double negatives, and saying ’Nam, and so forth were acquired camouflage to keep an upper-middle-class suburban boy from getting his skinny pink ass stomped flat. The truth was that Travis was from an affluent Dallas suburb. He’d gone to a prep school in New England and summer camp in Minnesota; his SAT scores were off the map; he had a trust fund. He said his motives for joining the Army were “forty percent James Jones, thirty percent Sartre, and twenty percent Errol Flynn.”

  Oh, he wasn’t a complete fake. Travis had been in the Army and was Texan, and he did have some authentic prole tastes. Fat girls, for instance. But who ever heard of a redneck Texan that didn’t like to drive?

  Freshman year, Travis and I developed a pattern. I’d drive him out to some place way out in the county that had Wild Turkey on special. He’d buy a case and give me a bottle of it. Then he’d use the booze to attract a girl or two to his room, get all of us roaring drunk, and tell preposterous tales of great overseas bars, getting laid in Mexican whorehouses, the awesome marijuana of Costa Rica, and so forth, till we all got too drunk to listen.

  His favorite stories were about the bizarre sexual behavior of Texans. Years later, driving from Raton to San Antonio in a single day with a busted car stereo, I amused myself for hours trying to figure out where, in all the miles and miles of miles and miles that you see there, all the pervs from Travis’s stories were hiding. Over that hill, perhaps, was a family reunion turning into a drunken orgy. Maybe, as I slowed momentarily on my way through the cluster of ten buildings with a town name sign and a single stop sign, I was passing the Baptist church in which the preacher had concealed a movie camera in the floor in front of the altar, with its lens flush with the floor and pointed upward, to take shots up skirts during altar calls. Perhaps that RANCH ACCESS NO SERVICES sign was the gravel road that led to the home of the wealthy rancher who kept six pigs, all named Barbara, in his house, bathed them daily in the same tub he used himself, and never, ever sold them. The small town of forty-five double-wides, a gas station, four churches, and two block-long facades of shops might harbor, somewhere, “the undertaker you never want to use for your daughter, John, swear to god, everyone for a hundred miles around knew it was true, the one time the head majorette at the high school in that town didn’t beat a train to the crossing, and that guy got the body, everybody said he put her back together prettier than she was in real life, but her own daddy checked that coffin after the viewing to make sure that old boy hadn’t kept no souvenirs. Honest to god and jesus and that whole crowd, John, I don’t make this stuff up.”

  Anyway, that was Travis, and I had driven Travis many places off and on for years, though not at all during the five years just before he rang my doorbell, at five-fifteen on an October morning not long before the turn of the millennium.

  Well, here we are at the start of the story again. I really am trying and stuff does happen in this story. It’s just that I promised some people I wouldn’t just make things up in this book, and nonfictional things make no sense without the context. So I keep giving context. I’ll stop soon.

  All right, so it was a very early morning, full of contrasts between the expected and the unexpected. I expected Ben and a snow shovel and I got Travis and a duffel bag. I expected to write a story and instead I got told one. Come to think of it, even Gaudeamus was unexpected that morning, and the truth is—I did promise to tell as much of it as I could—I wasn’t actually working on the book right at that moment, I was working on making myself get back to working on the book, after looking at Gaudeamus. And Gaudeamus was even more surprising than usual that morning.

  Writers don’t dress trendy or dance trendy, but they read trendy and they listen trendy; it has to do with what you can do in a small room in which you are trying to avoid writing. And Gaudeamus was trendy—oh, it was trendy. Somebody got me hooked on it, I thought Kara because she was in constant email touch with her very trendy Minneapolis friends, but she assures me that I got her hooked on it; she thought one of my grad school buddies introduced me to it, but it could also have been somebody I knew on GEnie.

  Anyway, I do remember for sure that I was hooked on Gaudeamus not long after we moved to Gunnison, and from then on it was a mandatory part of every day. By the time we bought our house, in the summer of 1996, it was a genuine phenomenon and it seemed like everybody and all six of his illegitimate brothers was always trying to introduce those of us who already knew about it to Gaudeamus.

  It’s weird how devoted so many of us were to Gaudeamus considering how forgotten it is now; one of those in-groupy things that flickers and goes, like Minneapolis in 1988, like Cathy Chamberlain’s one album, like The Rakehells of Heaven or Liberty Meadows. It was the kind of thing that might be discussed at a Renaissance or Heritage Weekend (Al Gore and Newt Gingrich both claimed that they followed it). An alt-weekly columnist might denounce it for its terrible attitude or praise it as the next big thing or complain that it was going downhill, only to get a note back from the editor saying “never heard of it—SIGNIFICANCE?” Somebody might leave a pile of the first year of Gaudeamus on CD with accessing instructions on a table outside a rave, and nine-tenths of them would end up like AOL coasters, but some of them would be on the projection screens at a goth gather the next week, and some of the wavs would find their way into a DJ’s mix.

  Places that had a “No Downloading Gaudeamus. at Peak Hours” rule included Sandia, CERN, and Livermore, but also the Centers for Disease Control, Lindesfarne, Industrial Light and Magic, Mother Jones, the NSA, Arcosanti-Banff, and Lucent’s Deep Black Facility. The poet laureate of the United States admitted that she was a fan but she didn’t understand it; the First Lady said it was an “ugly, ugly thing”; a Nobel laureate in economics used incidents from Gaudeamus to illustrate his BBC lecture series; one very tense night when it looked like Politically Incorrect might go up in an actual brawl, Bill Mahrer cracked an inside joke about that day’s Gaudeamus, and the whole thing fell into a gigglefest between Martha Stewart, Jack Welch, Anthony Hopkins, and a fat woman from PETA.

  And nowadays it’s at least as forgotten as Apollo 2000, Pugwash, My Name is Not Bitch, or Dyna-Soar.

  Gaudeamus was described, by th
e sort of people who are paid by Time or the Atlantic to explain trends to nonparticipants, as a “comic-book serial on the web,” an “interactive anime soap opera with footnotes,” “an online hybrid between a computer game and an editorial cartoon,” and “the product of one weird mind.” That last came closest.

  Each day at exactly 3:26 Mountain Time (the slugline was always in mountain time), it would be available for download from www.gaudeamusonline.com, a black web page with the single red word “Download” at the center in 18 point Courier. Click on that single word and you would download a self-unpacking compressed file—pure executable machine code, smart enough to know what operating system it was talking to. (That, and the fact that the phrase “One True” appeared in several notes in the code, gave me an idea that I’m still pumping money out of.) Once it got onto your PC or Mac, it locked up your system for seven to twelve minutes while it ran like a shrew on crack through a half meg of free space, generating a complex animated cartoon with many clickable objects.

  Most comparable self-unpacking stuff would have needed half an hour and three to five megs, or so my computer-jock friends told me, so whoever packed Gaudeamus was a genius in something other than satire. Several different things, if I understood what people who cared about stuff like that were telling me. Files like that should take weeks or months—or a large staff and a dedicated Cray—to create, and yet they sometimes referred to events as little as seven hours before posting time. If Richard Reno really was the sole creator, he must have animation, editing, and compression technology far beyond what was commercially available, and work faster than any artist anyone had ever heard of, to put Gaudeamus out on a daily schedule.

  The decompressed presentation would invite you to click on a start icon.

  That would launch a two-minute animated clip, a different one every day, loaded with icons. Clicking an icon might reveal panel comics (with headings like “earlier that day,” “what he was really thinking,” and “a random silly drawing”), short text essays (tightly edited tirades on everything from the way people treat their dogs to the failures of NASA to why high heels are sexy), photos of all kinds of things (sometimes the relation to the link was clear, but other times it was a complete mystery, just a picture of a fighter plane, or a bottle of ketchup, or a family standing in front of the Grand Canyon), and dead tree links to articles in dozens of publications, everything from Nature and Aviation Week and Space Technology to Double-D Hos, The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, and Direct Action!