Gaudeamus Read online

  The ongoing story itself was set in wildly inconsistent locations—if there were two characters talking, say O. B. Joyful and Harris McParris, in the first shot they might be whispering with heads together in a coffeehouse, in the following middle-distance shot they might be in tuxedos riding a camel across a desert as McParris turned around to address Joyful, Joyful’s reaction shot might show him (her, it? The character was as sexless as Tweetie Bird) in a grass skirt in a polar waste, and then the two characters might laugh together about the answer in shorts and t-shirts, obviously in a movie theater, with their feet up on the seats in front of them and a big bucket of popcorn between them.

  The characters bore about as much resemblance to any real living beings as the characters in Pogo, Krazy Kat, or Bloom County; there was no character named Gaudeamus (though O. B. Joyful might be a pun on it) and there was no known reason why the thing was called that, except, perhaps, that it made those of us who liked it unreasonably happy.

  The plot was intricate and complex, with a heavy dose of political or social satire. For example, Gaudeamus fans heard about the Monica Lewinsky affair about three days before Matt Drudge, if they clicked on the book on one shelf in one scene (the title was Fat Beaver and the Cigar of Joy). The week that Travis dropped by, in late October 1997, many of the fans were complaining, in the many dedicated Usenet groups and online bulletin boards, that Gaudeamus was getting too morbid and into very bad taste, because it contained many references to the ongoing hunt for the Hardware Store Killer.

  The main Usenet Gaudeamus group had around two hundred postings per hour, round the clock, from all over the world, so that no one could hope to follow all of that.

  As far as anyone could tell, the one and only creator was Richard Reno, who had drawn a panel called Gaudeamus from November 1978 through June 1981 at Moloch College in Indiana—in fact I’d read it in its early paper incarnation, because Travis and I had had a fling with two girls that went to Moloch.

  Several of the major characters were the same, or had the same names and seemed to be the same idea allowing more than ten years’ drift in drawing style and ideas. But it was impossible to prove that Richard Reno had even been on the planet between June 9, 1981, when he was photographed at the Moloch College graduation, and August 6, 1993, when Gaudeamus appeared on the web.

  When Gaudeamus vanished again, it went so suddenly that there was practically no evidence of its passing; within a short time everyone forgot that there had ever been such a thing. Nowadays radio guys refer to it as a trivia question on those 80s-90s mix stations. But this was in 1997, and I had been following Gaudeamus for a couple of years already, and there was no sign that it was going to go away; it was eternally there, like Montgomery Ward, the Soviet Union, or Johnny Carson. And in 1997, I think three-quarters of the professional writers in America were following it, with at least as much devotion as Sluggy Freelance got a few years later.

  It was not only that Gaudeamus was funny and dramatic and sad, silly an instant before it was touching, strangely moving and exciting so that many people confessed to having Gaudeamus daydreams. Every good comic had always been like that.

  Nor was it just that it was so amazingly alive in a way that reminded you of how strange our own world is, or the weirdly consistent physics that somehow reminded me—without being directly like—the odd extra joints in the middle of their insteps that people have in Don Martin drawings. It felt like a world that lived more than our own, like classic cartoons from back when studios could afford armies of in-betweeners to make every petal on every flower wave separately. You could come up with pages of comparisons and not really get what it was like. Surreal as Fleischer’s Betty Boop, political as Pogo, an eternally continued open-ended novel like Bruno or Gasoline Alley, a glimpse into the eternal present like Calvin and Hobbes or the later Roadrunners, a bitter sneer at an ugly world like Li’l Abner, brave and hopeful as Peanuts and dark as The Watchmen: all that with characters who combined the exuberant silliness of Bugs Bunny, the “Whatever!” acceptance of the Three Stooges, the never-say-die courage of Goofy, and the anarchic defiance of Hekyll and Jekyll. Think of all of that, all at once, seamlessly, and now you are nowhere near what it was like.

  You just had to be there.

  So anyway, this particular morning, I had been trying to make myself want to sit down and explain daisite, and why it’s such thoroughly horrible stuff. And I didn’t feel like writing that, but if I could do two pages of that, I could then return to Kit Miles, who was a character I really liked, in a scene with another character I really liked, and then eight pages would just fly out and I’d be all set to go swim a mile and have breakfast at the Quarter Circle with my conscience clear. But I just couldn’t stand to even type the word “daisite” again, and something about the phrase “spraying molten metal and burning sulfur into human flesh” wasn’t quite singing as it should.

  And my escape, as it so often was from everything else that wasn’t going well that year, was Gaudeamus. This morning seemed to be the bridge between two sequences. Usually I wasn’t as fond of the sequences that were Ower Gyro’s dreams, but this one was better than average. Ower Gyro was tucked into bed, looking like Ower Gyro—a sour-faced middle-aged squirrel in a baby bonnet—sound asleep. The viewpoint panned the room, and I saw that he had a picture of Merle the Killer Squirrel (whom O. B. Joyful had gunned down in the Christmas episode the year before) on his nightstand next to an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. I clicked on the ashtray and found a link to the official web page for E.T. with a note that said “He was here but he doesn’t look like this.” I clicked on Merle and discovered that I could download an mp3 of a song called “Gone But Not Too Gone,” from a band called Skin2Skin. Nothing interesting so far, or at least nothing I got.

  Then the image wavered in the way that denoted the start of a dream. Ower Gyro dreamed of God sitting at the computer, using a mouse—a real one, his tail tied in a shoelace knot to a wire that led into the computer. God was playing a dirty video game called “Who Fux Hu,” and on the computer screen Cindy Lou Who was riding astride the Chinese politician. A caption read “Who Gets Past First.” There was nothing to click on.

  God pulled off a mask to reveal that he was actually O. B. Joyful. The scene cut back to reality as Ower Gyro sat up in bed, tearing off his baby bonnet, and then looking at the alarm clock: 3:00 A.M. Next to the alarm clock, where the ashtray and the photo of Merle had been, there was now a small white box, about the size of a cable box, with three LED readouts; the readouts spelled out GAUDEAMUS across them. That white box was the only clickable artifact on the screen, so I clicked it. My screen went solid blue except for a blinking white message: “GAUDEAMUS. Password?” Beneath that was a blinking entry line.

  I tried entering “Gaudeamus” and got back “NO ACCESS. HAVE A NICE DAY. GAUDEAMUS!”

  Well, everyone had to admit that there was some large percentage of Gaudeamus that they just didn’t get. Obviously this was one of those for me. Kara and I were having lunch with Melody Wallace today, and Melody was Western State’s other semiotician besides me, and a big Gaudeamus. fan. Maybe she’d have seen something I didn’t.

  With a sigh, I clicked on the Word icon, cranked up my Walkman, and typed:

  “ … carries the burning sulfur deep inside the flesh”

  and looked to see if I could get by with just that much—daisite was just a digression. All I really needed at that point was to say “French-made incendiary grenades” and let it go, but I have a hard time trusting people to be interested in things without my supplying an enormous load of context.

  Oh, hell, supplying context was my life, if you came right down to it. I liked teaching humanities classes, and writing novels rather than short stories, and working out the unseen areas offstage of all my sets. My friends are always demanding that I get on with the story and stop telling them who everything and everybody is in it.

  I opened a new file and typed in

  IDEA:r />
  STORY BEGINNING:

  The Last Ride of Context Man

  by John Barnes

  He never knew how to start a story because the beginning needed a context, and the context demanded an earlier beginning, and in ten minutes he’d be all the way back to the big bang.

  The doorbell rang, and I heard it faintly over Alanis Morissette. At least I thought it rang, and that was good enough. I turned off the Walkman, got up, and hurried all the way upstairs, through the tiny kitchen and into the dark living room.

  I thought it was going to be Ben and his snow shovel, which would mean a much better day than it looked like being, but when I flipped on the porch light and opened the door, Travis Bismarck was standing there, holding a big duffel bag, just as if it hadn’t been five years since I’d seen him last, and at that moment I already knew that he’d be asking me to drive him somewhere, and that I would do it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was so ready for the pretty, Christmas-card-y scene that Colorado Street always is after a fresh snow that I was startled to see just a light scattering of crusted gray corn snow on my flowerbeds, left over from an inch that had fallen earlier that week. The walks and street were clean and dry.

  Then I realized with a start who this person who was not Ben was. “Travis Bismarck.”

  “Right,” he said, imitating the way I say it. For some reason people have made fun of that, since I was quite young.

  At that hour, every street in Gunnison is quiet. Not just “the occasional car passing” quiet. Really quiet. No moving cars, no people. You’re more likely, even in the middle of town, to see a deer than to meet a neighbor.

  Travis stood in the hard-edged yellow downlight of my porch’s overhead flood, looking like a sentimentalized painting of himself. That’s what light in warm colors with sharp shadowing will do. (I would need to remember this to use as an example in teaching lighting class, when my sabbatical was over.)

  Travis is just over six feet tall with no extra fat, long in the legs and arms, narrow all the way down, with muscles that are flat and hard more than bulging and thick. I’d sparred with him in a few different martial arts here and there, and though, if I got him cornered, I could pound his guard down and then manhandle him, first I had to catch him, which was unlikely. I was far too slow ever to foot-sweep him or beat him to a punch.

  He has coarse, planar features, but smooth soft skin, as if the sculptor had said well, fuck the detail work, I’ll just go right to the sanding. His nose, like mine, is a little frog-button that barely keeps his eyes from scrambling in the middle. But he has a strong, square jaw, his hair is black without the aid of dye, his face doesn’t bag and wrinkle and run down the front of his skull the way mine does, and he has marvelous, clear, piercing blue eyes. He always looked handsome standing next to me, and now he looks fifteen years younger than I do. And he’s four years older, may God fling his filthy soul onto the hottest coals in hell.

  For five years, our communications had been a few Christmas cards and a couple of late-night drunk dials.

  “Well, come on in.” His boots were clean, so I motioned him to Kara’s huge old futon couch and said, “All right, what brings you to my door?”

  “Well, a nice old boy driving a load of cows from Saguache on up to some ranch by Crested Butte brought me most of the way. I hitched a ride into Gunnison—still had your address in my electronic palm dingus, and was about to tell that trucker to dump me at the four corners and I’d look around for somewhere to get coffee and directions, when I saw the sign for Colorado Street, and had him let me out.

  “So then I just walked on up here, saw you had a light on in the basement, thought maybe you were up early writing—or up late—and rang your bell. I would’ve called ahead but I wasn’t even sure I’d be stopping in Gunnison; it kind of depended on where my ride turned off. And I didn’t want to wake you up. But when I saw that your light was on down there, and knowing two writers live here, I figured either you’d let me in or old Kara would.”

  “And you were right,” I admitted. “I have no judgment where old friends are concerned, and she has an irrational desire to populate the house with vagrants. Anyway, try not to look around too much. The place is a fucking sty. Are you up late or up early?”

  “Up late. Gonna be up longer, too.”

  “Coffee, or Wild Turkey?”

  “Let’s compromise and do both,” he said, which had always been our mutual favorite slogan. “Double up the Turkey. You’re up early to write, not late to finish, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you got any of that Pure Black Evil you drink while you write?”

  “I like to be able to taste coffee, not just warm brown water.” I went back to the kitchen, poured another big mug of nice fierce coffee for me, then poured one for Trav and added his two shots of Wild Turkey.

  I settled back into a big papasan chair that Kara usually sat in, facing Travis, and took a glorious sip of coffee, realizing that I was not going to have to explain daisite, shovel snow, or swim, for several hours at least. The day was starting off great.

  “So, John, is the little woman asleep?”

  “Kara’s asleep,” I said, “and that might be the stupidest possible thing you could call her.”

  “God knows why, John, but your lovely wife forgives me.”

  “She says you amuse her. She says the same thing about the guy that eats live chickens in the sideshow, by the way.” Kara liked Travis, which was a puzzlement to me. My first wife had hated him, and I certainly understood that. But no matter who liked him, or not, he has stayed in my life longer than both of them, and all the girlfriends between, all put together.

  I got married just a couple years after graduating from college, and started my alternation between getting tired of good jobs and getting tired of grad school. By then Travis was just finishing his second stint in the Army and trying to start his business as a private detective. Trav and I stayed in touch but not as much; he had decided to set up in Billings, Montana, and we lived in St. Louis and then in New Orleans. Besides, my first wife thought he was a jerk, and definitely not the kind of friend her husband was supposed to have.

  But then after a while we moved to Missoula, and even though that’s 350 miles from Billings, Westerners don’t think of that as much of a distance. (Hell, we used to drive to Spokane and back, about four hundred miles round-trip, for a decent Chinese dinner and a chance to see a movie the first weekend it was out.) So Travis and I saw more of each other—he’d drop by for the Missoula science fiction convention, or I’d be over there for some academic conference at Eastern Montana College, or he’d come out to see a Montana Repertory performance if I was road-teching, or we’d go to some ski area in between on a weekend. One way or another we were in touch.

  Then I moved to Pittsburgh, and I’d see Travis whenever missing persons cases took him that way, or whenever Kara and I took a trip up to Montana. (We did our honeymoon up there, and went through Billings on our way west; after all these years, Kara and I can still crack each other up by referring to our night in Billings, the second night of our marriage, which involved Travis, the Worst Country Band On The Planet, a pack of very obese coyotes, and “okay, so let the blind guy drive.” But that’s an entirely different story.)

  The last time I’d seen Travis in the flesh had been when he was tracking a deadbeat dad in the northern part of West Virginia, and had stopped in for an evening to visit Kara and me; it was during the ten days or so while we were packing to move out of Pittsburgh, off to my new job in Gunnison.

  We’d stopped long enough to clean up and grab a meal with Travis at the Star of India, near the Carnegie, a great little restaurant which was kind of a magnet for events in my life. It was there that I’d started writing One For the Morning Glory, successfully hit on a Norwegian grad student in robotics by getting into a conversation about glue, planned a huge all-day-long outdoor theatre cycle with four friends (it was never produced, foundations hav
ing no vision and us having no money), told my parents I was going to marry Kara, and broken up with a stripper. Not all on the same night, by the way.

  Looking back, that evening at the Star of India might have foreshadowed something, if anything had happened connected with that evening, instead of the utterly different things I’m reporting in this book.

  Travis and I were now both five years older, and none of it showed on him; all ten of it showed on me, I’m afraid. Small college theatre professors work a lot of hours. I was glad to see him but he could have had the decency to be a bit less of a contrast to me. “Okay, Travis, why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s because your old man was too impatient to go to the drugstore.”

  “Damn. Another corny joke shot to hell with overuse. Well, all right. You’ve always been willing to give me a ride when I needed one, and I don’t forget that.” He took a big swallow of his coffee-and-Turkey, about half the cup I would judge, which would have made my eyes sting and my head ring—I keep my coffee at least as hot as McDonald’s keeps the stuff they use for giving old ladies third-degree burns in the crotch. Add that much good whiskey and it will open up your sinuses right through the top of your head.

  “Travis,” I said, “of course you don’t forget that I give you rides when you need them. Sometimes you need another ride. And within reason, you’re welcome; I have to go to Denver tonight anyway.”