Up The Line

3.

I found out a lot later that he also worked part time in the Time Service. That was a real shocker, because I always thought of Time Servicemen as stuffy, upright, hopelessly virtuous types, square-jawed and clean-cut — overgrown Boy Scouts. And my black guru was and is anything but that. Of course, I had a lot to learn about the Time Service, as well as about Sam.

Since I had a few hours to kill in the sniffer palace he let me have a mask, free, and piped cheery hallucinations to me. When I came up and out, Sam and Helen and Betsy were dressed and ready to go. I had trouble recognizing the girls with their clothes on. Betsy for bosoms, was my mnemonic, but in their Missionary sheaths they were indistinguishable. We all went down three levels to Sam’s place and plugged in. As the good fumes rose and clothes dropped away, I found Betsy again and we did what you might have expected us to do, and I discovered that eight nightly hours of total immersion in a tank of cognac gave her skin a certain burnished glow and did not affect her sensory responses in any negative way.

Then we sat in a droopy circle and smoked weed and the guru drew me out.

“I am a graduate student in Byzantine history,” I declared.

“Fine, fine. Been there?”

“To Istanbul? Five trips.”

“Not Istanbul. Constantinople.”

“Same place,” I said.

“Is it?”

“Oh,” I said. “Constantinople. Very expensive.”

“Not always,” said black Sam. He touched his thumb to the ignition of a new weed, leaned forward tenderly, put it between my lips. “Have you come to Under New Orleans to study Byzantine history?”

“I came to run away from my job.”

“Tired of Byzantium so soon?”

“Tired of being third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper.”

“You said you were—”

“I know. Byzantine is what I study. Law clerk is what I do. Did.”

“Why?”

“My uncle is Justice Elliott of the U.S. Higher Supreme Court. He thought I ought to get into a decent line of work.”

“You don’t have to go to law school to be a law clerk?”

“Not any more,” I explained. “The machines do all the data retrieval, anyway. The clerks are just courtiers. They congratulate the judge on his brilliance, procure for him, submit to him, and so forth. I stuck it for eight days and podded out.”

“You have troubles,” Sam said sagely.

“Yes. I’ve got a simultaneous attack of restlessness, Weltschmerz, tax liens, and unfocused ambition.”

“Want to try for tertiary syphilis?” Helen asked.

“Not just now.”

“If you had a chance to attain your heart’s desire,” said Sam, “would you take it?”

“I don’t know what my heart’s desire is.”

“Is that what you mean when you say you’re suffering from unfocused ambitions?”

“Part of it.”

“If you knew what your heart’s desire was, would you lift a finger to seize it?”

“I would,” I said.

“I hope you mean that,” Sam told me, “because if you don’t, you’ll have your bluff called. Just stick around here.”

He said it very aggressively. He was going to force happiness on me whether I liked it or not.

We switched partners and I made it with Helen, who had a firm white tight backside and was a virtuoso of the interior muscles. Nevertheless she was not my heart’s desire. Sam gave me a three-hour sleepo and took the girls home. In the morning, after a scrub, I inspected the suite and observed that it was decorated with artifacts of many times and places: a Sumerian clay tablet, a stirrup cup from Peru, a goblet of Roman glass, a string of Egyptian faience beads, a medieval mace and suit of chain mail, several copies of The New-York Times from 1852 and 1853, a shelf of books bound in blind-stamped calf, two Iroquois false-face masks, an immense array of Africana, and a good deal else, cluttering every available alcove, aperture, and orifice. In my fuddled way I assumed that Sam had antiquarian leanings and drew no deeper conclusions. A week later I noticed that everything in his collection seemed newly made. He is a forger of antiquities, I told myself. “I am a part-time employee of the Time Service,” black Sam insisted.