Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read Free Page A

doingninety, and failed to make a curve. Fariña was thrown off, and killed.
    I called his house—no answer. Called the AP in Los Angeles—they couldn’t confirm anything for sure. It never occurred to me to call the hospital up there. I didn’t want to hear what they’d say. The only person I found in that night was a long-distance friend who’d also known him at Cornell. She didn’t have any more solid news than I did. Both still hoping, hope fading, we talked for a long time, into the middle of the night, about Fariña and the old days, in our voices the same mixture of exasperation and love most of us had always felt whenever his name came up. Finally, toward the end of the conversation, she laughed. “Just thought of something. If
that fucking Fariña
,” she said, “has only been seriously hurt—if he goes up to the edge of It, and then comes back, you realize—we’re
never
going to hear the end of it.”
    —T HOMAS P YNCHON

This one is for MIMI

“I must soon quit the Scene . . . ”
    Benjamin Franklin
in a letter to George Washington
March 5, 1780

BOOK
THE FIRST

1
    To Athené then.
    Young Gnossos Pappadopoulis, furry Pooh Bear, keeper of the flame, voyaged back from the asphalt seas of the great wasted land: oh highways U.S. 40 and unyielding 66, I am home to the glacier-gnawed gorges, the fingers of lakes, the golden girls of Westchester and Shaker Heights. See me loud with lies, big boots stomping, mind awash with schemes.
    Home to Athené, where Penelope has lain in an exalted ecstasy of infidelity, where Telemachus hates his father and aims a kick at his groin, where old, patient Argus trots out to greet his weary returning master and drives his fangs into a cramped leg, infecting with the froth of some feral, hydrophobic horror. Oh welcome,
    for home is the madman,
    home from his dreams
    and the satyr
    home to make hay,
    whether or not the sun shines, for in that well-hilled land of geological pressures and faults, there is always much rain.
    Banging up the steepest slope, shoving away mounds of cinder-spoiled snow with his hobnails, smelling of venison and rabbits, the anise odor of some Oriental liquor on his breath. No one has seen him (or if they have, there has been no acceptance of the impossible sight, for rumors have him dead of thirst, contorted on his back at the bottom of Bright Angel Trail, eyes gnawed out by wild Grand Canyon burros; fallen upon by tattooed pachucos and burned to death in the New Mexico night by a thousand cigarettes dipped in aqua regia; eaten by a shark in San Francisco Bay, a leg washed up in Venice West; G. Alonso Oeuf has him frozen blue in the Adirondacks), he stumbles back from its lakes now (found sitting on a bed of tender spruce boughs, his legs folded under him in the full lotus, a mysterious caste mark where his third eye would be, stark naked with an erection, discovered by the St. Regis Falls D.A.R. out on their winter bird walk).
    I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men’s minds. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I am the Dracula, look into my eye.
    Shuffling up an insipidly named Academae Avenue from the pea-green walls of the town’s Greyhound station, wrapped tightly in his parka (the blanket of Linus, the warmth of the woods, his portable womb), the rucksack packed thickly with the only possessions and necessities of his life: a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph, one hundred and sixty-nine silver dollars, a current 1958 calendar, eight vials of paregoric, a plastic sack of exotic seeds, a packet of grapevine leaves in a special humidor, a jar of feta, sections of wire coathanger to be used as shish kebab skewers, a boy scout shirt, two cinnamon sticks, a bottlecap from Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic, a change of