Read Online Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina - Free Book Online Page B

me.”
    “Giacomo? From the Mafia?”
    “I used your name; he’s operating out of Miami now. And let’s not make a big thing out of it, I’m not exactly free to talk.”
    “Oh intrigue, Heffalump, beautiful. I saw your picture in some photographer’s last night. Very dramatic. And what about that little dyke chic with the Joan of Arc look?”
    “Goddammit, I’m in love with her.”
    “No.”
    “Oh shit, I’ll see you later,” and he stomped out the door for Anagram Hall. Has it bad, all right. Conjures up cafes with back rooms full of anarchists, smoke thick over crowded tables. Dens for impregnating rebel minds, conceiving attitudes, ferment, brush-fire wars.
Heff
, he hears his khaki commander telling him, an arm clasped to his own,
this is no longer a time of waiting. Take this zircon to Foppa and tell him we move tonight
. One fourth of his blood French. Corpuscles of his reason. Needs some Greekplasma. Feed him dolma, more goat cheese. Biochemical transfer. Alter his mind. Must find a hothouse, plant pot seeds.
    Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semiprecious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.
    But they forget me.
    “Yes sir, mister,” Dean Magnolia was saying, “that is correct. Five dollars.”
    “Extraordinary amount of money. You realize that being trapped on this ice floe I was telling you about, it was difficult, to say the least, to get back to Athené on time.”
    “I understan’ your situation, naturally. But nevertheless the administration has its regulations, an’ we must abide by them.”
    “I’ll have to give you silver dollars.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “United States silver dollars. Good at any Federal reserve bank.”
    “I don’t understand—”
    “Where they can be given in exchange for silver.”
    “Ah yes, of course.”
    “I trust you’ll take them?”
    “Don’t you have any paper money, Mr.—”
    “My last employer never used it. Germs.”
    “Is that right?”
    “You’d be surprised the amount of parasitic corruption gets spread through the handling of dollar bills. Osmosis. Still a theory, of course.”
    “You seem to have a great interest in medicine, Mr.—uh—”
    “I am going to be a cancer surgeon.”
    “Ah.”
    “Dig down, find a little disease, cut it out.”
    “I’m pleased to see you’ve come to a decision so soon. Many of your fellow students, they—”
    “Oh, I understand. They take so long making up their uncertain minds.”
    “Precisely.”
    “Drifting aimlessly down the many separate trails of youth, irresponsible, failing to choose the Proper Path in time. It must be frustrating to men such as yourself, having to put up guideposts, show the way, and all that.”
    Dean Magnolia swiveling in his chair, fondling a piece of petrified Saratoga Springs, “It is refreshing to have someone understand my position. Why, you’d be surprised, truly surprised, the number of unsympathetic young boys pass through this office year after year.”
    “I am not surprised, sir.” Distract the cat, cool the five bucks. “It is the symptom of the times. Unrest. Indecision. Waiting for Things To Happen. What the first Dr. Pappadopoulis called the Largesse Syndrome.”
    “First Dr., um—” rimless spectacles slipping down on the potato nose, leather chair creaking with shifted weight.
    “My father, sir. Died in the steaming jungles of Rangoon. UNESCO experiment. You read about it, perhaps, in the special
Times
supplement dedicated to his memory.”
    “I