In Other Worlds by A. A. Attanasio

Author:A. A. Attanasio [Attanasio, A. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-02-22T18:24:32+00:00

The headlines glared from where they lay on -the mail carriage that 'clanked by Zeke Zhdarnov's room six days a week. He wasn't allowed newspapers-they fed his delusions-but Chad, the attendant, usually placed the papers on top. of the mail carriage and left it where Zeke could read them through the steel mesh of the door.

Lately Zeke had not been coming to the cage door. He was dreamward again--inspelled, he called it. Dr. Blau said it was catatonia simplex. For Chad, big gladsome Chad, it was the prelude to Out, that wakeful, brotherly, and voluble state Zeke got into after inspelling. He came out of his trances hungry for human contact. And Chad was always happy to face into his light-yearlong stare and listen to his mild, almost fatherly rantings about ghost holes, inertial waves, and infinity.

Chad was happy to indulge this lunacy because when the old man was through he was in a grateful mood and he always showed his gratitude by naming -a winner in the next day's Daily. Chad never told him that he played the horses, the old man just told him the winners' names on his own. And he was always right. The winners were invariably low-paying odds, but Chad had become accustomed to the regular stipend. And he'd learned not to question, Zeke-the old man babbled like, a washer-cracked faucet anywhere near a question. And, of course, he never told anyone else. It would have watered his odds at the track, and no one would really have believed him anyway.

He'd seen the old man do wilder magic than horsebetting with Dr. Blau, the chief of staff, and no one was impressed. Like the time Zeke knew everything about Dr. Blau, even his family secrets from the Great War, and the chief of staff explained it away as an afflux of the collective unconscious and ordered the old man shot up with depressants.

But drugs didn't affect him. After the shots, Zeke slumped to sleep,, and once the staff were gone he'd get up. When Zeke was medicated, Chad sometimes pretended to work in the rose garden, near the vine-knotted trellis from where, with the slant of the afternoon rays, he could see into Zeke's room. The old man moved about his cubicle with slow-motion ecstasy, arms held up limply like an orangutan's, face luminous as a child's. He was talking with the cosmos.

Zeke, naturally, was not really an old man. He was thirty-six. But in the last two years every strand of his black hair had gone white, and he had grown a full beard that on his brawny frame made him look like an aged mountain peasant.

He himself no longer knew if he was mad. And he didn't care. He had tapped a creative surge within himself that endowed him with a calm self-absorption. The surge was cosmic. It'waved through him with the rhythms of cloud-shadows, the spill of the wind. He couldn't predict or command it, but when the surge was on him, everything seemed possible.

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