Free Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina

remember it well. Must have been a blow to you and your mother.”
    “She died with him, sir.” Look at the floor. Blink.
    “Ah. I’m certainly sorry to hear that.”
    “Quite all right, I was prepared. May I go now? Ought to be hitting the books, really. Time is money.”
    “Course, my boy. You drop by sometime. Whenever you want to talk about your future again. That’s why I’m here.”
    It sure as hell is. “Thank you, sir.” Walking across the room, rucksack slapping against his shoulder, almost to the door.
    “Oh, unh, Mr. Pappadopoulass . . . ”
    “Yes sir?”
    “We, unh, forgot the matter of your fee. The one fo’ late registration.”
    Be cool, you’ll get revenge. “Of course. Terribly sorry, must have been distracted.”
    Look at him. Benevolent smile. White hair of the sage. Actually looks the part. Playing with pebbles. Wonder will his penie calcify, break off?

4
    But at quite another level, marking an entirely different breed of university time, right there on the listing top floor of Polygon Hall, he found the lean, ever-esoteric figure of Calvin Blacknesse. Gnossos discovered him where perhaps he’d been waiting all the while, posing beneatha grand mansard skylight in his lambent whitewashed studio, the very walls of which were impregnated by the odors of linseed oil, turpentine, paint, sizing, incense, and rosewater. Old Blacknesse, the only advising buddy who had paused, then failed to give his teacherly blessing on the voyage out across the asphalt seas; who had cautioned against the plotting friendship of G. Alonso Oeuf; who alone had warned him to beware the paradoxical snares of Exemption. In failing to subscribe or bear approving witness, he had become Gnossos’ only ear, the single object of introspective phrase. To him alone could the wanderer speak secrets.
    Now he stood with serene but ambiguous late-afternoon patience, wearing his linen mandarin jacket, sketching an eye in the hand of the dark goddess. Out of many thousand lines of light and gloom emerged small heads and skulls absent of some otherwise requisite feature: a mouth, or a nose. Here and there fanged monkey-demons hovered, the Eastern brethren of the gargoyles, who had been driven screaming, holding their horns, from all the celestial majesty of the Christian West. Around him were his stacked canvas, never static, always in flux, sections being painted out and annihilated with the same pitch and rhythm as the ones taking on substance. The demolition of self. A sucking vortex, Gnossos always reasoned, the diameter of which narrowed over the years, pulled closer to the pinpoint when creation and destruction were one. Then, with any luck, he’d die.
    “You’re all right?” came the easy question.
    “Hung, man. And constipated. How come you didn’t answer any letters?” Gnossos taking a seat on a fish-shaped stone. Its pocked surface was dappled with dyes.
    “They were more epistles than letters, yes? And we knew we’d see you again.”
    “Come on, you didn’t think I was dead? Along with the rest of Mentor?”
    Blacknesse laying the delicate graphite sticks on a piece of dried cobraskin: “No, Gnossos, not really. Your end could hardly have come in the rumored manner. A little at a time perhaps. By your own hand?”
    Sucking the barrel of a double twelve. Slugs or birdshot? “Thirty below when I got lost, man, can you imagine?”
    “No. By fire perhaps, but never by ice. I don’t need references for that one.” Blacknesse smiling the smile he had learned in India, setting a saucepan on his mauve hotplate for tea. Mauve, of course. No object so totally defined that it should elude decoration. One day, no doubt, the hotplatewould shudder, shake off its stasis, stand up, stumble out the door, and flop into Maeander with a violent, sputtering sizzle.
    “I’ve got some cinnamon sticks, if you want.” Feeling around through the hodgepodge of contents in his rucksack, coming against the jar of pot seeds,