Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Jimmy recited the entire poem. Ann was thrilled that he knew the whole of “Kubla Khan” by heart. He was handsome, irresistible, his shaggy head aglow with the slanting light from his pole lamp, his faint lisp echoing like a subtle motif throughout. She could see Jimmy’s “flashing eyes, his floating hair.” At the end, she cried.
“That’s so beautiful.”
“Coleridge had already done it,” Jimmy said, flopping down on the couch. “Neither Keats nor Shelley, and certainly not Byron, could do better than ‘Kubla Khan.’ And that includes Wordsworth.”
“What’s all this about an empty bucket?” she said. “You’ve got that poem in it. What else do you need?”
Blotting her face with his shirttail, he said softly, “And which Romantic poet is the most quoted to this day, I ask you?”
“It’s Coleridge, isn’t it? ‘Water, water, everywhere . . .’”
“And the albatross! You can’t even walk across campus without stumbling over the fucking albatross.”
“The ancient mariner had an albatross around his neck, and you’ve got an empty bucket inside. Water, water, everywhere, but nothing in your bucket, Jimmy? That’s absurd.”
“Yeah.” A grin broke out. “You make me feel better.”
“You make me feel better.”
“You know, if Coleridge suddenly came back to life in the twentieth century, he would fit right in. He’d be so hip he’d be collaborating with the Beatles.”
“I heard that a new Beatles album is coming out the first of June.”
“Yeah, I heard. I love the Beatles. They could end the war.”
“Maybe they’ll know what to do about the albatross.”
They held each other tightly, and Ann felt sure he loved her. She would fill his bucket with love, although she knew that seemed soppy.
JIMMY SAID, “DID you hear what happened to Blankenship?”
“No, what?”
“He flunked an undergrad who begged him to change his grade because if he flunked out he’d be drafted. But Blankenship refused, said he had to abide by the rules. He had his principles. Well, Blankenship just the other day got word that this student was killed in Vietnam.”
“That’s terrible. He must feel awful.”
“But somebody else didn’t die. It evens out.”
“Oh, good, we’re supposed to be glad this prof condemned a student to his death.”
“Blankenship probably feels bad but rationalized his part in it. But there he is—prof in ivory tower demoting lowly minion to the battlefield because he wasn’t good enough for college.”
Ann had her eyes fixed on a bougainvillea vine—the rampant flowers devouring light and air.
THEY STOPPED TALKING about the war when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band arrived with the force of a church tent revival. It was the first week of June, and spring quarter exams loomed. The pervasive smell of citrus blossoms gave the campus a mellow, dreamy air, while the Beatles provided a whimsical yet revolutionary soundtrack. The new album overturned what Ann had been thinking about the study of literature, her background, her future. It seemed to throw everything onto a smiling, self-congratulatory merry-go-round of in-jokes and jests. She and Jimmy listened to the album over and over, discussing it as if it were on a level with Chaucer or Joyce. They analyzed the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, at length. The holes symbolized alienated individuals, pitfalls, potholes. Empty buckets, Ann understood but did not say.
“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” Jimmy said. “The Beatles were stoned. Acid. I bet you anything.”
He scrutinized the collage of figures on the album cover. “Here we have the leaders of the world. Bob Dylan. Marlon Brando. Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Marilyn Monroe,” Ann said.
As the album played on Jimmy’s stereo, they were smoking a joint together and trying to identify each figure. Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire. Most of them they didn’t recognize. The figures were portrayed like a crowd of mourners at a funeral. Ann thought the Beatles could have been English majors, like her and Jimmy.
“I wish I’d seen them at Candlestick Park last summer,” she said. “I got here two days later.”
“I know a couple of people who went,” said Jimmy. “They said you couldn’t hear them for the screams.”
Ann took another drag on the joint. She was getting more accustomed to the harsh smoke.
She cut out the pictures that came with the album—Sgt. Pepper, the two badges (the band logo and the head of Sgt. Pepper), the mustache, the sergeant’s stripes, and the stand-up card of the Beatles in their satin Day-Glo band uniforms. Jingles the landlady was ahead of her time with her Day-Glo decor.
Jimmy placed the mustache under his nose.
“I’m Sergeant Pepper,” he said. “I am here for the benefit of Mr. Kite. He and I see eye to eye. We know who is going to die.”
ANN HEARD THE songs at Tresidder Union. At the gas station, lovely Rita, the meter maid, was coming to life, and when Ann arrived at her building, the songs were wafting from the apartments downstairs. Pixie and Sanjay were playing opposite sides of the album. When Ann went to her appointment with Frank the psychologist—who was exploring her mind, fixing a hole in it—she heard the song “Within You Without You” coming from behind the door that said MENLO PARK DEAF SOCIETY. Each encounter with one of the songs seemed to have a meaning—the power of coincidence, the continuity of a theme, a motif in the novel that was her life in the sixties. Or that was how it would seem decades hence. Synchronicity.
“SOMETHING IS HAPPENING that is bigger than us,” Ann ventured to say. She had no idea what she meant.
“Yeah. The military-industrial complex, for instance,” said Jimmy. “My car is bigger than us.”
He was teasing. But there was a feeling in the air, Ann thought. Chip reported that he had heard the Beatles blaring from every doorway when he walked through the Haight-Ashbury district.
“That place is harder and harder to get through,” he said. “Don’t ask me what I was doing in the Haight. Pixie wanted to go.”
Chip had just come from downstairs, after spending the night with Pixie. He complained that her pink pebbles hurt his arches.
“That gal is a madwoman,” he said.
IN THE CAR Ann and Jimmy talked about Sgt. Pepper all the way to the beach at Half Moon Bay. The radio was playing the album over and over. Jimmy sang along happily as if his “bucket” was filled with music now.
Ann saw the Lonely Hearts Club Band as an old vaudeville act telling stories to the future. “Billy Shears the band singer and his friends,” she told Jimmy. “Maybe they’re going to help him with a barn raising. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes is going boating. The girl running away from home. Rita the meter maid. Even the guy imagining his old age.”
She imagined that the meandering strains of the long song George Harrison played on the sitar was about a Buddhist monk.
Jimmy pointed out that the characters were all ordinary people except for the last one on the record. “Look what happens at the end. The lucky man blew his mind out in his car. The successful man—maybe he was even in the House of Lords.”