|
He who feels
punctured
Must once have been a bubble.
–Lao Tze (trans. Witter Bynner)
ONE
1. A Hole in My Mind
I was thumbing through New
Mexico with nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in with a shaman
named Shaman who pricked a hole in my mind. A little prick it was,
but everything gushed in through it, and everything spilled out.
Suddenly, I could not tell the difference between myself and others
or between my body and the rest of the world.
"Don’t be afraid, Mel," Shaman
said. I was very afraid. We were sitting inside a long canvas
tent, the communal kitchen of the Space People. All the other Space
People were asleep. They had picked me up outside of Albuquerque and
driven me out onto the desert to their little spread. Because Shaman
liked me, they had picked me up. Even though there were Chicanos in
those days who hated hippies, who conned their way into communes and
shot them up, and I am as dark-skinned and small as a Mexican, they
had picked me up.
It was dark in the tent. Flaps
open, stars filled the big triangles at either end; feeble
candlelight unsealed the night between us, loud with cicadas and
dead souls crying. There was a votive candle in a shot glass on the
dirt floor. Rococo shadows angled and sprawled across chairs, long
table, canvas, and ourselves.
"You’ve broken me." The words
jumped where my bones should be. Something in me arched and bristled
like a frightened cat. Were the words mine?
Shaman took them for mine.
"I’m you," he said. Incomprehensible. "Relax."
I left that place. I left the
Space People sleeping. I left Shaman with his kit of tropes that
killed or cured or pricked your mind and left you to bleed to death
or to drown in the world’s blood, bleeding into you through a tiny
hole. The last thing I saw there was the candle flame reflected in
Shaman’s eyes, two little flames dwindling as I stumbled out into
the desert, out into stars and the cries of cicadas and dead souls,
which might have been my tongue, my voice, my limbs, or my self,
since Shaman had pricked a hole in my mind.
2. Talk with a Joshua
Tree
I had a talk in the dark with a
Joshua tree. I said, "Everything’s okay. I have a mother in New
York. I have brothers and a sister. My father left us, but he’s
still in my mind. In there, I can see the faces of all the people in
my life, I know the names of everything, and no one on Earth would
disbelieve me." The Joshua tree was unconvinced. I couldn’t remember
my mother’s face. I stood there, out of sight of any highway, lost
to the Space People, stars in my skin. Someone had just spoken. It
might have been the Joshua tree. It might have been the sand.
3. Izzy
Finally, tears gushed. I was
sitting on a curb by the highway before dawn. I was dawn, not quite
risen over a small, dark man on a desert highway. I was a pool of
tears splash-fed by a biped above my gutter. I was a tremble, a sob,
a cicada, a dead soul listening in. I don’t know what I was. I was a
car coming, high beam illumining tear-slicked face, driver coming in
earshot of moaning figure, alone in the desert, in the
dark.
The car stopped a few yards
past me, then purred back. The passenger door flung open, and a man
leaned out, balding, single-browed, a skinny man with a nasal
accent: "Get in, Jack. We ain’t got all day."
I smelled jasmine, sweet and
piercing. Inside, beneath a red tassel hanging from the rearview, a
small soapstone elephant was lit by the map light above the dash. My
tusks curled into the tangle of threads. I had many arms. In my
hands were medicine bottles, knives, diamonds, skulls, crushed
demons, and snakes. A naked woman scissored me.
I was sitting in Ganesha’s lap.
My legs embraced the elephant’s hips. My heels massaged his
buttocks. My nipples rubbed his chest. I smiled, but held my lips
enticingly distant. The Indian behind the wheel stroked my
back.
Or perhaps I was from Pakistan.
I was irritated at Izzy. I, the driver, said, "If I had wanted like
this, I would have stayed at my motel, Izzy. Do we have to pick up
everybody?"
"Exactly, Sarvaduhka," One-brow
shot back. "That’s who this piece of merchandise is: everybody!
Ain’t you, Jack?"
I pulled my sleeve across my
face to erase the tears. The car, a warm shell of light, seemed
heaven, but I couldn’t find where to say yes from. When I tried to
speak, the car door groaned instead. It closed. I was inside, in
front, squeezed between the door and the man with one long eyebrow.
"How did you know?" I tried to say; instead, the sun rose.
4. Relic Background
Radiation
Sarvaduhka pressed a button,
and there was the United States of America: news, music, tractor
pull ads?"SUNDAYYYYYY!"?static, evangelist patter, a song by Johnny
Abilene . . .
There’s a splash across the
southern sky
Named "I love
you-oo!"
And I know just what a big
man
Ought to
do-yodelayhee-do.
I’m sorry I left you
somewhere in the blue-boo-hoo-hoo
With your mama singing
lullabies to baby-boo . . .
. . . used automobiles, paid
political announcements, weather reports . . .
"Wait a damn minute," Izzy
said. "Turn it back to the Haymakers, Duke. I wanna hear that
song."
"Haymakers, Izzy?"
"Gimme that." He pushed
Sarvaduhka’s hand away and manned the radio dial himself. I felt as
if someone were reaming my navel. The smears of sound as the needle
skimmed the tuner scale were gurgles of cud surging up my throat.
Finally he found it. There were the slightly off-key notes and bad
mixing that signal a live performance:
I’m gonna bring you right
back some day.
Though you may be far
away,
I can always pull a little
stunt
That the folks call
"epoch\xE9"
"Epoch\xE9?" Sarvaduhka
took his eyes off the road?me, a flat, black triangle long as
the desert, wide as the squareback here, beetling to a point out
there, and dotted with my Bott’s dot vertebrae?to frown at Izzy.
"Did the Haymaker say epoch\xE9, Izzy?"
"Shut up! I gotta hear this."
Take a long lost dad’s
advice:
Though yore mama’s Guldang
nice,
Save a little bit of love
for yodelodelayhee-me!
Just then Izzy’s beeper went
off. I’d never seen one before. I don’t think anyone had at
that time. But Izzy’s was beeping. "Not good," he said. He pulled it
out of his belt, then held it up close. "Four degrees Kelvin. Shit.
It’s up a whole degree. He’s actually tried it."
"Tried what?"
"Epoch\xE9, for crissakes. What
have we been talking about?salami? Sarvaduhka, who’s
President?"
"McCarthy. Why?"
"McCarthy? Still? What color is
the American flag?"
"Red, white, and
yellow."
"Unchanged. Okay. This wasn’t
the big one. He didn’t manage it. And Mel’s still here beside us.
Okay. Good. We got time. Johnny’s out looking, and we’re in the
pink. I’m taking a nap."
"Wait. What is four degrees
that was three before?"
"Relic background radiation,
Savvy. I never told you this? It’s like a pilot light. It flares up
when somebody does an epoch\xE9. It didn’t work though. I’m taking a
nap." Brooking no protest, Izzy turned off the radio and scooted
down in his seat.
"I am driving with a mad man,
and still no female action."
5. The Temporary
Thoughts smoked from my
skin.
"Is he a werewolf, Izzy?"
Sarvaduhka whispered.
Izzy said, "Let me
snooze."
I squeezed Mel’s eyes shut to
keep from slashing too brutally the delicate inner membrane, with my
light. Rising open-armed before Sarvaduhka’s VW Squareback heading
east out of Albuquerque, I bathed them, squinting in the munificence
and splendor, till Izzy yanked down the visors.
"Snooze, he wants to snooze!"
Sarvaduhka said. "Snooze, Izzy, but when do I get my female action?
Everything you want to do, we do. Now we have the boy and you are
satisfied. But I still have no female action. I never should have
left my videos." He pinched a cone of incense from a slot under the
ashtray, stuffed it into a compartment in Ganesha’s back, and lit it
clumsily with a cheap butane lighter. Smoke spouted from Ganesha’s
trunk.
"You horny bastard," Izzy
grumbled, "didn’t I tell you, you get some nooky in Memphis? We
gotta finish with the kid first, but I’m too tired now. I gotta cop
some Z’s, Sergeant Ducky. Can you clam it?"
I was terrified. A slug in the
kill jar?the sting of jasmine like carbon tetrachloride?I curled
away from Izzy’s body, my skin electric with loathing. He yawned and
stretched. His arm looped across my shoulders. His head lolled
against my chin. The feel of that clammy bald spot. I tried to be
the sun, huge, distant, omnipotent.
Through the hole in my mind
images stuttered: Mayan priest pederasts; surgeons, masked and
gloved, their hands in my bowels; Shaman shaking and shaking his
head; the Space People, the desert, my father?Run! "Please
let me out," I said, one of me.
"Shit!" said Izzy. "I forgot
this happens." He stopped the hole with his finger.
How did you do
that? He didn’t hear
me.
"Savvy, stop the car," said
Izzy One-brow. Sarvaduhka groaned and pulled onto the shoulder. "We
get no rest until he’s cauterized."
I felt as if I were being
buried alive. The sudden constriction, even though it produced a
more normal-sized, more workable mind, was suffocating. Izzy
amputated the world. As soon as the car stopped, he pushed open the
door and shoved me out. He fell out on top of me, wrestled me down.
"Sarvaduhka!" he shouted. "Help me."
"Is this legal?" the Indian
said. I heard his door open, then slam shut. He was pressing me
down. I was scrambling and wheezing after something like breath or
like my name, or else I was trying to cough it up. My name, too
small for me, was wedged in my windpipe. Izzy was
butterfly-bandaging Shaman’s hole. Or plugging it. Or welding it. Or
sewing it closed.
"This is just a temporary," he
said.
I coughed up my name. "I’m Mel
Bellow!" I said, astonished, I who had been the sun, the sky,
Ganesha’s shakti, wind-blown sand.
"We know who the hell you are,"
Izzy said. "You left home the day after the US pulled out of Vietnam
and President McCarthy ended the draft, May 6, 1970, right? Happens
to be one of my bench marks. No more sitting by the mailbox chewing
on your lottery number, right, Mel? Slam goes the door. Up goes the
thumb. Izzovision, case you’re wondering."
"Izzy, be civil. He is
traumatized," Sarvaduhka clucked.
"Sure," said Izzy. Now I could
see he was sweating, exhausted, still straddling me on all fours.
His sweat fell into my eyes and made me blink. I knew which one of
us I was! He said, "I’m Izzy. This guy here is Mr. Sarvaduhka, the
motel mogul. We’re pleased to make your acquaintance. Now let’s haul
ass back into the vehicle, because we got a lot of miles to cover
before we hit the launch site, and the Duke is hot for nooky."
6. Certain Responsibilities
Accrue
"My name is Izzy Molson," he
told me over watery coffee from a machine at a rest stop outside
Amarillo. Sarvaduhka was looking at magazines. "Some people think
I’m psychic, other people think I’m psycho, but I’m here to tell you
that I’m just an ordinary Joe with his ear to the ground. I’m
currently employed at the Gibson plant in Lockport, New York,
setting up tool machines, which I got because I lied about my
medical history, which you would too if you had a back like mine,
and I’d appreciate it in consideration of which, if you didn’t
wrestle me quite so vicious next time I do you a favor."
"Sorry." I sipped my coffee
slowly, just to feel the warmth spread, like dye staining the part
of my world that was me.
"Forget it. Anyways, I happen
to be able to see inside things, like your noggin for example, past,
present, and future, regardless of distance?sometimes. Certain
responsibilities accrue. Which is why I am spending half of this
vacation, which I only get two weeks of at my present level of
seniority at Gibson, and my next vacation also, when it comes up, on
you. Gawd, I guess there’s no limit to how bad you can make a cup of
goddamned coffee." He wrinkled his nose and swallowed the rest of it
at a gulp. Then he squashed the Styrofoam and threw it down with a
shiver.
"Spending your vacations on
me? What’s going on? A guy did something to my mind . .
."
"Shaman."
"Yes! Then you fixed me
somehow. That’s all I know."
"How can you drink that stuff
so easy? You look like you like it! You know, you can tell a lot
about various civilizations by the kind of coffee they put up with;
that’s what I find. . . . Listen to me. Shaman is trying to set you
up to be his pabulum, Mel boy."
"He wants to eat
me?"
"Yes, Mel, he wants to eat you,
farm you and eat you. He’s tired of hunting and gathering, let’s
say. He’s been living catch-as-catch-can for five, six thousand
years, and now he wants to cultivate, raise a family, like. Between
you and me, he doesn’t know what he’s in for in that department, but
try to get Shaman to listen to my say-so.
"Now, I’m just a little guy,
see, but we can play the star guys off against him, because they
want you back on Sanduleak."
"Ah."
"Listen. Shaman’s gotta start
fertilizing now to plant seeds next year and harvest the year after
that, when his larder gets echoey. This is why I have committed two
vacations, though God knows there are things I’d rather be doing,
named Fay in East Tonawanda. You kapeesh, Old Lower
Forty?"
"Why do I believe you’re not
crazy?"
"It is written."
7. Shaman’s Farm
Many things were written of
which I was unaware then, but where I now live, folks know
everything. Time flows differently two hundred thousand light-years
from my old galaxy. I look up at the sky from Sanduleak,
rotating five times a second, and I see there the histories of all
the worlds, compiled by epoch\xE9. . . .
Shaman chose the womb of a
twentieth century North American woman to be born from. Egyptians,
he had found, were too hard to proselytize, Indians too easy,
Japanese too slavish, Australians too anarchic, but the American
bourgeoissie?perfect. He magnetized their children, told them
tales of Pharaohs and extraterrestrials, himself always in the
middle, Tuthmosis, seed of Chephren, son of the Great Sphinx.
Compare Chephren’s statue and the Sphinx: were not their faces the
same? Anciently, as Tuthmosis, he had excavated and restored the
man-lion from the stars.
To prove it, he brought down
lightning, made stars dance, grew younger instead of older, humped
or killed, without compunction, everyone, high and low, male or
female, drawing his strength, he declared, from the Father of
Terror, Abu al-Hawl, the Great Sphinx. He visited the Father
of Terror yearly, in El Giza. Travel was difficult, but he had an
easier way in mind, more present and more permanent. That is why he
gathered his Space People. That is why he drilled a hole in my mind.
Many holes he drilled, to no effect, in many souls: the Space
People. But at the bottom of the hole in my mind he glimpsed
Abu.
8. Oil of Cloves
"What do I do? What am I
supposed to do? You haven’t told me
anything!"
They were pulling away, about
to leave me at the rest stop. Sarvaduhka’s squareback screeched to a
stop, sending a cloud of dust back into my face. I ran to Izzy’s
window. Sarvaduhka was gritting his teeth and peevishly chanting,
"Female action, female action, Izzy. This is what you promised me.
This is what my vacation is about. Female action, female action,
female action."
"Never mind Sergeant Ducky,"
Izzy told me through the window. "Jeez! We’ll see you next year.
You’ll live till then, don’t worry. I plugged you; that’s all I do
this time. Just remember, that thing is a temporary. If you start to
feel pressure . . . what can I say? Oil of cloves? The Lord’s
Prayer? My hands are tied, kid. I gotta be back at the plant in a
few days or they’ll fire my ass, and kimosabe here still has to get
his damned female action, and guess what: I just got this. The North
Vietnamese just overran the South. A rout. It’s all over. Keep this
in mind, Mel. It’s a good bench mark. Next year we’ll plow you up
and sow salt, don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna farm you."
They were speeding away down
the on ramp. The sun was so hot, everything was white. I didn’t know
what to do. I just stood there. I stared at the place where Izzy had
been, until my neck got sore. Then I headed back toward the vending
machines and rest rooms.
9. Duck-Rabbit
They came back, not in person,
but on the juke box. The juke box was in a caf\xE9 on the westbound
side of the highway. Once I had urinated, there was nothing further
to impel me in any direction whatever. So I wandered across the
glass-shelled pedestrian overpass, still dizzied by the physical
sensation of something (my piss) actually leaving my body; I had
contained everything for nearly twelve hours.
There was a juke box at every
table. I sat down at the nearest one and fished out a quarter I’d
never had. I pushed my quarter into the slot and pressed A-1, "If
You Want Some Food for Thought, Take a Bite of This," by Johnnie
Abilene and the Haymakers. Out came Izzy.
"Put your tongue back in your
mouth, Mel, this is not a drug experience," he said. Everyone kept
right on eating, while Izzy’s voice spilled from the jukes. A lean,
sunburned trucker with faded tattoos on each bicep was drinking
coffee in front of me, staring meditatively into his own cigarette
smoke. A few tables bubbled with tourist families, whom every twang
and gewgaw set chattering. A very fat old hippie in tie-dyes and
cut-offs walked in and leaned against the mother juke near the
cashier; he scanned the listings, the families, the trucker, and me.
Nobody but me heard Izzy.
"Can you hear
me?" I whispered into the Wurlitzer.
"No," he said, and laughed.
From the left speaker?Izzy was in stereo?I heard an angry cadence,
Sarvaduhka’s. "Okay, okay," Izzy told him, "I’ll be nice. I couldn’t
help myself." Then to me: "The guy that just walked in, the
zaftiger in flip-flops, he’s from Sanduleak, but he’s on our
side. Just be careful about giving him anything of yours." Static.
". . . in Memphis, I told you. Give me a break, Vaduhka; this is
intergalactic stuff here for crissakes and after all you said and
done, put me flat out on the run, now you think you got a mess of
love to shove in my face?well, take a bite of this!" It was Johnny
Abilene. Izzy’s voice was swallowed into the pedal string guitar. I
seemed to get a whiff of Sarvaduhka’s jasmine, then nothing. The
Haymakers.
The big man came to my table.
"Mind if I sit down here?" I shrugged. He sat. Maneuvering into the
chair, he had to push against the next table to accommodate his
gut.
The table slid back into the
tattooed trucker. "Hey!"?as his coffee splashed onto the
table.
"Sorry," my Sanduleak contact
said, turning meekly.
"Just watch it, okay?" The
trucker threw a napkin onto the spill, then lapsed back into
samadhi.
"Sure. Sorry." My hippie turned
back to me. "What’s your name? I’m Gypsy. I’m waiting for my sister,
is all. She’s in the head. She takes a long time, I don’t know why;
she just always does. What did you say your name was?"
"Mel," I said. There was a
floating astigmatism, like a skyflower before me, the kind that is
pushed away by one’s looking, so it’s never quite in focus. At first
I thought it was in my field of vision, but the more I tried to
sweep it to center stage, the more I realized it was a sort of
thought. A name on the tip of one’s tongue. A half-remembered
face. An inkling, an intimation, but of
nothing.
It was Izzy’s temporary. My
mind-tongue stroked and stroked it with instinctive curiosity, like
leukocytes casing a virus, something hard and foreign patching my
mind.
"You’re looking at my beard,"
the Sandulean said. "Is there something stuck in it?"
Stroked and stroked it. My
father was in there, Gone Joe. Stroking and stroking Izzy’s amalgam,
it was Gone Joe’s fingers I stroked with. He was digging his fingers
into Izzy’s bung, trying to flee my mind; the rest of him had
vanished when I was two, left Mom and me at the gift shop in Niagara
Falls. Only this shade remained behind, Gone Joe’s shade feeling
guilty in the mind of his abandoned son.
If you fiddle with the tracking
on a VCR, sometimes you can see another movie just under the one
you’ve been watching. It flirts between the scenes, steals outlines,
blurs faces, commandeers bits of dialogue, makes a lawn into a lake,
a domestic comedy into a primeval horror?duck-rabbit. Gone Joe’s
old, blue watch cap wanted to preempt Gypsy’s beard.
"Did I get some butter in there
or something? Robins lay an egg? What?"
"No. Sorry. You’re from
Sanduleak, right?"
Gypsy’s jaw dropped. I mean, it
really dropped; it hit his sternum, then sprang back, like a bungee
jumper. The whole thing took maybe two seconds, during which I
glimpsed Gypsy’s real body. In there, behind the phony jaw, a yellow
snake bristled and shifted. There was a gasp from one of the tourist
tables, babble, then hush. Gypsy stood; his hams shoved back the
trucker’s table.
"Goddamnit, you fat slug!" The
trucker slammed down his coffee and stood up. Gone Joe had
penetrated the seam up to his elbows.
"I’m terribly sorry," Gypsy
said. "I’m just fat, see? I’m big. I’m clumsy. I can’t help
it."
I could see the trucker’s face
cloud. It was a new one on him. He paused. He frowned. He said,
"Ain’t you got no pride whatsoever?" He sat down again and mopped up
spilled coffee with another paper napkin. He cussed under his
breath, then said, "Just be careful, get it?"
"I get it," Gypsy said. "Thank
you very much."
"What in the goddamned State of
Texas you thanking me for, fat boy?"
"Here’s my sister, Nora," Gypsy
said to me, sotto voce. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen in
my life came right up to our table. She stood there next to Gypsy,
with her hip in the cleft of Gone Joe’s chin. She looked impellingly
familiar, but I was drawing a blank; whatever she had been to me was
occluded by a sliver from Izzy’s bung.
10. What It Feels Like to Be an
Angel
Even the trucker had to stop
mopping and look. How could a brother like that have a sister like
that? It wasn’t her cup size or complexion. Oh, she was pretty. She
was very pretty, in a domestic sort of way. She wore boot jeans and
a large T-shirt. Her hair was a tangle of brown cascading halfway
down her back, with here and there a strand of silver. Her mouth was
wide, the lips full, her dark eyes clear and intense. Her face was
washed by sorrow, like a stone worn smooth by water.
Compassion, it said. There was her beauty.
The way Nora walked, the way
her eyes moved, effortlessly, without a trace of affectation or
desire, everything about her won me. Hers was the secret face I put
myself to sleep by. I loved her immediately.
Even Gone Joe stopped clawing
for a moment. A cool wave spread through the caf\xE9. The tourists
stopped jabbering and breathed. The trucker stubbed his
cigarette.
Gypsy pulled out a chair for
Nora, and she sat down. Gypsy sat again, carefully. He said to her,
"He knows."
Our eyes met. When she
breathed, I breathed. She seemed to nod, and I understood that she
was acknowledging our kinship. "How?" she said. "Please tell me how
you know about us."
Her voice thrilled and pacified
me at once. I thought, This is what it feels like to be an
angel. Through her voice, as through a channel, I felt down
inside her, to where her voice came from. I felt the blood bathing
in oxygen inside her lungs. I felt the quiver of her vocal chords,
the undulations of her tongue, the way the cartilage in her nose
resonated with each vowel.
"I’ve been through a lot," I
said.
Nora’s forehead wrinkled ever
so slightly. With exquisite concern she sighed, "Oh!" She reached
across the table and laid her hand on mine. It was all I could do
not to burst into tears. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me, Mel.
Tell me everything."
11. My Debriefing
"I’m twenty-three. I’m from . .
." I couldn’t remember where I was from. "I took off because I
wanted . . . you, Nora." Saying that was like coming. She
just kept looking at me, unruffled, like a calm ocean, a sunset, a
mother, the moon. "I wanted you, and you weren’t there in . .
." I drew a blank. "So I started hitching around. My mom is . . ."
What was Mom? "Well, of course, I didn’t tell myself I
was looking for you. I was headed for Yucat\xE1n to see the eclipse. I
was headed for Atlanta to visit the Coca-Cola factory. I was headed
for British Columbia to live off the land. I was headed for the
Grand Canyon to learn the ways of the Havasupai Indians. That’s how
it was. I remember once . . ." I hit a cul-de-sac; my sentence had
nowhere to go. "Anyway, I love you. When Shaman picked me up . .
."
"Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" Gone Joe was
punching and prying Izzy’s bung but making no headway. Detritus from
the operation was scattered all over my mind, I realized. There were
little lacerations too, creating lapses and blind spots randomly. It
had been a quick job.
"Go on," Nora told
me.
I concentrated. "Go on," I
echoed. "Yes. The Space People picked me up and gave me something to
eat at their place, just tents and a few goats and chickens out in
New . . . New something. York or Hampshire or Mexico. Orleans,
maybe. Did I say I want to be one with you, utterly and completely,
forever?"
She nodded.
"Mm. Then I was alone with . .
."
"Shaman," Gypsy
said.
"Thanks. With Shaman. And he
said some words that made a hole in my mind. But Izzy fixed
it."
"Izzy!" The word sprang from
Gypsy’s mouth like air from a burst tire. As he stood, Gypsy’s jaw
dropped again, this time to his knees. The flesh unpeeled from his
chin to his navel like tape rolling off a dispenser. There was the
snake, yellow and glistening. It turned inside Gypsy’s human fa\xE7ade
like an uncoiled intestine. A shadow of displeasure crossed Nora’s
face, and she reached over to roll up Gypsy’s chin. She just started
it, and Gypsy was shamed into finishing. No one had seen that one
but us. Looking at the blithe tourists checking out at the
cashier’s, I thought of all the bizarreries I might have missed in
my life, just in my peripheral vision.
Look, and it’s rolled
up.
Gypsy tucked his shirt in and
sat down. Nora said, "Mel, tell us how you know Izzy."
"He and Sarvaduhka,"?Gypsy
didn’t stand up?"they picked me up back in New Whatever, in a
helicopter or a car or a train or something. It had an elephant in
it. Jasmine. He sealed up Shaman’s hole. I feel a lot better now,
but I’ve got like shrapnel in here. . . . Yes, it was New
Mexico!"
Nora smiled at me, and my heart
turned to Silly Putty. "Don’t you have something you want to give
us, Mel?" she said.
"Not that I know of. And Izzy
said be careful."
"That’s the limit!" Gypsy
shouted. He slammed his fist on the table. The hand flattened and
cracked away from his wrist. No blood. A grey tendril, like an
octopus’s, poked through. "He has to have his nose in everything.
I’m gonna kill him, Nora. I’m gonna eighty-six that scum bag. We
come nearly two hundred thousand light-years to this backwater solar
system, and Izzy has to gum things up, put in his two cents, jimmy
everything in his direction. No, Nora. No, no, no! No
more!"
Suddenly, Gypsy remembered
where he was, and he froze. Moving only his eyes, he sneaked a
glance sideways. The tourists were watching. The cashier was
watching.
The trucker had just returned.
He was sidling up to our table with a fresh, long-stemmed red rose
in his hand. He gave Gypsy a nasty squint, then turned to Nora.
"This is for you, ma’am. I got it in the gift shop. You’re the
nicest dang little thing I seen on this highway since 1957."
12. Liftoff
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say
this out loud: "Help me, Gone Joe! Please don’t go. Help me. I don’t
know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to
be. Things are turning strange." I often prayed to Gone Joe when I
was in a spot. Once I was alone in my high school locker room with a
fullback who wanted to kill me for correctly naming the capital of
Massachusetts, after he’d embarrassed himself by saying, "Idaho."
Another time I was alone with a girl in her bedroom, during a sweet
sixteen party with no adults around. In both cases Gone Joe gave me
the same advice, and I took it; he said, "Run!"
But now things were different,
because Gone Joe had his fingernails at the edge of my mind, and
there was a chance he would escape completely. "Don’t bother me,
kid," he said. He was in up to his shoulder. I was looking right
through Gone Joe’s cuff, squeezed up his arm past the elbow now, at
the trucker’s back. The trucker had gotten his smile from Nora and
was walking away. The tourists, alarmed by Gypsy’s sforzandi,
were pushing through the door into the glass tube over the highway,
right through Gone Joe’s overalls.
I must have been mooning at
Nora, my brows bunched skyward, head cocked like a dog’s at the
table. My Gone Joe was getting goner. "Poor Mel," Nora said,
straight to my heart. "You’ve been very brave. We knew you were
being harrowed. We’ve come to stop it, to help you. It isn’t right.
Shaman is a bad man. And powerful. How did you ever get away from
him, Mel?"?her hand on my forearm, her thumb stroking the inside of
my elbow.
"I just left."
"He didn’t follow?"
"No."
"I don’t like this," Gypsy
growled.
"You’re right," Nora said to
him. "We should leave. We don’t know what Shaman might be up to. Get
rid of the other human. We need to take Mel up with us."
"Right." Gypsy shook off his
clothes and skin, steamrolled to the cashier, opened his hingeless
snake maw and swallowed the fellow whole.
"It’s all right," Nora cooed,
making it all right.
The cashier was a great lump in
Gypsy’s throat. Gypsy slithered upright to the walkway door. His
human body dragged along the floor like a pair of half-discarded
Doctor Dentons. He licked the jambs and the seam between the glass
doors, causing them to melt together. Where his tongue touched,
smoke shot out. I saw the passage accordion away from the caf\xE9 like
a portable airplane tunnel. Cars were braking and screeching below.
Then the liftoff.
"You worthless fool," Gone Joe
said. "Izzy told you not to give them anything, and now they’re
boosting your ass to Sanduleak." Gone Joe was catching his breath,
double, in Nora’s eyes.
Gypsy undulated back to the
table and pulled his skin back on, just like a scuba diver
stretching into his wet suit. The cashier was less prominent now;
Gypsy’s digestive juices must have been formidable. "Forgive us if
we don’t do a ten-nine-eight," he said, once he had his mouth back
on. The floor shook. "Goddamn Izzy Molson. One of these days I’m
gonna put him right here." He tapped the dwindling
lump in his midsection.
Nora clucked and shook her
head. "Gypsy!" she moaned.
I looked through Gone Joe at
Gypsy. "But Izzy said you were on our side," I said.
"I am," he said. Outside,
through the window, Earth was a smoky, blue agate, then a dot, then
invisible in the solar blaze, and the sun too was dwindling.
13. What You Can See in
Texas
It’s amazing what you can see
from a highway rest stop table, especially in a place like Texas,
where people tend to let it hang out more. Hitching west, that’s one
of the first things you notice: how much more at ease folks seem to
feel with themselves out west. They let you catch them scratching
their navel or adjusting their hang or spitting or mopping sweat
from a cleavage. It’s okay by them. There’s so much more space out
there, west of St. Louis, and people are a lot more self-contained.
They know they can just get up and go somewhere else if they damn
well feel like it. Listen to western music. Listen to Johnny Abilene
and the Haymakers, for example. They don’t take shit from anyone,
bosses, lovers, fathers, children . . . "take a bite of
this."
Once, over a Swiss Miss, in a
Panhandle rest area, I saw a woman and her husband duking it out on
the back of a flatbed pickup. That was the best cocoa I ever had.
Nobody got seriously injured, though their five kids, pasty, bleak,
skulked in looking like war orphans. In New York, you’d see couples
swap looks, and you’d notice their kids squirm a
little?that’s it, that’s all. If one of them raised their voice
slightly, everybody in the restaurant would turn and stare. Somebody
would dial 911, sure. In Texas, three people would have to be
murdered first.
You see more.
14. So Was the Sphinx
They were talking about
me.
Gypsy said, "You see? He’s
paralyzed. He can’t do anything. Everything goes in, and nothing
comes out. He has no idea what he is. He doesn’t remember anything
deeper than the Milky Way."
"Shush," Nora said, "He can
hear you. You’ll upset him."
"So what? It doesn’t make any
difference. Look at him. He’s not even here."
"Poor baby. Still, that’s it
for Shaman. He can’t do this twice. Mel is his feed hole. Shame’ll
starve down there. You can take Mel back to Sandy. He’ll be a
hero."
"What hero? They’ll build a
museum around him. Put him in a glass case. He doesn’t know what he
is, Nora. There’s nobody in there."
"That’s because of Shaman. He
blew Mel’s mind, is all. It’s like the Sphinx before Tuthmosis:
half-buried in the sand."
"What mind?" Gypsy said. "I’ll
bet he cut it off himself when he was a baby, like a trapped rabbit
gnaws its foot off. Maybe it’s an impediment down on Earth to be
what he is. That’s what made it so easy for Shaman to put a hole
in."
"Izzy tried to patch it.
Look."
They leaned into my face like
oral surgeons. Gypsy waved his phony fingers in front of my eyes. I
just felt numb. I didn’t want to respond to them yet. I wanted to
keep thinking about things I’d seen at rest stops in the west, on
Earth I mean.
"It’s a temporary," Gypsy
said.
"Yes. Sloppy work."
"Goddamn Izzy Molson!" Gypsy
said. "Hey, wait a minute! What’s that?" I felt Gypsy’s finger come
straight in through my eye to nudge a spot near the
filling.
Nora said, "Gone Joe. Guy in
Mel’s mind. Looks like he’s trying to squeeze out."
"Typical. Lot of damage in
there, but it’s small stuff, non sequiturs, lacunae, causal gaps,
the usual. It’ll heal. Izzy’s bung won’t last more than a few months
though. You want to insert anything while we have the
chance?"
"For heaven’s sake, no! This is
a sovereign person, Gypsy."
"The hell he is! He’s just an
extremity, Abu al-Hawl’s blow hole or something. The Mel
Bellow personality thing is just static, a TV ghost. Shaman’s
feeding through him, Nora. The guy’s nothing but a junkie’s
vein."
"You’re beginning to sound like
Shaman. . . . Look! He’s coming round. Get your hand out of
there!"
I started to "come to." I had
been reluctant. You don’t try to land in a volcano. I had plenty of
fuel left inside my mind, plenty of things to think about, vivid,
fascinating. I didn’t have to join Gypsy and Nora in this impossible
reality. But then I heard Nora defend me to him? "a sovereign
person"?and things felt much safer.
I made my entrance: "Where are
we? What’s going on? Why is it so black out there?" I pretended to
be woozy at first, for the sake of continuity. Discontinuity is a
terrible enemy of one’s sense of selfhood.
Gypsy looked at his wristwatch,
if it was a watch, which hung half through his wrist, if it was a
wrist. "Fifteen minutes," he said. "We’re about a hundred million
miles out."
Gone Joe said,
"Run!"
"I don’t want to be here," I
said.
For some reason, this sent
Gypsy into a rage. He stormed over to the bus tray station and
overturned it, shattering dishes and launching silverware. "Sure.
Let’s just turn around. Let’s take you back to Shaman. Maybe we
should garnish you with parsley first. I think there’s some in the
goddamned kitchen."
"Careful, Gyp, or you’ll jar us
off course," Nora said, like a nanny admonishing a fractious
toddler. "Have we reached the Magellanic Stream?"
"Not quite." Gypsy stood stock
still and glared at me. His fury had distilled itself into a
poisonous timbre.
"Let’s do an epoch\xE9. We want to
make sure Shaman can’t catch up. Go into the kitchen and use the
automatic dishwasher."
"But Nora . . ."
"An epoch\xE9, Gypsy. I’ll see if
I can get the rabbit’s foot."
"Ah!" Gypsy turned on his heel,
on his fake heel, and shouldered through a padded, swinging door
into the kitchen.
"You’re safe with us, Mel,"
Nora said. "You know what Shaman would do to you on Earth. Izzy told
you, didn’t he?"
"Izzy’ll be back in a year," I
said. "That’s what he told me. On his next vacation. He hasn’t got
much seniority."
I felt better with Gypsy gone.
I looked around. Except for Gypsy’s mess and the fact that a few
tables remained to be bused, everything looked fine. There was a map
of U.S. Route 40 on the wall nearby, with colored lights at the rest
stops and interchanges; ours glowed red. The condiments station had
plenty of ketchups and mustards, though the relish was getting low;
maybe a few more of those tiny paper cups would help, in case of a
rush. There were kitschy oil paintings of long-horned steer and
cacti over the empty tables. The one over ours had a campfire in the
foreground with a circle of chiaroscuro bronco busters; one of the
cowpokes had a guitar in his lap. Near the stack of salts and
peppers at my elbow, there was a display explaining how you could
get prints of the Western Landscape Series for your very own.
Everything was fine. Everything was okay.
But out the window . . .
"Mel . . ." Nora said. What is
that moment between a man and woman when he starts to see her face
as skin, the pores, the sweat, the small swells and hollows
that he will fill, swell for hollow with his own? When his eyes
become tactile organs? When her breath warms the air between
them, and they feel themselves drawing nearer, like buns proofing
under a warm, wet towel?
"Nora, do you look like him
underneath, like a snake or something?" I said.
"Didn’t Izzy tell
you?"
"No."
"Run!" Gone Joe
clamored.
We were leaning together like
tin leaves in an electroscope. Our knees touched. "Mel, why don’t
you know what you are?" Her nose grazed mine. We rubbed. I
groaned.
"Shaman wants to eat me," I
said. "How do I know you won’t eat me too?"
"Why would I eat you? I love
you, Mel." She kissed me. A purple dye seemed to swirl through the
room, tinging everything. The walls, tables, paintings, juke boxes,
bus and condiment stations, cashier’s desk, melted as they changed
hue. Everything shrank and became cylindrical. I felt her kiss in my
stomach, in my toes.
She peeled her lips away
slowly. I wanted to cry. She was tearing my heart out. She never
broke eye contact. We were in some sort of space vessel, it seemed
like. I was a hundred million miles from home, I think. There wasn’t
a single fact I could rely on. I looked around. As soon as Nora
stopped kissing me, the spaceship looked like a rest stop caf\xE9
again.
I said, "I was hitchhiking . .
."
She said, "So was the Sphinx."
15. Your Mother Never Did This
with My Belt
Gone Joe was like a man
half-buried in the sand. He had grunted himself into the hairline
fissure between Izzy’s bung and the lip of Shaman’s puncture. The
tip of one fingernail?the ring finger of his right hand?was actually
protruding from my mind. It dipped in and out of my field of vision
like a phantom scimitar, like a crescent moon, or like a glint off
troubled water, half-hypnagogic, half-real. Sometimes, pressing
hotly against Nora, my cheek slid against her cheek, and I was lost
in the jungle of her wavy hair. I opened my eyes, as if to breathe
through them, so breathless did normal air leave me then. I blinked
out the window into the daunting black, star-speckled and streamered
with burning lights, and I caught Gone Joe’s moon, at home in the
cosmos and traveling with me as the moon follows a traveler on
Earth. It seemed distant and large; really, it was near and
small.
Gone Joe’s nail scratched
things. It scratched Nora’s long, perfect flank. She seemed to like
that. She uttered a small cry that I could feel vibrating right
through my breast bone as we undulated together. I was straddling
Nora on her chair, like Ganesha’s shakti. I lapped her and thwucked
breast to breast and belly to belly with my shirt pulled off. We
were tongue and palate smacking. I tore her T-shirt up over her
head; during the seconds of eclipse, when Nora’s face was inside the
T-shirt, I was panic-stricken, desperate to see her again. Without
her eyes, I was perdu. Embracing her, I tried to swallow her
through my whole skin, to engorge her like an amoeba. It enflamed
and infuriated me that she was outside me. She groaned and
kissed.
Gone Joe kept appropriating
parts of Nora. He was superimposed on her, like shower screen lilies
on a bather. Once, when she smiled and blinked?I had made hungry
babies’ mouths of my palms, pulling at her breasts?the movement of
one eyelid was Gone Joe’s mouth: "Run!"
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," I said. "I love you,
Nora. I’ve always loved you."
To Gone Joe, inside, I said,
"Stop it! Shut up! Go away."
"You’re crazy," he said. "This
chick is a geek. You saw her brother. She’s a pit viper inside, and
yellow! Not to mention, we’re in outer fucking space. She’s
using you."
"What do you want me to do?" I
said inside.
"Is something wrong?" Nora
asked me. She started unbuckling my belt.
"Kill her. Strangle her. Get
away. Get that boa constrictor in the kitchen and run us home with
the automatic dishwasher, right? That what she said, the dishwasher?
You know how to use a dishwasher?"
"Dad . . ."
"Don’t call me that. What’s she
doing with your belt? Pay attention to me, will you? Get control.
Pull your pants back up, damn it all to hell! Hers, too! What’s she
doing with your belt? Your mother never did this with my
belt. Mel, if you don’t stop this and get us out of here, I’m going
to give you a headache you’ll never forget."
Suddenly, Nora jerked backward,
toppling the chair, with me on top of her. "There’s a finger in the
air," she shrieked. "It’s pointing at me!"
16. Planting My Flag
"Please, Dad, get back in
here," I said out loud.
"Don’t call me that," he said,
inside me. He was out, though, from the tip of his right forefinger
almost to the knuckle. It was hairy near the bottom. It was heavily
callused, a workman’s finger.
The finger did not come out of
my head. If you followed it back from the edge of the nail, across
the lunule, the joints, and the knuckle, it didn’t terminate
anywhere; you just eventually found that you were looking past it
toward something else. It wasn’t distinctly placed in
three-dimensional space, but hovered somehow against it, solid, yet
incommensurable. Gone Joe’s finger was not coming out of my head. It
was coming out of my mind.
"Gypsy, what is this?"
Nora squirmed under me on the floor.
Gypsy poked his head out the
kitchen door, the human head, the one with eyes and whiskers. "It’s
Gone Joe!" he said. Gypsy pushed through the kitchen door. It
snapped and swung on sprung hinges, creaking as he strode to us.
"God damn Izzy! He really botched it. A guy’s leaking out of the
kid’s mind."
"Mel, Mel," Nora said. She held
my face between her two hands. "Make love to me, Mel. Make love to
me now." The finger was playing mumblety-peg around her head.
She turned to avoid it, back and forth. "You don’t need Gone Joe,
Mel. You don’t need Izzy. You don’t need anybody. Take me,
Mel."
"Yeah," said Gypsy. "You’re the
only Earther for half a billion miles. Plant your flag,
Mel."
Gone Joe’s wrist showed, his
forearm, his elbow, one shoulder, then his neck, chin,
face?scrunched like a newborn’s?and the watchcap, drenched with my
thoughts. "Run!"
Holding me on top of her, Nora
nudged the chair away with her hips. Gone Joe was someplace
indeterminably near, in our way, but not fatally so. I had to have
air. My senses burned and beat as if on smelling salts. I wanted to
toss like a netted fish. When I arched up to take in more air, I saw
the window above our table fill with rosy, supernal
light.
"Shit," Gypsy barked. "It’s
Shaman."
17. Smiling and Serving
Shaman had a voice like
incense. It permeated us. His words were not the main thing. The
words were trails in a cloud chamber. It was something else that
moved us, the things that made the trails, powerful,
terrifying, small. Waves of meaning effulged from Shaman.
Striking our minds, they crystallized into words:
"He’s mine. You know
that."
Gone Joe was out up to his
navel. "Run!" Both arms were pushing against the edge of my
mind, the meaty part of him making no way, but the part still
cerebral gaining purchase and levering his body still farther
out.
Gypsy pranced idiotically from
table to table, reaching high and low, trying?impossibly?to place
himself between my eyes and Gone Joe. Where Gypsy stretched, an
occasional crack formed, revealing the slither inside his clothes
and skin. But he didn’t want me to be distracted by Gone Joe. He
wanted me to concentrate on Nora.
"You love me, don’t you?" Nora
bumped her pelvis up against mine.
"Yes!" Despite everything, I
started humping. The floor was cold, hard linoleum. My knees hurt
from pressing and jamming with Nora.
Shaman thickened among us.
"Stop this," he said.
Gone Joe said, "Stop this!"
too. He was out up to his knees. He was wearing his blue mechanics’
overalls with the embroidered tag on the breast pocket. In the
middle the tag said, "JOE," and around the perimeter, "SMILING AND
SERVING!" There was a Niagara Falls souvenir pen behind it. It had
an illusionary moving picture of the Horseshoe Falls on the
barrel.
Shaman wasn’t ruffled a bit. He
sounded like someone trying to talk a suicide down from the ledge:
deliberate, calm. I heard him with my skin, between pulses of blood,
between breaths, between thrusts and red thoughts as I
mortar-and-pestled Nora: "Now, Gypsy, now, Nora, you must
stop. You know this. The Earther’s one of my Space People now. He’s
a part of me. Don’t fuck with me, Sanduleans, or there’ll be hell to
pay."
Nora was fondling something
besides my buttocks. She was stroking something inside my mind, a
part of my mind invisible to me, as the nose is to the eyes. She
stroked as you might stroke a dog to make it let go a ball. Of what
ball did she want me to lose hold?
Shaman said, "Does the Earther
know what you are to him, Nora? This isn’t Sanduleak, you know. Some
things are frowned upon in this galaxy."
Gypsy emitted a blast of red
vapor. His skin ballooned outward like a swollen calf’s belly, and
exploded. The wet shards settled. Some stuck to the ceiling and
walls, where they slid and dripped. He was the snake, or a gigantic
yellow neuron, more like, bulbous at the bottom, grey dendrites like
Medusa’s hair tangling on top.
"Run!" Gone Joe rasped.
He was out.
And I was out. I couldn’t stay
inside Nora any more. Soul and body were shriveling to a bead. I
couldn’t act. Nora groaned disappointment and withdrew from
my mind, leaving the ball in whatever jaws held it there. Gone Joe
took one look at Gypsy and beat it into the kitchen.
"Did you get it?" Gypsy asked
Nora. He used his whole reptilian body for a tongue.
"No," she said.
"You see," Shaman gloated, "the
boy’s not like you Sanduleans, Gypsy. You’ll come in anyone, won’t
you, even your mother? In fact, especially your mother, ey,
Gypsy?"
"Damn! How did you get here,
Shaman?" Gypsy yelled. "I know you can’t epoch\xE9 worth
spit."
"Didn’t have to," he cooed?from
the kitchen, sounded like. And there, at the swinging door, where
Gone Joe had been a moment before, stood Shaman, his features
melting from Gone Joe’s into the ones I had seen in the New Mexico
tent, by candle light, like a dry, crushed sponge duck springing out
in water. "I came along in him, Gyp. A little reconnaissance.
I figured someone like you would try to spoil my party. You’re
trumped, Sandulean. Thanks for the ride, Mel."
"Are you my father?" I
said.
"I’m you."
Incomprehensible.
18. You Are My Sweet Burrito
(Please Be True)
Many years later, on Sanduleak,
collapsed by then to a neutron star, a pulsar, in the Large
Magellanic Cloud, I happened to hear the following song by Johnny
Abilene and the Haymakers. Folks live on bebop there, always have,
always will, but on the station I was tuned to they liked to
interrupt the Top Million every now and then for a little down home
Country Western, especially tunes that have to do with me,
since I am a sort of galactic hero there, or mascot, more
like.
The Sanduleans are funny that
way, like Bible thumpers on Earth who like to pepper every exchange,
however secular or banal, with references to the Gospel:
"Can you believe it, Ethel?
They charged me three-fifty for one pair of athletic socks at the
Spend-and-Save. I felt like turning over their table."
"Render unto Caesar,
Georgette."
"Praise the Lord!"
On Sanduleak they say things
like this: "as tight as Gone Joe in Izzy’s bung." Or when they just
almost get something they want, but fail at the very last moment,
they often say, "It was like Mel and Nora in Texas."
The number was announced as
"You Are My Sweet Burrito (Please Be True)," I think. Things go by
very fast on a neutron star, and the news came on right after:
I won’t call you "honey,"
’cause you know you’re not that sweet,
Or "knockwurst," though you
knock me offa my feet.
You’re a sight too lumpy to
be my "cream of wheat."
Yes, you’re just my salsa
verde sweet burrit-
O! Please be true.
Don’t leak on my place mat.
Just be you
Underneath that space hat!
You popped from my heart
like refries out a tortilla.
Pretty mama, I’m hoppin’
happy to be here and see ya.
Just like Mel when Shaman
popped outa his mind,
I’m a durned sight
spun-around, run-around loco behind.
But if you’re true to my
dream,
I’ll be your sour cream,
My roly-poly holy guacamole
sweet burrito queen!
Please be true, true, true!
Won’t you please be
true?
(The phrase "space hat" in the
eighth line refers to the pleated headdress popularized by Abu
al-Hawl, the Great Sphinx at Giza, a sort of interstellar thinking
cap he used for performing epoch\xE9s. It became quite fashionable
among Earthers of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty [circa 2500 b.c.] who
lived in the vicinity of his landing site. On Sanduleak, it’s still
la look.)
By the way, what Shaman said is
quite true. On Sandy, when a singer calls his loved one "pretty
mama," he generally means just that.
19. Lingua Franca
"Let’s be human, shall we?"
Shaman proposed. Diplomats settling on a lingua franca. "You have a
spare somewhere, don’t you, Gypsy?"
The big nerve undulated to the
cash register and punched "NO SALE" with one of his dendrites. He
pulled up the tray inside the cash drawer, where the big bills are
usually kept, and produced a squeaking mass of rubbery material that
looked like a deflated beach ball. He started to pull it on like a
pair of pants. When he was done, he was the rotund, superannuated
hippie I’d met down on the highway, and fully clothed.
Nora squeezed my hand, then
headed for the little girls’ room to tidy up. "You’re okay, Mel,"
she said. "We’ll get through this together." Then to Shaman: "The
toilet?"
"Go ahead," Shaman
said.
"I’ll be a minute. We’ll sit
down together when I get back. You’ll let him be till
then?"
"Of course, Nora. What do you
take me for?" He was wearing Gone Joe’s overalls. It still said
"JOE" on his pocket, and "SMILING AND SERVING."
"Oh, stop it!" Gypsy said.
"Just because she’s an Earther doesn’t mean she’s stupid. She was
thoroughly briefed when we recruited her, Shaman. She knows all
about you, old Tut. She knows all about everything."
Gypsy offered me his "hand." He
helped me up off the floor, then sat down at the table with me.
Shaman joined us.
Nora was in the bathroom. She
had been in the bathroom when I first entered the caf\xE9, when I saw
Gypsy, when the juke box played Johnny Abilene and Izzy? "Take a
bite of this." What did she do in there? Maybe she slipped in
and out of fake bodies the way Gypsy did. I still ached for her, but
I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a small, brown nothing.
Shaman was tall and muscular, with strong, chiseled features, a
square jaw, clear blue eyes, thick black hair neatly trimmed. He
wore a white caftan and loose white linen pants; one leg was still
soiled by errant thoughts?e v a p o r a t i n g?from my mind.
Shaman could have Nora whenever he wanted to, and finish the
job, I thought. My mind was a barber pole, thought-blood, endlessly
supplied, spiraling endlessly down.
I listened to Shaman as a radio
"listens" to a broadcast. It went through me. I should have been
crying, but, though I looked and looked, I couldn’t find my tears.
* * *
20. Inoculation
"Izzy Molson can’t help you,
Mel," Shaman told me. Gypsy twiddled his thumbs and snarled under
his breath. "I’m you. And you’re not what you think you are,
Mel. I’m you. You didn’t consummate with Nora, Mel, or you’d
know how right I am. I’m you. She wanted you to explode
inside her, and not just your sperm, Mel. I’m you." I felt
like a cow being milked, helplessly and dumbly chewing cud. Shaman
squeezing my udders, his fingers sticky with my milk. The hiss of
milk spray into Shaman’s bucket. The pressure inside me dwindling.
Chewing and chewing.
Then Shaman whispered: "I’m
you, Mel. They want to pull the Sphinx up through your mind like
a baby gorilla out an aphid’s pussy, so they can install him in the
Magellanics. I’m you. Is that what you want, Mel?"
"You make me laugh." Gypsy
turned on Shaman suddenly. "The arrogance! You think you can bore
into him right here in front of my face!"
"But I am. He’s mine,
old Gyp. You can’t do squat zip. Look at the poor worm. Even if you
got him to Sandy, he’s not Abu. You make me
laugh, Sandulean."
"Shaman, the only reason I let
you get this far is to inoculate him against you. Now he’ll
recognize what you do." And Gypsy slapped me sharply across the
face. It stung. My ears rang. The flood of awareness made me
conscious all at once of another, deeper violation, and I swung my
gaze toward Shaman as if I were wielding a shillelagh.
He drew back, startled. There
was the slightest hint of fear, then it passed like the moon shadow
of a wisp of smoke, and Shaman was his own again. He smiled a
studied smile. I withered.
"I see," Shaman said to Gypsy.
"You want to take away my farm."
Nora careened to the table and
stood over Shaman. There was blood smeared on her neck, down her
arms, and across her chest. "You’ve been at him. You said you
wouldn’t."
"Shaman tried to drill him,"
Gypsy said, "right here in the Magellanic Stream. Mel threw him out.
It was funny, Nora. You should have seen it. Mel bounced
him!"
Shaman shot back, "It wasn’t
the Earther. It was him, it was Gypsy using the boy like a
hand puppet. The boy is mine. He has no will. He has no self. He is
nothing. He is my straw, my chocolate flavor straw into the mind of
Abu. This had nothing to do with you or with anyone on Sanduleak or
anywhere else in the Magellanics."
"You’re wrong, Shaman," Nora
said. "Abu is our father as well.
"I’m no menace to your
galaxies. Why can’t you live and let live?" Shaman pushed away from
the table and stormed to what used to be the glass doors leading to
the pedestrian walkway. He stood there, staring out into black
space. Gypsy applauded sardonically; Shaman’s was the gesture of a
Shakespearean actor.
"Nora," I stuttered, "you’re
covered with blood."
"It was that tattooed man," she
said, "the one who gave me a flower. He must have been in the men’s
room when we took off. He stayed there and hid, apparently. I heard
him through the wall. I had to kill him."
21. If and Only If
"Vampires!" My mind rattled
like a dryer on three legs; Gypsy’s slap had knocked to center stage
the bubbles from Izzy’s quickpatch. Thoughts jostled and non
sequitured inside. I ran behind the salad bar and inched back and
forth along the sneeze guard, ready to fling dressings at any
attacker.
(These days, when I get an
audience with Izzy, he likes to give me a lot of grief about that
episode. He calls it the Intergalactic Food Fight.)
There wasn’t much Russian left,
but I was hoping to do some damage with the Roquefort and Italian,
if I had to. I thought the vinegar in the Italian might blind them
for a moment. The lumps of Roquefort cheese could slow them down. I
could make for the dishwasher and fly us home, beating them back
with ladles and meat cleavers and stuff that I found in the
kitchen.
But the cheese was probably
fake, I was thinking, or skimpy. I might be doomed in interstellar
space by larcenous highway restauranteurs. "Vampires! Stay back," I
said.
(Intergalactic Food Fight?IFF.
It’s a pun. "IFF" is also short for IF AND ONLY IF. I had to suffer
and be a maniac ignoramus so that Abu al-Hawl could get a ride home
and Johnny Abilene could ascend to the throne in the Small
Magellanic Cloud; once I did all those stupid little things I had to
do, the big matters inevitably resolved. IFF. Izzy knew
it.)
"Vampires! Stay
back!"
"This should be interesting,"
Gypsy drawled.
Nora walked toward me slowly.
"Trust me, Mel."
"No." I picked up a metal bowl
of ruffle-cut beet slices and threatened her with it. "You killed
that trucker. Did you eat him, Nora? Gypsy ate the cashier. Are you
fighting over who’s going to eat me?"
Shaman laughed. "You shouldn’t
have slapped him, Gypsy. Now he’s awake, such as he is."
"Mel . . ." Nora kept walking
toward me, undeterred by the beet slices. "You shouldn’t distress
yourself over blood. Bodies aren’t important, Mel. Don’t you
remember? You were almost there with me. . . ."
"No more love-making!" Shaman
warned. "I can do an epoch\xE9 too, Nora, and you might not like
how you’re greeted where I would take you."
"You wouldn’t dare," she said,
without taking her eyes off me. "You don’t know how, Shaman.
You’d turn the world inside-out. It would be the end of you." She
was more beautiful than ever. The blood somehow appealed to me now.
It made me tacitly aware of her neck, her chest, her arms. I was
hungry for her, starved to the marrow. She kept coming.
"What should I remember, Nora?"
I said. Then she would be mine.
"Remember the Sphinx, called
Abu al-Hawl!" Shaman shouted. "Remember he who made Chephren. The
Sphinx is still thumbing, and in all these millennia, none of
you Sanduleans has managed to pick him up. Stay put, Nora. You could
wind up in some waterless place for a long time, Nora, and there’d
be no WC."
Gypsy burst into flame. "I’m
you, Shaman!" he said.
"The hell you are. Don’t try
that on me!" Shaman pointed at him, thrusting his arm as if
it were a fire hose, and the flames whooshed out.
"What am I?" I said. I
dropped the beets.
(The Haymakers still send me
tribute every three hundred years: uranium juke boxes, fake books
from all parts of the universe?with performance rights
granted, since they know I like to gig on the acousticals
Johnny gave me in Giza?music boxes with their songs transposed to
Larmor frequencies, and so on. Three hundred years is a long time on
Sanduleak, but for most of my galaxy, it’s a blink; Johnny and the
boys are tremendously grateful to me, even though I really had no
choice in the matter, and if I had, frankly, I wouldn’t have
helped them.
I know that must sound pretty
crass, given that the Italians were using Abu’s head for rifle
practice during World War II, among other indignities that Ylemic
Lord had to suffer during his captivity. Still, I thought of myself
as an individual being for most of the time I was in the Milky Way.
I didn’t think that the Sphinx was of any importance whatever!
Deluded as that may be, I think you could call it a mitigating
circumstance: not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor. I was
looking out for Number One, so I thought, as if there were
any.)
22. I’m You
"You are Abu al-Hawl,"
Nora said, "the Father of Terror, Rahorakhty, Sun God of the
Two Horizons, and I am Queen of Punt, the land of incense, the land
of purified desire. Gypsy is my servitor. Shaman is a foul grave
robber. Abu al-Hawl, thou knowest everything. Abu al-Hawl,
Soul of the Great Sphinx, Ka, I invoke you."
Nora was looking straight at
me, but I could not believe that it was me she was talking to. She
was talking through me, as if I were a phone tube. Behind her
I saw Shaman laughing so hard he had to support himself against the
glass door. "Tell the boy what you like to do in water closets, oh
corpulent Queen of Punt." He made for us, stumbling and guffawing.
He placed himself between us, one hand on the sneeze guard, the
other on Nora’s bloody shoulder. Gypsy rose. "Tell him how you have
to watch water swirl in toilets or sinks or maelstroms, wherever
water goes down, oh Queen of the WC."
"You call it a toilet," Nora
said. I couldn’t see her face now. Shaman was in the way. "You think
that makes it something profane. I tell you Shaman, whatever is, is
an effulgence of Abu al-Hawl, whose home is Sanduleak and the stars,
but who dwells in all thoughts and all things. All that swirls,
swirls down to him. Feces and incense are one to him. Who shuts
himself off from one shuts himself off from all."
Shaman spun to face me.
"I’m you," he said, "I’m you, I’m you," and the
old feeling returned: a dumb, helpless beast, I was, stroked and
prodded by my master.
"Remember, Mel," Nora said.
"Remember the desert. It wasn’t New Mexico, Mel. It wasn’t New
anything. It was Egypt, Mel, not a day or two ago, but five
thousand years ago." Gypsy worked the ersatz flesh down his snake’s
flank and moved toward us, his hard, small eyes fixed on
Shaman.
I blinked and strained for a
thought that seemed just beyond my reach. I had seen pyramids
in the sand, Nubian slaves, teams of men laying massive
ashlars, granite facing stones, on jagged tiers of limestone.
It had been somewhere between Albuquerque and Espa\xF1ola, not far from
Saqqarah, somewhere around Abu Sir, Cairo or Santa Fe . . .
"I’m you," Shaman said.
Gypsy’s ichor-dripping, black maw yawned behind him. I smelled the
stink of Gypsy’s breath. I had seen Chephren on Route 25,
whose face was just like mine, just like the Sphinx’s. And
everything historians and archeologists had written about the El
Giza Sphinx was wrong. I remembered?But how??King Chephren had
not fashioned the face of Abu al-Hawl to resemble his own. It was
just the opposite!
Gypsy was closing his teeth
together with Shaman in the middle, but I overturned the salad bar,
tumbling steam trays of soup, shattering bowls and jetting forks,
knives, and spoons into Gypsy’s tongue and palate, or what passed
for tongue and palate. Shaman, wet with Gypsy, laughed. "I’m
you!" he was saying. "I’m you! I’m you!" Nora cowered
away from him, from me. Gypsy fell back.
Yes, it was I, the Sphinx
who had fashioned Chephren in his, in my likeness?not the other way
round?just as I had fashioned Mel, and a million other emanations of
my Ka, the sacred Ka of Abu al-Hawl.
23. Abu al-Hawl
I had everything I needed
there: maps, music, food, sanitary facilities, amusing art works on
the walls. In the gift shop there were games, books, trifles
aplenty, even T-shirts with my own likeness?weathered countenance,
sandblasted by a myriad storms, pecked by shells from MP 40’s,
jimmied block from ashlar and jammed with concrete in dullard
"restorations"?cum space hat, in day-glo pink. Enough truck
for my long passage beyond the realm of the living. At the rear of
the main funerary chamber were twin rows of sacred fountains, one
beyond the sign of "MEN," one beyond the sign of "WOMEN," swirling
water eternally present at the touch of a silvered lever, the symbol
of the devotion of Isis for Osiris, or of the Queen of Punt for Me.
I had entered the Stream, neutral hydrogen smeared by tidal forces
across two hundred thousand light-years between the Magellanic
Clouds and the Milky Way.
Wherever My gaze falls, if
the soil be fertile?this is what I realized?beings spring up in My likeness.
Their thoughts are but foam on the waves of My mind. Each little
creature is a door into Me. Seeking Me, they seek their true self.
Invoking My name, they will come home in Me.
Come, then, Queen of Punt,
ring my loins, receive My pollen. I will open into
you. I crawled toward
Nora over Gypsy’s slithering hulk. Shaman was pinned underneath him.
"I’m you!" he pleaded in a tinny, squeezed voice. Nora opened
her flower around me like Ganesha’s shakti. Lo, I destroy you
from inside. "Bodies aren’t important," she moaned. Mine is
the maelstrom you have sought. I swirled into her. You
could not hold Me on Sanduleak. You could not detain Me in the
Magellanics. My life is greater than that.
Gypsy coughed and spat black
blood. Shaman struggled out from under him. "You’re still down
there, still in Giza, still on Earth," Shaman told me. "I’m
you. I stopped you there, Abu al-Hawl. I’m you. I held
you as a man holds a morsel with his fork, then cuts and eats.
I’m you. This being here is a flake of your dried flesh, a
leaf trembling in your wind. I’m you. This being here is Mel,
little Mel, will-less Mel, the hitchhiker through New Mexico?I’m
you?through whom my pipeline has been laid. I speak to you,
Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You
are not here."
The sun burned my back. Desert
afternoon. I was seated in a huge limestone ditch. Between my paws,
where Tuthmosis’s stela used to rise, tiny creatures teemed. They
stared up at me, and I felt the pressure of their dreams against my
stone skin. I had pressed my dreams into Tuthmosis (now
Shaman) two thousand years before: Uncover Me, Noble One.
Remove the sand that girdles and swallows Me. I shall make
you king. He had dug me out, I made him Pharaoh, then he
betrayed me, anchored me to this claustrophobic world by the very
power I had dreamed into him. Now his stela was gone, its ground
defiled by vulgar feet, but Tuthmosis still lived.
He was speaking to me in a
mosquito’s voice, from an impossible distance: "I speak to you,
Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You
are not here." Little people shuffled, jabbered, clicked and
flashed in the shadow of my headdress. For the thousandth time, I
perceived, Tuthmosis had changed his name. Like snake skins or like
locusts’ hulls clinging emptily to the barks of trees, his old names
polluted history. Now he was "Shaman."
"I’m you," Shaman said.
A huge block rumbled and fell from my shoulder. The tourists
scattered. "Sanduleak couldn’t hold you, but Earth will. I
will. You are not in the Stream, Great One. You are in the desert
near Nazlet El-Semman. Gypsy and Nora are the grave robbers, not I.
They want to take you back to Gypsy’s galaxy, Abu al-Hawl, but you
are so happy in the sand! You are so happy to be my sun, my blood,
my radiance, my eternal source! The little brown man in the starship
humping Nora is Mel, not you! It’s Mel, and the child he is making
in her is a pitiable monster, a monster, Great One, and not the
child of your Mind, not the vehicle of your mind seed, not the
vessel of your radiance. This was a mirage. I am that.
Tuthmosis is that. Shaman is your vessel. I’m
you."
I felt heavy, very heavy. I had
no desire to move. I was being slowly drained. Perhaps that was
good. Perhaps it would lighten me. I scanned the crowd of little
people skirting the chunks fractured from the fallen limestone. They
were hysterically running east toward the tourist buses. Only one
person remained at the site of the ancient stela. With great
difficulty I focused on the small man between my paws. He was
wearing a T-shirt with my image in day-glo pink, and behind that,
the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren in blue. He wore Bermuda shorts
and a pith helmet. There was a camera hanging by a thong over one
shoulder and a canteen over the other. In one hand he held a
shopping bag that said "Nefertiti Bazaar."
Large wraparound sunglasses
covered his eyes and part of his forehead and nose. He peeled them
from his face, and I saw the brow, one brow arching over both eyes.
"Well," he shouted, "it’s been a year, just like I told you, and
here I am, Melly-belly. Don’t time fly!"
24. Not the Memphis in
Tennessee
"Looks like you’ve got a little
dandruff there." Izzy scattered slivers of limestone with a playful
kick. "And one of us could use a shave. But my cork held, didn’t it,
bubeleh, in spite of all the bad-mouthing from various cosmic
adventurers I could mention?"
He took a few snapshots of
me?Click, flash!?mopped his forehead, downed a swig of water.
The suck and gurgle of the water smacking back into the canteen when
he pulled it from his lips. The distant murmurs of tourists huddling
back as soldiers herded them with batons. Millennia whispering by:
sand, wind, sun. . . .
"So, you like it here or what?
Sarvadhuka’s going nuts in the novelty shops and brothels. I told
him he doesn’t get a disease or induce any
pregnancies?Izzovision?so now he’s taken out all the stops,
if you’ll excuse the expression. He got so burned when he found out
that the Memphis I promised him nooky in wasn’t the one in
Tennessee, I felt I had to share some information, to make it up to
him.
"I like the weather station on
your rump, by the way. Getty Institute, right? No, don’t bother to
answer. That’s all right. Don’t exercise yourself, kid. That would
really freak the tourists. As if it wasn’t bad enough having
a piece of your shoulder fall off and then seeing a lunatic like
yours truly gabbing at Old Stoneface here as if he was an old
acquaintance.
"You just take it easy. Shaman
talks a good game, but he can’t do nothing for a while yet. I’ll
come back after nightfall. Me and Sovereign Duchy was just casing
the joint thisaft, bagging a few collectibles and that. Don’t say
goodbye. Don’t say thank you. Don’t say a thing, Great
Abbadabba."
A moustached soldier in khakis
and beret with a Kalashnikoff slung over his shoulder grabbed Izzy’s
elbow to escort him from the Sphinx enclosure, the hollow I formed
about me when I first crash landed on Earth and created human
beings, a long, tiring process from the initial joining of
nucleotides through the evolution of humans, through whom I could
actuate my mental processes, and eventuating in the birth of
Tuthmosis IV, on whom I believed I could rely, but consciousness has
its own intrinsic imperatives, so here I was, anchored in this
blank, vasty shoal, cut off from the stars my home, and utterly
dependent on the ministrations of a punch press operator from
Lockport, New York.
Somewhere on the wind a mite
was buzzing: "I’m you! I’m you!" I felt so tired!
TWO
25. The Mysteries of
Monophysitism
Izzy did not make it back that
night. He was being detained, I learned, in an Egyptian hoosegow.
Sarvaduhka ran the message over to me. He had to pay one of his
Cairo prostitutes one hell of a baksheesh, he said, to guide
him, on the back of a camel, through Nazlet El-Semman over to the
western funerary complex, and on to the enclosure, my
enclosure. Mastaba by mastaba they crept. It gave
Sarvaduhka the willies.
Sarvaduhka’s guide was a Coptic
Christian, Lila Kodzi, who discoursed on the mysteries of
Monophysitism at the most inappropriate moments. Sarvaduhka
complained about it. He seemed to think I was God. He told me
everything. At the moment of orgasm (Sarvaduhka’s orgasm?she
didn’t have them) she would curse the Council of Chalcedon, some
fifteen hundred years past, and she would vociferously affirm, in
excellent English, the one divine nature of Christ, as
Sarvaduhka twitched and spasmed, emitting expletives in three
Sanskrit-derived languages.
Sarvaduhka and his shakti
huddled at my hindquarters as lights flashed brilliantly on the
pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and on my own disintegrating
limestone hulk. It was just at the end of the late Friday night
sound and light show, the German language one. The show must have
been impressive for souls with human bodies and eyes, but all the
information was false. As I said, it was I who made Chephren,
and not the other way round.
26. What We Can Learn from
Linguini
There’s nothing like a few
thousand years in the sand to give you a certain sense of
perspective. Something deep inside me had loosened up in the
millennia since my New Mexico adventure, which, I now understood,
preceded the Fourth Dynasty just as much as it followed it.
Don’t let the dates fool you.
The people who wrote down the
Bible understood this kind of thing. Look and see: Genesis, XIX:3,
for example. Lot bakes matzohs?Passover bread?in his house in Sodom.
But this was before Moses, before the exodus from Egypt, before
Passover started, with the unleavened bread the Children of Israel
baked in the sun while the current Pharaoh was saddling horses.
Israel (i.e., Jacob) hadn’t even been born yet. So what was Lot
doing baking matzohs back in Sodom?
If Izzy has taught me anything
at all, it’s that clock time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Sometimes five p.m. comes a week or two before six, and sometimes
they’re simultaneous. The so-called excluded middle is positively a
jungle, teeming with unenumerated possibilities. And causality, so
far from being the one-dimensional line that Kant and even Hume
talked about, is as wild as linguini on a rolling boil.
Where I now live, for example,
on Sanduleak, the surface temperature is three or four hundred times
what it is on Earth or Mars. Since Sandy went supernova and
contracted to a neutron star, it’s a thousand degrees
Kelvin?in the shade! That makes things go pretty fast.
By Earth scale, a decent life span for a citizen on Sandy is maybe a
quadrillionth of a second. It feels like a long time here. You’d
think a bridge like that could never be gapped, that Earthers and
Sanduleans could never communicate, and you’d be right except that,
in this man’s universe, there is no absolute standard. We have a
sliding scale. And I mean sliding!
The Earther Protagoras had it
right:
Man is the measure of all
things.
Well, not Man, but Mind really,
not to be anthropocentric. All those scales and numbers and laws of
science are just hypostatizations of something that actually belongs
to the realm of Mind. Mind made them. Mind measures them. Mind
compares, adjusts, interprets, changes. That’s what the epoch\xE9 is
all about, for example. That’s why Shaman was such an imminent
threat even from a couple hundred million miles away, even if it had
been light-years away?c is not the top speed in
this man’s universe, not when you can do an epoch\xE9. Nature is a lot
less rigid than that, believe me.
Look at linguini.
27. Dualism
"Mel, is that you, Mel? Abu
al-Hawl?" Sarvaduhka was whispering into my hindquarters, the
pyramid of Chephren at his back, and in between, Lila Kodzi and two
camels tethered to a rock. "I can’t believe I drove you in my VW
Squareback on Route 40. Is this you? Izzy says you are the Father of
Terrors from before the pharaohs and that you have shepherded the
dynonucleic acid ancestors out of the primal soup down to modern
Homo sapiens such as I myself, Sarvaduhka, that you are the
progenitor of all life on Earth. Izzovision. Is this the
truth? You did not appear this way to me in New Mexico or Texas. I
hope I did not offend you, Great One, by anything I may have said or
done at that time, Om Shantih."
Lila said, "Sir, you’re talking
to a big stone."
Sarvaduhka ignored her. "Izzy
couldn’t make it, oh Terrible One. He is being held by the
authorities here. They think maybe he is a terrorist, but Izzy says
not to worry. He asked me to give you this message, Ineffable
Ancient Great One.
"Number One, he apologizes that
his gambit did not work exactly as planned . . ."
"Number One, Number Two!" Lila
Kodzi slapped Sarvaduhka on the shoulder. "He’s been rehearsing this
all the way from Cairo. Number One, Number Two! Bah! There is only
Number One! Is this not so, Ancient Greatness? All is the divine
holy Christ Nature, and the divine holy Christ Nature is one." Now
she whispered into the clefts of my badly mortared
posterior.
The sound and light show had
reached the reign of Cheops. People here seemed to consider that
fairly ancient. They should have seen the first lungfish. They
should have seen the nucleotides I netted from the asteroid belt,
how I landed them and nursed them, turned them inside-out,
left-to-right, and said to Myself, "Let us make Man." That,
they could more justly have called "ancient."
"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka
said. Lila grumbled. Sarvaduhka went on. "Number One, Izzy wanted
the Sanduleans to save you from Shaman, but not to take you so far
away from Earth. So, that didn’t work out so well, and he is sorry,
Greatness."
"He’s right here," Lila said.
"What?far away? Obviously, you are a dualist."
"I am not a dualist. I
am your employer. You don’t know what you are talking about,
Lila. The Mel Bellow person is in outer space somewhere."
"I thought you said he was the
Sphinx now."
"Yes and no."
"Dualism."
"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka
honeyed his voice. "Number Two, Izzy requests that you employ your
vast powers to bring Johnny Abilene to El Giza. This appears to be
the only way that you can be saved from eternal slavehood to Shaman,
who is also Tuthmosis IV."
"Dualism."
"Lord Abu al-Hawl, Great
Beneficent One, please make the whore shut up."
28. Who Am I?
I bolted upright, like a
stricken dreamer. "Who am I?" Gypsy sat across the table from me, a
half-peeled banana, the dendritic bulb sprouting from his crumpled
human thorax like fungus from the crotch of a dead oak. He wasn’t
moving. Nora sat beside him, still and silent. Her mouth was
slightly open; she stared dumbly past me. Nora was naked?still
human?and her long hair was splayed all over her face, shoulders,
breasts. I touched her arm. It was cold.
From the kitchen: the whooshing
and humming of the dishwashing machine, and sometimes a knock, as
from badly vented plumbing; then the whole caf\xE9 shook. Each sound
was accompanied by a change of scenery out the window. The streaks
of starlight shifted angles, they grew dense or sparse, or danced in
circles, or split into planes like layers of grenadine and liquor.
We passed through glittering banks of sperm-like particles, auras of
colored light, moments of darkness so profound they seemed to darkle
the caf\xE9 pitch black, nullifying our fluorescents.
Tools clanked. Shaman
grunted.
"Nora?" I said.
The noise in the kitchen
abruptly stopped. Shaman appeared at the door. His white pants were
stained with grease. He held a box-end wrench in one hand. He looked
tired. "I’m you, you little shit."
I slumped back into the
chair.
He took a few steps in my
direction, then barked, "You’re not here." I was gone. It was night
on the Sahara. On the fringe of my mind, fast fading, was the image
of Shaman coming closer, jabbing at Izzy’s bung with something like
an ice pick, doing it without much spirit, as if he’d tried it a
dozen times before to no effect and didn’t really expect it to work
now. He slapped Gypsy and Nora to see if they would respond?they
didn’t. Then he returned to the kitchen, to the dishwasher, in the
same disgruntled, hopeless frame of mind.
"I’ll have to do my own
epoch\xE9," he muttered, "if this doesn’t work. God help us all
then."
Then nothing. Then sand, sound
and light, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi shouting up my stone ass.
29. Epoch\xE9
" ‘Who am I?’ Did you hear
that, Lila Kodzi? The Sphinx spoke." Sarvaduhka shivered.
"It was one of the camels.
Hamad snorted. He snorts, that’s all."
Sarvaduhka persisted. "Oh Great
One, I will convey your question to Izzy: ‘Who am I?’ I myself am
but a poor, small person in the hospitality trade. I have two, three
motels jointly with my cousins, although they hardly do anything but
watch TV and drink alcoholic items. I will ask Izzy, who knows many
things like that. But can you get Johnny Abilene, Wondrous One? Izzy
wants to know, will you do it A.S.A. of P.? He would do this
himself, but he is indisposed."
"Maybe Abu can give us a sign."
Lila nudged Sarvaduhka.
"Exactly, but please be quiet,
Lila. I am doing this . . . Great One, can you give us a
sign?"
My selfhood was significantly
in disarray. I was being addressed by creatures whose formation I
had initiated some seven hundred million years before in an attempt
to disembark from the Milky Way, where I found myself stranded. On
the other hand, I was being held in a Texas highway rest stop caf\xE9 a
good ways out in space toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Besides
which, I was some sort of tourist attraction.
Shaman wanted to eat me. I
wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t find my center. To me was lost
that Archimedean fulcrum from which the soul can act.
"A sign, oh Great One! Please,
a sign!"
It was like trying to sit up
when your back is out?Where are those muscles? My desperation drove
me deeper and deeper away from my senses, deeper and deeper away
from thoughts and feelings too. Sinking in, even the desperation
dwindled above me like bubbles rising away from a skin
diver.
Through murk and roil, I
squinted as an artist squints, bracketing the details to understand
the whole. Fish and weed of mind tumbled by, denuded of names
and relations, continually devouring one another, blurring
boundaries. This wasn’t the swill of Shaman’s hole, for now I
was the diver and the pearls I found would be
mine.
But then the word "I" grew
goosefeet. It emptied. "I" was just a mark, a convenience of
thought, vacuous outside the quote marks.
The voices of Shaman?I’m
you!?of Sarvaduhka, Lila Kodzi, the sound and light
show?upbeat, mendacious?all merged in a current without source or
destination. The moan of the wind, an atom bomb, nostalgia, the
planet Mars, the number three, oneself, the South of France, all
lines all gone!
DON’T TRY THIS AT
HOME.
Place went. Sequence went. Time
was ungetatable. No thought to think and not a thing to think it.
"I" kept diving. "I" allowed "myself" to be swallowed further until,
dissolving, "I" melted into a dark, pliable mass one could only call
the bottom. Sea creatures here, murky, inchoate, that altered
as one’s gaze changed, inseparable from one’s gaze.
A stirring here,
continually! Not the blank void of the mystics! Call it an urge,
call it Der Wille Zur Macht, call it Tao or Pauli’s
Exclusion Principle, impelling the contractile world back out of its
own navel:
Terms may be
used
But are none of them
absolute,
says Lao Tze of this foetal
state.
"I" had unwittingly performed
an epoch\xE9, and this was its crux. "I" had found the fulcrum. "I" was
utterly free. "I" could do anything.
I broke wind.
All at once, the goosefeet fell
away. Iwas there, little me and big me, as before: Mel and
Abu al-Hawl, the one space-bound in a helpless stupor, the other
grounded in a strange galaxy, both on account of Shaman. Yes, Shaman
existed and Gypsy and Nora in the Magellanic Stream, Izzy in his
lockup, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi holding their noses, the camels
huffing and turning away, the tourists . . . oblivious.
I had glimpsed my fulcrum.
Used it even. I had witnessed the birth of a world ex
nihilo, with me in the middle. Epoch\xE9. Incomprehensible! I would
bide my time and wait to see what it meant.
Some things were a bit
different. I was aware somehow, as information, as something
casually read or heard, that Gamal Abdel Nasser was dead. (He had
been alive before the epoch\xE9.) Also, the Vietnam War was still going
on, with American soldiers heavily invested.
And Eugene McCarthy wasn’t
president. My epoch\xE9 had shifted a sweaty upper lip into the Oval
Office. There it had been, for a hundredth of a second, hovering
above a swivel chair, just the lip, a little damp skin above it, and
the barest hint of nostril. Then, due to a principle the Magellanics
call "Causal Recovery," in order to preserve the causal chain
locally, a human being congealed around it, complete with his past,
present and future, grade school teachers, mortician, the lot: a guy
name of Richard Nixon. Some other things changed as well. The
American flag was now red white and blue (and now, it
always had been!).
Nobody but me would know the
difference, for my new universe came complete with
history?retroactively?and memories in synch. Nobody, I suspected,
but Izzy.
There was one other change I
was immediately aware of. A guy in cowboy boots with spurs, wearing
a ten-gallon hat and carrying a guitar case under his arm, was
striding into the Sphinx enclosure where Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi
grimaced: "Feh! Feh! Feh!"
"Mel?" he was saying. "Is that
you, son? Is it really, truly you?"
"Gone Joe! Dad!" I
said?somehow.
Somehow, he heard me. Effluvium
despite, he galloped to my rock butt and embraced the cooling, rough
stone, pressing into me with all his might, kissing me and weeping
for joy.
30. Passport Photo
"Are you the authentic Johnny
Abilene?" Lila Kodzi said. "I have all your records. I love
your music."
Sarvaduhka was trembling,
hysterically trying to piece together how Johnny Abilene had
appeared on the scene. Sarvaduhka’s Causal Recovery, apparently, had
been incomplete. He pulled Lila violently away. "Take me back to
Cairo. This is all Izzy said to do. The sound and light show is
almost over, and I don’t want to be caught back here when they start
cleaning up. . . . It still stinks?what was that?"
She pushed him back. "And what
about Number Three?"
Sarvaduhka slapped his head. "I
forgot! The photograph. The passport photograph. Give me the
Kodak."
"It’s a Polaroid."
"Give me the
Kodak."
It was a Polaroid. The epoch\xE9.
Sarvaduhka blinked. He took the camera. "Wait." He sneaked around to
the front of me, in among the tourists, and snapped a photo of my
face and shoulders, pleated headdress and all. Then, shaking wildly,
he managed to return to Lila and the horses?they were horses now,
and not camels. Epoch\xE9.
He tore Lila away from Johnny
Abilene, who was oblivious to her advances as he hugged me and
whispered and whispered. Sarvaduhka and Lila were still arguing as
they mounted their horses and trotted away between the pyramids of
Cheops and Chephren.
31. Nora Wouldn’t
Understand
Johnny Abilene whispered: "Oh
son, we finally made it! Guldang if you ain’t one with Abu al-Hawl!
I knew we could do it! I knew it! You forgive me for leaving you and
your poor little mama, don’t you, Mel? You must know by now that I’m
no Earther. That makes you a half of what I am, son, you and Abu,
half-Magellanic. I’m gonna take you back to the Clouds, where you
belong. You’ll come now, won’t you?
"I’m sorry we can’t take your
mama there, boy, but she’s an Earther; believe me, Mel, Nora just
wouldn’t understand."
In the Magellanic Stream and in
the Sahara, my mind brittled like frozen tofu. "Did you say ‘Nora’?"
32. Earther, You Don’t
Understand History
I had thought she looked
familiar.
Johnny Abilene was astounded to
discover that Nora was also a Sandulean agent. More accurately, she
was an Earther recruited by Sanduleans for the purpose of returning
Abu al-Hawl to the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Emperor, the
same entity who, with his United Diet of the Small and Large Clouds,
maneuvered the Magellanics into orbit around the Milky Way, the same
who caused Sanduleak to go supernova in order to convey Johnny
Abilene to Earth, this same Emperor also found Nora, via epoch\xE9, and
installed her as a backup and secret watchdog over
Abilene.
"In this business, you can’t
trust nobody," the Emperor told me much later. Only Izzy was in a
position to know all the details at that time, but now, on Sandy,
it’s immortalized in the song, "Marriage is Just Two Alien Agents
Hiding from Each Other, Anyway," Number 423 on the list, last I
heard, about a billionth of a second ago.
By inseminating the Earther,
effecting the commingling of the Magellanic and Milky Way branches
of Abu’s great family, the Emperor and my father (and, unknown to
him, Nora) had planned to produce the Sphinx’s Messiah.
"Yeah, every time we tried to get through to Abu, it was ‘ADDRESSEE
UNKNOWN,’ the Emperor told me once, over neutron latt\xE9. "It’s
enough to make a guy agnostic. So we figured we’d try a little
psychology."
But then they didn’t know how
to use me to get through to Abu. Undercover as "Johnny
Abilene," world-traveling musical goodwill ambassador, my father
left Nora and me to look for a clue. Everywhere Johnny gigged, he
buttonholed Egyptologists, astrophysicists, and Edgar Cayce
fans.
Neither the Emperor, Nora, nor
Johnny actually understood how to get to Abu via Mel until Shaman
inadvertently showed them the way. Then it was a race to avert
disaster; the Earther Shaman, after his own selfish ends, threatened
to thwart the entire proceeding. The Magellanic Emperor sent Gypsy
in the caf\xE9 ship, to help out Nora. The Emperor had, of course,
first prepared the way by lining the North American throughway
system with rest stop caf\xE9s that resembled the Magellanic craft, so
Gypsy’s caf\xE9 could land undetected.
And if you think that any of
this is less reliable information than the Battle of Hastings or the
invention of the cotton gin?which may change any moment due to
epoch\xE9 or political revisionism?then, Earther, you don’t understand
history.
Johnny Abilene was astounded.
Just imagine how I felt. And now she was pregnant again?my
mother, with my child. Whatever in hell "my" had come
to mean!
33. After Nasser’s
Death
In the confusion following
Nasser’s death, Izzy was sprung, and all tours of the Giza funerary
complex were put on hold. Lila Kodzi led Izzy on horseback, with
Sarvaduhka, Johnny Abilene and one of the Haymakers, just arrived
from the other Memphis via Lufthansa. Nobody stopped them. I
saw them from above and from below. I felt hooves echo against the
roofs of underground chambers; I saw them, tiny, remote, from
millions of miles above the sky. And from inside their skins, I felt
them also, not chaotically as when Shaman had pierced me, but
clearly, from a standpoint: Abu al-Hawl’s.
Izzy waved a little navy-blue
book. "I got it! I got it, Melly baby. I got you a passport. We’re
gonna haul ass out of the Sahara." They cantered into the enclosure.
"His Polaroid did it; the sun spoiled my Fuji’s. Sarvaduhka’s a
hero. And you, you’re great too, boy. You got Johnny Abilene here,
and he’s our main man." Izzy dismounted and held the passport photo
up for the Sphinx to see.
Lila jumped down beside him and
twined herself around his arm. "You lovely one-brow, you are a crazy
man everywhere, just like in bed. How will you get the Great Sphinx
through customs?"
My father clapped a husky arm
around Sarvaduhka. Sarvaduhka was cadaverous and grim on the
outside. Inside, he was set to explode. "He gets everything," ?I
could hear him thinking? "female action included, and my squareback
thrown in, free mileage, everything. And what do I get? Saddle
sore."
"It so happens," Izzy crowed,
"that if we can take him through during the hour just after sunset,
the customs official lets it right by. He just thinks maybe
something’s kind of funny, but he can’t put his finger on it, see
what I mean?"
"Why do you have to move him at
all," said Sarvaduhka, and he thought, ". . . you stupid,
back-stabbing fornicator?"
"I’ll ignore the last part,
Marmaduke, but the fact is, I gotta take him into the shop. I can’t
finish fixing him against Shaman out here in the Sahara. My skin’s
too pale, okay?"
"I will not bother to ask how
you expect to move a sixty-five-foot-high limestone statue across
the desert, through customs, and up the gangplank onto an airplane,
and convince everyone that he is simply a mid-level executive at
Coca-Cola. Two hundred forty feet long, Izzy!"
"Good work," said Izzy, "you’ve
been listening to the Son et Lumi\xE8re. I get his peanuts and
that on the airplane, don’t forget. I called it at the Cairo Khan
Suites."
They were gathering under my
chin, where my plaited stone beard used to hang, the Pharaonic sign
that shaded Tuthmosis when he dug me out of the sand. My father,
Johnny Abilene, passed around his canteen; it was a scrotal
second-hander from Death Valley. "I’ve been waiting for this moment
for a long time, Your Majesty," he said to Izzy.
"Don’t call me that," Izzy
hissed, "not in front of him."
34. Peripherizing the
Sphinx
"Okay, Johnny A.," said Izzy.
"I think you know what to do."
The Haymaker produced a ukulele
and started strumming backup, while Johnny tightened his bowels as
if he were about to defecate. Johnny pursed his lips and squinted.
The sky blinked black and then shone so brilliantly that they all
had to squint and shade their eyes. There was a faint rumble from
deep below.
Johnny was
peripherizing. "I’m gonna impossibilize that gigantus right
down to a midgy," he grunted. "He can walk among us like a regular
man, as long as we don’t look too hard, and I’m gonna fix it so’s we
can’t, and so nobody can, till he gets to Izzy’s
shop."
Sarvaduhka was unimpressed.
"What about the plane? It won’t hold him."
"Anything that touches old Abu,
once I’ve peripherized him, is gonna fall down into the same
squint and follow along."
"Do it, cowboy," Izzy said,
sweating under his pith helmet as the sun crossed over the
zenith.
Johnny gave one last push,
"Ee-hah!" Nothing had changed, but suddenly, everyone was looking at
me differently, that is, without craning their necks! It was no
longer possible to focus directly on the Sphinx; I was quarantined
to the corner of everyone’s eye, where a lot can pass, believe me,
that would terrify down center. I was as if man-sized. Johnny
patted me on my stone shoulders, gave me a kiss, they all remounted,
and we headed out.
35. The Space People
came across the desert like a
swarm of locusts. They were swinging "spirit catchers" over their
heads, dowel-and-rubber-band doohickeys furiously
buzzing.
We had left the Sphinx
enclosure. Dad had given me sunglasses and a white polyester suit to
wear. Izzy stuck a briefcase in my paw and hoped that the headdress
would pass for a touristy gewgaw. For reasons unknown, the
headdress, unlike my gigantic size, earthen complexion, missing
appendages, and leonine corpus, could not be easily camouflaged. I
walked in the middle, flanked by Johnny and the Haymaker, a baritone
in a bolo tie, with Izzy and Lila Kodzi in front and Sarvaduhka
bringing up the rear.
Dad and the baritone Haymaker
had been singing:
Halfway home, boys, halfway
home!
Jimmy jimmy jimson
weed,
Nono nono no
m-
Ore alone!
With my little bitty
buckaroo baby
Sa-sa-saddled by my
side,
My honey bunny
sonnyboy,
Let’s ride!
Halfway h . .
.
And there they swarmed,
Shaman’s Space People, a dozen humans swathed in what looked like
twisted bedsheets. They swept straight for us over the sand. Dad and
the Haymaker fell silent. Izzy started beeping.
"No!" Izzy pulled out the
beeper and examined it. "Three point five and rising. Damn! Shaman’s
trying an epoch\xE9." The air shimmered with heat waves. The Space
People advanced through a mirage of shining sand that looked like
the Great Salt Lake. As we continued to advance, it cleared, and
behind them, suddenly, nearer than the chotchke market of
Nazlet El-Semman, there appeared a large concession complex that had
not been there a moment before, although everyone in the world
except Izzy, Johnny and I?and Shaman?remembered its being
there.
The Texas state flag hung
limply from a huge pole beside it. In addition to the entrance at
the base, there was another entry on the upper story, a pair of
glass doors opening into empty space. It looked exactly like a
highway rest stop caf\xE9, with the overhead passenger walkway
amputated.
"Lila," Izzy asked her, "how’s
the Vietnam War going?"
"The what?"
"The Vietnam War. This is
important."
"Well, Iz, last I heard anyway,
the VC were still holding onto Manhattan, Washington, and most of
the American east coast, but the government in Memphis is making
them fight like hell to advance inland. Why?"
36. Plan B
"And who’s president? C’mon,
Lila, honey, I gotta know the score before Shaman leaves the
dishwasher."
"What president?" Sarvaduhka
interjected. "The last president was Kennedy, in nineteen hundred
and sixty-three. Since then, it’s been a monarchy. Are you
completely crazy, besides being a back-stabbing
fornicator?"
"Well, boys," Izzy said,
"better switch to Plan B. Looks like we’re not gonna make it to
customs before midnight?Do we still have midnights. . . ? Hey!
Where’s the baritone?" The Haymaker’s horse was snorting nervously.
Its saddle was empty. At its hooves was a dead asp with a bolo tie
around its eyes.
"Dang!" Johnny said. "There
goes the best Earther baritone you ever saw."
"Phooey!" Sarvaduhka spat and
tramped forward, biliously abreast of Izzy. "It was stupid to bring
a horse to carry that asp in the first place."
The Space People huddled about
two hundred yards away. Someone had appeared against the double
doors of the caf\xE9. "That’s Gypsy or I’m a mute coyoot," Johnny said.
"I ain’t seen that boy since we chain-ganged together on the
Magellanic Stream." Gypsy was banging on the glass. Banging,
banging. Then sliding down slowly, leaving a trail of ichor. And
revealing behind him, as he fell, a tall figure dressed in white.
There was a catch in Johnny’s voice: "And that’s gotta be
Shaman."
Where’s
Nora? I thought?I
Mel?eyes closed, swooning at the caf\xE9 table. Is she
okay?
"Sure she’s okay," Izzy said,
down on the desert. "She’s batting a thousand, kid, only we
may not be doing so good. I don’t like the way Shaman’s
smiling."
Johnny Abilene was unzipping
his human skin. My father! The big hat fell down around his
dendrites. The spurs and boots slid down his horse’s flanks and
slithered, still stuffed with feet, to the sand below. The horse,
spooked, took off toward the Pyramid of Cheops, leaving Johnny
hovering there for a moment before he fell to the ground, at
noticeably less than 32 feet per second squared.
Lila Kodzi petitely threw
up.
Sarvaduhka dismounted, ran to
Izzy and fell on his knees. "Izzy, we are okay, yes? The Space
People will not hurt us, yes? You have Plan B? Izzy, what is
Plan B?"
Izzy slapped the Haymaker’s
mount on the rump and watched it gallop toward the Space People,
followed by Sarvaduhka’s horse. "Let me think a minute," he said.
37. Drunken Tarrier
"Nora?" It came out of my
throat like a death rattle. "Mom?" I lifted my head from the table.
My cheek was wet?I had been drooling. She was cold. She didn’t move.
I saw Shaman standing at the glass doors, Gypsy slumped at his feet.
An acrid vapor rose from Gypsy’s flesh. The color was steaming out
of it, yellow to grey to black. "Nora?"
"I’m you," Shaman said.
He was looking out into the desert, not at me. He drilled without
spirit, like a drunken tarrier, never noticing how dull his bit was
since my epoch\xE9. "I’m you"?a tired song, water on water; I’d
seen my fulcrum, I’d glimpsed who I was, though I too was
tired.
Shaman angled and bobbed his
head, peering past his Space People at Izzy’s band. "Peripherized,"
he muttered. "The sly dog!"
He turned toward me and lifted
his chin; I knew he wanted me to come to him, to stand at his side.
My body felt leaden. My pulse echoed in my skin. I had to leave Nora
and go to him. He put his arm around my shoulders.
Down below, the Space People
leaned toward us like heliotropes to the sun. Sarvaduhka was hugging
Izzy’s saddle bags. Lila covered her eyes and drew her head down
between her shoulders as if she could withdraw like a turtle into
its shell. The force of Shaman’s thought flung Johnny Abilene into
the sand; posing there before the glass, Shaman spoke to
everyone?inside their own heads.
"This is my property. He’s
me. Here is my fountain, my ancient spring. He’s
me. His deep waters sired and nurtured me until I ripped out
my umbilicus and dammed Abu for my own pleasure. He’s me. Abu
will remain on Earth forever. Abu?He’s me?is my
eternal life."
"But Shaman," I said, "I’m
not you."
38. Officer Domingo’s
Conclusion
Izzy was ransacking his saddle
bags, as if Plan B were in there. Lila had climbed down off her
horse and was sitting on the ground, her head lolling against
Sarvaduhka, who still knelt beside Izzy, begging him to think of
something to save them. Johnny, his slimy Magellanic body glimmering
on the sand, struggled to lift himself.
"I got a feeling," Izzy said as
baggies of moldering Danish, maps, sun tan lotion, airline tickets,
ephemerides and sen-sens flew from his saddle bags. "I got this
feeling, Ducky!"
I, Abu, had lived through many
things. I had seen civilizations come and go. The Space People could
scythe Izzy and the others into the dunes, and I need barely notice.
But I, Mel, was so new to this world?twenty years of it?that
every flutter was still a revelation. Oh, Izzy, come
through!
"Ah!" Izzy thrust high a travel
brochure he’d picked up at the American Embassy in Cairo. Then he
riffled through it till he found the paragraph he’d been looking
for, the one that hadn’t been there before Shaman’s epoch\xE9, the one
he’d sensed via Izzovision. "Look at this, Sarvaduhka."
Sarvaduhka read as Izzy held
the page open before him. "So what?"
"The motel business has really
dulled your brains, Duke." Izzy ran toward the Space People waving
the brochure over his head. "Hey! Look at this. Hey! Did Shameface
show you this?"
The Space People were leaning
to see Shaman through the glass doors above. Izzy had to swing them
around, one by one, bodily, to make them look at his paragraph. When
they did, some gasped and seemed immediately stricken, others became
angry and denied it, pushing him away, while still others started to
argue with Izzy and with one another.
Above, Nora stirred. I ran to
her. "Mother!"
"I’m you!" Shaman
protested. I ignored him.
"I am but a remote descendent
of your creature Chephren," Nora told me. Her face was coloring
again, the eyes filling with light.
"No." I kissed her forehead.
"You are the Queen of the Pontius, the land of incense ladders, my
beloved consort. I never made Chephren. I have nothing to do with
Chephren."
Shaman boiled. "Chephren came
to me in a dream. He told me to dig you out, you ridiculous ingrate.
Are you disowning Chephren?"
"It was your own epoch\xE9 that
changed things, Shaman," I said.
Down below, Izzy was trumpeting
it for everyone’s ears: "See, it says so right here, folks:
‘Visitors to the Valley of
Kings may be interested to note that, contrary to previously held
theories, there is no relation between the Sphinx and Chephren.
Frank Domingo, a senior forensic officer of the New York City Police
Department, has concluded, after rigorous examination and analysis,
that there is no actual similarity between the face of the Giza
Sphinx and the face on the statue of Chephren previously supposed to
be its model.’
(Or vice versa.) There it is,
boys and girls. Your Fearless Leader lied to you."
"I warned you, Shaman," Nora
was saying. "You can’t control the epoch\xE9. You’re nothing now. The
Sphinx never sired our race. We came up out of the mud all on our
own. The Sphinx is just hitching through. You’re just another human,
like me."
The Space People were pelting
the glass doors with rocks. With his mind, Shaman commanded them to
stop?to no effect.
39. The Death of Gypsy
The ice pick with which Shaman
attacked me was no less lethal for being non-physical. He hacked at
Izzy’s bung. Thoughts hissed from me like leaking steam, but the
patch held. "You!" he screamed at me. "You laid your own mother. You
want to kill yourself, don’t you?"
"You forget I’m only half
human," I said. "We Magellanics mummafug all the time, didn’t you
say so?"
The glass cracked and
collapsed, littering jagged fragments behind Shaman. Space People
chinned up and climbed through. Izzy was there, on what would have
been Johnny Abilene’s shoulders, were he wearing his Earther skin.
The Space People grabbed Shaman’s arms; Johnny grabbed his
mind.
I stood by Nora, watching it
all.
I stood below, on the desert,
behind Lila Kodzi and Sarvaduhka, bursting out of the sunglasses and
synthetic suit as the peripheralysis wore off and I was once more a
gigantic monolith from the stars.
Johnny Abilene knelt beside
Gypsy, his brother Sandulean. "Bodies aren’t important," Gypsy
gasped. Then he saw Izzy. "Your Majesty!"
The Space People were tying
Shaman to the condiment stand. Izzy stroked Gypsy’s wan anterior
bulge. "You been bad-mouthing me, Gypsy. I can tell.
Izzovision."
"Why didn’t you trust me, Your
Majesty? You sent me here to do a job. Then you came yourself and
never let me know."
"I didn’t think things would go
so fast, Gyp. I had to epoch\xE9 on down in a hurry when the Space
People killed Shaman."
"Killed Shaman? Shaman’s not
dead."
"We got past and future mixed
around here, old Giblet. Anyways, I’ll confer with you before the
whole thing ever happened?retroactively?once I get a
minute."
"I hate your guts, Izzy," Gypsy
said, and he kissed him, the way Magellanics do, thwucking their
nodes against each other, then expired in Izzy’s arms.
Johnny shook his dendrites.
"Well, my Lord, there goes the best dang Sandulean operative you
ever want to see."
Izzy heaved a sigh. "When we
get back to the Mags, I’ll name a couple weeks after
him."
"I thought you didn’t want me
to leave Earth. I thought you worked at Gibson’s in Lockport," I
said.
"Yeah, that’s just part-time,"
Izzy said. "I’m also the Emperor of the Magellanic Clouds."
40. Beyond Oedipus
"That still don’t let me out of
having to be back at Gibson’s 8:30 a.m. Monday morning though," Izzy
said, "unless I want to be docked for the time, which I
don’t."
"Dualism!" cried Lila Kodzi.
With Sarvaduhka, she had found a way up from the base of the rest
stop caf\xE9 rocket ship desert concession. Sarvaduhka had become too
frightened to remain in my shadow below. "Dualism! You are not both
here and there, liar! If you are an Emperor, you are not a lathe
setup man as you claimed to me in our conjugal bed at the Cairo Khan
Suites Hotel. Izzy Molson, I abjure all past relationship with such
as you."
"That suits me okay," said
Izzy. "I’m working on a little something in Tonawanda, anyways, name
of Fay."
"Creep!" She abruptly turned
away, grabbed Sarvaduhka’s jaw and kissed him passionately and long.
He squealed. He stopped squealing. He kissed her back.
I stared at Nora, and the world
dissolved. Let the Space People devour Shaman. Let Izzy install
Johnny Abilene on the throne of the SMC and himself take up the
Imperial Scepter of the combined galaxies, while punching in and out
at his Lockport factory. Let Sarvaduhka have his female action, and
Lila her one divine nature of Christ. Gypsy was dead, but bodies
aren’t important. Nasser was dead too.
"Nora . . ." I said.
"It’s impossible, Mel," she
said.
"Why? We’ll go to Sanduleak
together and live there forever, Abu al-Hawl and the Queen of Punt,
Mel and Nora Bellow."
"You know it’s impossible, even
by epoch\xE9. You have to go back to Sandy, to release Abu, to return,
to become one again on the neutron star. You’re
half-Magellanic. I’m just an Earther. And I’m pregnant."
"I love you, Nora."
"I’ll raise our child, my
grandchild, your sibling."
"I won’t poke my eyes out,
Nora."
"I’m not asking you to. Keep
them open. Keep them wide open."
"I will. . . . Hey!" The caf\xE9
was shaking and whipping like a flame in the wind. Izzy was beeping
again. "Izzy, who’s doing an epoch\xE9?"
"I am, Melba," Izzy
said. "There’s a number of things wrong here. I don’t like
monarchies in North America, or Vietnamese troops either, not yet;
also, this rest stop belongs in Texas, and Abu?which means
you?better haul ass back to the Magellanics right now, if I’m
gonna have time to patch you permanent and still make coffee and
Danish before the morning shift. Keep a tight ass now, Melly, but
don’t bother to buckle up. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . .
."
"Take this, son!" Johnny threw
me his guitar.
The relic background radiation
spiked to three point eight, then dipped to three again, and we were
gone.
EPILOGUE
Izzy’s epoch\xE9 left Nora
standing between the zucchinis and the cherry tomatoes behind the
house Johnny Abilene had built her in upstate New York. Somehow, a
year had passed, and her mouth was full of clothespins. She found
herself hanging diapers to a yellow nylon line while she stared
southwest at dusk’s rosy fingers. She was in the wrong hemisphere to
see the Magellanic Clouds. But I could see her?and Junior
too, inside, in the wicker basket next to Nora’s bed:
Izzovision.
There’s a splash across the
southern sky
Named "I love
you-oo!"
And I know just what a big
man
Ought to
do-yodelayhee-do.
I’m sorry I left you
somewhere in the blue-boo-hoo-hoo
With your mama singing
lullabies to baby-boo . . .
Just gimme a great big
Magellanic kiss.
It’s the sort of thing a
daddy ought to miss.
I’m gonna bring you right
back some day
Though you may be far
away,
I can always pull a little
stunt
That the folks call
"epoch\xE9."
Take a long-lost dad’s
advice:
Though yore mama’s Guldang
nice,
Save a little bit of love
for yodelodelayhee-me! |
