The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

 

And then there’s Frederick, who discovers that The Sheltering Sky  is premiering at the English-language cinema right up the street, a ten minute walk from his rented room on Hauptstrasse. Not another Odeon! Cinemas called Odeon and restaurants called Tivoli: failures of the entrepreneurial imagination. Having reclined in the dirty velour seats of various Odeons in seven American states he thinks how if he ever runs his own little arthouse cinema  -a dream on par with living in a lighthouse- he’ll call it by its proper name, which would be Odeum.

He turned thirty a month prior, in London, weepy-drunk in his sublet with two slags he snagged in the off-license. The even-drunker, if that’s possible, blonde had three feet of thick braid sashing her bare back and asked him if he’d like to have it and Frederick slurred his assent in the form of the eternal question. So he found a chopped gold snake in the bathtub the next day and spent a tense noon struggling to reconstruct the events. He eventually found the courage to check the freezer for a head or a blonde tit in a baggie. He packed it in his luggage with the tailored shirts laughing.

The little bald refugee from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it.

-Oh, you know. Look around. See what’s what.

The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the cinema lights go down. He doesn’t know for what he came to Berlin but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen window as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight. Banshee brakes, infant muezzin, dogs in the gene joy of fight. Frederick recalls a news item concerning an opera lover who’d baked feces (authorities never specified if it was his own) in a tray of fudge brownies and had given one each to every of the dozen unrequited loves in his apartment building and Frederick makes a mental note to politely decline any food or drink Herr Ludwig offers. The word feces seems blacker, Greeker,  with an “a” in it. A church bell older than the country of his birth is chiming the hour.

It must be some sort of omen that The Sheltering Sky is playing the very day he lands in Berlin,  though the idea of Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket, thinking of apter actresses and astonished to see people drinking beer from plastic cups in the cinema foyer and one of the patrons Frederick espies holding just such a cup at chest-height is not much more than ten years old, upperlip frothed as he chats, open-faced, with his parents. Frederick is finally granted the sensation of being adrift in a foreign country.

Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of, he eases into his dirty velour seat (Germans to the left, Germans to the right; Germans in front and behind him) and nods off under the influence of the after-tasty narcotic of jetlag, dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise, a ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.

“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.

“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.

Later that evening, wakened by an usher and reluctant to go ‘home’, Frederick wanders downtown, following the bus route, a forty minute walk the first half of which takes him through a Turkish neighborhood with operetta-like touches of the bazaar, showing fruit vendors crying out and burka’d matrons at waddle like sinister nuns and veiled glances from sloe-eyed houris with infidel-bashing tits. The Germans are a spectral presence and remind him of UN inspectors in their own country. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo and the angled black doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.

He is staring at an exquisite little blackhaired girl in a party of six at the VIP table under the window of the DJ’s booth. Her lipstick is as black as everything else in the bitter bang and webby fog of the long room until someone lights her cigarette, turning her lips for an instant the color of poppies, a bloodred field Frederick saw from a bus in the Sierra Gourda in Andalusia while writing in a now-lost notebook, stories about Levantine girls who make love like damp Joans of Arc in smoke-vomitting flames and either attempt murder or commit suicide after the party and in doing so reveal themselves to be the protagonist’s long-lost twin. Or something.

Winter comes to Berlin with the unspectacular viciousness of a jilted lover.  At the height of the  summer one blindly intuits that life will never be cold again and it is exactly then the cold comes falling back as the enemy’s pulped face on the window or heirloomed breaths of the mythical ancestor’s tubercular sleep, a misery so general it’s an insult.  Six months of drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. The notorious German dream of bunker life.

Frederick’s affair with the blackhaired girl thrives in this desolation. They meet on a blustery corner and exchange those double-cheek kisses and shiver indecisively in front of one cafe after another until finally abandoning the pretense and hurrying back to his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the greatgrandniece of Gustave Mahler. Cackling under a duvet at the caterwauling Mahler. Sariah is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid, as though her virginity stubbornly heals between fuckings. He thinks she fucks like dogs swim. They always seem surprised they can do it.

How it started. He took her to the third day of a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small that the ceiling was someone’s living room floor.

They are watching The Birds in German and can hear a pavane of footsteps crisscrossing the parquet overhead. Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night in which everything appears to be pretending to be busy they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as Khomeini came to power in ‘79, says  I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.

“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”

“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother-  they’re all women. Okay.”

He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark -his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his exgirlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”

“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly coifed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a -a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”

“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jadegreen Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spungold hair is immaculately coifed.”

“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”

He finally looks over to see a silver eleven of tears runneling the Persian girl’s cheeks and down her neck to salt the never-sucked breasts in her schoolgirlish jumper and jacket.

Frederick is trembly climbing over her, sliding into her, the yellowtiled stove a stone headache of heat behind them as he relishes the strenuous work of mining her innocence for pleasure. Sariah with the Salome hair. Hair like a garment and pussy her little black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. He jigs her across the room, gasping in her mouth, her legs around his waist, her brown back slamming the door. Fraulein Mahler wails across Herr Ludwig’s basic chords. There is homework all over the warped parquet and he steps in it. He slips on world history and comes.

Sariah has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the kitchen table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.

Summer is the relief that everyone has promised. The city gushes green and the Tiergarten park is clothed in flesh, the women blasé about unpacking their marshmallows, the men strutting their bellies and cocks, the gregarious Turks organize epic barbecues in their nudity-free corner of the park with music and card games and dancing. The Germans keep apart and sun themselves with mute efficiency. Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she and Frederick traverse a field of what looks like an obscenely neat aircrash.

Their relationship is topsecret and they become as crafty as addicts at the protocol of deception. Sariah’s mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls him from pay phones, or leaves scribbled notes about when and where it is safe to meet. As their second half year commences, Frederick is introduced as an English tutor. The matriarch unwittingly pays for them to see R-rated English language movies at the Odeon. The day before Sariah tells him she’s pregnant, Frederick dreams it: he’s following a long trail of tiny footprints in warm snow to a tree. He looks up the tree and his mother is in it, hung by a leafy umbilical.

At Chez Jacques, their favorite cafe, Sariah says her period is late. Frederick finishes his spaghetti, staring at her in the tender light, the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques. He looks at Sariah and sees it in her, a mistake the size of a thumbnail and lodged in her core. Why does he feel such peace at that moment? She, too, is unaccountably serene in the face of this disaster. Why does genuine peace briefly fill them with its fearless heaviness? They are bound by an Old Testament pact that hinges on a sacrifice. On a real death.

Her belly doesn’t grow very much in six weeks, but fat lines, the consecration of a ghostpriest’s ashed thumb, bisect her navel and her nipples and the breasts balloon and her scent changes from musk to cinnamon to saltwater. Her mother tells her she looks like the moon.

You look like the moon, Azizam.

A foggy morning. The slender birches along Mahlerstrasse hooded in ectoplasm. Cross Mahlerstrasse and then Alymerstrasse and hurry between two buildings and over a carless blacktop to U-Bahnhof Hirschfeldtplatz, descend to an empty platform. Wait in silence. Stare down the tracks.

The waiting room is ringed with occupied chairs. Sariah stands with her arms at her sides at the receptionist’s desk while Frederick sits stealing glances at the other patients. One in particular, all alone, is sniffing and gulping and rubbing her raw wet cheeks with the sleeve of an old sweater. She appeals to Frederick’s mercy with crushed pink eyes and he cowers behind an obsolete Vogue and  it occurs to him right there in the abortion clinic, months after the fact, that Sariah’s religion-based reading of The Birds may well have turned out to be the freshest interpretation in years, an interpretation he himself could have appropriated, but he stepped on her argument with his glib presentation, showing off, and now it’s too late.

He has just gotten to his incomprehensible horoscope when a nurse calls out a broken version of his name. She is walking as fast as a dreamfigure down a long white hall but he catches up with her and she points at the door he is to enter and says hinter rechts (rear right) without stopping.

The room is divided into six cubicles, each cubicle made of three rolling walls and a curtained entrance and in each cubicle is a high bed, on wheels, affording minimal privacy on a sort of honor system. Flustered, Frederick turns left, or links, rather than right and enters the wrong cubicle, parting the curtains. He comes upon a girl, shirtless in a bra but no panties, knocked out and skinny on her bed, the inverted italic v of her legs bent open, her eyes just fluttering slits. Her bruised white arm, the i.v. needle still taped to it, is at a wild corpse angle, reaching, but not reaching, for the leather backpack, square with textbooks, that sits on a chair beside the bed.

She is young, tall, with wild blond hair like slashed violin bows piled on the pillow. She is blond in all the places where Sariah is black. Around the mound of her sparse pubes is a saucer-sized winestain or how he sees it as a shockingly well-placed comment which purples the skin around the furled lips and stains the lips themselves nearly glossy black as burnt sugar against which the wisps of her bush are pale as devilglows of static under a duvet on the longlost night of a boy’s first masturbate winter.

Frederick, angry, can imagine the creep who has gotten her pregnant making jokes about it. About the birthmark. Jokes about Negroes or blowtorches. He can imagine how this unexampled angel is probably ashamed to fuck and how the birthmark’s kicky ugliness has undercut her ability to select an apt lover because our souls turn so sadly on trivial pivots and Frederick can well imagine this lucky creep exploiting the wound and pumping long-stroked into her with an exaggerated sense of his right to.

 

 

 

1.

 

Venal Cunt spread her legs like a vile temptation at the end of the night, face deflected, eyes unplugged. Long and elegant and platinum-haired and bone-white with her sexy puckering lisp. The only color is the childish yellow scrawl of her bush and her pupils like residue in cocktail glasses and the raised red chevrons where she scratches her right wrist incessantly like a fox in a fur-lined trap. Even her nipples are white. She says what do I need to read for, my life is a bestseller. She says don’t take all day. Needy Cock lowers himself into her snob-dry vadge with pragmatic detachment and he cradles her too-small-for-compassionate-thoughts skull while he pushes in, prospecting in vain for as little as a teardrop’s quantity of moisture.  

The days run together like yolks. His savings evaporate and his postcards begin to repeat themselves. Surfers march like bowlegged Aztecs into the Rite Aid for sunblock and the bakery in Ralph’s sells cinnamon buns at four a.m. and the gardeners wield their shoulder-slung gas-powered leafblowers like AK-47s and yes the Mexicans are poor as pigeons but they are polite and very clean and it’s no wonder the blacks feel threatened. I’ve never seen so many convertible-driving Aryan teens in my life. Not even on television.

Literature doesn’t prepare you for any of this. 

His students shreik and clap. They say, “Say schedule again!” 

2.  

Needy Cock can tell by the look on the cop’s face that the cop is disturbed by something about Needy Cock’s demeanor. Something doesn’t add up. This is not a by-the-book domestic. Wifebeaters are usually not so. What. The two of them are out in the hallway by the open door of Needy Cock’s flat and his cop’s two colleagues are inside and Venal Cunt is communicating tersely from within the locked bathroom. She refuses to come out.  

It’s a beautiful day. A sack of Krugerrand-colored sunshine pours through the skylight, absorbed by the infinite dinge of the hallway. How many times has he plodded down this very hall to this very spot in front of his very door without having noticed that the pattern in the carpet is dollar signs? Well he notices in the extremity of his tribulation and the hallway appears to him as terribly run-down and it strikes him that he is now the working poor, one of Graham Greene’s shipwrecked whisky priests with a twist: an author of books who has recently resorted to borrowing money from one of his villa-dwelling students to pay cash for cafeteria sushi. O, this foot-blackened carpet and cigarette-sooted walls and cigarettebutts on the laundryroom stairstep…  

Needy Cock finds that he’s strangely unashamed as a curious Queer neighbor (probably the one who made the call to the cops in the first place) steps out from two-doors-down and steals an avid glimpse. I Will Survive blares defiantly from the Queer’s open door. How many times has Needy Cock phoned the police in the dead of night to complain about the level of the disco music and this, ironically, is the first time they finally come?  

“What was the fight about, Ma’am?” calls the cop through the bathroom door.  He’s a freckled bull with bristly rhubarb-colored hair, scratching his chin. His partner is tall and black with close-set eyes and a mustache. The black has a hand hovering near the heavy gun on his hip and more of the essence of his being is concentrated in his pistol hand than in his face at the moment. The pistol hand is worried. How does the pistol hand know that Venal Cunt doesn’t have a weapon in there?  

“Was it about money?” the ruddy bull, the spokesman, the one with the degree in sociology, offers. “Was it about debt?” 

Venal Cunt snorts. They can all hear it through the bathroom door. A hefty snort of derision. “None of your fucking bithineth,” she screams. 

A career criminal couldn’t muster as much arctic contempt for a uniformed cop as Venal Cunt, in the waning throes of her beserking, is spitting at them. Needy Cock has to admit he admires her for it and yet he realizes that his admiration only exacerbates the problem. Like when she was banging him across the apartment with kick-boxing techniques she’d spent the year learning, at Needy Cock’s suggestion and expense, as a way to channel her anger. He’d seen the humor in it. And she’d looked magnificent to him while doing it, too, even as she was kicking his thighs and punching his ear and his balls and knocking him over with a reverse hooking roundhouse and smashing things she had first carefully identified as his before smashing them. A splintered wooden bar stool is arranged like kindling across the bed. Steel-framed pictures are knocked off the walls and stunned with cracks. The phone is smashed and first editions are ripped and stomped-on and strewn about in what looks like the aftermath of a fascist rally.  A fancy soup, still warm, is dripping from the walls and windows. 

“Who started it, Ma’am?” the uniformed sociologist with a gun in their living room tries again. 

Venal Cunt snatches the bathroom door open. The Bull steps back into a near-crouch in a reflex as she steps forward, six foot two in platform shoes, red-faced but otherwise camera-ready, and she says, “It wathn’t him, it wath me. Can you fuckerth pleathe get the fuck out of our fucking living room a. eth. a. p.? Can you pleathe just go?” 

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Ma’am,” the Red Bull counters, regaining the force that he’s lost as a man in the bulwark of the law’s tradition. He’s well aware that out of uniform, in a nightclub, in his dancing shoes, he’d be less than a mosquito in Venal Cunt’s ear. He regains his manhood in the Judeo-Christian majesty of the civil laws he has sworn a kitschy oath to protect. 

“The discretion to press charges in a domestic abuse call is not entrusted to the private parties involved, for obvious reasons.” He gets out a little notebook. “It’s up to us,” he nods to his tall black colleague and the short blond one with Needy Cock out in the hallway, “…to make an evaluation at the scene, and act accordingly. Taking our observations under advisement, it’s the prerogative of The State,” he gestures out the window, “… whether to press charges or not.” 

But they do leave, after a cursory admonition for Needy Cock and Venal Cunt to try to get along, with the tall black nodding at a framed Helmut Newton of a naked, welt-breasted goddess saying Nice picture and doing a double-take as he realizes the model is Venal Cunt herself as a teenager. How far she has fallen. Needy Cock points out the photographer’s autograph on the print. The Red Bull, taking leisurely note of the almost-ornate library that Needy Cock has amassed on tall shelves against two adjoining walls of the living room, inquires if they’re Needy Cock’s books. 

Needy Cock lifts his chin and says yes. 

The cop says everybody should read more. 

3. 

Needy Cock closes the door quietly and tip-toes in the kitchen to get a bucket to start the long clean-up. The fancy soup on the walls, books and everything else is hardening. The glass from shattered pictures needs sweeping up. The splintered bar stool disposed of. Prater Violet is a write-off. 

Venal Cunt is back in the bathroom and he can hear her crying again. He turns the kitchen tap off and he puts the bucket down and he stands there, face to heaven, hands in fists, stuck in his existential quagmire. He still feels that love. He raps softly and enters the bathroom in order to embrace her and her knuckledboned back is turned to him. Her shoulders are hunched in crying. He tentatively touches an elegant shoulder blade where it raises a soft cotton scallop…just that hesitant fingertip touch…  

…she spins and drives a steak knife home in his chest. He throws an arm up in a futile defensive gesture and shouts an effeminate ”Don’t!”  He grabs at the blow which seems to glance off his chest with a stinging thud. She’s clutching the bladeless knife handle and whimpers and avoids his touch with spider-horror, sidestepping where he clutches at the shower curtain splashing blood. 

Needy Cock is calling her name with absurdly gentle indignation. Venal Cunt! Venal Cunt! The pain of the blade in his body isn’t so bad, but the shock of it is sickening, humiliating, awful, for he has crossed a dark border into the Land of the Violent Poor with their tacky knife and gunshot wounds. Even as he grabbed for the shower-curtain, seeing stars, he knew it couldn’t support his weight and they’ll need to buy a new one. Venal Cunt has run into the bedroom in tears and slammed and locked the door behind her. The curtain rings go pop…pop…pop… 

He’s gasping in the tub, legs over the side of it, the sucking wheeze and bubble of his fatal chest wound. He fingers the copious puddling heat on his Fred Perry shirt and the blade at the center of it and realises the handle snapped off when she drove the blade in and this warm piece of metal rises an inch from the puckering slit. Touching it’s like tapping a tooth. He recalls that grunt she grunted while shoving it in and he keeps hearing the vitality of it and Christ it’s too funny. The most sexual noise she’s ever made with him. 

4.  

That night she fucks him. Lights off of course. She strokes the crusted periphery of the wound. Strokes also, with a virgin’s holy awkwardness, the metal itself…which he discovers he enjoys having tugged. She touches it “accidentally,” at first. She touches it again more boldly. She pays it more direct attention, twisting and tugging and jarring it as they lose themselves in the screaming fall towards massive orgasm and she displays the kind of dirty fascination with the blade anchored firmly in his dead heart that he had always hoped for regarding his genitals.  

Venal Cunt strokes the jagged edge of the dull glint in the dark room post-coitally cooing to herself. Needy Cock thinks they should have done this years ago. He thinks things could be worse. He imagines all the American girls he will score with this new secret weapon. 

.

 

“Time is the ultimate disguise.”

-Christian Sands

It was pointed out to me that the defeated-looking guy who invariably took the table between the ladies’ room and the Picasso poster at The Supreme Bean was Chris Sands, who had once meant so much to me, as the walking embodiment of his records, at least, though to look at him now you’d have to double-check the timelessness of the records. Which I did.

The evening of the day I learned just who that local coffee-sucking wreck really was, I meandered home in a timefog. I went through my vestigial collection of vinyl and pulled out two whole records (his debut and his peak), which is saying something, since I’ve only managed to save one record each from such greats as Sun Ra, Jeff Buckley, Sam Cooke and the mighty Roche Sisters. I never even kept my Zager and Evans. The Voidoids and The Nyce are all gone now, too.

I lowered Chris Sands and the Manifestones on the spindle first, Side B track three, and for three minutes and forty two seconds, I was twenty years younger, though burdened with all-too-convincing visions of the troubling future. I clutched the headphones like a migraine.

I still believed.

I phoned Ed.

“The Chris Sands lives around the corner in my neighborhood in Berlin, and you never bothered, before this afternoon, to fucking tell me?”

“I never even knew you knew who he was,” yawned Ed. “What time is it?”

I had no idea.

The next day, unfortunately, I had business in Stockholm.

This was a change of itinerary from an original destination outside the EU. Since I’ve learned that the best way to make it quickly through Customs (anywhere other than in the literal-minded U.S.) is by looking too obviously suspicious, I’d grown another mustache for the trip. I’d started liking that mustache, and didn’t bother shaving it off before getting the S-Bahn the frigid next morning to Schönefeld. A thick black glossy mustache that screamed bathhouse, backgammon, radical mosque, Ummagumma.

The flight was turbulent. It felt as though we’d never left the ground and were rolling vindictively over luggage on the runway. When we made it in one piece to Arlanda, I considered booking a train for the return trip. The train rolls into a ferry to cross the Baltic. I’d done it before.

“Chris Sands,” it says, in this yellowing clipping from the cover story of the March, 1980 issue of SideBeat magazine, “isn’t the next Dylan, but Dylan just might be the next Chris Sands, if he keeps at it.”

What is youth but one long exercise in hyperbole? And what is everything else but hyperbole’s correction?

“Timeline, Ed,” I said, two days after my trip. “Fill me in.”

I plopped his cake and coffee in front of him and pulled up a chair, not even bothering, after all this time, to notice that Ed never says preciate it anymore. He expects me to pay because I’m rich. Not rich rich. Ed rich.

“Well,” drawled Ed, smiling over my shoulder at white-haired, goateed, red-eyed Chris Sands in his dirty black raincoat and his baldspot-protecting homburg hat, “he kinda fell off the radar ten years ago, after his third divorce and the fiasco of that,” eyes bulging, “comeback album. Various rumors had it he was either a born-again, a suicide or, you know, the third option: gone Country on us. Then the rumors stopped and, well, the interest dried up and I kinda realized I hadn’t thought about the man for years. Until I found myself standing right behind him in the checkout line at that all-night market on Torstrasse.”

“What happened?”

“He paid for his stuff.”

I tried to remember exactly how Ed and I had met and I couldn’t.

“Are you writing him up in your Year in Review?”

“I doubt it. He’s just a Trivial Pursuit question, at this point.”

“So is Trivial Pursuit.”

“Touché.”

“I think I’ve been using touché incorrectly, mostly. I say it most often when someone says something witty with which I concur, when, in fact, it’s meant to concede…”

“In other words, I just used it wrong.”

I shrugged. “Half-wrong.”

Two American tourists pushed open the café door with the unearned swagger of the militantly unashamed. I brought them to Ed’s attention and said, as he twisted in his chair,

“Have you noticed how they’re turning fat into a race, back in our homeland?”

“A voluntary race. A non-racist race. A race you can opt out of.”

“You’re reading an ad in a magazine and you notice that even the after picture is fatness. Maybe it’s all to the greater good.”

“What was that tribe? Where fat was beautiful?”

“They made that sculpture.”

“Yeah. A famous fat sculpture with no neck or face and stubby limbs.”

“A fertility symbol.”

“Yeah.”

“Caveporn.”

“Be great on twelve-cent stamps and five dollar bills. Or not?”

“You’re saying imagine a whole country.”

We each chuckled an inch over our cups and drank with a synchronized motion. Both going ahhhh.

Early on,  months prior, I had a vivid dream that Ed was in my livingroom, his flimsy silhouette in a characteristic stoop and thumbing through my records, a finger over his lips going shhhh.

“I still can’t get over the fact. That’s Chris Sands. Right behind me. I could almost reach back and touch him.”

“But don’t.”

Coiling under all the clever dialogue was the disappointment and disgust of any genuine male friendship. Ed, the online music blogger, abruptly double-taked me.

“Wait. You always have a mustache?”

                      ***

Time fell away like a shattered mask, and I was twenty again, shoplifting 45s with a Frisbee. The air was thicker and the sunshine was sweet to the touch. Never the best dresser, I see me got-up in flipflops and painterpaints and a powder-blue ruffle-breasted shirt, three dollars from Ragstock, the original Ragstock, the one on that godforsaken stretch along Washington Avenue, in the warehouse district of downtown, long before warehouse districts all over America became loft fodder. Hoboes straight off of freight trains and still bearing the momentums of their trotting dismounts would burst into the store for incredible bargains on camouflage pants. Off The Record was right up the street and around the corner from Ragstock, next to a headshop in which a girl I had mixed feelings for toiled, price-stickering water pipes, blacklight posters and Mexican porn.

If I concentrate it will come to me.

Candace.

“Wait,” she said. “You always have a mustache?”

I handed over a stack of 45s… Bauhaus, Siouxsie, The Wallets, The Is, Ultravox, Chris Sands… in exchange for the profoundly niggardly, now that I think of it, prize of a quasi-European air-peck on each cheek. Mustaches were the ultimate young no-no in 1980, yes, but where the crowd zigs, the free spirit zags, and girls with tattoos (a dotted line circumnavigating her neck) prefer zaggers. Or so I was told, or led to believe, or deluded myself into dreaming. One day I walked into the headshop and an eyebrowless man with an idiomorphic white Mohawk, leaning over the counter towards Candace’s plump little near-naked heart, regarded me over a bare shoulder and said, with a pretty good fake British accent, or maybe he was British,

-Oh dear, it’s Journey.

“There was this girl, the year I quit school. This girl who looked very much like a punk version of Grace Kelly. Wouldn’t sleep with me but said I could watch her do herself if I promised to stay in this plush Edwardian wingback gentleman’s smoking chair she’d set up on the opposite side of the bedroom. Very much the kind of chair a Pope would probably scream in if Francis Bacon were to start painting him. I promised to stay in the chair. There were countless candles around the bed. I had to wait in the bathroom with my eyes closed while this girl with the shakes tried to light two jillion candles and get the room just so. Plumping the satin pillows and whatnot. Dressing the set.”

“Fifteen years too early for webcasting, sadly.”

“Don’t interrupt.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Saying is interrupting.”

“You could be halfway through your story by now.”

“I’m making a point.”

“The point you’re trying to make is negated by your method of making it.”

“How will you know until I’ve made it?”

“How will I know a joke about a Muslim, a Jew and a Pollack isn’t funny until I’ve heard it?”

I stared Ed down for a good whole minute with my blankest face and continued; slowly, at first; my anger cloaked in grandiloquence, “On the floor beside her futon was a kidney-shaped tray, such as one might see in the coroner’s lab with, say, an enlarged liver upon it. There were things on the tray that I assumed were dildoes, mainly because they were longer than they were wide, but dildoes like nothing on earth. These were not reassuring facsimiles of the human male organ. Remember the first time you ever saw a Sci Fi flick in which the space ships weren’t of a naively aerodynamic design? And how it opened your eyes, and you grew up, a little, and you could never go back to your sentimentally childish way of thinking of space ships again?”

I could see he was not interested. Who wants to hear some other guy’s sex story? Some other guy’s ancient sex story? We’d been friends for exactly a year.

I could write, at this point, that we stepped out of the café into the blistering sun. Or I could write that it was an effaced city of windsung snow and dagger-ice we stepped out into, and that I could see Ed’s breath as it slid towards me; that I dodged the head-shaped cloud that came out of his mouth for fear of being touched by it.

                      ***

A week later I was in London. My trips were usually spaced by months so this felt very quick and I was, in a way, disoriented. Oxford Street’s Christmas-week delirium was diluted to half-strength by the moderating influence of its immigrants, patterning the packed thoroughfare with ski-vested kaftans and over-coated burkas and faces ranging from pale gold to lustrous black. The vodka-colored sun was setting early after a late lunch, becoming a low bulge in the city-lit clouds as I let traffic urge me along towards Wardour Street.

I found the American-style self-serve restaurant I was supposed to find and chose a table, neither at the windows nor at the very back, as I had been instructed, and waited. While I was waiting, a well-dressed, honey-tanned blonde who couldn’t possibly be making eye contact with me from the other side of the salad bar appeared to be doing just that, while also doing something delicate to a frizz of beansprouts with tongs. She gestured with the tongs, seeming to mime a question about whether I cared for some salad. The improbability of the situation was virtually psychedelic. I was thinking how she looked like someone, a younger version of someone, though I couldn’t say who, but someone familiar.

I’d been doing this job for two years and this would be the first time anything really exciting happened while doing it, despite the fact that I’d travelled to six EU, and three non-Eu, cities. I was a courier, but it had nothing to do with drugs (or not directly, if at all): I was simply hand-delivering international mail in an age when cellphone messages, faxes, email and, especially, the postal and overnight parcel delivery services, are no guarantee of privacy. Sometimes I’m expected to wait for an answer, an answer I’ll carry back with me, and sometimes I’m not.

I wasn’t sure if I was always working for the same concern, or concerns, or a different well-off individual every time, but I did know I was well paid for it. My doorbell would ring (usually pretty early in the morning), and a man would hand me two envelopes: one with another envelope in it, and the other containing a plane ticket, a note with minimal instructions on it, and, best of all, a nice little packet of undeclared cash for my trouble. The Germans call it Schwarzarbeit or “black work”, an under-the-table transaction, and such assignations drive Berlin’s limping economy.

How I got this job was a stranger approached me in the lobby of a cinema, after a film. Just like that. He used the term luxury mail. Told me they were looking for trustworthy individuals of a presentable appearance who could jump on a plane at a moment’s notice kind of thing. It definitely appealed to my sense of cool, and freed me, if temporarily, from the horror of giving English lessons.

When the blonde gestured with her tray that I should clear a space for her on my table, my first thought was that she must be insane. My second thought was pure glee. I moved the hardcover novel (in which I’d slipped the envelope I’d been entrusted to carry) onto my lap and she lowered the tray with a clink of cutlery and sat down. Looking…yes. Like a young Vanessa Redgrave. In Blowup. With infinitely more strident boobs.

“Alright?” she asked, with an appetizing south-London accent.

“Over the moon,” I answered, and Vanessa smiled, clearly sane enough to evaluate the compliment. She was well-dressed, but the presentation veered a little towards the slutty, with lots of compressed pink bosom bulging up and out of a shiny gold blouse in a black velveteen jacket. All I needed, to deflate the fantasy and ruin my week, was to have her slide a laminated price list across the table at me.

“May I see the Christmas card?”

Aha.

My face burned as I opened the book, furtively, and handed her the squarish envelope out of it, feeling an utter fool. Hers lit up almost childishly as she tore the envelope and extracted the card (snowman), a fifty Euro bill falling out of it. A microchip in the card played a dismayingly loud Jingle Bells as she read the message to herself, lips moving, and afterwards kissed the card and reached across the table and touched my cheek, saying Sorry under her breath, the tinny music still playing.

Sorry, you never know.

In the same voice, Vanessa said, it’s best if we sit here and talk for a bit. An hour should do it. What shall we talk about? Name a topic. Or I’ll start if you want me to.

Then she closed the card and things were quiet again. I was thinking: Methinks a certain young lady hath seen one too many spy movies, Luv, but I decided to play along. After all, I was paid to.

I said, brightly, “How’s mom?” as she tucked into her salad.

“Don’t be cheeky.”

“Okay, then you start.”

“Hmm. Have I mentioned my flatmate is the ultimate pain in the arse? She leaves the loo lid up, doesn’t flush, and forgets to record my phone messages. She fluffs under the duvet while we’re watching Parkinson! And get this: she thinks she’s posh!”

“Is she half as beautiful as you are?”

“Don’t be slimey, darling.”

“We seem to be running out of topics.”

“What’s that book in your lap? Give us a peek.”

I put it on the table.

“Are you reading it, or is it just for show? Sorry, just teasing. Bad habit. What page are you on? I adore McEwan.”

“It’s the language that saves it from being a Cold War potboiler. I’m halfway through it.”

“Then I won’t spoil it for you.”

“Does Leonard die, or something?”

“I wouldn’t worry about Leonard. He’s the eponymous Innocent, isn’t he? What do the innocent have to fear, from God or the author?”

There was another long pause; what to discuss with a beautiful woman if you aren’t allowed to flirt? She didn’t seem bored, or anxious to leave, at all. Of course I was tortured mildly with curiousity about the message written in the Christmas card: no one sends an expensive private courier on an expensive plane ticket, from Berlin to London, with eight hours’ notice, to deliver a cheap card with fifty Euros in it.

Forgetting the fact that I would probably kick myself later for sounding like an innocuous, middle-aged man, I said, “Well now I can say that I’ve met that thing of legend, a genuine English Rose.”

Ms. Redgrave’s smile had a neat little sneer folded in with it. She opened the Christmas card and Jingles Bells started. “First off,” she said, “You won’t tell anyone anything about what you did in London today. Is that clear? Second, I’m not an English Rose, you bloody goofy American in a panto moustache; I’m not that physical type, with all of its racist implications, and I’m not even British.”

She closed the card. Then she told me, for the next forty minutes, in a warmly animated voice, all about her vacation in the Maldives.

I was thinking: my initial assessment of her sanity was essentially just.

                      ***

The ones who don’t give a damn what you think of them: they are the rulers of Time and Space. Whether fictive or factual, they marshall the hordes. What’s a horde? A group of young men. What would History be without its hordes? Do you know about young men? How they grope towards the human; how they can’t be reached? They can’t be reached by young girls, older women, old men, sisters, mothers, fathers, teachers, clean-living role-models or the parents of friends. They can only be reached by the mythical, clench-jawed savant, spot-lit and incandescent in his sweat: the Holden Caulfields, the Saint Pauls, the Adolf Hitlers and Chris Sands.

                      ***

A lovingly well-worn bit of apocrypha. This is years before Sands gets famous. Two summers before he’s discovered by the New York sharpie in a sharkskin suit by the name of Mal Pearl who engineers his debut on a college station in Duluth, Minnesota. It’s 1977 and Chris is 18 years old and he’s in a park in Minneapolis with his friends on the Fourth of July, bar-b-cuing and playing Frisbee and sucking on furtive communal reefers or whatnot, shirtless in the sweet American sun. This is a Cold War sun, remember. The mainstream use of the word Jihadi is about twenty five years in the future; a glimmer in the geopolitical eye: the nearest contemporary equivalent is Patty Hearst. In some versions of the story, the girl is a Nordic Amazon, a budding supermodel of the Ford models type, fresh out of high school, feeling her power. Other versions she’s half-black, stunning, fucked-up mentally, leery of other blacks but nursing a grudge against whites, who never accepted her but teased her, ironically, over the very rich features that made her so embarrassingly attractive: pillow lips, pointy tits, plump ass and lyre hips, and her  dirty-blonde rainforest of not-quite-kinky hair. In my favorite version of the story, she’s Asian: Hmong. Haughty and weird and Sci Fi pretty. She’s there at the Fourth of July gathering with Chris’s best friend/first disciple Manny Holzapple, the guy who actually taught Chris his first guitar chord in junior high school, only to see Chris surpass him in proficiency in such a short time that an adolescent deal with the devil would be the only rational explanation, if Manny’s parents weren’t avowed whitebread Buddhists, raising their Manny to see any religious practise other than chanting as a humanity-denigrating superstition. She’s there with Manny and Manny is on a very short velvet leash, so to speak, one end of which is tied in a slipknot around his brand new balls. She says Manny I’m thirsty and Manny hops up and runs about a fucking mile barefoot over a broken-glass-strewn sizzling blacktop to this Mexican-operated panel truck selling ice cold drinks and he fetches her back a frosty can of A&W rootbeer and it’s not exactly what she had in mind so he runs back and gets her an iced tea instead and she doesn’t give thanks, or otherwise demonstrate gratitude. That kind of thing. This inscrutable Queen Bee protocol against which Manny and his horny little touch-football-playing cronies are powerless to assert themselves as anything more glorious than serfs. This is long before women would be taken back down a peg, so soon after being hoisted a peg in the first place, by the widespread dissemination of hardcore pornography and the common currency of anal sex. These were good boys, boys raised to be feminists, inculcated with the notion that woman are, in all the ways that count, superior to men, a concept completely alien to their grandparents, from many of whom many of them are, in fact, by parental decree, estranged. But not Chris Sands, who was both very close to his nostalgic-for-whorefucking paternal granddad Christian Djindzc, whom Chris called DJ, and way ahead of his time. Legend has it that Chris Sands, in all of his Beethoven-haired, shirtless, shoeless, kung-fu-pantalooned pigeon-breasted summer incandescence, reached forth and plucked a badly-tuned Gibson off of somebody using it as a tabletop for the homely task of culling weedseed and he strapped it over his bone-colored shoulder and composed, on the spot, with amused fury, what would become the anthem of the defiantly fuckless, Woodeneven Dooya, singing it with a lordly arch of one bushy eyebrow and a supremely impertinent boogie in his slender hips, going You could hide a diamond in your pretty little voodoo / Wouldn’t even do you if my mama begged me not to, composing it right there on the spot, right in The Queen’s expressionless (in my version: inscrutable) face, with all the pussywhipped dudes gathered ‘round to gawp in grateful astonishment at the birth of Chris Sands’s epic witsneer of sixteen borderline-misogynist verses pulled like a thundering freight by that locomotive chorus straight out of his mouth, though he wasn’t quite Christ Sands yet, he was still Christian Djindzc the Third, and it’s doubtful he wrote the song whole, as it appears on his sophomore effort Yesterday’s Insults are Tomorrow’s Compliments, right there, on the spot, though it’s more than reasonable to assume he came up with the jist of it plus chorus, or a rough version, fairly close, per legend. And of course the girl was grossly insulted and thereafter ran off with him; they married, fought, attempted multiple separate suicides in an almost compositional sequence and divorced. Okay, maybe they never actually got married. Manny got a job in television, came out of the closet, owns a mindboggling little chunk of Starbucks stock and lives happily in Seattle with a guitar-strumming boy thirty years his junior to this day.

                      ***

A series of bombs went off on Christmas Eve, in London, and no one was killed, as we now know. All of the bombs were in one structure and the structure was evacuated twenty-five minutes before the carefully-timed sequence of explosions brought it down. More than 3400 people managed to stream out of Saint Paul’s Cathedral before the first sequence ringed the dome with puffs and it imploded as larger detonations sent dead pigeons flying, and rained holy debris, including genuine gold dust and micro-relics of the ancient dead, for miles around. Because that event, and the three others that occurred, near-simultaneously, across Europe, were orchestrated precisely in such a way as to cause zero casualties where they might just as well have killed thousands, they were given the ironic handle “The Goodwill Bombings” by the British press. Three hundred billion-plus Euros of damage but only three serious injuries and one human death (heart attack). Ed sent an allcaps text message to meet him tomorrow at The Supreme Bean.

“Goddamn,” I said, rubbing my eyes. It was Christmas Day, and the Supreme Bean, owned and run by non-Christians, was one of the few cafés in Berlin still open, a blinding cube of light in a shrouded landscape. Consequently it was packed with family-free expats, the culturally and willfully dispossessed, along with Ausländers of every level and complaint, dark-faced and travel-wrapped. There was white-haired Chris Sands in a black rain coat, predictably, too, gloating over his lonely bowl of coffee. Far away back there in his favorite place near the ladies’ room.

I was thinking: Chris Sands could be your friend. Why not?

“Goddamn is right,” said Ed. I handed him his breakfast. He said, with an edge to his voice, “I take it you’ve seen the news.”

“I’m just glad nothing happened here, knock on wood.”

“Yeah, what an incredible coincidence.”

“How so?”

“Whatever.”

“Huh?”

He made a hateful dumbfuck face and aped me: “Huh?”

“What?”

“Whaaaat?”

My heart was racing.

.

 

The last photo in the row of photos in cardboard frames on the windowsill was face-down on the sill and he wondered if this meant something or if the wind had done it, despite the fact that the window, for as long as she’d been living here, had never been open. The air was piped-in like music. He checked the seam between the lower half of the window and the track it was in and confirmed his suspicion that it was thickly painted shut, thick as a welding seam, seafoam green like a jail. Through the blinds the janitor, the Latino, was visible down there with his obscenely oiled hair dumping suds on a drain in the parking lot. Making even that look furtive.

Richly colored Penthouse tear-outs pasted all over the boiler is what Dominic pictured. Ripe-mouthed deposit bottles in a discreet cache behind a seatless toilet in a magic kingdom of pipes and pilot lights and pagan practises. He set the photo upright again and saw that it was his mother looking prettier than any girlfriend he’d ever had. No way would you correctly identify the woman in that picture now.  

He’s thinking: when they’re young and valuable you build a citadel around them with a fence, big dogs, an armed response insignia. When they lose their value the security drops off considerably. Anybody could walk in here. But who would want to? He looks at his mother and then that picture again and scratches his neck. He could probably spirit the picture to safety without her noticing.

She’d given up the theatre after his father died under what an expert called ambiguous circumstances and the chore of paying attention to her had fallen to Dominic’s twin brother, Dean, by default, for some reason, but Dean balked after a few years and they worked out a schedule. Dominic had her on Sundays and national holidays including Thanksgiving and Christmas, making that long drive into the city from Lake Zurich in the light morning traffic with a jumbo thermos of good coffee and a beachbook and whatever paperwork. 

He’s thinking she looks mauled by the feral dogs of time. This life is a peach something / eats from within ‘til the taste of the peach turns / distasteful is a piece of a poem he remembers she wrote before even half of the depredations to come. It literally looks like whatever it was chewed her awhile and spit her out again twitching. As Deano once put it: Jesus Dom it’s like she bet God a hundred bucks he couldn’t fuck her up.  

Dominic winks and uses the graying good looks of his last-chance middle-aged boyishness to reassure her. The old her wouldn’t have been so easily reassured. The version he feared and loved. He opens the blinds to let more light in and sees the janitor is now propped up on a mop handle, his chin on his hands on the handle’s tip, chatting with the colored security guard and casting a very short shadow. She is no longer the brave, honest, wisecracking cynic he always knew but has become prayerful and humbly positive-minded after the first operation and this is upsetting.  

Why does this upset him? Because he loosely based his life on her example but then it comes down to the nitty-gritty and she does a one-eighty in the direction of Disneyland? No. It’s more about the howling terror he smells under this happy new mask of acceptance. Right under the surface of the so-called serenity of her badly lopsided smile. She’s like a hostage reading from the kidnapper’s prepared script. She has a wound on her right ankle due to poor circulation that keeps opening, with the leg swelling off and on. She’s had multiple pelvic and spinal fractures due to thinning bones. She was diagnosed with NPH and NPH is diagnosed with a lumbar tap and they had difficulty doing it so she was stuck repeatedly. They took her to surgery and had to shave the right side of her head and place a shunt from the right side of the head to the right side of the abdomen for absorption of the excess fluid.

She gazes upon the magazine he brought her from the rack on Evie’s side of the bed and singsongs androgynous hairstyles are “in” again, I see, with affectionate irony, pretending to dwell on a page she simply can’t turn because her fingers are too cramped and distorted with pain. Like a collection of useless quotation marks bunched in her lap. 

Dominic says if Evie came home with a cut like that I’d divorce her. But he’s smiling. Pretending to smile. Pretending to wink. He peers through the blinds, talking away from her:

“I can’t say I like the look of your janitor.” 

“Don’t be a racist, Dominic.” 

“Whoa. Is ‘janitor’ a race?” 

Dom’s thinking how safe it is up in Lake Zurich: no gangs or wild animals and even the few teenagers haunting the mall are girls and rarely gather in groups larger than three. The boys are neatly dressed loners and won’t become dangerous until well into middle age. It’s a suburb of middle-managers and their lotioned toddlers and the Guatemalen nanny is their minority group. People have the common courtesy to move out before their kids hit puberty. Dom likes the alpine allusions of the name and the name figured prominently in his decision to move up there and also in the ease with which he’d persuaded Evie, sight unseen. He liked how he might be backed up in traffic on a rusted and unpredictable sidestreet in Chicago with the air conditioning off so he could hear things, taking his life in his hands, yet soothe his jumpy soul with visualizations of Switzerland. The Alps.

Dom says, “I used to call Dean Dom, secretly, and he called me Dean. For most of our childhood. He never told you that?”

Luis says, “That’s just between you and me and the mosquitoes, man,” and gives Milton one of his long custodial looks and pats the ass pocket of his overalls for that book of matches his kid gave him sometime during the last sleep-over. The Museum of Science and Industry. For some reason the kid is under the impression he collects matchbooks. Milton lights up and takes a few puffs before committing himself to a reaction. 

“But you saw all this.” 

“No man. I told you. The lady of which I speak saw it and she told me about it in convincing detail. And now I’m relating it to you instead of more or less eating my lunch.” 

“And she wasn’t on drugs.” 

“Nothing out of the ordinary.” 

“And you come to me.” 

“Well, unless I’m sadly mistaken.” 

“You’re saying I have a reputation as somewhat of a…” 

“I’m saying take it as a compliment.” 

“Okay.” 

“I’m saying have a look for yourself.” 

“You’re saying drive out there…” 

Luis does a little move with the mop at arm’s length and brings the hardwood tip of the handle back to his mouth like a microphone. He’s uncomfortable in Milton’s presence because he doesn’t want to stare so he fidgets. He says, ”I’m saying investigate the site first hand and come to your own conclusions. You of all people.” 

“Because of a so-called reputation.” 

“What can I say? People notice. A man reads a certain kind of books…” 

“You’re saying it sets him apart.” 

“For better or worse.”

“And we’re taking your car?”

“If I had a car would I be asking?”

“Man, I was having a perfectly average day until you…damn. Damn. Okay. From my perspective?”

“I know.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying that what we call the supernatural…”

 ”I know.”

“… is another word for the unexplained.”

“I think we’re seeing eye to eye on this, Milton.”

“But phase two of this conversation is called gas money.”

Luis gestures politely for one last puff on Milton’s lucky. Milton shades his eyes from the sun and frowns with patience as Luis sucks the life-giving smoke all in. Milton is thinking how a middle-aged Catholic gets divorced and suddenly he’s the prey of every emotionally disturb 17-year-old girl who looks at him. Still, he’s flattered that Luis should approach him as some kind of expert in the mysteries of life. He thinks of himself as tuned into the highly unusual. He maintains an open channel on the wavelength of the ain’t-necessarily-so.  

2.  

It was one of those uncomfortable summer days in Chicago that mellows into a bearable late afternoon. Dominic was out in the parking lot feeling estranged from his late model Ford, staring at the keys in the ignition through the glass of the passenger-side window. His mother was just then going through her physical rehabilitation routine with a woman in a powder-blue pantsuit from Manilla and he didn’t want to interrupt things in order to use her telephone. Neither did he have what he calls a toy phone on his person.

The nearest phone booth was probably a forty minute walk and covered in gang graffiti and reeking of piss and the chances that it would actually work after he went through all that were slim. People in phone booths are usually shouting. Dom tapped the glass. He yanked on the door handle one more time for magical reasons. If his mother lived in a conventional nursing home there’d be an office with a flirtatious not-bad secretary in it to ask about using the phone but the suggestion had time and again been stubbornly resisted. Dean says we’re paying nursing home prices for fraternity house conditions but she says the point is the lock I have on that door. Dom questions the concept of privacy when nothing you’ve got is what anybody is interested in seeing. She absorbs the comment with that Helen Keller smile that drives him up the wall. For magical reasons he yanked the handle again.

A reconditioned black Buick Roadmaster with RKO starlet curves and a big chrome sneer of a grill pulled into the lot like a death barge and emitted a passenger at the far end of the otherwise empty lot, motor running. Dom recognized the emitted passenger as the janitor and tried and failed to make eye contact with the man as he jogged into the building in his streetclothes. Instead Dom strolled towards the Buick. He’d grown up in an integrated area of Chicago and was cautious but not afraid.

When the driver leaned over and cranked the passenger-side window down so they could interact Dom smiled and said, ”Anybody in here capable of getting into my locked car without setting the alarm off?” He framed it as a joke, being that the only person in the car beside the black driver was a very pretty white girl on the back seat. Couldn’t have been older than twenty. She looked like a girl Dom had dated about thirty years ago called Toni. 

The driver said, “Lock yourself out of your car on the Fourth of July weekend…that’s pretty rough,” and Dom was embarrased at how well-spoken the man was. His English had a commiserating quality categorically alien to car thieves. Dom turned and the janitor was walking towards him with the duffle bag of dirty uniforms he’d forgotten. 

“You’re 212’s son, right?” 

They shook hands. “Yeah. I locked myself out of my car.” 

“Can we give you a ride somewhere?” 

“My brother lives in Elm Park.” 

“By all means hop in.” 

As a container of people the car is something other than its stated purpose of transport, thought Dom. There’s an intimate mood that’s fully visible to the public. People sleep, eat ramen noodles and do whatever in their cars. He’d peered into many a car in the long commute from Lake Zurich and taken note of every possible contingency. You look into cars and see alternative selves driving by. Take away the motion and what you have is suspense: four people waiting for something to happen. There were books and magazines at the toes of his boots on the floor under the seat in front of him and he could see that one of the yellowing paperbacks was called The Book of the Damned. As a young man Dom had often participated in mixed-nut selections of automobile passengers like this. You get older and the variations tend to tone down regarding class and race and profession.

They drove without music or conversation by a long series of modest lawns behind hurricane fences. On each lawn was the curved sword of a sprinkler jet chopping the air. The girl, who hadn’t been introduced or as yet spoken a word, said, “You’re a Leo.” 

“That’s correct,” said Dom. He responded without sizing her up, not being sure which, if either, of the men sitting on the front seat of the car she belonged to. He looked past her through the window on her side of the seat behind the driver and pretended to focus on a shirtless black boy with an eyepatch steering no-handed on a brand new bicycle falling gracefully behind.  

“Luis is a Leo,” she added. “I’m sensing an illness in your immediate family.” 

“Pardon me?” 

“An illness in your family. Someone close. I’m sensing.” 

“Well,” laughed Dom, “That’s a pretty safe bet considering that you picked me up in the parking lot of an elder care facility.” 

Everyone chuckled, including the girl herself. Dom went further and sort of took in all the passengers in the Buick and said, “I’m sensing a conflict with your father,” and got a much bigger laugh. 

3.

Milton said, in a spooky-wise tone of voice, “15,000 kids disappear every year, man. Where do you think they go to?” and for whatever reason Dom felt that a UFO conversation was trying to assert itself. It’s like Rod Serling dies and you have a sudden intense interest in his reruns again, looking for clues.

“Matter can neither be created or destroyed, am I right?”

Dom was thinking: she’s so turned on with three guys in this car and she’s the only female she’s about to slide off that hot vinyl seat. A Puerto Rican, a black and an assimilated Mick: exactly the kind of dirty joke my old man would tell at the airport. Back when there were lots of propellers and you could talk as loud as you wanted and say pretty much anything. Do I really want to be dropped off at Dean’s? On the other hand do I want to start a race riot on wheels. The pros and cons have to be weighed against the irresistible force and divided by the immovable object. How would Sun Tzu handle this? Slyly, he said,

“Luis, we got any possibility of some music up there?”

Milton said, “Got an AM radio.”

Dom said, “I won’t say no to that. How do you feel about oldies?”

Milton said, “I’m gonna say a word, okay, and you respond with the first thing that comes into your consciousness and that’s the process by which we will determine whether or not we think the same type of thing by which we mean ’oldies’.”

Milton was grinning at Dom in the rearview yet beside him Luis Reyes had grown enigmatically stiff-necked; stiff-necked and coiled as he sat there in front of Dom on the passenger side, reading Dom’s mind with the back of his head. The thing of significance was between the girl and this janitor called Luis.

“Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

Dom liked taking tests. Milton put his eyes back on the road and allowed the intervening silence to develop. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Beach Boys.”

“Bullshit.”

Everyone laughed except Luis and the girl and Milton saluted without looking and announced, ”You passed it, guy.”

He reached and twisted at the radio in a bird-like fashion and for the first time Dom noticed that Milton only had two fingers and a thumb on the right hand. It looked less like a wound than a birth defect. In other words if you didn’t know what a hand looked like it looked fine. There was a tinny, vintage speaker mounted in the upholstered surface behind the back seat where the rear window sloped towards the trunk and right behind Dom’s head there rose, like the sonic equivalent of a Persian miniature, Gypsy Woman, by The Impressions, on exactly the type of speaker the song had been engineered to sound best on.

With that lofty white male edge to his voice Dom said “Nineteen hundred and sixty three…” but the girl reached over and slapped her hand over his mouth to literally save his life.

    

Veering into the sun before his sunbrella went up was like having a frying pan in full sizzle put flat on his cheek. The bulgey curve of the station wall had a sharp collar of shade around it in which sat the gypsy with her accordion, playing the dolorous tango they all played within a laughable range of capability, from not at all to mastery. She gave him a look as he veered out into the sun because she blocked the very narrow path the shadow protected, sitting cross-legged on a collapsible chair with a shoe tip burning in light. The look she gave him contained a library of philosophical treatises, a look at once aware and detached, worldweary-yet-playful, dismissively flirtatious, seductively bored and suppler than thought itself. It took him somewhat aback. She was in the same cruel league of beauty as his obsession Margarethe, though she was just a gypsygirl and he was late for dinner.

Margarethe in a printed dress as tight as a chocolate bar’s wrapper handed him warm wine and introduced people who were milling around the room hungry and browsing her paintings, examining the work with what struck Van in some cases as almost hostile diffidence, as though the paintings were untouchable meals reserved for richer guests due to arrive much later. As he’d often said his ex-wife Margarethe was the best bad painter in the world and he thought of her near-perfect copy of van Gogh’s self-portrait in front of the easel, 1888, showing the darkling feral head and retardedly intense blue eyes but in her version he’s smiling and hoisting a condensation-bejewelled bottle of Coke. She said,

“Van, this is Taylor and Scotty and you know…”

“Konrad.”

“Exactly,” she grinned.

A large-ish American with short shiny hair stood up from the couch and introduced himself as Bartholomew, pointedly ignoring nearby Taylor and Scotty, who were Queers from London. Fucking Heteromanic American.

The air in the flat was dense with meat. Her new husband Konrad was clearly no vegeterian but a well-built, distracted-looking German in formal attire with red hands and a peeling nose which propped up big square black-rimmed glasses. From time to time he’d nod or grunt with disgust or amusement despite the fact that no one was talking to him. He prounounced “ski” in the old German manner: she. He peeled some skin off his nose and said aprés she as he went ahead to his place at the dinner table, Margarethe rolling her eyes at his back.

She confessed with rue that one has to climb so high to find natural snow these days that one wears a Lycra space suit on the slopes. The men get tremendous hardons. The glasses Konrad was wearing may or may not have been connected, though Van had noted that Konrad sported them in the manner of the blind, face beatifically elevated in an unfinished smile.

Something sharp-toothed and furtive squealed flaming to cinders in a trap in one of the rooms under renovation and Van could see it for a moment and then he couldn’t. He blinked.

When Margarethe announced dinner with a clap of her hands they formed a pilgrim’s procession of low chatter and crossed the apartment through a long, over-lit wing of plastic sheets and scaffolding. Up some plaster-dusted stairs they went leaving shoeprints and Van straggled behind studying the pretentious sepiatone images on the wall in a hallway, pictures he’d taken with the antique Hasselblad Maggie had given him their first Christmas. Gypsies of unvarying facial expression hefted arched accordions over their knees like gulls with broken backs.

Margarethe laid a hand on an arm each of Scott’s and Taylor’s as she lead the procession, walking between them, and said, “I had the most ghastly nightmare again, darlings.”

Konrad was chewing and laughing at something on the ceiling as they filed into the diningroom.

Bartholomew with his wide, flat, not fat at all body, waved a finger at various points around the dinner table at which Van found himself seated among the others having their chunky pork soup ladled into exquisite porcelain bowls. Van only heard what sounded like the sea in a very big conch shell as the American droned on, a prime examplar of the effect of the loss of empire on a disoriented consciousness. The dining room felt airless lit only with candles feeding mostly on Bartholomew’s breath and Van wanted desperately to open a window but he was no longer the flat’s master. Bartholomew had no plate set before him; no knife or fork or water glass. No food.

Konrad exhibited open-eyed signs of REM.

Someone was saying,  ”I suppose in the latter category you’ve got the theory of Relativity and smoking will kill you and an embryo is conceived when an egg cell meets a sperm cell in the womb and so forth.”

Bartholomew was rocking in his seat.

Second course was blood pudding.

Konrad noted suspicious gas leaks in Istanbul and Crete, hundreds dead or unaccounted for.

Van recognized the spider, limbs fanning long and tenuous as internet links, in a high corner. The spider or its descendant. He’d been separated from Margarethe for over two years and divorced for a year yet every single thing about the apartment was the same as he’d left it, minus the meaty veil of odors. He recognized the faint pattern of stains on the tablecloth, the brown-tinged continents on a medieval map of the known world.

He glanced at Margarethe with her high forehead and incongruously Croatian nose and the peuter ringlets of her hair. Memory provided the glistening plum of her kissable buttocks which had in turn been provided by her superblack boy-diddling bishop of a sweet-breathed father late of an almost blackless Capetown. Due to whom she pronounced black as bleck.

Van heard, “The fear of looking stupid is what keeps the intellectual in line.”

Playfully, he imagined Bartholomew as a big blond gypsy with a ring in his ear wrestling an accordion in the shadow of the station begging for coins instead of dispensing unsolicited pontifications at the dinner table. Van edited the gypsy girl into Bartholomew’s place, seated beside him at the table, slyly embarrassed by her decadent plateful of fatty meats. He found himself hoping she’d still be on that stool at the station wall when it came time to leave but it was New Year’s so of course she’d be at the Brandenburg Dome with the others, picking pockets or playing that same hideous tango with champagne-oiled ease.

Konrad had Bartholomew’s bright hair in a knuckle-grip and jerked hard, hacking through pulpy fat neck with a serrated blade, though no one else seemed to notice.

Fingerbowls were distributed.

Margarethe was blowing kisses at someone, mouthing Kiss ma bleck aws, while Taylor indulged in the so-called New Nostalgia with the repeated use of the phrase, “The Tolerable ‘20s.”

Maragarethe was saying, behind her hand while she chewed on gristle, “It was that nightmare about Bartholomew again, I’m afraid, I hope he calls,” but Van never heard this. She was hoping to get a rise out of her insufficiently jealous husband.

She was playing the drollest of hostesses and staring into her wineglass, the bowl of the wineglass magnifying her eye into a batty black goldfish, telling Van that Taylor was a Money Artist. That is, she clarified, Taylor works in the medium of money. The national gallery has a room of his elegant displays, each display featuring a fluctuating digit synched to an enormous amount somewhere. You see he started his career with artifactual lucre…didn’t you, Taylor…crisp bundles of Euros and dollars, arranged on plinths…though his breakthrough came when he finally grasped money in its most spiritual form.

Critics call his new work cleaner.

Konrad quoted an article to the effect that the art market is the biggest money laundering operation on the planet. He told a joke in a halting cadence that ended with the punchline the sweet smell of sock sex.

After a haunting gypo film in the screening room about transvestites (Manche Mogen’s Heiss), Margarethe, rubbing her eyes like a waking child, excused herself with a cautionary remark about dessert and Van, glancing at Konrad, offered to help in the kitchen, so down a dark hall and with the vented door still swinging he lay a finger athwart her woodgrain arm and moaned how he missed being the only black couple at the opera.

He said he missed the way she kicked in her sleep and commented too mordantly and far too loud in the theater and buttered both sides of her toast or snatched at her bushy cloud of pillowed hair like a honeybear in a cloud of bees when he used to go down on her.

He pulled her towards him and she laughed offering a modicum of resistance saying don’t. She said,

-Van, your words are lovely as ever, and you’re a good Christian, truly you are, but as a woman grows older she responds less to words than to deeds, and deeds aren’t done without power, and, as you know, Konrad has an inherited seat on the Ministry of the Interior…there’s more power in one of his ash-colored eyelashes than in the whole of that big carbon dick of yours.

-Ha! That old white devil be damned.

-You’re talking about my husband, darling.

-I’m your husband.

-No you’re not. Not any more you’re not.

-In the eyes of God.

The first punch stunned her and the second one brought her to her knees.

When she swept in from the kitchen with sugar-free parfaits on a tray of hammered tin from Morocco that Van, trailing behind her with half a dozen neon aperitifs, had forgotten giving her for their second anniversary, the shifty mass of her sheathed bosom as she lowered each parfait to every spot around the table was so milk-maidishly servile that it made them appear to be overdressed black help. This pleased Van perversely and he handed out the aperitifs with a shamingly servile flourish.

Scott turned to Taylor and said, not quietly enough, “I’m having that headache we talked about.”

Margarethe stamped her foot with winning petulance and said but it’s almost midnight!  Her plan was to gather on the balcony after dessert and watch fireworks and greet the majestic change of centuries with upturned faces of child-like wonder.

A meth-massacre in Phuket. Konrad joked from the corner of his mouth that it takes a child to raze a village.

They sweated the proximity of the sultry night and watched animated neo-classical constellations like Diana the archer and Pegasus flapping his wings and the stars-and-cross of the Anglo-Germanian union scintillate then shatter into hundreds of jiggle-boobed goose-stepping showgirls in turn becoming great pinwheels lilting like funereal Lillies to Earth. After which, rainbow-colored cubes representing the six colors of the union rolled across the sky unfolding into crucifixes larger than any skyscraper. Crucifixes ringing the ecliptic, pulsing to Die Walküre and foreshortened towards the galactic hub.

Van was distracted by the scene he watched instead. Down there on the sidewalk, two stories below the balcony, near enough he heard their pleas for mercy. Handsome theatergoers surrounded and doused by a broken circle of gypsies and put peremptorily to the torch, dancing away from each other in flames towards opposite ends of the street trailing rich black streamers of skinsmoke. Reflections of the flames shrank curving across bubble windshields and Van was clutching his throat, suppressing the nausea, unsure of what he was seeing.

Konrad shouted U-Nasa with conclusive evidence: Asgaard settlement extinct. The others on the balcony merely oooh’d and ahhh’d with patriotic boredom at the immensity of the crucifixes stainglassing the sky.

Van knew it now. He was bewitched.

2.

He rode the near-empty train to its endstation. He gasped at the foretaste of heat that rolled under the platform’s baked awning as he stepped from the train. It pulled away as he shuffled in his bright white flapsuit and widebrimmed hat, a Pierrot in blackface shuffling to platform’s end then down the hundred stairs in his two-legged tent, the handrail untouchably hot, bracing himself to emerge from the station into the noon’s blast furnace, slower than wading through oil.

Entering Gypsytown at high noon was the only way to sneak into the city.

He pictured them snoring in dark rooms while he stalked the blinding streets at noon, a striking lone figure, something from a dream, and he realized that he was thinking about himself again, as he often did, and the tight cap of his mossy black hair itched.  He was thinking of himself as a museumpiece, a rare collection of features gathered in the vitrine of his flat-nosed face, so broad across the cheekbones and heavy in the jaw, a public monument trusted to his own irresponsible stewardship. What if a gypsy punched him in the nose, ruining something of priceless rarity?

The rare blacks allowed back on the continent had been welcomed grudgingly under the stainless-steel wing of the Church. He was thinking of Margarethe’s father, Bishop Siss, or his own great-grandfather, the influential Christian theoretician famous for Multiple-Christ Doctrine, the original Vanross Olubodon, a remote and frightening figure. Not for one moment since birth had Van…or anyone from the small colony of blackies and darkfacers in Berlin…felt welcome.

Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. Margarethe had nieces and nephews who were already as light as the palms on her hands, or no darker than the inner folds of her navel, but, still, there were tests you were required to take at a certain age. Forms you had to fill out. You’d get Homo sapiens africanus stamped on your license for all to see, though perhaps one might keep it a secret on all but the genobureaucratic level.

Van’s family was an oddity. Both for having been in Europa for so many generations and for breeding almost exclusively black for the duration. Many of his people were priests; Van wasn’t a priest but he was a prominent theologian. The family members who weren’t in the priesthood, who were out there in the game of life, competing for love and money, were running out of black non-relatives to mate with. And with Van’s recent loss of mostly-black Margarethe, what would he do? Write his amateurish sonnets and masturbate on whores in blackface until the end of all time?

The station was a ziggurat of limestone steps on a dusty peninsula of asphalt. Across a weedy road were the vacant lots of the western edge of Gypsytown and beyond the vacant lots, a fifteen minute walk over rubble and weeds, queued the first of the white buildings, the coated buildings like walls in a low maze, each building decorated with its check of foil, foil over all the windows, the abandoned vista of an ancient millennial film project.

Set on the very edge of the asphalt before the broken road there stood a longish tent full of stacked bundles of newspapers and a sinewy bearded troll. The tall troll was seated crosslegged, dressed in the altogether save a suet-colored loincloth and sandals and sipping from a vintage bottle in the open shade of the tent. The man had the shaggy blonde sea-burned look of the Viking about him. But he was very thin.

As Van approached the tent in order to cross the broken road behind it the Viking put down his bottle with great care and slipped into a hooded cape which hung from head to knees. The cape had weight to it and concealed a dagger no doubt. He stepped into the sunpressure towards Van wielding a newspaper and Van recognized the paper as the Cassandran Standard and formed preemptive noises in his throat, shaking his head, but there was no way the tout would be put off, for Van was probably the first non-gypsy to cross his path all day…all week, possibly. Despite being momentarily flummoxed by the impossible blackness of Van’s face, he smiled and followed across the broken road with his spiel:

“Get your Cassandran, get your Cassandran right here, your sweet Cassandran Standard, all the news you were never supposed to know, reported at great risk to all involved, no gratitude necessary…top stories: the facts are in…average life-expectancy down by thirty percent in less than a century…top stories…the Asgaard Settlement alive and well and preparing for war against Earth…top stories…fish return to the Persian Gulf…you’ll read it here first…the news you were never supposed to know…all this plus the usual tasty all-color supplement: they’re fresh, they’re female, they’re Pagan…five dollars and the truth is yours to filter as you see fit….”

But when Van gave him a stainless steel dollar in hopes he’d scurry off the tout secreted the coin in the voluminous cuntfolds of his cape and said, wonderingly, after licking his lower lip, “You’re black.”

Van stopped walking and sighed. “That’s right.”

“I’m honored. They call me Gregorius. Is it true that blacks think not in words but in pictures, Sir?”

“I can only speak for myself when I say no to that question.”

“Ah.”

Van nodded.  Gregorius pointed at Gypsytown. “You are not going in there alone, are you, Sir?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” He glared from the grottoe under the wide brim of his hat.

“For one thing, there are no street signs…they took every single one of them down, Sir. The gypos are dead clever. You’d find yourself hopelessly lost in minutes. In heat like this, for more than an hour, no shelter…that can mean heart failure, Sir.”

“You’re advertizing your services as a guide.”

“Not just a guide. There are horrors greater than being lost…”

“Horrors.”

“Not many know that the gypsies are provided by The State to operate under their own rule of law and governance, Sir.”

“I’m well aware of that fact.”

“But do you know the tone or timbre of these Laws of theirs, Sir? The codes and statutes? Run afoul of them and it could mean your happiness, to say the least. And then there are ravenous crowpacks to deal with and bandits…”

“Alright.”

“Five steel dollars an hour. Payment on the hour.”

They shook on it and continued across the weedy terrain of the vacant lots, Gregorius just slighty ahead. What does he have in that cape, wondered Van. A telescope? A rifle?

Without turning to face Van he called out, “What are you looking for, if I may ask, Sir?”

“Who.”

“What?”

“Who, not what. I’m looking for a gypsy girl. A gypsy girl I saw this New Year’s Eve just past.”

“A gypsy you saw at the Dome, was it, Sir?”

“No. Earlier that day. At the Charlottenburg Station.”

“Charlottenburg Station? Performing there or just travelling, Sir?”

“She was performing.”

“Fair or dark?”

“Dark.”

“Young?”

Van shrugged. “Not old.”

Walking backwards at Van’s pace, Gregorius stared a good long time before finally turning to point far off, lifting the edge of his cape. “That’ll mean she lives over there, on what was formerly known as Bergmann Strasse, then. The other end of Gypsytown.”

Van laughed.

“Sir?”

“The way you pronounce ‘Strasse’. “

“Strasse.”

Van laughed again. “Strah-suh. You even talk like a gypsy. You speak it?”

“Fließend.”

“What?”

“Fluently, Sir. Fließend means ‘fluently’.”

Van was pleased. He felt he was getting his money’s worth.

Flickered shadows now and then swept them over and up they’d look to see clouds of suntorched crows tumble headlong as though hurled from an invisible mountain and Gregorius would crouch low and dip one shoulder as if ready to swing hard at whatever came at them but the shadows flew onward, falling sidelong away at great speed. The nearest tree was kilometers distant.

Van and his taciturn page (what was he brooding on?) exchanged nary a word until they were well into the city-within-a-city, with its uniform myriad six-storey flatblocks and narrow treeless immaculate streets and sidewalks. No trash or thick brushstrokes of dogshit or mosaics of smashed glass forever. Nor rusting hulks of cars or trucks or gutted refrigerators. So unlike Berlin proper. He could have licked the griddle ground and left it hissing with spit with no fear of dirt-eating.

“It’s all so clean,” marvelled Van, breaking the silence at such a low volume, just slightly above the striding rustle of his garment, that breaking it was barely worth it. His unwieldy white flapsuit. He was exhausted.  He longed for his sunbrella.  “It’s cleaner than any street I’ve walked on!”

“Of course it is, Sir. The Gypsies waste nothing.”

“Not even merdes…”

“They make fuel with it, Sir.”

“You’re very well-spoken for a man who lives in a tent, Gregorius.”

“There was a time, long ago, I participated in the world, like you. I gave it all up to do the noble work of selling the Cassandran. It’s a hard life but I sleep well every night and my gypo wife supports me. And I don’t live in that tent, you see. We live in a flat like any other.”

“I suppose it’s a myth that they steal, as well, then, Gregorius?”

“An ugly and ignorant myth, Sir. No offence.”

Van chuckled. He said, “So if one had a peek through a gypo flat…”

“One would most of all see books, Sir. Every gypsy lives with more books than he has stories to tell…a gypsy aphorism.”

Van curled his lip. Even he couldn’t afford more than a few books, and those he kept in a vault. “Books?”

Gregorius continued, “In point of fact they make nearly all their money as infobrokers.”

“Infobrokers?”

“Spies, Sir.”

“Spies?”

“Is there anyone less visible than a gypo? All dressed alike, all playing the same…”

Van scratched at his nose and grunted. He did not believe this, nor the other thing about books. He said, “Possibly.”

“May I ask why you speak so softly, Sir?”

Van lifted his chin at the building they were just then shuffling past and said, “They sleep in the heat of the day, as you know. It’s prudent…one speaks in certain tones…”

“Another falsehood, Sir,” Gregorius said, wearily. “Ironic, too, considering that they’re all awake and been doing business for hours when the rest of Berlin is still yawning over its first bitter coffee! It is true, these buildings have no power to offset the heat, but the cellars of the buildings are dark and cool and…”

“This is astonishing news…”

“…the gypsies have connected all the cellars in a kind of underground city.” Gregorius stopped in the street and touched his bare red chest with a flourish of his cape. “And I know the safest point of entry to the system.”

“But I must,” pleaded Van, revealing his desperation suddenly, “I must find this gypsy girl! She has bewitched me!”

Gregorius pointed at the cracked black skin of the three-hundred-year-old road.

“You’ll find her there.”

Looking at the road where he had been directed to, Van watched as Gregorius’ shadow appeared to raise a long dark sword to the sky, gripping the hilt with both hands as though he might fly away on it.

There was a roaring silence as Van stared blinkless into the white skull of the sun without being conscious of ceasing to.

3.

A temperate breeze poured in over the tall grasses of the Auroran Savannah and clattered through the blinds and windchimes on the front porch and the naked prospects of the sunrooms above it and pushed open, with one polite hand, the curtains of the attic window.

The servant stooped polishing wood in the attic bedroom happened to look out the window at that moment to glimpse through the curtains the procession of secondhand government Zils coming in on the long approach paralleling the canal, like a funeral, though she knew for a fact it was only a lunch.

The master was still drowsing in his hammock on the porch. Drowsing as indolent in the summer’s long day as he was frenetic during the winter’s long night of restorative darkness, and though she felt the giddy impulse to hurry downstairs to wake him, one of the others would probably see to it, so she kept at her polishing, waltzing the soft fat cloth over the loops and whorls of the wood’s exquisitely ancient fingerprint. The chest of drawers she brought to its hard gleam predated her language; her people; the city of Aurora itself. Centuries of breath had trapped spirit-words in the microscopic chambers of the wood and she felt the furniture breathe as her palm swirled over it.

She expected at some point after lunch that the master would gather the barefoot staff in the kitchen in order to introduce them to the overfed guests, as ever, and charmingly perform his favorite trick of naming their various tribes: Aleuti, Russo Lapp, Samoyed, Swedish Tungu, Dane and Red Yankee! All living together under one roof, he would exclaim. A boast of his taste, his benevolence.

And all sharing one bed, she was always tempted to add. The two boys among them were even prettier than the black-eyed girls.

Lieutenant Governor Mey and the trade delegation from the North Atlantic States looked mortified in their youth, clustered together in the center of Stark’s library, waiting obediently for lunch. Stark was still drowsy and rumpled in his patrician, couldn’t-be-bothered away, scratching his belly through a fine garment. He knew history well enough to relish this sensation of intimidating elected officials with anything more subtle than an army. Their sincere diffidence was innocence and a luxury that wouldn’t last more than a few generations before sophistication, with the renascent persistence of evil, returned again to the world. But for now a breathing space. An Eden.

Stark drew their attention to two black heads on a recessed shelf in the wall beside the book case. The floor-to-ceiling, wall-wide case was emblematic in itself of staggering wealth, but they couldn’t begin to calculate the value of those heads.

“Very beautiful,” nodded Lieutenant Governor Mey, hands clasped behind his back, because otherwise they’d be shaking. “May I ask how you got them that color?”

Stark laughed. “Jahweh gave it to them.”

“Jahweh?”

“The super-being they both believed in, while they lived. The man in the sky who created the Earth and the Heavens. In the beginning he is said to have said to let there be light, and there was light.”

The trade delegation chuckled politely.

Stark touched the male head with a collector’s awed affection. “Preserved eternally with a process that renders the flesh incorruptible without changing its natural composition. If you care to touch here…very carefully…you’ll find that it is indeed flesh, flesh like yours or mine…at room temperature. Not even particularly cold. Though they’ve been dead for centuries.”

“Anyway, it’s a lost technology. We couldn’t do anything close to it.”

With a cupped hand Stark rounded the cheek and delicate jawline of the female head, her ear bending and springing from under his touch. The gesture was so like a lover’s postcoital caress that two of the delegates flinched. The head was so beautiful, so life-like in its preservation, yet so strange in its blackness and shining shaved skull that they expected the eyes and mouth to pop open with a scream when Stark had finished fondling it.

“I call the two of them the world’s greatest love story. I also call them the gypsies, because they’ve been all over the habitable world, seeking one another in death. The facts are really quite extraordinary.”

“Before I explain how I acquired them, I’ll let you in on the amazing fact that I know quite a lot of detail about their social status, their manner of dress and eating habits and even the specific circumstances of her death. His death I know less about.”

“I inherited him, you see. I grew up in a house that counted him coyly among its treasures, though he was kept in a locked case in the attic. I didn’t get a look at him until my father died and I inherited the estate. We were doing an inventory of the art treasures and he sort of popped up. As it turns out, he was worth more than all of the other paintings and sculptures combined.”

“He’s the only known example of a fully intact head from the species Homo sapiens africanus…what they called back then, rather obviously, a black. Interestingly, the black species thought only in pictures but not in words as we do. Otherwise, they were both shockingly different and uncomfortably similar to us.”

“I only regret that in preserving the head they’ve shaved the hair off, you see, because his hair was just as unique as the rest of him…very tight little kinks, very short, rather mossy…imagine, possibly, a cross between moss and wool.”

“The female’s hair was a bit different…imagine a cross between his hair as I’ve described it and yours or mine…because she’s not a purebreed, you see; her mother was a Homo sapien. Look at the nose.”

“Anyway, for years I’ve had him here in my library, the guardian of my books. Then one day, on a trip through Romana, to pay my respects to the ancestors, as one does…and also because I love French sweets, and France is right across that border, as it happens…”

Stark could see he was beginning to bore them. Time to spice up the story.

“I was offered the chance to bid on her by a private collector of ill repute. Of course I couldn’t refuse…money was no object. I felt I owed it to my black Adam to provide an Eve.” The Biblical reference went over their heads but he forged on. “The broker I purchased her from informed me that she’d been quite the celebrity of her era…married to a rich, powerful official…back when those three words together weren’t oxymoronic, gentlemen…back in that barbaric era…”

“He was rich and powerful and rather psychotically jealous. It seems he beheaded her lover and fed the lover’s corpse to her guests at a dinner party! Only a few weeks later he killed her, too. Beat her to death…most luckily sparing the face. The interesting thing about all that is how little punishment he received for his crimes; I’d dare say any of you would face more bother over a parking violation than he did for double murder. He lived to be a ripe old age and dined out, no pun intended, on the legend of his atrocity.”

“It was only after bringing Eve home to Adam, and setting them beside one another on that very shelf, that I began to wonder if they might have known one another in life. I wondered if there was some connection…perhaps by a few degrees of separation at the least. I knew they were from the same part of the world…I knew they were from the same era, vaguely…”

“Peeling off the tiniest amount of flesh from the back of our Adam’s neck, a technician had his genetic numbers checked against the oldest known database.”

“You won’t believe this, gentleman…but I assure you that what I’m about to say is true. It turns out…I’m getting goosebumps as I think about it…it turns out our black Adam and Eve were once married.”

“Let that sink in for a moment.”

“They were married, divorced, met their separate deaths…were separated as artifacts by thousands of kilometers for centuries…different countries and continents…now reunited on that shelf.”

Even Lieutenant Governor Mey was obviously moved. There was a catch in his throat when he asked, pointing to a small oil painting set in the center of the book case…asking, perhaps, merely to diffuse the intensity of the moment…”Can you tell us who this is?”

Stark drew himself straight with awful pride, but spoke with self-satirizing pomp.

“This? This is Iseult Tsurak, mother of the modern nation of Romana, hero of the Gypsytown rebellion, intellectual architect of the Pax Romana and the founder of the immense fortune that nourishes the Stark family to this day, even as far north as we’ve drifted. Stark is an Arctic modernization of the name Tsurak, you see.”

“She’s my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.”

“What a look in those eyes, eh?”

“What a look.”

 

The drive up was tense not only because of the tritely appropriate drama of the rain but also because if he got lost on the way there was no one to call to for help. No safety net. He was forbidden from square one to store the information on a device or to print the directions on paper.

      *

The directions appeared one morning in an audio loop that disabled itself after ten or fifteen minutes, a loop accompained by a black screen, a loop in the form of a sonnet. He’d been chanting it to himself for forty eight hours with an eerie pride in knowing that medieval illiterates had done it in much the same way. Further back than that, too, because songs in the fog of unmetered time had been less often used as entertainment than mnemonic devices of desperate importance. Didn’t antediluvian Asians in birchbark canoes navigate the Aleutians to landfall on North America using chanted sea maps? Or something.

      *

He was roughly a third of the way through the sonnet and maybe two thirds of the distance to the compound and all of the clues had worked out very smoothly. But what if they hadn’t? He’d been on the road for seven hours. His team was up for an Emmy. He had inside information that the world would end before they won it.

      *

Of course he could have cheated and written the directions down but he hadn’t wanted to. He longed for that new beginning. He hungered to start afresh. No more lies or cheating. Lose weight, no television, early nights and mornings. Stop masturbating. He had less than twelve hours, driving from several states away, making rest stops to eat and/or relieve himself, to get there before the others took steps to block the old dirt access road. To make the place impenetrable. If you can’t stop cold turkey, cut back to reasonable levels, at least. He thought of a cool title: Get fit at the Apocalypse Spa.

The new kind of man he was to become was not the kind who’d find himself bashing his Amherst-enhanced brain for four days against three lines of sitcom dialogue, of this he was certain. Like a chain of hyper-haikus from the sinisterly dumb future, various versions were branded on the soft white flesh of his consciousness.

Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!

Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.

Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, does it come in human sizes, too?

      *

He thought of a picture someone had posted on the message board in the production team’s lounge. The multi-Emmy-award-winning production team’s lounge. A photograph from 1905. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein in a class picture from his days in the Realschule in the city of Linz and there, a distance of one or two students to the upper right (a knight’s move, as Nabokov would have put it), looking resigned to his fate, is Ludwig’s classmate Adolf Hitler. The fact being that nothing Wittgenstein had subsequently done as a philosopher, no great strides in ethics or logic or the lyric aprehension of mathematics, amounted to a hill of beans compared to the contribution he could have made had he taken the opportunity to act decisively during the long walk home from school one day and crush young Adolf’s skull with a paving stone. In other words, not only thought but direct action is required of us at certain pivotal moments. And not only action but a little prescience helps too.

      *

Hamilton Gold, the head writer, always said name me what’s funnier than decapitation. But, he’d say, let’s see if the audience is there yet. He’d looked over the bit quickly on Monday, flipping the pages in that idiot-savant scan of his and immediately picked out the three lines they’d been having trouble with and shook his head, I like the bit but fat jokes are dangerous. Fat is our demographic, don’t forget. How about substitute fat with slut? Slut is funny.

      *

Gold propounds a theory that sitcoms govern Congress. What people laugh at is exactly how they will vote. Americans can’t bomb a country until they’ve laughed at it a little bit first. Maybe he took the sentiment more seriously than Gold had intended but pretty soon he was feeling like J. Robert Oppenheimer in that porkpie hat hearing the phrase comedy has known sin and he’s on the internet at 3:14 in the morning, looking for absolution.

      *

No one knew that he’d based the popular character of Elke Hall on his mother. He had inside information that it was the end of the world and he hadn’t even notified her.

      *

Beyond the rain and the ticking of the clock, drama or any sense of a grand doomsday epic on the road itself was sorely lacking. No roadblocks or frenzied hordes or menacingly black or fluorescent sunset: just zonked-out commuters in start-and-stop traffic on the long way home from the daily deathsentence of work. Most of these people were only vaguely aware of things, if at all, and the precious few who considered the situation anything to lose sleep over had lost sleep over so many looming catastrophes of the past that this recent matter would strike them as little more than more of the same. Tonight they would go to bed after a starchy meal, vacuous television and perfunctory sex per usual. A couple of pills and out like a light. How typical to be wrong the one time it counted. The one time it counted in a thousand years, you dumbshits. You call your wife to come out on the porch to have a look and less than a second later you’re all dead.

      *

What gave him a kind of vertigo when he contemplated it was how close he had come to being just like them. Before that life-changing night on the internet which fanned into a dozen online conversations, each conversation in turn fanning out into a hundred others, and all of those but the crucial one petering out…the crucial one connecting to his special contact to the man whose vision he had now irrevocably made himself a part of. Yes, thinking back on it, it was amazing…how cloaked in the ordinary it had all once seemed. How something appeared in the inbox of a personals account at a no-hoper’s dating site he’d signed up to pseudonymously because it was free and therefore relatively untraceable: a message exactly two sentence fragments long. Two months later, after visiting god-knows-how-many encrypted sites and exchanging deepcover spam mails and vital details in chatrooms he found himself paypal-ing a mindboggling sum into an account set up in a Biblical name.

Eighty acres of land and five years of provisions for twenty three people (they’d done their best to balance male with female but visionary survivalism is not, strictly speaking, a female interest, so nine females and fourteen males. But their unflinching honesty about this state of affairs reassured him). No couples or families or friends. Only loners with college degrees…professionals older than 27 and younger than 55, disgusted with mainstream politics, wary of organized religion, environmentally friendly but not averse to the occasional bar-b-que. All strangers to one another. All white.

      *

Sid Caesar.

      *

Radio was out of the question, in case some catchy tune came on and drove the sonnet out of his head. What he had was seven hours of motordrone and rubberhum and occasional rainfry sizzle on the roads. That and talking to himself. He supplied his own commercials. He thought of the Man from Glad, that futuristic Aryan hovering in a jetpack to shill ersatz Saranwrap to sexually frustrated newlyweds. He thought of The Beatles’ rooftop concert and George switching his amp back on in open defiance of the bobby. He thought: of course the whole thing could be a clever scam.

But the verisimilitude of the finework of paranoiac details like emailing strategies such as using spam prosodies for deepcover (mploy *black anal virgin* n subj. line & spyprgs wnt rd ur eml) had convinced him. Or how the ambiguously allusive chats he’d had with the man himself, the chats on the gratis personals site, had been regularly scheduled for 3:14 in the morning, based, he realized, on the value for pi and he wasn’t exactly sure why but that last detail had soothed him. Assuaged his fears.

      *

I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

      *

When traffic slowed to a crawl he took the opportunity to peek into other cars. All those faces in profile, innocent with impatience or boredom. For the first time in his adult life he found himself loving humanity.

The automobile beside his to the right was a bruise-blue vintage Ford with a cream-white top, a big old iron box of a thing, perfectly preserved, its contour suggesting a jut-jawed crewcut profile and containing, as it happened, two male passengers with just that style of haircut. The driver could plausibly have been the father of the boy in the passenger seat. They both had brown hair…the guessed-brown on a vintage b&w picture tube…and they were so animated in that hatefully cheerful and perfectly postured way you’d expect in the kind of midcentury film the car and their haircuts seemed keyed to. You can’t see two males like that without automatically picturing the female that belongs with them. The bandana and the oven cleaner. The bubble bath and the shapely leg and the drawer of “female items” you aren’t even allowed to open in your mind, forbidden as the Arc of the Covenant in the cabinet under the sink.

He wondered, for a bemused moment, if he weren’t hallucinating, or if such types in just such a car weren’t obviously time-travelers. Terrorists from the future, because that’s what they will look like, although, wait, he keeps forgetting that the future has already arrived. Would he be crossing state lines with a trunk full of firearms otherwise?

      *

Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!

Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.

Lola Beedo:  (beat) Tell me, did Bill Clinton design it? 

He’d never known a girl named Amanda. He’d never been slapped in the face. Why was he sad about these two facts?

In the script margin Gold had scribbled, Bill who?

      *

They had a regular skit called “Poem of the Week” that was supposedly topical. In the memoes Gold had taken to referring to it as Poem of the Weak and the written phrase had acquired a poignance and profundity all its own. He swears he saw Gold’s assistant-to-the-assistant wiping her eyes and sniffing furtively after reading that phrase. Honey-baked boobs out to here.

      *

The dream he held both dear and sheepishly for its foolishness was the dream of the girl who is waiting for him, waiting at the compound, one of the nine, the most beautiful of the nine, the barefoot heroine in rustic clothing without whom he had been rudderless, unmated, bereft for all these years. She’ll step intuitively out onto the porch of the rambling woodframe house in order to watch him drive up, her tomboy heart quickening to the recognition. She’ll smile tentatively as he greets her with an ironic salute, lugging his trunk of munitions stiff-legged towards the front steps, winded but amused by the exertion, shrugging off her offer to help him carry the massive thing. Golden-haired, curly-haired, of solid pioneer stock. She’d say, the others are inside.

-I’m the last?

-We thought you weren’t coming. We were preparing…

-To mine the road.

-Yes.

She’d hold the door open for him. She’d search his face as he squeezed his way past the woodland aura of her health into a sort of vestibule that opened into a large, high-ceilinged room, a room with a rough, honest look to it: a gathering place for the strong, the wise, the bravely sad. Oil paintings of country life on the walls, maybe. Old bay mares. Or, no, something ironic like Victorian portraits or blue period Picasso. A dynastic sort of fire snapping twigs in the hearth. Quiet conversations here and there tapering off as he sets his clanking trunk at his feet and senses her feminine presence gather force at his side as he takes everyone in while catching his breath, the late arrival at a party in honor of the end of the fucking world. Peripherally he’d feel her delicately hawk-eye him for the subtlest reaction to everything as though her self-esteem depended on his acceptance of the new reality. As though she’s putting herself in the picture with him and hoping there’s a fit.

      *

Then it hit him who She was. She was Donna Douglas aka Ellie Mae Clampett and only then did the improbability of the fantasy mock him and he leaned on the horn and spoke in the precise duration of the car’s grievance as a motorcycle cut in front of him. He realized in a fleeting panic that he couldn’t remember the name of former president Jimmy Carter’s brother; if that went, could a key line from the sonnet be far behind? He then wondered in a morphed extention of this panic if he’d left the shower on. Which extended and morphed yet again into the awful realization that he’d left all his speed in a fannypack in the gym bag on top of his bedroom dresser. How was he supposed to get through the Apocalypse without his vitamin S?

      *

He considered turning back for it.

      *

The howdydoody Ford lurched forward and fell behind in the maddening traffic. Lurched forward and fell behind. It caught up again in a fanfare of horns he added his note to and he saw with self-perplexing irritation that the father and son were indifferent to the agonies of the traffic jam. Just chatting away. Even their windshield wiper seemed relaxed in the offhandedness of its gesture and the two reached up all smiles and lowered their sun-shades as an errant beam levered under the lowered lid of the late-afternoon rainmass with gospel brilliance. The beam illuminated them grinsquinting at eyelevel, goop-haired and adam-appled, a hit show, monster ratings from 1957 broadcast straight into the traffic beside him.

He pictured the mom, coifed and trim in her gown in a pensive pose smoking in the living room window, the young trees in a line in the front yard doing the Watusi and all the televisions off, the radios off, the wall clocks off, the power dead and the Frigidaire silent in the t