Box Nine (34 page)

HER FATHER: Miranda, baby, chill out.

When he hears the girl's name, the whole thing becomes clear. He's about to witness some reinvented Shakespeare. It's
The Tempest.
He read it in high school. He saw most of it on PBS a few years back. The big storm. The fairy. The ugly witch's son. The dispossessed duke. The bored young daughter. It's
The Tempest
done as a Frankie Avalon—Annette Funicello beach party movie.
Gidget Goes to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Ike knows they think this is wildly original. He wonders if they've ever heard of Natalie Wood. He's sitting in front of a surfer version of
The Tempest.
And the door to the place is locked.

He gives a soft knock on the bartop and Bella's eyes open. He holds up another twenty and points to the bottle of bourbon on the bottom shelf. Bella rolls her eyes, then nods her head, and Ike hoists himself halfway over the bar and grabs the bottle. He pours himself another shooter and settles back down on the stool to watch.

The play is jumpy, more like a series of old-fashioned blackout skits than a continuous story. The dialogue is all slang, white-leisure-class-teentalk and surfer colloquialisms, monosyllabic, perpetually sarcastic, tinged with a weird falsetto drawl. And by the first act it's almost unbearable. Each time Miranda gasps “Daddy!” in the exasperated, breathless, eye-bulging whine, Ike belts back a drink. He's starting to feel plastered by the end of the second scene.

And because of this he starts to think that maybe he's missing something, that possibly, as the play progresses, the actors get more chancy, start to go beyond simply translating Shakespeare's English into West Coast beachyak. The pace of the production starts to seem unraveled to him. The action starts to somehow seem more serious and less farcical. And all of these changes seem to be revolving around the entrance of the actor playing Caliban.

Ike tries to pay more attention, but he feels he must be more drunk than he realizes. The dialogue starts to lose its logic, speed up a little, get louder. More than once, the actors stop in midsentence and stare at one another. Ike glances over to see Bella up out of her rocker and leaning on the bar, eyes squinted, giving full attention to the action. Ariel, the spirit, played fully naked by a well-developed adolescent girl, can be seen whispering something into Prospero's ear.

The actor playing Caliban is a real muscleboy, probably about six four with a chest span twice the size of Ike's. He's dressed in a tattered loincloth and he's got a blond head of long Sampson-curls that put Miranda's locks to shame. His body is covered with white powder and he moves in a strange skittish but agile manner, sort of leaping about the stage with the hyper-surety of a chimpanzee and the risky grace of a veteran dancer. Ike can see his Adam's apple doing a weird, overly rapid throb in the center of his neck. He's playing off Prospero, and to Ike, the older actor seems clearly uncomfortable.

CALIBAN: You unrighteous fuck, I hope you get windburn like no amount of cocoa butter will help.

PROSPERO: You're like the most strung-out meat I've ever tuned, dude. You should watch the tongue. I know some cheap change'd give you crabs that never leave.

CALIBAN: This was
my
beach, man. You cruise, hang a bad left on the pipe one Saturday and bang, you cruise in on
my
grains with the bimbette. I'm Mr. Right for the first go-around, def, “Hey, Callie, join the clambake, babe, hey, Callie, you're the main guy.” But it's all lie-city, man. I'm no Mr. Bonus,
nooo
, sir. You were a righteous fuck to Callie, teach me how to roll with the big curls, the right wax to lay on my board, okay? But now it's just Calliethe-lifeguard, eyes on the water, don't move your ass, and holler when the high tide breaks. I wish you'd drown in the barrel next time out, you shit!

PROSPERO: [
angry, but fearful
]: You dog! You mother! Me, who taught you the Prospero-roll, who taught you one-foot balance, who taught you surfer tongue—

CALIBAN: [
outraged, screams
]: You taught me the language, and the big score is that I know how to curse! The red plague eat your heart for teaching me the language!

Prospero's mouth drops open to speak, but Caliban suddenly takes a swing and lands a full fist to his gut. Ike can see the big actor lose his wind and sink to his knees. There's a shocked look on his face. Ariel lets out a yell. Miranda appears on the scene, looks down on Daddy, and grabs hold of Caliban's steroid-expanded arm. He flails her away, letting out a bizarre barking noise, then grabs her around the throat and heaves her down on the floor next to Prospero.

“Jesus Christ,” Bella says, “this ain't in the script.”

Surfers start to flood the stage area. Caliban starts into a yelling, spastic unrecognizable speech, while throwing fellow actors into walls and smashing random props and then regular bar chairs and tables. Ike sits frozen for a second. He hears Caliban yell words that sound familiar but have no meaning to him. Then the words end completely and there's just an awful, high-pitched buzzing sound, as if a hive of crazed wasps were living in his mouth and throat.

Then the blood starts to flow. Caliban is taking full power swings at everyone, catching jaws and noses, cracking bone and tearing open flesh. He grabs Ariel and lifts her bodily into the air over his head, then pitches her against a wall. The sound of her impact stops everything, but for just a half a second, and then Caliban is on top of Prospero, pounding on his head, stomping on his kidneys.

“Do something,” Bella's screaming, and it takes Ike a moment to know she means him. She wants him to act. To help. To subdue this insane son of a bitch in a loincloth.

Ike slides off the stool and watches as Caliban does a replay of the Ariel-heave with Prospero's limp body. Then he notices Ike in the distance and his head begins to jerk and make horrible violent twitching motions. His eyes go into spasms of blinking and bulging and the whole time his mouth is moving too fast to really see, lips opening and closing in an awful, stomach-turning blur.

He starts to walk toward Ike in a jumpy stutter step. Ike begins to tremble, grabs the seat of his barstool, and pulls it up in front of him like some ill-prepared circus act. He thrusts out into the air several times and Caliban makes swatting motions with his hands, still too far away to grab a leg.

Ike tries to hold the stool steady. He yells, “I'll smash it over your fucking head, asshole. Don't do it.”

Caliban takes one more hopscotch step forward. Ike wheels, smashes the stool through the glass of the locked front door, and throws himself outside, tearing open his cheek and hand on shards that remained lodged in the frame. He falls onto the sidewalk and rolls, gets to his knees, then feet, and without looking starts a wild, panicked, screaming run away from Bella C's.

After several blocks, he looks back over his shoulder, but there's no sign of Caliban. He turns down an alleyway, jogs to the far side of a trash dumpster, falls to the ground, hidden from view of the street. He starts to suck on his bleeding hand, gags, falls sideways, and vomits. He begins to have spasms, his stomach emptying over and over until all that's left to throw is acidic bile that burns all the way up to his mouth.

When the dry heaves finally begin to fade, he leans his back against the brick wall behind him and tries to reduce all his thoughts to a simple, logical plan of action, of movement. He needs to get home. He needs to get to Lenore. He needs to tell Lenore everything that's happened. The box of mutilated fish. The Bach Room. The box of severed fingers. Caliban's fit. Lenore will know what it all means. And what to do.

He reaches into his pockets but they're empty. All of his money is on the bartop at Bella's. He doesn't even have a dime for a phone. So he'll have to walk back out of the Canal Zone. He doesn't want to move. He'd rather stay right here in the alley, like some kid who's wandered off in a shopping mall, like some camper who went too far into the woods. Stay in one place and let the rescuers come to you, isn't that the rule of thumb, the key to safety?

But, technically, he's not lost. He knows his way back home. He's an adult who's lived in this city all his life. If he can just get started, he'll be home in an hour. If he can just make the first move, pull himself up off the ground and walk out to the main street.

He stays seated. He begins to have muscle spasms in his arms and legs, annoying cramps of tightened muscle that start off as a ticklish throb, but once he's conscious of them, increase to an awful, painful knot. He tries to massage the backs of his calves, tries to make his body calm down and let the muscles unclench. He runs his hands up his opposite arms from elbow to shoulder. The knots reduce back to the quivering, ticklish mode, but then lock there.

So he gets up and tries to walk the feeling off. He moves slowly to the end of the alley, pokes his head out, and looks from side to side, then steps onto the sidewalk and turns left toward the west side. He starts walking near the edge of the sidewalk, using the wall of parked cars, half of them burned-out hulks, as a shield. Each time a car comes down the street, he fixes his eyes on the pavement and quickens his step.

There's an amalgam of dissonant background noise that perpetually changes. Mainly, it's made up of music from the dozens of hole-in-the-wall clubs in the Zone. Weepy, overamplified guitar fades to neo-bebop alto sax, which is overtaken by slightly out-of-tune chamber music which mutates into a postmodern, electronic orchestra of unnatural, machinish sounds. It's never clear exactly where any of the sounds are coming from. It always seems like it's just one more block ahead, but by the time Ike reaches this position, the next noise has taken over and beckons from farther up the street.

And there are images to go with the sounds, glimpses of movement and light framed within the obsolete largeness of the tenement windows on the opposite side of the street. The windows belong to the second-floor apartments above the street-level storefronts and most of them are without shades or curtains. He can see picture after picture of people in the midst of an assortment of common activities—dancing, smoking, embracing, pacing, eating. Everyone he spots seems to be dressed in black, as if the entire neighborhood had agreed to mourn some terrible loss.

Ike thinks the windows are a lot like the succession of comic strip frames in the newspaper. Only this is a long strip that makes little or no sense. And that's probably totally appropriate for the Zone. A living comic strip of the absurd. Live-action Nancy and Sluggo in the grip of post-punk existential boredom. Someone else, maybe even Lenore, might get a real kick out of the window-pictures. Ike just wants to get back home. He wants to find the most direct route back to the green duplex and lock himself inside. He wants to pull some 1930s mystery off the shelf and lose himself in the logic of its investigation. Or even better, he wants to be inside Lenore's apartment. To eat waffles in her kitchen—he'll do the cooking—while she checks the bolts on the doors and stands a confident watch with her Magnum.

He'll tell it all to Lenore as soon as he gets home. He'll run down the whole sequence of events and ask her what it might mean. He'll leave the next step up to her, trust in her experience and general wisdom. It occurs to him now that what he's casually taken to be faults in Lenore's character—aggressiveness, suspiciousness, and, at times, full-blown paranoia—are really probably talents, tools for survival, the very attributes that could ensure longevity and, maybe, peace of mind.

On his right he passes an old Catholic church made of sandstone and stained glass. It's long been abandoned by its parishioners, desanctified and sold by the diocese a good decade ago. Ike was inside once for some forgotten relative's baptism. He was only a kid, eight or nine years old, and all he can remember is the infant's screaming at the water and balm.

Now the place is a nightclub of some sort. It's retained part of its original name—St. Anthony's—but the new owners have added, in orange neon under the original sign, “Temptation.” There's a bouncer standing before the heavy wooden double doors, a big black guy in leather pants and wristbands, but wearing a priest's shirt and white collar. It must be the uniform, Ike guesses. He wonders how the waitresses dress. The bouncer stares down at him as he passes, the whole time running a finger around the white collar like it was choking him. His tongue comes out of his mouth and stretches up toward his nose, then dips back inside and does a run around his gums, making the mouth and cheeks balloon out. A clicking noise starts to come from him and Ike turns his walk into a jog and hurries past the church club.

He runs a right onto Verlin Ave and slows back to a fast walk. In a doorway across the street, he spots a man and a woman, obviously deaf, speaking with their hands. They're lit by a yellow bulb in a wire-mesh cage mounted above the building's entrance. Ike makes himself watch as, simultaneously, their hands speed up, practically convulse, fingers flying, opening and closing and making forms too fast to be perceived. They're jabbing their hands so close to one another's faces, it seems someone will lose an eye. Ike begins to run again.

Within a block he comes upon two women, both dressed in white leotards, dancers he's sure, brawling in the middle of the street, rolling over and over, clawing and choking each other, slapping wildly, biting, butting heads. Their bodies are covered with dirt and oil from the street. And the sound of an insect swarm seems to engulf them.

He reverses direction, cuts through an alleyway, emerges onto Congo to see two teenage boys facing off on a second-story fire escape. They're stripped to the waist and sweat on their chests actually glimmers in the glow of the streetlight. They're both holding baseball bats, waving them in narrowing circles directly above their heads, mouths open, hollow, taut—the wasp sound gushing forth, echoing off the walls of the brick five-family tenement opposite them.