28
Shaker Design, Shaken Faith
Early in November, Xavier noticed,
or thought he noticed, that the Suit’s effectiveness against the Philistine Syndrome had begun to taper off.
He wore the Count Geiger costume, under his sports clothes and minus the stalwart’s hood, to an exhibit at the Upshaw called “Shaker Design.” The Mick also went because his history class was studying Early America Utopianism, and the hand-crafted objects on display—wheelbarrows, cupboards, spinning wheels, baskets, and dry-goods dippers, among other items—spoke eloquently of the artful practicality of these “radical idealists,” as a typed label beside a toy milk bucket characterized the Shakers.
One section of the exhibit, under the watchful eye of a museum guard, allowed visitors to touch some items. Mikhail took up an ax handle. Xavier ran his fingers over a pyramid of drawers in a cherrywood cabinet. Although the idea was heresy to the kid, maybe the past did have something to teach the present.
Xavier turned smugly to The Mick. “Well, how does this hoary old stuff stand up to today’s VCRs and PCs?”
“Not bad,” The Mick conceded. “It’s technology too—an earlier technology. And it’s art because it’s so, uh, spiffily framed.”
“But
primitive
technology, right?”
“Shit, no. For the time these holy rollers crafted ’em, it was state-o’-th’-art gear.”
“Interim technology. That’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?” Because Mikhail was contemptuous of any human enterprise antedating Smite Them Hip & Thigh, and because Xavier felt pinched by his Suit, his job, and the retropunk lodger in his apartment. It had been a lousy day. Although this Shaker stuff was weirdly soothing, a kernel of irritability gritted somewhere inside his hidden underarmor.
The Mick shot back: “
All
technology’s interim, unc. That’s what technology is: one step from Back There to Up Here, forever. A technology that ain’t interim is end-o’-th’-world. Unless you can do some adds-on later, who’d give a fuck about it anyway?”
“Easy, Mikhail. Didn’t mean to rip your cord.”
“What’s the
problema
? You ready to stick me on a flight to Bangladeath?”
“Mikhail, I
am
sorry. It’s the Suit, and work, and Bari’s refusal to marry me.”
“You mean I’m putting the kabosh on your at-home adult entertainment.”
“No. Not at all.”
“Yeah you do. So get this: you don’t exactly light up my social life either.”
The guard strolled over, as if sensing imminent combat between them. Gently, he took the ax handle from Mikhail and laid it back on its display case, a priest returning a saint’s bleached ulna to its reliquary. The guard’s name was Addams, it was impressed on a hard plastic tag above his heartside pocket. Addams apologized for liberating the ax handle from The Mick. Ax handles, even Shaker ones, made him nervous. In Atlanta, once upon a time, his great-uncle had been bum-rushed out of Lester Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant by a group of white men brandishing ax handles—“nigger knockers” in their fey lingo. Thus his tendency to focus in on any whitey so equipped, even if with a 175-year-old Shaker forerunner of the bigots’ weapon of choice. This story told, Addams launched a by-the-numbers spiel about the Shaker exhibit: “Mother Ann Lee of Manchester, England, was the primary Shaker mover, so to speak—a working-class lady who arrived in NYC with eight disciples. Her followers eventually established communes here from Maine to Kentucky. . . .”
The Mick, incredibly, was
listening
to Addams’s spiel, at one point even recording it on a Japanese device that looked more like a Day-Glo clothespin than a tape machine. Could The Mick be getting into history? He was largely a blank slate, a void between the ears. Ordinarily, his interests were limited to the newest retropunk CD, “chix” with “to-die-for bods,” the next local thrasher challenge, and
Soap Opera Digest
’s rundown of the latest doings on
By Love Designed
.
“One of Mother Lee’s most distinctive tenets—it says a lot about every item you see here—explains the Shakers’ tendency to turn their handicrafts into art:
‘Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.’
Deep, huh?”
“Yeah, deep,” The Mick agreed. Addams picked up and passed back to him for another reverent feel the Shaker ax handle.
Xavier heard footsteps in other galleries and on the Upshaw’s swooping atrium ramps as a soft drumming, a music of reconciliation. The burr in his undersuit ceased to chafe. He found serenity in the beveled smoothness of all the Shaker spinning wheels, chairs, benches, plows.
Later, on the street with Mikhail, Xavier felt nausea flying moth circles in his gut. Had the sublimity of a certain kind of art—today, Shaker spirituality bodied forth in fine household goods and farm tools—gnawed through the metabolic/psychological shield afforded by the Suit? Or had lunch at First Stringers—a hot pimiento-cheese burger, flaccid fries, and a cup of coffee not even a beat cop could have stomached—done that nasty trick? Hard to say. They’d taken lunch hours ago. Before the trip to SatyrFernalia, attacks of his syndrome had always come
during
, not after, a fine-arts experience. So lunch seemed the likelier of his two choices—though it may’ve taken a while for the sublimity of the Shaker Design exhibit to counteract the beneficial whammy of his weakening costume. Maybe.
Xavier put an arm over Mikhail’s shoulder and limped back to Franklin Court with him uncertain and apprehensive.
29
“Say Yes to Droogs”
In Satan’s Cellar, the Droogs needed Christmas bread,
and two Droog eyemen, Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T, had had a warehouse under heavy vid for three days. That night, a prop cop in a go-truck stopped at the warehouse, checked it out, and shuttled on. “He be gone,” Qwarq said. “Let’s hit it.” Qwarq was amazing. With more tools on his whip-thin person than a hardware store, he magicked a filament pick out of his coat. Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T ran in a crouch toward the warehouse, and Qwarq popped the padlock. Each took a door half and jammed it back so they could squeeze inside. Once in, they stood in a lumpy blackness, smelling goods rank with mildew and dust.
At first, they stumbled around filching penny-ante junk, some of which would fence and some of which was so rat-gummed that a guy would have to be lidded-out even to consider boosting it. Finally, though, Shai Shiv-T bumped against a crumpled machine. The Droogs’ penlights tickled it. It had a nameplate, an ID tag:
Therac 4-J.
“Therac 4-J,” Shai Shiv-T said. “ ’At be some vandal handle.”
The warehouse doors began to rattle. The prop cop who’d left a minute ago was standing in those doors with a beamer, flicking its light about like the hot ash of a cigar. His face was as broad and flat as a frying pan’s. He couldn’t see Qwarq or Shai Shiv-T and didn’t really seem to expect to, either. Shai Shiv-T threw a quarter at him. It banged against one door’s tin liner and ricocheted away. Qwarq, lithe and pantherine, closed the twenty steps between the Therac 4-J and the startled cop, clotheslining him with a jacket arm. The prop cop flopped. Almost as quick as Qwarq, Shai Shiv-T jumped him, a knee on either side of his bug-eyed face.
“Ice him,” Qwarq hissed. “Ice him!”
In a creamy blade of alley light, Shai Shiv-T watched the prop cop’s irises roll like marbles under his brow.
“Do it!” Qwarq said. “Come on, Shaister—do it!”
“Don’t sound me with that Shaister shit.”
Qwarq backed off. After all, Shai Shiv-T was an entitled brother Droog.
And the prop cop did appear to be surfing a totally trampled brain wave. He probably hadn’t even scoped them.
“Reet,” Qwarq said. “Let’s rack him somewhere safe.” He dug into his hardware inventory, closed the prop cop’s mouth with a strip of duct tape, and blinded him from earhole to earhole with another silvery strip.
“When that tape come off, this fuzz ain’t got him no eyebrows anymore,” Shai Shiv-T said. He and Qwarq stowed the prop cop in a closet in the back of the warehouse, and Qwarq said, “Take the go-truck and roust the brothers. Then hustle your butt back. I be here to overwatch the trove.”
Hustling, Shai Shiv-T drove the stolen go-truck through Satan’s Cellar to the Droogs’ basement HQ. On one of its walls hung a poster with a photo of five homeboy gangbangers: say yes to droogs. The slogan was Hi-Quince’s invention. Tonight, Hi-Quince wasn’t around, but Anthony and Papa Mel Mel were playing slash card at the basement’s only table. They heard Shai Shiv-T out and came along. Anthony rode up front with Shai Shiv-T in the doorless cab, but Papa Mel Mel hunkered in the cargo bed amidst rolling soda cans and crumpled cigarette packs.
At the warehouse again, Qwarq said, “Most of this stuff ain’t for shit, but Bro’ Therac might repay a ride.” Grunting and wheezing, the Droogs lifted the Therac 4-J over the go-truck’s drop-gate, shoved it into the loadbed, and blocked it up against the cab. After kicking soda cans and coffin-nail packs aside, they hooked the machine into place with a leftover bungee cord.
Hello, Cracker Land, Shai Shiv-T thought. Here we come. . . .
*
After Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T dropped off Anthony and Papa Mel Mel two blocks from the warehouse, Qwarq ran the truck at fifty mph out Highway 42 toward Silvanus County and its bohunky county seat, Philippi. With its doors chopped, the truck was a wind tunnel, and side-of-beef cold. Shai Shiv-T’s teeth chattered the fifty-some miles between Salonika and the piny edge of Philippi. Qwarq kept waiting for an Oconee Highway Patrol car to come wailing up, but it never did. Sheer luck.
Cherokee Junque & Auto Parts Reservation dawdled across a quarter mile of highway on Philippi’s eastern outskirts. All Shai Shiv-T could see of it was starlit hulks among the scrub brush, and dying kudzu vines strangling the midget trees growing in the shadow waste: stove-in sedan tops, wheel-less limos, an up-and-down row of lookalike jalopy husks. Driveway gates popped up at uneven lengths along the blacktop, and eventually a two-story gas station and office shack slotted back from one gate rose out of the darkness. Studying the place, Shai Shiv-T felt like he’d been smoked and shipped to a ratty hell planet.
“Too early to crash the man,” Qwarq said. “Better park and let ’er cool.” He drove them up to the gas pumps. A metal sign, visible beyond the last pump, said cherokee junque & auto parts reservation /
Gas Oil Hot Sandwiches Worms
/
Tune-ups Fishing Licenses Videos
.
A yellow bulb in the downstairs office winked on, and Juitt, a long-haired cracker in a suit of tree-bark camouflage, kicked open the inner door. Squinting, he slapped the screen wide and limped toward the driver’s side of the go-truck. “You niggers mighty brave to ride into Silvanus County in a stolen vehicle this time o’ the moon.”
“You mighty brave to talk yore honky dis shit,” Qwarq said.
Juitt eyed the truck. “You brung that? Larry Glenn’ll have to recoat the sucker.”
“Naw.” Qwarq nodded tailward. “That gleamer piece of rad e-quipment.”
Juitt sidled away to assess it. “To do what with, pray tell?”
“Cut ’er down.” Qwarq followed him to the loadbed and rubbed the machine’s nameplate. “Looky here: Therac 4-J.”
“Give you twenty-five for Brother Therac,” Juitt said. “And three C’s, cash, for th’ truck.”
“Three hunnerd!” Qwarq said. “Thass insultin’ cockroach scale!”
“I got overhead. I got cop trouble. I got paint to buy. ’Sides, Larry Glenn’s gonna taxi you back to the Cellar.”
“Praise de Lawd,” Shai Shiv-T said.
Juitt regarded him as if a ventriloquist’s dummy had come alive.
In the end, the Droogs took the deal, and Larry Glenn Wilkins, Juitt’s flunkie, drove them back to Salonika, gut-scared the whole trip that they’d roll and ditch him. They didn’t though. They were three hundred heavier in their pockets than they’d been before tying up the prop cop and boosting the Therac 4-J.
*
At a pay phone in Satan’s Cellar, Shai Shiv-T dropped a quarter and called police central. “Prop cop down but not dirt-napping in a Satan Cellar warehouse. Put a thermometer in the pig.”
His duty done, Shai Shiv-T hung up.
30
Bad Time at the Parataj
Tchaikovsky proved to Xavier
that doubt and fear were rational responses to his hunch that the Suit was losing its powers. A month after the Shaker art exhibit, the city’s towers reduced to dullness by mist and river fog, Xavier took in one of the Metropolitan Ballet’s yuletide performances of
The Nutcracker
at the Parataj Theater.
Houselights down, the inner dome of the Parataj glowed purple. On the worn upholstery of their seats, kids fidgeted beneath this off-world planetarium show, some awestruck, some bored. Gratingly, the orchestra tuned its instruments. And when
The Nutcracker
actually began, Xavier got into it, for this production was in every respect superior to last year’s. He’d say so in print, for the Metropolitan Ballet relied heavily on Christmas revenues to make up for its less popular offerings.
A pair of ten-year-old boys next to Xavier regarded him with disgust. He recalled that at one crescendo in the score a painful twinge had rippled across his knuckles. His hands, arranged on his knees like two pale tarantulas, were exuding pus from between his fingers and a cheesy-sharp smell. While their female guardian beamed at the doings on-stage, the boys pinched their noses and looked askance at him. The stench got worse. Xavier spread his fingers to make room for the pus oozing out. Worse, he had to reach into a hip pocket, further smearing his clothes, to fetch a handkerchief with which to stifle both the ooze and the smell. The brats next to him looked vilely green-gilled. “
RrrUPPH!
” went one, letting go of a half-digested slaw dog and the unabsorbed remains of a soda. The boys’ mama, aunt, or nannie saw this substance crawling between her feet. She said, “Oh, Spencer,” rose halfway from her cushion to help him get his face out of his own duodenal overboil, and caught Xavier’s eye. Xavier, heedless of those behind them, got up, nodded coldly, and eased himself out of the row.
“Oh, believe me, sir,” the woman said, “Spencer’s sorry.”
Xavier backpedaled away. Once in the aisle, he strode toward the lobby. He left the Parataj without looking back or regretting his deception of the woman.
What did she know about real suffering, anyway?
*
“The Suit’s not working as it should,” Xavier told The Mick later, once safely back at Franklin Court.
“Nobody feels tiptop all the time. Forget it.”
“It’s not ‘all the time’ that worries me. It’s during, or soon after, an aesthetically rich experience when I ought to feel great, and instead I feel . . . crappy.” Xavier sat in a recliner with his handkerchief-bandaged hands deep in the pockets of his robe. He slowly withdrew and clumsily started to unwrap his hands. “
The Nutcracker
was great,” he said, “but see what happened during the dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.” He raised his hands and spread his fingers.
“Yuck,” said The Mick. “Phieuw.”
“It’s starting again. The Philistine Syndrome. What it means is . . . my doom.”
“Be glad it’s your hands. Think what else could’ve happened at a performance of, you know,
The Nutcracker
.”
Xavier continued to display his hands as if they’d been mangled by an unoiled chain saw. Eventually, The Mick decided to show Xavier some low-grade celluloid art with the VCR. He located a bootlegged video of Ray Dennis Steckler’s
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
, shot in the early 1960s in a process dubbed by Steckler “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision.” Once this video started rolling, the cracks between Xavier’s fingers began to heal and his hands to drop toward the thighs of his Fred Flintstone pajamas. His look of wary fascination hinted that in a numbed-out way he was
enjoying
the movie.