Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day (4 page)

“Ah, well,” says the newcomer, “it’s only money, yes?”

He turns to Edgar. “And you need to urinate and can’t do it so well, yes?” He leans forward and sniffs. “Cancer of the prostate, if I’m not mistaken.” He nods to himself, satisfied with his diagnosis. “Invariably fatal, I believe but—” He sniffs again. “I think this one will respond to treatment. A few visits to the radiography area will put it to rest … plus you’ll be able to start up electrical household objects from twenty paces.”

Turning to Rosemary, he places a grubby hand on her knee and squeezes once before removing it. “And you, my dear, are worrying about your husband and your little boy …” He pauses and closes his eyes. “New England?” He opens his eyes and sees Rosemary staring at him, her mouth hanging limply open. “Nice place … but terrible winters.” He pats the knee again. “You’ll see them again, my dear … but leave it until the spring.” He glances away quickly, trying to convince himself that one lie might ease a burden where the truth would only increase it.

“And you, sir,” he says across the table to Jim Leafman. “Woman trouble, I believe, is what ails you.”

“Who—” Jim’s voice sounds about three octaves too high, like a choirboy’s, and he clears his throat before continuing. “Who said I was ailing?”

Gandalph Cohen laughs. “Ah, we’re all ailing,
mon ami
,” he says to Jim, “it’s only the reasons that are different. Your future lies away from your wife—is it Clarice?”

Jim nods.

“Yes? Nice name. Well, your path goes in another direction from hers. But be happy with it. It’s a good path.”

“What about my bar?” asks Jack Fedogan. “You never said. You just said, ‘It’s only money’.”

 “No, you’ll never lose the bar,” says Gandalph Cohen. “But you’ll lose its present location. And it won’t be the same.”

 “Shit,” says Jack, and then, “pardon my French, Rosemary.”

“French?” says Gandalph Cohen. “That would be
merde
surely?”

“Of course it won’t be the same,” says Jack, annoyed. “But where will it be if it ain’t here?”

“There’ll always be a Land at the End of the Working Day,” comes the reply, “just as there will always be a proprietor. Right now, it’s here and it’s you. A few years back, it was a Laundromat in Queens. Before that, a hot dog stand down near Battery Park … a video store in Jackson Heights—that was the one before you …”

“A Laundromat, a hot dog stand and a video store all called The Land at the End of the Working Day?” says Jim Leafman.

“
Mais non
, my little garbage collecting friend,” says Gandalph Cohen. “‘Squeeky Clean,’—with a double ‘e’— ‘Frank’s Franks’ and ‘The Big Picture’. The name isn’t important.”

“Never mind the name,” says Jack, “what do you mean ‘before me’? I don’t think I’m following you? Just who are you?”

“I told you,” says Gandalph Cohen. “I’m Gandalph Cohen.”

“How do you know so much, I think is what he means,” says Rosemary, pulling a cigarette out of her pack.

 Gandalph Cohen shrugs. “I just know, that’s all. I know that the City creates its own amusements. It’s like an offshoot of the Gaia theory … you know? Where the planet is a thinking entity that looks after itself?”

Edgar nods and takes a drink. Suddenly he’s feeling a whole lot better than he’s felt in days. In fact, he’s feeling downright good.

“And,” Gandalph Cohen continues, “it needs something to appease the people who live in it. Kind of like a pressure valve, through which temperatures are allowed to cool off. But it moves it around.”

“It moves it around?” Jack Fedogan shakes his head. “
What
moves
what
around?”

“The City,” says Gandalph Cohen. “The City moves its pressure valve around. On a whim,” he says, brandishing an arm theatrically, “for no good reason other than sheer caprice. And tonight’s the night it goes from here.”

McCoy has been silent for a while, thinking over what has been said. He clears his throat now and says, “Where does it go from here?”

The man in the strange hat shrugs. “Don’t know yet. Don’t ever know. Thing is, I don’t need to know. People only need the valve when they’re close to bursting. Some folks are close to bursting most of the time and they become regulars … kind of like therapy, you know? Some folks are so
very
close to bursting they never find it—like not seeing the wood for the trees?—and they end up blowing away a couple families in their local MacDonalds or decapitating their neighbors for not returning a half-used carton of barbecue-lighting fluid.

 “Me, I’ve been at 14 of these handovers over the years. I suspect it was someone else before me, someone the City picks.”

 “What … you know, what do you actually
do
?” asks Jim.

 “You
believing
all this?” says Jack, slapping Jim’s arm.

“I don’t actually
do
anything,” Gandalph Cohen says, ignoring Jack Fedogan’s remark. “I’m what you might call a conduit. It’s through me that the necessary levels are attained so that the … the force, I guess you could call it—though I am aware that someone else already thought up that particular usage of term—so that the force can be freed.” He drains his glass and pours some more beer. “Where it’ll go from here is anybody’s guess. How long it’ll stay there, the same.” He reaches into his coat pocket and removes the sandwich.

“You never said,” says Rosemary, grimacing as she watches the man take a bite out of the soggy-looking baguette, “how you know so much about us … our names … and everything else.”

“And you never said what was going to happen to
me
… you ‘did’ everyone else,” says McCoy.

“You,” Gandalph Cohen says to McCoy Brewer, speaking around a mouthful of sandwich, “you are out of a job. Tomorrow you will
still
be out of a job. But a job is just a job, yes? Tonight,
mon ami
, you have a mission … a quest, even … and a quest has always been more important than a job. More than that I cannot say … though I will say that you will be immensely helpful to Jack here, over the months and years ahead. As, it must be said, he will be to you.

“And in response to
your
question,” he says to Rosemary, “the rhythms of the City are complex.” He offers her a huge smile which exposes brown teeth. “But it is possible to follow them. Those rhythms are the people that live here … like fleas on a dog. It’s too difficult to explain any more than that.” He takes another slug of beer and wipes his sleeve across his beard.

“The people know that the force is moving on,” he continues. “That is why there are none of them here tonight. They wouldn’t say that if you asked them, of course. They would simply say that they had other things to do … like dinner parties, movies, bowling—do people still go bowling?”

Everyone shrugs.

“No matter. But the point is that the City is keeping them away.”

“Why?” McCoy asks quietly. “Why does it want to do that?” Even as the last word of the question leaves his mouth, McCoy Brewer wonders whether he has had too much to drink.

“It doesn’t need them.”

McCoy says, “But it needs us?”

Gandalph Cohen nods. “It needs them that need it the most. Tonight, you five need the City in the worst way. Tomorrow night, it’ll be other people; last night it was others still. And so it goes on.” He slaps the table. “But, enough talk … we have work to do.”

“What work?” asks Jim Leafman.

“We have to enjoy ourselves and perform the handover.”

“Hey,” says Rosemary, holding her hands palm out above the table. “can you feel it?”

“
Feel
it … I can
see
it!” says Edgar.

And, sure enough, the table seems to be shuddering, tiny, infinitesimally small vibrations that make it seem as though it’s alive, alive with expectation.

“What do we do?” asks Jack Fedogan.

“Well,
mon ami
,” says Gandalph Cohen, “I suggest you get us another couple pitchers of beer—and maybe a few pretzels or nuts? that would be good—and we’ll just sit around like the friends we are and we’ll make each other smile.

“Tell me,” says Gandalph Cohen, leaning onto the vibrating table in The Land at the End of the Working Day, “has anyone heard the one about the guy from the mid-west who goes on holiday to Scotland? He goes into this bread and cakes store and he says to the assistant, pointing at this cake-thing in the display case, ‘Is that a donut or a meringue?’ And the assistant, she says—” He puts on a Scottish accent. “‘Och, no, you’re right—it’s a donut.’“

Jack exchanges a quizzical expression with Edgar, and then his eyes light up and he starts to laugh. Then Rosemary starts to giggle, her eyebrows raised high in sudden understanding … and then McCoy Brewer. Only Jim maintains a frown. “I don’t think I get that one,” he says quietly.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Gandalph Cohen. “Keep it going. Every joke you ever heard … every funny story, every anecdote.”

 “Okay,” says Edgar. “How about this one …”

 As the night wears on, and the beer flows thick and fast, the stories come out …  some stories the teller heard just the other week and some are dredged up from their deepest memory. Sometimes the stories get a laugh and sometimes they don’t … but the City accepts the laughter from all of them, drinking it in gratefully like a man lost in the desert drinking in droplets of soda from a discarded can. Eventually, a little after 11 pm …

Resting his hands on the table and sensing something has changed, Jim Leafman says, “The table feels different. Has it happened?”

Gandalph Cohen nods and places his empty glass on the table.

“It feels sad,” says Rosemary. “It feels like I just sat up all night with a sick friend and now … now she’s gone.”

“Not gone,” says Gandalph Cohen. “Just moved on to where she’s needed more.
Ecoutez
…” he says. Out in the darkness, outside the two-flight walk-down on the corner of 23rd and Fifth, a wind seems to have gotten up.

 “So tell me,” says Jim Leafman, watching the others cocking their heads to one side, listening … smiling to themselves … watching them get to their feet and stretching, seeing them embrace and shake each other’s hands,  “what
is
a meringue? Could someone tell me that?”

Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day

Copyright  Peter Crowther 2008 & 2011

The right of Peter Crowther to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form in
The Land at the End of the Working Day
by Humdrumming.co.uk in 2008. This electronic version is published in March 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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