Aeryl talked with the driver, heard out his grave song, of Debbie, his wife, and kids Jen and Petey, murdered in their beds by an intruder unknown and at large these eight years later. Pain like a wheel his life was broken upon, useless pieces drifting in torpid suspension toward the bottom of a bottle, waking alone in the gray streets to the survival denominator and the sometimes regretfully ugly requirements of a life impossible to imagine before the murders. And to think, once he had been president of his own company, Psychoplex Systems, Inc., an educational testing service netting more than five mil the last time he was in position to check.
The man was weird, obviously, a dubious presence fading in and out as if broadcast from a TV station at the limits of its reception area. But in a world of breakaway certainties, such transparent elusiveness was an attraction, erotic in appeal, the tease of a puzzle stripping itself bare. She didn't believe a word he said.
All this while perched on the edge of her seat dressed in a single T-shirt, the curious logo STANDARD MISSING CORP.
emblazoned across the chest, and Laszlo lying beside her like a dead man, head flung back openmouthed, a slug beneath the rock of sleep. Where in luminous dark, ever faithful, gamboled one of her slithery selves. Because she was different alone with the driver. Laszlo's girl was asleep with Laszlo. She was someone else now in this mood, before this person. She was always someone else, and if this were craziness, she'd been born with it. Either she had bad genes (the curse of the Chaces) or everyone was coming apart minute by minute, but nobody was talking, no way to gauge where she ranked on the normality curve. Other people were alien planets you visited whose landscapes, customs, atmospheres, changed you. This Tom, for instance: a shiny metallic sphere, a solitary foil tree, a pool of quivering mercury; hollow, too, no doubt, but nice to visit for a spell, a pleasant variation from Laszloville, which was nice, too, but she had been on all the rides.
Laszlo's plump eyes shuttered open, focused in random incomprehension upon a brightening verticality, a hardness of a thingness he was quite unable, for several entertainingly disoriented moments, to recognize as the blunt chrome shaft of a simple door lock. Half his sweat-basted face lay roasting in direct sun, though he neither moved nor spoke, content to lap in the sensory wash of blur and hum and the amusingly inconsequential quality of the nearby conversation.
"Eighty-five for a single," Aeryl was saying, pointing to a passing motel behind a red windmill, "and the cable sucks." She turned, unexpectedly confronted by Laszlo's lupine glare.
"I need to piss," he said.
"He needs to piss," said Aeryl.
The driver glanced at the dash. "When we stop for gas."
"Yeah, when's that?"
The driver shrugged. "Hour, hour and a half."
"Pull over along here. I'll go down in the ditch."
"I can't do that," said the driver.
"Why the fuck not?"
"See those signs? No stopping except in case of emergency."
"This is a fucking emergency."
"I'll determine that."
"Look," said Aeryl, reading it off, "Next Rest Area Twenty-five Miles. We could pull in there, couldn't we, Tom?"
Tom? Tom??
"Twenty-five miles? Fuuuuck. I can't hold it that long."
"You're a big strong guy," said the driver.
"You can do it," assured Aeryl.
"I said I gotta go now. Whaddya want me to do, stick it out the fucking window?"
"Lasz," Aeryl said. "Be nice."
"You talking to me or you talking to him?" Something had happened while he slept, something evil, like the air itself had been changed, sucked thoroughly from the car and replaced with a mixture of counterfeit gases that were altering the composition of his brain. "Pull your goddamn pants on!" he screeched at Aeryl. "You think he isn't enjoying this?"
"Well, that, I thought, was the idea."
"You're too stupid to have an idea."
She could see from where she sat, down into the well on the passenger side amid a welter of travel trash and crumpled tabloids, PRIEST GIVES BIRTH TO LIVE FISH
,
the plated handle of the gun lying in packed potentiality, scenarios swarming up like angry wasps.
"We're taking your bladder hostage, kid," joked the driver. "Behave yourself if you want to see it again in one piece."
"Fuck." Laszlo turned away to look out his window. Fucking rays. Fucking dirt. "Fuuuuuuck," he said, slow as he could drag it.
"Too much Colt for breakfast," said Aeryl. "Shit goes through you like white water."
Laszlo imagined himself letting go, hosing down the ratty interior of this car, spraying golden halos about the driver's chipmunk head.
"Look," said Aeryl. "I'll count off the numbers on the miles thing. You'd be surprised how fast a mile goes. Like by now we're probably already down to twenty-three, so like what do the numbers say, four five one. . . Move your arm, Tom, I can't --"
"Anybody got a cup?" inquired Laszlo.
"What are you gonna do?" asked the driver. "Drink it for good luck?"
"I'm counting now," said Aeryl. "The numbers are rolling by."
Carefully Laszlo leaned forward to deposit directly into the hairy convolutions of the driver's unprotected ear: "Aglon Tetagram Vaycheon Stimulamathon." He went on: "Erohares Retragsammathon Clyoran Icion Esition."
"Another mile down," Aeryl announced.
"Just what the fuck is your problem, bitch?" said Laszlo to the last of the five hundred faces she had been flashing him since he woke up, and the surreptitious semaphoring of her hands signaling him to the front, the front of what?
"Your boyfriend's got quite the mouth, hasn't he?"
"He won't be talking to you anymore," Aeryl explained. "He's a real stubborn person like that."
"Kanda Ess Trotta Montos," Laszlo hissed. "Eadryx Nutt Nosferatus Kanda Emontos Kanda." His diabolic eye fixed on the back of the driver's neck, the encircling fringe of uncut hair in curled clawlike strands, an insufficient neck whose appearance, whose otherness, was a vile offense to the gaze of the initiate. His mind was going and going, outracing the car, running on ahead of his thoughts, fibrillating like a bad heart until suddenly it stopped, dead still, conjectural operations ceased, and a clear bracing coldness descended through his overheated body in one long slow continuous wave. Now he smiled. Now he could slump back in the same careless attitude as when he slept, the same road decor droning past his semi-lidded gaze.
"Oh shit," Aeryl declared. "I've lost track of the numbers on the miles thing."
The William H. Bonney Rest Area was one large parking lot, one small brick building, a few shade trees, and a couple of green picnic tables, site the previous week of a rape and attempted murder by one or more unidentifiable unapprehended subjects. Aeryl and Tom decided to wait in the car.
"Hey!" called Aeryl from the open window. "Get me a Diet Sprite."
Laszlo kept on walking. "This ain't no goddamn refreshment stand," he said, without looking back.
He must have remained motionless for three solid minutes before the steel urinal in a perfect transport of eliminatory bliss, all the kinks and knots of the last few hours rushing in a mad slide down the chute and out. Long way to go for such sweet relief. Moral of today's lesson: if you're drinking, make certain you're the one driving. He shook himself off, admiring the imaginative antics of the many cocks and cunts penciled, penned, and scratched into the wall tile at convenient eye level. He zipped up, checked himself in the mirror. Did coolness have a face? Don't even ask. Now, here was the plan. The car was his, no doubt about it. He touched his pocket. He had the gravity blade and the will to use it. Ask one unfortunate cat. Mister Driverman was history, yeah. Give me shit, I'll cut the shit out of you. Blood on the asphalt. Move your fucking leg or I'll back the car over it. Yeah.
He strolled out to the car and discovered it no longer there. Wait a minute. Ford Galaxie, wasn't it? Some weird shade of green, '69, '70 or so? Nothing sitting in this sun matched that description. He returned to the lavatory, methodically searched the Men's, the Women's, stall by stinking stall, causing one male occupant to inquire if he were some fucking faggot and several alarmed females to threaten to sic their husbands on him. He went outside, walked the lot from end to end, inspecting the make of each vehicle, the interior for familiar objects. He stood before the little brick house, the well-tended hedge, the flaming geraniums, bedraggled travelers of both sexes and all ages who needed to pee passing courteously around his vaguely disquieting form, and he removed his fancy sunglasses and hurled them to the pavement, the sole of his surplus combat boot vigorously grinding the cracked yellow lenses into a fine sugary powder.
Overhead in a dry wind fluttered the federal bunting, a clip on its swaying halyard clanging disconsolately against the tall hollow pole, the empty seasound of a ruined clock tolling a nonexistent hour, the extended shadow of the flagstaff falling diagonally across coupe and sedan, machine after master machine, on out into the lot, where at its tip a flapping black shape twisted furiously upon the hot cement like a small tethered animal struggling to break free.
Five
GETTING HAPPY
When Perry Foyle heard the telltale knocking behind the papered wall, he merely retrieved the remote from beneath his pillow and, red button properly thumbed, waved it in the general direction of the camcorder, quite indifferent to the rapidly clich
é
d marvels of technology, the magnetically preserved prurience being celebrated next door. He had seen it all before; what was new was the scary predicament Gregory Peck now found himself in in 1965 New York, lost in time without family, without friends, without a memory, pursued by ruthless strangers with guns who seemed to be operating from a fairly clear conception of precisely who he was, the moral of the picture
(Mirage,
today's Afternoon Classic) being apparently this: if you should happen to misplace your identity, better slip into your running shoes 'cause they're coming at ya, representatives of your true life, and they seriously want to kill you.
Poor Greg with his bumbling do-gooder notions of saving the world from atomic radiation -- of course he had to be eliminated; who profited from peace in twentieth-century corporate America? -- but still enough innocence abroad in the land to end with the bust of the evil exec, the cementing back together again of Humpty-Dumpty Peck (he's actually a physiochemist, whatever that is), and the final fade-out embrace in the arms of a handsome woman, a triumph of stardom, good looks, and conventional plotting.
Perry watched television the way small children slept -- gone so deep inside that resurfacing was a shock, the place up top looked familiar but obviously required greater expenditures. The inevitable appearance of
THE
END hit him with the dismay a drunk feels at the approach of dawn. He lived in his bed, his body just another stick of furniture in an otherwise cluttered room, the world offering a happier perspective from the cushioned horizontal, his essentials (Bud, Marlboros, cable control) at convenient arm's length, his operation central from which he could (simultaneously) read a paper, eat a peach, soak up the fine Sony rays. It was a minor calamity to be forced too soon from the nest, but one had duties to perform, liaisons to maintain beyond the dream. Head as light as a balloon, he staggered over to the opposite wall where the Handycam was mounted on a small shelf before a ragged lens-sized hole. The camcorder was dead, the adjoining room empty, its anonymous couple having completed their business and fled, and who knew what rare species of erotic practice had escaped documentation forever because he, the compleat vidiot, had pointed the Mitsubishi VCR remote at the JVC camcorder?
Perry resided (temporarily) in a Fuck House, his term for this deteriorating South Side SRO, rentals available on an hourly basis, the communal John at the end of the corridor one green-bearded bowl with a cracked seat, the view from his window the 24-7 promenade of the broken-glass people, their sharp-edged psyches coming at you like ninja implements every time you braved the block for a food run. He had spent the majority of his years (twenty-seven of 'em so far, rings on a tree he honestly expected to be chain-sawed for pulp before producing any decent shade) attempting with about six meager ounces of Perry-essence to fill a ten-gallon mold of a half-imagined figure somewhere east of Dean and north of Elvis, but now he was simply searching for the bottom, his bottom, The Bottom, it didn't seem to matter. The future was coming; the herald of its gaudy carousel lights already visible out past the barren moons of the self. He would be instructed then, presented with the proper rule book on the game's last half. In the meantime, he was a pervert (temporarily).
A long rattle down the antique elevator, a couple of hot cassettes in hand, best of the week's catch, dank cave breath sighing up between the floor cracks, exhalation of a beast, to remind even the sleepwalking rider that a simple trip to the street might be a plunge toward adventure or a descent into the mines. Monitoring lobby traffic was the troublemaker's troublemaker, Pisshole Pat, the chain-smoking desk clerk with the crippled arm and the motor mouth, who, from the security of his bulletproof glass cage, enjoyed harassing peers and innocents alike, his bleached eyes a reproach to naive hipsters like Perry who cultivated his tolerance out of the same dark need pushing them out to the margins here, all the good little girls and boys, lives from the womb pointed like compass needles in this damned direction, the tug of The Life, you think you're on a visit when you've really found a home.
Pat was always glad to see one of his regulars slink past. "Nice ass," he muttered to Perry. "Implants?"
The car was a stale Chrysler four-door on permanent loan from his father, its numerous arthritic complaints prohibitively expensive to treat, the missing passenger window a flapping sheet of taped plastic, the interior having been broken into five, six, seven times, routine in a neighborhood neither parent, to his indifference, would ever consent to visit. For folks like Stan and Allene, Pisshole Pat with his smoldering cigarette was the cherub at the gate with the flaming sword.
Since the "problem," though, Perry had heard rather frequently from Allene, calling in her depressingly chirpy hospital updates, "apprising" him of the "current situation." Today Daddy moved an eyelash. Yesterday curled a pinkie. Tomorrow will twitch a lip. Each lonely evening, after the last nurse had completed the last round, Allene pulled her chair close to the bed, slipped into a warm trance, and began firing her thought bullets directly into the yolk of darkness at the center of Daddy's skull. The power of right thinking, of which could be found no greater force in this life, witness the successful exorcism of the crime-ridden Westland Mall by Pastor Bob, who had personally promised her via recorded message that he would be praying for Daddy during special request night at this month's All-State Angel Jamboree, when the lame shall walk, the guilty get happy. Get happy, Allene exhorted her errant son, the Lord sends sunshine to brew the tea that is you. I am happy, he assured her. You are not. Am too. Are not. Then the lapse into black silence so similar to Daddy's notorious moods you are no doubt destined for. . . well, I don't want to say. Yes, Mother.
Stan Foyle was an unregenerate maniac who never smiled except by accident and who once in the middle of an IRS audit stabbed the agent in the hand with a government ballpoint pen. Stan loved pornography in any form -- movies, magazines, Hellenic vases; had he known his son was intimately involved in its production, he would have beaten him severely; had he known the condition his son had reduced his car to, he would have killed him.
The destination this fine Friday night was the customary weekend blowout at The Rainbow Bridge, a big house on a small ground outside Denver city limits, so by definition a "ranch," though the only animals to be found wandering the premises were the ubiquitous cats and the disheveled or plain "skyclad" humans of a distinctly undomesticated variety. The party was well into second-stage burn by the time Perry arrived, the driveway and yard so jammed with vehicles he had to park out near the skull-shaped mailbox and walk in, the amplified throb of tribal drumming a beacon to the passing fun-seeker.
The house itself seemed to be excreting excess merriment; there were revelers perched like boisterous birds along the rooftop; a clumsy fellow in a rubber suit trying to clamber out the second-story bathroom window; the other windows dense with movement, flashbulb explosions, the caustic glare of camera lights, with loose faces rarely seen behind the penitential bars of nine-to-five; from an upstairs bedroom a lanky runway model in a floor-length satin cape and not much else appeared to be blowing hello kisses to Perry, a total stranger; the veranda was overrun by a loud gang of bland white guys holding talismanic cups and cans of precious alcoholic fluids; and at the front door a steady seepage of dizzy humanity in search of air, space, reduced noise level. "Excuse me excuse me excuse me," the chant Perry used to propel himself crabwise across the threshold into the really thick congestion inside. "Anyone seen Freya?" he called out hopefully.
"Yes," replied a pompous European with an unplaceable accent, turning to present Perry with a close-up view of the back of his wrinkled linen jacket, his ragged gray ponytail. The vehemence of Perry's expletives opened a startled rift in the nearby wall of bodies. The room beyond was a suffocating nightmare of babble and humidity. What was going on? He had never seen so many in attendance.
"Welcome to the twenty-first century!" The man gripping his arm had an extraordinarily piercing voice and a distressing muscular strength. His eyes resembled boiled eggs. He wasn't wearing pants.
Perry pulled himself free and pushed on, the game plan for rude gatherings such as this: better a moving target than a stationary dummy. Familiar faces hove into view, some known personally, some known at the intimate remove of modern celebrityhood, local media types tanned and satisfied, a sprinkling of higher-magnitude stars down from the mountain in Aspen, the socialite grouper fish, the trolling politicos, and the renowned and endowed from the glamorous world of adult entertainment, all the well-connected folk you could ever hope to rig a hot wire to.
Perry snagged a harsh anise-flavored concoction from a passing tray and pushed on, past the women with too much makeup, the men with too much cologne, stepping cautiously to avoid trampling underfoot the unwary cat or foul-mouthed dwarf.
A blonde in a red bikini, licking a cherry lollipop, in this case a phallic symbol in the actual shape of a phallus, said to her companion, "No, I know what happens. After you die, you pass out into a sticky white web. I saw it clearly in a dream."
"Yeah? And then what?"
She looked surprised. "I don't know," she said. "I woke up."
"I believe," announced a bored male voice, "I'm the only one in the room who hasn't had a nip and tuck."
"I believe," answered the model/actor/singer at his elbow, "you're the only one in the room I haven't fucked."
"Look," declared someone else, "isn't that Senator Wilcox? When did he get out of prison?"
"If you can imagine it, someone's done it."
"The ice queen's in back," someone said.
And then, no avoiding it, Perry was face to face with the Marguerita sisters, demonic twins outfitted in matching costumes of straps and buckles, their special glee: ridiculing the strange ways of the inferior sex.
"So, Perry," began Margaret or Rita (he couldn't tell them apart), "how's it hanging, good bud?"
The other stared critically at his crotch. "I fail to discern much of interest there."
"Girls," he begged, attempting to slip discreetly around. "Please."
"Girls??!!" they shrieked in unison. "GIRLS??!!" And with a precise dexterous teamwork admirable to behold, one sinewy sister pinned him against the wall as the other opened his fly and with a forbiddingly long stiletto removed his -- no, his briefs, in two quick surgical slices before scampering away into the amused crowd, brandishing aloft the trophy of his poor violated shorts, which they took turns conspicuously sniffing between whoops of delight. Perry hadn't even time to get himself refastened before an anonymous bystander remarked cattily, "Goodness, not something I'd care to flaunt in public." Perry acted the good sport despite the homicidal rage seething behind his embarrassed smile. The rule was that once you crossed The Rainbow Bridge there were no rules. The paths to the playing fields of carnal liberty were curious and diverse, that of humiliation among the most honorable, its fervent devotees always well represented at these affairs, though Perry continued to encounter difficulty untying the knots that kept him from experiencing the advertised thrill of this particular mode. The job, he knew, was to defuse the body so as to allow the sexual angel to emerge, in whatever guise it chose.
The public rooms in the rear wings of the house were painted in warm uterine colors and named, rather too cutely, he thought, after popular parts of the human reproductive organs. The Vas Deferens, traditionally a holding pen for unassigned extras, was teeming with sparely dressed young women tottering about in six-inch heels like a herd of spooked deer. The Glans was occupied by a trio of naked fat guys, more hair on their shoulders than their heads, playing draw poker around a massage table. "What are you looking at?" The speaker had no teeth and a patch over one eye. Perry pushed on. The corridor, which was as packed as a stadium aisle the day of the big game, suddenly erupted into a wild water-pistol fight between opposing squads of squealing boys and girls in sequined G-strings, the liquid being so freely dispersed of a highly suspicious nature. Perry dodged and weaved and moved on.
Following the psychic current to its source, he found Freya Baldursson in the Mound of Venus, resplendent in her superhero garb of black spandex bodysuit and rune-embroidered baseball cap, the contrast merely emphasizing her dazzling, almost inhuman blondness, a look calculated to tickle the eye of either gender; she was always composing, manipulating the physical into the photogenic -- a compulsion, she admitted it, but one that had rewarded her with the time's twin grails of fame and wealth. "I may not be able to tell a decent story," she confessed, "or round out a character, but, God, I know how to shoot skin." Textures, she loved textures.
At the center of this swarming room, the focus of eyes, lights, lenses, was a queen-size motel bed, aqua sheets, no pillows, upon which knelt a young red-Mohawked woman cinched into a monstrous illuminated dildo she was attempting, with intrepid gingerliness, to steer up the raised orifice of a scaly emerald creature only recognizably human by the incongruous pink penis dangling forlornly from a hole in the costume.
"It hurts," complained the creature.
"Cut!" Freya stepped impatiently into the light. "You're too tense, Tony. Are you practicing your breathing?" The creature mumbled assent. "Remember, now, you're a flower, not a stone."
"I think my batteries are dying," announced Ms. Mohawk, indicating the transparent plastic horn between her legs.
"Elsie," called Freya. "Take care of this, please. And more K-Y jelly. I want a nice sheen on the close-up."