The rest of the evening proceeded at a hallucinatory pace.
The rosebushes along the western wall of the house served as the garden of Gethsemane where an ex-Bronco fullback betrayed Mr. Dyne with a highly enthusiastic kiss involving an exchange of bodily fluids Freya frowned upon, but endorsed by the hearty applause of deranged onlookers.
Pontius Pilate, a six-foot Valkyrie in drag (another rumored dalliance of Freya's shipped in from the homeland), ordered Mr. Dyne to suck her dusty toes, after which she whipped him with her hair.
An eruption of lawn sprinklers sent actors and audience scurrying for cover through the mist and the rainbows, head and leaf baptized alike. An enraged Freya demanded the identity of the prankster who had dared to ruin her scene, but there was no one within twenty yards of the faucet except an unconscious drunk with a condom for a hat.
Objects continued to disclose for Perry an unnerving shimmer even after the water had been turned off. Was this the herald of a lunacy the opening to which he had already observed in his viewfinder? He worried about fainting at an inopportune time.
"I feel funny," he complained to Freya. "I think there's drugs in the food."
Freya replied in the grand manner, "I serve no drug but that of love."
Elsie scrutinized him as if he were a particularly offensively dressed mannequin.
"Let's do it," Freya barked, like an honest-to-God American.
Banks of hard light mounted on tall poles had been repositioned about the picturesquely gnarled oak, a supporting character in its own right, high wattage carving an illuminated cave out of the solid opacity of the night, spectators gathered round like the crew at the site of an important archaeological dig, tense, subdued, primed for awe.
Freya called "Action!" and Ula emerged from the darkness, clad in flimsy raiment of diaphanous veils she shed singly, artistically (Elvis dispensing stage scarves in Vegas the operative comparison), slithering across the floodlit space toward the tingling tree, more alive now than it had ever appeared in naked day, where Mr. Dyne, his scrawny arms strapped to a pair of Y-shaped branches, eyes girlishly aflutter, feigned to yield his hairless body into the ecstatic admixture of bliss and pain of which he fancied heaven was justly composed. The mesmerized crowd attended in lickerish silence, Freya squatting on a root barely out of camera range, the jeweled irises of several crouched cats glittering down from the upper limbs, the incense of grilled meat wafting lazily over all. Perry zoomed in for the close-up. The sight of Ula's virtuosic mouth working Mr. Dyne's floppy crank with an ardor even the jaded might term "indelicate" introduced a potent dose of skittering ambivalence into Perry's jeopardized systems. In accordance with the dictum "Peer long enough into the camera and the camera will peer into you" he seemed to split into two distinct but identical organisms, sharing between them nonetheless, like yoked twins a common heart, one tattered shuttlecock of an ego being batted from this perceptual center to that in a brisk volley that left him confused as to which self was the original or indeed whether such quaint concepts as "originality" were even valid, in both the ontological and epistemological senses. It was all Perry could do to keep the camera steady and aimed in the proper direction.
At the climactic moment Mr. Dyne tossed his moist head back against the ragged bark and emitted a scream so exaggerated, so cinematically feminine, onlookers stared about in bewilderment, uncertain whether to laugh, applaud, or rush to his aid. His dimpled chin dropped to his chest, lolled lifelessly to one side, and there was silence.
"Is he dead?" someone asked.
Perry focused in on Ula, who gave the elided camera the startled-doe gaze of one caught in a crime she had momentarily forgotten was illegal, the blankness persisting for only a beat before she flashed the loosest grin of the night, blew the lens a soulful kiss, and scampered nimbly for the house. Perry stopped tape. Mr. Dyne had not yet stirred, much of his audience, grown quite bored with his wooden impersonation, his rubber member, were already deep in the wholesome embrace of one another, naked duos, trios, quartets even, in all combos, distributed across the sloping lawn, heavily engaged in (insert favorite sexual practice), versatile Freya striding anxiously amid the fun, directing Perry's laggard camera from one novel clinch to the next, herself pursued by the twinge of melancholy (none must ever know) such a feast sometimes raised in her, the spectacle of the multitudes screwing too near to the god's-eye view of the multitudes dying. Editing, however, was the great anodyne -- there she could maintain the flow of arousal through time, her way of sticking it to death in the ass.
"The woman is an absolute witch," someone said.
"Triple X certainly," said someone else, "but is it politically correct?"
Perry at this point, incertitude as real as a disease to him, was stumbling around inside the notion that perhaps not everything he was beholding through his trusty camcorder was actually "out there." The last image he remembered framing as an objective fact was of a dignified gentleman in a Vandyke beard, latex gloves, and nothing else, hunched behind a juniper bush, furiously masturbating onto a slice of wheat bread.
Events assumed a hyperreal clarity.
He saw Satan himself, an electric charcoal starter in each taloned fist, chasing a big-bottomed nymph into the garage. He saw, under a picnic table, Eric and Elsie with artistic gravity, shaving one another's pubic hair. He saw Mr. Dyne raised from the dead and floating in bright radiance above the roof, from which elevation he tossed frozen pizzas to the starving flock. He saw Senator Wilcox running a slimy tongue into Ula's flushed ear.
He understood this was the vision of the mad, the prophets, where all is revealed as it is. He had been blessed.
He had no memory of the drive home, one minute hearkening with a drunk's elaborate attentiveness to Freya's postproduction critique ("blasphemy should be, I don't know, more droll"), the next minute scientifically inspecting the damage to a ratty green Ford Galaxie of antique love-bead-era vintage he had just reshaped attempting to squeeze into the last available space on the block. He thought about leaving a note under the Galaxie's wiper, thought about hunting through a trash can for a scrap of paper, thought about borrowing a pencil from a passing hooker, thought about printing the words in large block letters for easy comprehension, thought. . . Then he was upstairs, blundering about the reduced space of his room -- its puny dimensions apparent for the first time -- the lamp too bright, the TV too loud, trying to open the lid on a jar of Planters peanuts with a Phillips screwdriver, unseen fist banging on adjoining wall of unseen room, outside sirens, shots, shouts in the street, weekend noise, neighbors partying on.
Sockless, he was shuffling among his stale possessions, mumbling silly nonsense to himself, the harmless old inmate revered for his longevity in an institution where they died young and hard in various stages of ego deficit, pants around his ankles (it had become urgent that the horrible pressure on his abdomen be relieved), alternately exalted -- the king of video space! -- and debased -- the same genetic worm boring through his father's software now begun its fatal work on him -- searching aimlessly for an irretrievable odd or end among vast collection of same, unable to locate what he couldn't remember he was looking for, puttering about in a thoroughly disturbing and disengaged manner when he heard, firehouse dog alert, the fucking behind the wall. Determined to avoid the previous disaster -- had that only been earlier today? -- he attended to the Record button personally, observing his own human finger reaching out to depress the button manually. Numbers began their reassuring roll across the camcorder's timer. He looked into the viewfinder and saw: a naked white man, limbs and torso slashed with bold strokes of black paint, kneeling in liturgical fashion before a naked black woman with matching strokes of white paint, "Oh," she was moaning, "oh, Tommy, oh," and without further sound or movement her head burst into lurid flame, the fire standing straight up off her skull, arms lifting in useless spasms as if seeking to confirm by touch the unimaginable. Perry gasped, recoiling from the sight, and in his haste to increase the distance between himself and the image tripped in the tangle of his pants, crashing backward into a favorite table plucked from the Dumpster in the alley, ashtrays, beer cans, cassettes clattering across the hard rugless floor, where he landed on his back, a sharp bottle of vitamin B complex jabbing into his left kidney. He lay there for an indeterminate period, considering the dry riverbed system of plaster cracks, assessing the situation. His psychic temperature did seem a tad elevated this evening, retinae probably not responsible for the reports his brain was receiving. Slowly, to avoid further mishap, he crawled back over to the camcorder, lifted one unsteady eye up to the viewfinder and saw: another eye, monstrous and icy gray, looking back. Pure panic. It's mine, he reasoned, over the heaving clamor of heart and lungs, ordinary lens reflection. If he were truly insane, would his own hallucinations be studying him? -- a conundrum best left unexplored for now. Cautious as a private under fire, Perry raised his throbbing head to the parapet, braced himself for a third peek. The room was empty! The special photographer's bulb burned on behind its stained saffron shade. From a framed field of coarse madder the stylized Siamese on the wall with the elongated body and triangular head continued to regard him through abandoned eyes. The thin plastic-sheathed mattress had been stripped of its pilfered hospital sheets. Room 512 was as devoid of life as a room could be. In the morning, should these symptoms persist, perhaps Perry ought to pay a call to the local human resource center for a low-income reality check. He turned then and noticed the open door he obviously had, in his befuddlement, neglected to close, let alone lock, the private idiocies, discomfitures of these last few hours on public exhibit for hallway creeps dragging their fungoid flesh to and from the reeking stall opposite the stairwell, how acute his embarrassment had his faculties been intact, when would this life ever mend? another inquest to be recycled into another day as suddenly he knew -- the fine hairs of his neck so informed him -- he was not alone, no, a shadow shared this space, his fetch perhaps, if a fetch slipped about in khaki trousers and painted feet, one such leg planted now at the edge of his frame solid as the trunk of the oldest beech, Go! screamed the hairs, the wind from the future playing over his nerves, and he wished, he wanted, but it was too late, he was tod late, story of his life, as the long painted arm with the big big gun swung inevitably toward him, it was an illusion, he wasn't sure how it was done, but it touched his head, and then he knew he was falling, he knew precisely what was happening until the moment he didn't because EVERYTHING CHANGED.
Six
THE QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
Her dream name was Melissa. She lived in Chicago, or sleep's facsimile of that mythic city, under the haunted arrogance of its towers, in a shadowy winter light of alienated intimacy. A reluctant grownup, she preferred the loud garb of children, the bright frocks, the arbitrarily numbered oversized jerseys, loose jumpers with fuzzy animals embroidered on the bibs, her radiant red hair either pulled into a sleek ponytail or separated into cute girlish braids. She liked cheap jewelry, too, of the plastic, clunky variety, the weight of a dozen toy chains around her neck, arms rattling in bracelets from wrist to elbow. If a creep tried to get friendly, she'd kick him in the groin with her steel-capped lineman's boots. Goodness, this grocery store was large, bigger than a football stadium, miles of aisles, each strangely empty. No exit but the checkout lanes, and to pass through there you needed to make a purchase. There were guards in white masks. Her cart wobbled and squeaked and was almost impossible to steer. The bland piped-in music was driving her mad. Would this curse ever be lifted, or was it her fate, as the fabled Wandering Consumer, to trace these mocking aisles to the final decline and fall of Late-Stage Capitalism itself? Happily, she wouldn't have to wait, for there on the last shelf of the last aisle stood one forlorn can of fancy-cut green beans and she experienced a rush of relief positively erotic in intensity. Why? She hated green beans.
Late in the afternoon Jessie Horn awoke to the dreary realization that there now existed a possibility (not a certainty) she might (not would) dissolve into embarrassing tears during one of the night's numerous weddings. Well, she thought not. Last time she had cried hard enough to pickle a memory, Garrett was being led, bloodied and handcuffed, toward the waiting patrol car, her name a curse upon the night. Since then, her tender tissues had been scraped and cleaned and replaced with steel, and steel didn't leak. Pathos would have to take its place in line behind several other clamorous emotions. The face glaring back at her in the bathroom mirror was one she refused to acknowledge. And her hair was no dreamy red either but a horrid nest of peasant black she carried on her shoulders like a bundle of charred nettles. This was going to be a long day. She threw on a SAVE THE UNIVERSE
T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and hurried out to pick up the kids.
Cammie, a tattered sheaf of fresh Crayola drawings in hand, was already patiently waiting outside Moe Dalitz Elementary; at Lucky Duck Daycare Jessie had to dash inside herself, scoop up one cranky Bas and flee, while simultaneously bestowing air kisses and gratitude upon the frazzled staff. Back in the car the children, ever alert to Mommy's moods, sat so unusually still, observing traffic, the passing phantasmagoria, Jessie wanted to stop right in the middle of the Strip and give them each a big hug. Weirder things had happened on this boulevard, but a public display of affection, an interruption of the mystic cash flow, would probably get her in real trouble. These days she was, as a practical survival mechanism, dedicated to the art of avoidance, her true goal the achievement of a state of personal invisibility. She wanted to be in attendance in life, she just didn't want anyone noticing her. Unfortunately, for reasons inexplicably arcane, the gaudiness of her own plumage being transparent to her, she was a person other people liked to look at. A crowd was not a warm solvent she could melt into but a crystallized field of bored anxious eyes. So amusement parks were not favorite places, but here she was on her way to Kid Kountry, a bloated monument to sensory redundance, price gouging, and group fun, because a promise was a promise and she had already reneged twice in the past two weeks.
For the children each visit was a ritual that must be performed in proper sequence or the magic was lost. First, a ride on the reduced-scale Union Pacific encircling the park and its celebrated attractions: the biggest video arcade in the Mojave, a grand circus tent containing three rings of nonstop acts, a miniature golf course depicting major events in the life of Elvis Presley (free game to all holes in one down the toilet bowl on the eighteenth), an enormous whale-shaped swimming pool from which every fifteen minutes spewed a geyser of water to drench the unwary and amuse everyone else, and a monitored recreation area consisting of sturdy reproductions of the world's wonders where children could build sand castles in the Coliseum, race up and down the steps of the Aztec Temple of the Sun, play hide-and-seek in Stonehenge, or tumble giddily down the crimson-coated throat of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. Then it was off to the petting zoo for an extended session of touchy-feely-smelly with animals more commonly enjoyed in the kitchen and dining room than roaming at will about the house. Then forty-five minutes (renegotiated to an hour) feeding quarters into video games of exuberant violence, followed by ice cream cones from a vendor apparently dressed as a pimp, a stop at the batting cage for Cammie, who was already wondering why there were no girls on major league baseball teams, and a peek inside the big top to see if the killer klowns, Cammie's favorites, had been loosed yet upon an unsuspecting audience, but just past the entrance, lounging inside a cage air-conditioned so, the sign said, he would not get mad and break the bars, was a large male gorilla Bas took one look at and began to cry, a sign it was time to go. And through it all Jessie had not been unaware of the gray-haired, gray-faced man smoking a cigarette and leaning against the far rail as the train passed or the trio of jocks in matching shorts and UNLV caps waiting on line at the Devil's Drop or the two women with babies on the bench outside the rest room or the preening lifeguard with an abdominal scar or the bald-headed tourist in sunglasses who actually appeared to have taken her picture in front of his family or any of the several others she protected herself against through a willed act of psychic dislocation in which her body was rendered secretly unavailable for the fantasies, wishes, projections of strangers. Or so she hoped.
From the driveway Jessie could see through the plant-choked window Nikki fiddling around at the sink, but by the time she got the kids herded from car to house the kitchen was eerily empty. Okay. The mystery of the human relationship: a question with no answer? -- tune in tomorrow.
For dinner Jessie made the children grilled cheese sandwiches, a request-night special, each prepared exactly the same way, cut into exactly the same pieces. She then settled into the chair between Cammie and Bas, mommy cop on break with a cup of coffee, the day's paper, her physical presence a barrier to further trouble as she attempted, for one minute, to lose herself down the caffeine chute amid titillating reports of catastrophes too distant to touch her life in any serious way.
"I don't want to go to Mamaw's," announced Cammie. "I want to go with you and get married."
"You're awfully young yet, honey." A respected Texas businessman had strangled his wife with her aerobics unitard and run off with his transsexual lover. The world in its course. "Who would you marry?"
"I want to marry Bas."
"No!" her brother shrieked. Whatever marriage was, he wanted no part of it.
"Yes!"
"No!"
"Yes!"
"No!"
Nikki appeared in the doorway, hair tied in her traditional impending-doom knot on top of her head. She said, with the determination of one who has carefully considered her position, "I'm getting a gun."
"Fine," Jessie replied, then, "That's enough!" to the children who were trying to get at one another with their fists.
"Maybe I can lift one of Pop's. He wouldn't miss it."
"Do what you have to do." She slapped the back of Cammie's hand and now it was Cammie's turn to cry.
"Well, I don't see why I have to be more worried about this situation than you."
"You don't. I can handle Garrett."
Nikki paused for a moment. "I'm getting two guns."
In the universe of the spirit every individual was a sun. Lovers and friends revolved in nearby orbits. Families gathered in constellations. Gravity impelled these bodies toward one another. Gravity was love and love was indeed grave. For if, more often than not, the music of the spheres resembled a howl of celestial feedback, that was because harmony was under eternal besiegement by evil centrifugal forces. The alignment of bodies in a pleasing and enduring pattern was devilishly difficult. A longtime stargazer, Jessie was still trying to read the proper signs, dodge the occasional space junk. Having weathered eclipse, asteroid showers, the shattering of worlds, she had learned the importance of keeping one eye acutely on the sky. And what exactly was it she was witnessing now: an ominous flaring in the heavens or a reflection on her lens?
"Oh, that's just your paranoia," Nikki had said last night. "Everything's the same as it ever was."
"That's what I'm afraid of," Jessie replied.
Why was it so damned impossible to love one good person cleanly, honestly, and have that love returned in kind without trial, without tragedy, without tears? When she died, she hoped all this would be made clear.
Tonight Cammie and Bas would get an extra kiss, an extra-tight hug, before being bundled off to Mamaw Odie's with favorite toys, pillows, individual security blankets essential for physical as well as emotional comfort since Mamaw's year-round air-conditioning was potent enough to chill a ham in the living room in the middle of July. Mamaw Odie was also the former Candy Cain, now retired, a highly popular masseuse at the Bucking Bronco Ranch in Nye County, six feet of lean woman in pink hot pants and white go-go boots, a specialist in the Venusian Love Burn and the Creme Spritzer, her trademark boast: "I can get any man, straight, drag, or fag, hard as a tent stake in less than a minute." When she quit the trade it was to marry a runty bowlegged deputy sheriff who flagged her for a speeding violation, "I got the ticket, and I got the man, as hetero a guy as any you'd want to meet," and five months later gave birth to Jessie, crouching, so she claimed, in a ditch like an Indian squaw out on the road to Bullhead City, a leather belt between her teeth. When Jessie was seven the deputy died of a heart attack while waiting in an optometrist's office for a new pair of prescription sunglasses. Everyone had always pretended he was really Jessie's father. Maybe he was.
"You got that Paiute blood in you," her mother said, "why you act the way you do."
"You're a racist, Odie," Jessie complained, "and a homophobe, too."
"I put up with you, don't I?" replied quick-witted Mom. The kids loved Mamaw, her wide-screen TV, her weakness for sweets, her little dog, Shasta, who could count to ten, the "hootchie-cootchie" dance she did to make them laugh, and her new friend, Tito, who drank a bottle of beer, wiggled his ears, and stood on his head in his underwear. More entertainment, more nonnutritional treats, more customized coddling than you could get for cash at Kid Kountry. Their periodic complaints, the fidgeting, the dawdling, were really expressions of employee burnout, the nightly expedition to Odie's marking the third shift of an interminable day sister and brother had already come to understand was divided naturally into eight-hour segments only one of which was spent at home, useful indoctrination for future service workers of America. At least the security of Jessie's children was assured during these dark hours of maximum danger, no vacillating about firearms in this house, Mamaw had been locked and loaded since the Kennedy assassination.
Alone now, for the first time since waking, Jessie and Nikki sat inside the moving car stiffly as strangers of different tongues locked together in an iron cell, sullen fields of silence swelling aggressively at one another, each trying to trigger a lapse into defensive speech. A psychological experiment Jessie certainly had no patience for.
"No gunnysacking," she commanded. "Fair fight rules strictly enforced."
"They're my emotions, Jessie, I'll do with them as I please, thank you."
"Aha, a glint. C'mon, open up that Pandora's box, show us all your pretty treasure."
The car traveled on in its own sound, windows closed against an unseasonably early chill.
"When have I ever hidden the truth from you?" Nikki asked.
"Please. Sincerity is secrecy's other face. Truth in a suspicious mouth is still suspect."
Nikki waited a beat. "Go on. I don't want to miss a single one of these witty aphorisms. You've been reading behind my back."
Jessie breathed it in, breathed it out again. "Without me," she said, "you wouldn't have a problem like Garrett in your life."
"Sure, but I wouldn't have you, either. No one's clean, Jessie, we're always dropping baggage at one another's feet."
"Not all of it armed and dangerous."
"Well, as I said, I'm making moves to deal with that issue."
"Sometimes, Nikki, I think you look at me and see Garrett sitting here. I think some shit's been flung at the wrong target."
Shadows played tag across Nikki's impassive face. "I'm sorry you feel that way," she said. "I apologize. But I worry about things, I get tense."
"I'm worried, too," Jessie said. "About us."
"We're solid," Nikki assured her. "This ol' boat may rock a bit from time to time, but we ain't gonna drown."
Jessie dared the full strength of Nikki's gaze, she had weird green eyes from outer space few mortals could resist. "Truth?" she asked.
"Truth," Nikki pronounced emphatically. She waited then until the turn onto Fremont, into the naked incandescence of Glitter Gulch, the heart of a city at the heart of the country, their bleached faces exposed to immeasurable gales of cascading light, electric streams jeweling the skin, before inquiring, in all sincerity, "Who do you see when you look at me?"
Well. For Jessie, an intolerably complex question. Her "knowing" eye tended to get lost in people, in the ornate and patterned beauty of their strata and schist, in the transparent shapes time sculpted in the dark, the mesmerizing quirks, the harsh elegance, laminated canyons and smoky peaks testifying to the nova at the soul's core, the perpetual womb of images, the dance of savage possibility. Beneath such scrutiny proportions were onerous to maintain, the concept of a bounding wholeness relegated to triviality. The examined Other slipped out of focus, a certain ghostliness prevailed. The more you knew, the less stable the object of your knowledge. Mind haunted the world like a devouring demon. What did she see? She saw cracks and fissures and chinks. She saw her past rising up through the crust at her feet.