The Bend of the World: A Novel (17 page)

Jesus, Uncle, said Johnny, you’re a real fucking salesman. Your customer service is top notch.

Fuck you, Nephew. I’m a model of fucking customer service. This is a customer-centric business. Your ass is always right. He glared. Johnny started laughing. Elijah held on to his frown for another second and started laughing as well. He reshelved the book. So, Nephew, what can I do you for?

Well, you know Winston Pringle?

Pittsburgh Project. Writer dude. Yeah. Why?

I need a connect.

Nephew, didn’t I just tell you to lay off the goddam needle? You’ve got to purify your body, son.

What are you talking about? Johnny said.

What are
you
talking about?

Well, do you, like, know how I can get in touch with him? Like through his publisher or something?

Why the fuck would you go through his publisher? I told you I
know
the man.

Like, know him know him? said Johnny.

Yeah, said Elijah. Like know him know him. What the fuck, you think I mean I’m familiar with his oeuvre? You know that motherfucker’s crazy, right?

Holy shit, really? Oh man. That’s awesome. How do you know him?

His fat ass lives out in Wilmerding. He comes into the store sometimes. Don’t like to pay for nothing neither. I’m surprised you never met him. He’s a goddamn substitute teacher. You know, his real name is Wilhelm Zollen. I mean, supposedly his real name.
Doctor
Wilhelm Zollen. He
teaches chemistry
, if you know what I mean.

No. Wait, what do you mean?

What the fuck do you think I mean? The fat pervert sells drugs, my man. He’s the goddamn Timothy Leary of the Mon Valley, except he’s fat, insane, and a fag.

I’m a fag, said Johnny.

There’s fags and there’s fags, Nephew.

True enough, said Johnny.

10

After a week of waiting for the good doctor to stroll through the doors of Elijah’s store, which he did, according to Elijah, no more than once or twice a year anyway, Johnny decided that he could do no worse than spend a fruitless day in the Monongahela Valley, so he bused downtown and transferred to the 69 and took the long ride through the East End and the bombed-out remains of Wilkinsburg and the fleeting prosperity on the border of Forest Hills and through Turtle Creek and over the same actual and eponymous creek into the borough of Wilmerding, population two thousand one hundred and some odd thing. According to Wikipedia, there were just over a thousand households in exactly one square kilometer. Someone, Johnny figured, must know the man.

And, mirabile dictu, as soon as Johnny stepped off the bus on Commerce Street beside the small park and next to the Allegheny Housing Authority office and below the bluff on which sat the Romanesque pile of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company headquarters, wherein, according to Winston Pringle, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla had performed a series of Gnostic-Cathar sex magic rituals to divert the fire energies of the hollow earth through the subterranean ley lines of Allegheny County, thereby inculcating the fire element that birthed the Satanic Industries, whose sheer Vulcanic force weakened the liminal boundaries between this world and the next, thus setting the stage for the Deep Government’s Pittsburgh Project, through which psychically sensitive children, including Pringle himself, were broken down via the processes of ritual satanic-sexual abuse into subservient subpersonality psychic operators who might, one day, at the culmination of years of research and effort, complete this greatest magical working that the world had ever known by actually dissipating the barrier energies that held one reality apart from the next and the next and the next, collapsing the Quantum Matrix and enabling the Secret Powers of the World to pick and choose among the infinitude of potential realities and in doing so achieve ultimate, inexorable, and godlike power—just there, at the bus stop, because, I imagine, Johnny must have looked a little confused, unsure, precisely, of where to go, an old guy smoking a cigarette in a wheelchair decorated with American flag decals, who looked for the remaining life of him as if he had no intention of ever leaving that spot on the sidewalk, took one look at Johnny, spat on the pavement, and said, Well, I guess you’re here lookin for the witchy-poo.

What? Johnny said.

Yinz are always comin around looking for all that witchy-poo. Dressed in black and all that
shit
.

I’m not dressed in black, said Johnny, who was wearing his usual collection of browns.

You might as well be, the man said. Well, go on and ask me.

What am I supposed to ask you?

Ask me how to find the witchy-poo.

Hey, Johnny said, can you tell me how to find the witchy-poo?

Yeah. He lives up the end of Wood Street.

Winston Pringle?

I don’t know his witchy-ass name. I just know he’s up there at all hours, doin who knows what with all the whatchacall.

Right, said Johnny. Well, thanks.

Don’t thank me, boy. I ain’t do you no favors.

Thanks anyway, said Johnny.

11

He walked away from the Housing Authority and the squat forms of sixties-era Section 8 apartment blocks made of skinny glazed bricks past the Westinghouse mansion and up the hill into a neighborhood of brick and frame houses that recalled the great, gaudy, fifty-year illusion that there ever was a middle class in America, their trim having seen better days, their roofs having seen newer shingles, and as he went on, past the stained church whose front-yard marquee read
GUNS, GUILT & GIFTS
—the subject, perhaps, of a sermon?—as he went on, the street got steeper and greener, overhung with black walnut and weedy mulberry trees; then he was on Wood Street; it was as if he’d passed through a portal that skipped the fifty intervening miles and deposited him in the first, forested swells of the real Appalachia; the few houses winked in and out of the trees; their foundations were half dug into the steep hillsides and they looked like nothing so much as dogs swimming against a brown river.

At the end of the street, a dead end, there was a gated driveway leading into the woods. The gate looked to have been constructed of the final sales from a dozen different gone-out-of-business hardware stores. There was an old
PED XING
sign with a single bullet-hole on one of the posts; it had been altered with black paint so that the heads of the adult and child figure were almond-eyed aliens.

12

The gate wasn’t latched. Johnny pushed it open and walked down the driveway. After a few yards, a very large dog and a very small woman of indeterminate age, somewhere between twenty and sixty, wiry and weatherworn in a pair of sensible jeans, emerged from the trees. The dog loped up to Johnny, who regarded it warily; it stuck its nose in his crotch. Stinky, the woman said; come here, you stinky-stink. The dog obeyed. Hey, Johnny said. I’m looking for Winston Pringle.

Dr. Wilhlem? she said. He’s up at the house. She pointed down the drive.

Can I just go up?

It used to be a free country, she said.

Is that a yes?

It’s not a no. Anyway, it’s not my place. My and stinky-stinky-stinkers here were just stopping in to say hello.

That’s some dog.

He’s a werewolf.

Oh, really?

Not really. He’s just big and stinky. Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yes, you are. Yes yes you are.

Well, Johnny said. I guess I’ll go up.

I guess you will, she said, and she and the dog went on down the road.

13

The house was ramshackle, a mess of asphalt shingles and rotten gutters, but still less so than Johnny had expected, given the aesthetic condition of the gate. It reminded him in an odd way of his grandparents’ house; it had the same dimensions, the same roofline, a similar dormer window, and on the far edge of the property there was a large shed. There were some wrecked and useless autos and a derelict school bus without wheels in the clearing.

Pringle answered the door in an apron that read
FIST THE COOK
. He couldn’t have weighed less than four hundred pounds, but his head and hands were delicate, suggesting a naturally small man grown huge through a dedicated program of excess. He had a rooster’s jowls; he was flushed from the exertion of walking to the door, and the flush contributed to the impression that he was part poultry. Under the apron he wore jeans with an elastic waist, and he was wearing a sweatshirt despite the heat billowing out on a strong draft from inside the house.

I’ve been expecting you, he said. Like his head and hands, his voice was unexpectedly dainty, nasal and a little swallowed, like a birdcall run through a kazoo.

Me? said Johnny.

Pringle squinted and leaned closer. His breath smelled like peanut butter.

Oh, he said. No, not you.

Oh, said Johnny.

I thought you were someone else, said Pringle.

And Johnny, recalling unintentionally a story I’d told him, said, I am someone else.

Which must be some sort of magic phrase that unlocks the universe, because Pringle smiled—an unsettling redeployment of his lips into a sort of deflated parabola—and chuckled and made a sound like a duck that was his version of Well or Uh or Hm or
Alors
, and he said, Yes, I see that you are. Well, why don’t you come inside and we’ll talk about it?

Awesome, said Johnny. I’m your biggest fan.

Well then, said Pringle, maybe you can help me figure out this Internet thing.

What Internet thing? Johnny asked.

Oh, you know, said Pringle. Just the Internet. In general.

14

Then Johnny was gone, but I didn’t much notice; Mark kept hauling me to meetings I didn’t really understand or have any business participating in, as well as hauling me to lunchtime strip joints, which I tried to appreciate ironically, but did not. Neither did he, really; he seemed to be trying to convey something to me, some message in a language I couldn’t translate; although I don’t know, maybe he did like it: one afternoon he paid Sassy Cassy, who was the dwarf who worked the early weekday shift, a hundred bucks to slap him across the face. She obliged, and when he righted his head, I saw that she’d split his lip. His tongue touched the blood, and he smiled as if he liked the taste of it.

Then one night Lauren Sara and I were meeting Mark and Helen for dinner. Hey, have you heard from Johnny lately? she asked. She was in the shower, and I was shaving. It was nearly the end of July somehow; the year had only gotten hotter; it had been ninety degrees for a week and felt like Florida.

No, I said. Why do you ask?

It’s like he disappeared, Lauren Sara said.

And it had been longer and deeper than his past benders. Since getting hooked up with Pringle, he’d rapidly effaced most of his online presence. We don’t want our psychotronics mapped onto the Google worldmind, which is, you know, running an algorithm to simulate human consciousness, predicting to the individual level the actions of every human on earth, literally eradicating free will through the power of prediction, he told me. I thought you said he wanted you to teach him how to use the Internet, I said. How to use it, Johnny snapped; not how to be used by it. It was the last time we’d really talked, although I did receive the occasional cryptic text message. His cell phone, at least, still worked. Meeting Pringle was all he could talk about. It’s all true, he told me. The Project, everything. You have to see his research facility. We’re close to a breakthrough, once we get access to the Project’s files in the Westinghouse building. His research facility? I said doubtfully, and Johnny whipped out his phone and showed me some pictures he’d taken. Is that a bathtub? I said. It looks like someone’s basement. It looks like a meth lab. You know, Morrison, fuck off. Whatever happened to you anyway? You see a goddamn UFO; you’re a straight-up witness to the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy; you see it with your own two eyes, and you become
more
normal. It’s fucking disappointing. Oh, that’s disappointing? I said. I disappoint you? You put yourself in the fucking hospital and maybe almost in jail on a weeklong bender, and then, as soon as you’re back on your feet, you start in with this? I’m fucking worried about you, Johnny. But as soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have, because his voice lost all of its hoarseness and anger and his tone went flat. I’m fine, he said. You’re not fine, I said. You’re far from fine. Morrison, he said, calmly and with a disconcerting lack of affect, I’ve seen things that would melt your mind and freeze-dry your eyes. You’d be on your knees begging for mercy. You. Don’t. Even. Know.

15

His absence, however, had a surprisingly salutary effect on Lauren Sara and me. Or maybe his absence only happened to coincide with an improvement in our relationship. I suppose that without Johnny around, I felt freer to behave as he’d accused me of behaving: more normally—to behave, in any case, with greater conformity to the ordinary expectation of how a man of my age and income should behave around his girlfriend. In fact, it occurred to me that I was only just beginning to think of Lauren Sara as my girlfriend, even though we’d been seeing each other for the better part of a year.

I was working late a lot. I suddenly had work, or something very much resembling my idea of it. Not long after my promotion, Mark had reappeared in another expensive suit, still wearing a
VISITOR
badge, and spirited me down to the twenty-third floor, which had been filled, seemingly overnight, with the apparatus of a busy company, and I’d been there ever since. Should I say something to someone? I’d asked him. About what? he said. About, you know, moving offices or whatever. Say, he said, whatever you like. But I hadn’t had anything to say, and that’s what I said.

So anyway, I was working late a lot; a group of Mark-like lawyerish beings from Vandevoort, some American, some British, some Dutch, with a few other Europeans and a South American or two, rotated through the office; they all looked alike to me, as if they’d been grown in the same alien hatchery or bred from the same tub of DNA—the effect was made more unsettling by the fact that they called themselves the V’s; that derived from Vandevoort, obviously, but still. They brought me personnel files, which seemed to me like it might be illegal, and asked me my opinions on such-and-such and so-and-so, and though it made me a little uncomfortable, there was no denying the allure of knowing that the Other Peter made more than Leonard or that, despite his claims to the contrary, the company was not paying for Ted’s MBA. The one woman among them, a thin, beautiful, terrifying Czech named Assia, who smelled like delicate perfume and indelicate European cigarettes, would tell me to call John Boland at the
Post-Gazette
or Larry Meigel at the
Trib
to talk on background about the company’s plans to move its global headquarters to Pittsburgh, about the creation of jobs, about the contribution to the local economy. Do we intend to locate the global headquarters in Pittsburgh? I asked. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? she asked. She had a slight Irish accent from doing her graduate work in Dublin. Well, I said, I’m a little uncomfortable lying to these people. Oh Christ, oh fuck me, she said. You’re telling them the current truth, Mark said. I hadn’t even noticed him there; I hadn’t known he’d been listening. The truth is an artifact of the present. It’s time that changes. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. Assia rolled her eyes and walked away.