Hackendorf coughed. ‘In a way, General, in a way. But it’s also about X Forces.’
X Forces was the as yet unnamed cadre being assembled in Florida under General Rockstone. It was the Pentagon’s hope that X Forces could regain some of the reputation for toughness lost by the old Green Berets in Vietnam, and become a model and a morale booster for the other services.
‘Go on, then.’
‘The Cheyenne had a peculiar military corps called the Contraries. These were the finest, fittest braves in the tribe, and more.
They were so tough, they did everything backwards.’
The general looked at him, then turned his Roman profile. ‘Come on, Hack. I’m tired. Either spit it out, or let’s get back to the hotel. I’ve got to fly to Washington in the morning.’
‘They really did, sir. They rode to battle mounted backwards, and they never carried weapons. There was much more merit in it, if when a man had the chance to
kill
an enemy he just
touched
him instead. Just slapped him with the open hand, or hit him with a small stick, the
coup
stick.
‘Another thing is, the Contraries never touched women. They were like monks, or knights under a vow…were supposed to be. They fasted and prayed and tortured themselves all night before a battle, and then they just clowned around on the battlefield, taking incredible risks. All for honor.’
Weimarauner sighed. ‘Yes, yes, but Hackendorf, we already have
enough
honor.’
The Yale younger poet and his followers came in from the hall, leaving the elevator doors jammed open, and went straight to the bar. The poet turned his back on Mr Bradd, who was too busy talking to the cryogenics man to notice. Glen and the peach-sundae girl went into the bedroom and locked the door.
‘They call me the I B M wish, baby,’ sand the World et al., ‘They call me the Icy B M fish.’
A lighted sign went on over the bedroom door:
UNE FEMME EST AVEC MOI.
‘I envy that bastard Glen Dale,’ said a Shriner. ‘He must of gone through more ass than I have socks.’
The cryogenics man, sensing a customer in Mr Bradd, began to sober up fast. ‘Freezing isn’t just a science, you know. It’s an art. Look at it this way: If you’d frozen yourself twenty years ago, today you’d be—what, sixteen years old?’ He judged Bradd to be forty-five, actually.
‘Twenty-four,’ Bradd said, ‘but I wouldn’t have any money.’
‘No? If you had bought
this
sheaf of stocks,’ the list brought out and held so that Bradd had to turn and move closer to have a look at it, ‘you’d have nearly a hundred dollars for every dollar you invested then. Even if you put your money in the bank, it would nearly have tripled! And youth, don’t forget, youth—is—money!’ From another pocket he produced a full color brochure of freezer designs.
‘What I was thinking,’ Bradd said, looking them over, ‘was something for a friend—really a business associate of mine. A woman thirty years old. The thing is, her job effectiveness—her RBI—depends on her age. In maybe five years, she’ll be useless. Meanwhile, she works maybe an hour a week, maybe two. The rest of the time, she just mopes around the house. Do you think we could do something to shape up her career?’
Mrs Grebe peeled off her jeweled face and put it away. She was about to go with Sir Somebody to his hotel room, to look at his pictures of Welsh Corgis. The art dealer in the feather cape and Myra shouldered Ank and headed for the door. With a look of irony, Jerry stood out of their way.
A businessman in a fur wig rushed in from the hall. ‘Hey, somebody fell down the elevator shaft! I heard him scream!’
‘Christ! Somebody get the janitor!’
‘Where the hell is he?’ demanded the walking hot dog. ‘He was right here a minute ago. As soon as there’s any work to be done…’
Two pork-pie hats swiveled to look at him. ‘Forget it,’ said one of the musicologists. ‘No hurry now.’ They went back to their amiable discussion of the recording date of Deef John Holler’s
Decatur Freight Blues,
One floor below, Deef John Holler lay on the roof of the elevator. He had few cues to his whereabouts, being not only deaf but nearly blind, but he found this place more congenial than Glen’s penthouse. Here there were no irritating, jerky vibrations from amplified clumsy playing, no smells of stale smoke and spilled whiskey, only a gentle descending motion. He was not interested in getting anywhere, in being anyone, or in living at all. So Deef John sat up, dusted off his new overalls, and began to sing.
All the rest of the evening, riders of the elevator declared they had never heard Melodiak sounding so good.
‘I see what must’ve happened,’ said the Knight of Columbus. ‘Some prick left this mop stuck across the door like this, and guess some drunk tripped over it.’ He unstuck the mop and let the doors close.
‘Forty floors. Some trip.’
Miss Columbine, plumping her enormous breasts into shape, came out of the flat. The stiff blonde wig was askew, and one trickle of mascara ran down to her white—faintly bluish-white—jowl. Drawing her red velvet cloak about her, she turned her back on the others to wait for the elevator.
When she was gone, they chuckled. ‘I think Ank was right about her, she is a lesbian,’ said one. ‘I mean, did you see that five-o’clock shadow?’
‘Sure upset her, though. She spent the whole evening sprawled out on the couch, bawling.’
They went back inside.
Someone lurched up to the bedroom door and peered at the lighted sign over it, spelling it out. ‘Fums?’ he said. ‘I wonder where in hell the other one is. What do they call it? Ohms.’
The water in the bathroom was thigh-deep, but the six pseudo-Egyptians hadn’t noticed. They were all piled up against the door to the bedroom, listening to Glen’s taped music.
Ank awoke to see Myra and a man in a feather cape looking over his two completed paintings. He was at home, on the bed. One of his paper sleeves had fallen off; it lay in the middle of the floor, like an abandoned snakeskin.
‘Never mind those,’ he roused himself to say. ‘They’re not…not what I wanted.’
‘They’re what I want, thougih,’ said the man. He introduced himself as Drew Moody of the Moody Gallery. ‘Those paintings
live
. All right, it’s corny, but I’ve been looking at other stuff all week. Cold mechanical stuff, the kind those computer jerks crank out.’
‘Computer…?’ Ank tried to clear his head.
‘Half the kids in the country think if they can only get a random number generator they automatically become a painter. But this—this is by God
human
art, untouched by mechanical hands. Can you do a few more? I’d like to give you a one-man show.’
‘But…do you think the critics…?’
‘The critics! The critics are a bunch of dehorns who wouldn’t know paint from diarrhea. The real world will eat this up, if I present it right.’
‘Et’s e wenderfel eppertenety, Enk.’
‘He’s tired and foggy,’ said the dealer. ‘Tell you what, Ank. I’ll give you a jingle in the morning. And here’s my card. Now Myra and I will sneak off and let you get some sleep.’
On the way out, the art dealer noticed the tarpaulin-draped painting machine. ‘What’s this? Sculpture?’
‘Uh, no, it’s—it’s just a paint-mixing machine.’
‘See you then. So long, Ank.’
The door closed, setting up a breeze that stirred the empty paper sleeve on the floor. It made one clumsy painting movement, then lay still.
‘Fear of effeminacy. It might work,’ said General Weimarauner. ‘Combined with fear of the fool. The—The Pink Barrettes?’ He began to laugh, inclining his noble head and putting up a hand as if to ward off blows. ‘I’m tempted, Hackendorf, I’m tempted!’
He paused to study the figure in red velvet sitting in another corner of the coffee shop. Nudging Hackendorf, he dropped his voice to say, ‘Look at that, will you? Did you ever see such an ugly woman in your life? Gad, any uglier and they’d draft her. Come to think of it, she reminds me of an aide I used to have, only she’s about fifty pounds heavier. What was his name, now? Pouts?’
He tore his attention away from the person in the corner, who had just ordered six Danish pastries and a chocolate malt. ‘The Pink Barrettes! Yes by God, we’ll do it. I can just see them on parade!’
The Knight of Columbus was telling the last person he could find about the accident in the elevator shaft. Jerry was looking for Myra. The gloomy producer was telling someone about Miss Columbine: ‘Balling somebody all evening on that sunken sofa, and nobody even noticed.’ There was no one left for the American Studies professor to tell a Little Moron Joke to. The hot-dog publisher had fallen asleep in a chair, letting his coat open to reveal his truss.
Bradd asked the cryogenics man for the hundredth time if he was sure it could be done.
‘See voo play,’ someone asked, ‘oo ay lays Ohm? E.c. ay lay Fum, may oo ay lays Ohm?’ He gestured at the bedroom door.
‘What do you want with a man? Won’t I do?’
‘Of course it’ll work,’ said the cryogenics man. ‘We freeze donuts, don’t we? So why not a girl?’
‘Can’t wreck her appearance, though.’ Bradd removed his TV glasses and inspected them for dirt. ‘She’s got to look good, for, say, thirty or forty years. In front of the cameras, anyway.’
‘Don’t worry about a thing. Now, what price range freezer were you thinking of?’
Glen Dale put on the ninth tape. There were ten, arranged by experts in order of arousal, and now there was nothing left but half an hour of Ravel’s
Bolero.
And he still hadn’t figured out a way of kissing Miranda, the girl in the peach-sundae dress. He had fed her arousing music, stirred up the fire in the fireplace, changed (behind a screen) into a dressing gown of red silk, poured many brandies into their two snifters, switched on the electronic odorizer that filled the room with musk and frankincense, talked knowledgeably of Krafft-Ebbing and Tantric Yoga, even shown her selections from a Cinerama blue film. Now he sat inches away from her on the bed and toyed with the tassel of his dressing gown. All this brought them to the point where he
had
to make a move—or a mistake.
‘I gotta go home now,’ she said, looking at her watch.
‘But it’s early!’
‘Don’t argue with me, I said I gotta go! Anyways, I can’t crap around here all night waiting for you to make up your mind. We been in here three hours,’ she said. ‘Three hours, and
nothing happened.’
‘But I…’
‘I guess you think I’m not good enough for you, with all your Miss Monthly girls and Does and all.’ She stood up, straightened her ruffles and smiled. ‘So bye-bye.’
‘Wait, Miranda, wait!’
Miranda did not wait. She chose the wrong door, tugged at her skirt, and marched over to it. ‘Bye-bye.’
Six people in Egyptian costumes tumbled in upon her, accompanied by several dozen gallons of water.
‘Christ almighty! What the hell is this, a voyeur hotel?’ Extricating herself, Miranda kicked at the Egyptians.
‘Miranda, I—wait…’
The right door slammed. Glen sank back on the bed. The six fake Egyptians scrambled up and came to sit next to him, one pausing to turn up the taped music.
‘Nice sounds, man. Who is it? Sounds like
The Andrew Jackson Davis Penetralia.’
Alone in his room, Bates, the young anglophile, took off his wicker suit and hung it up carefully. It was, after all, a suit with a London label, from a shop on Portobello Road, even if he had bought it at a Minneapolis department store.
Next he took off his imported English leather shoes, his imported English wool socks, and his Union Jack ‘Standfast’ underwear. He crawled into bed to meet his insomnia.
That Englishman, Sir Somebody, had laughed at him! That was the worst part. They all knew by now:
He hadn’t been to England at all.
The nearest he ever got was buying something English, reading a travel guide, or corresponding with his pen pal, a ten-year-old boy in Scunthorpe whose hobbies included collecting American stamps. The little snot was blackmailing him: information on the English scene for batches of stamps.
This wasn’t jolly hockey-sticks at all. He’d have to get to England itself, no matter how.
England! my England!
he thought.
England’s green and pleasant land. Swinging England. Land of hope and glory. Little Olde England, where the sun never sets…
He gazed on the picture over his bed, a dazzling picture of the Queen, while his right hand moved under the covers in a familiar and traditional rhythm, old as the rhythm of the waves over which Britannia rules.
NUMBER ONE TAKES CARE OF ITSELF
………. noun is a replacement for the pronoun I wonder Bob wonders this man wonders how the hell long he’s going to be in here trapped here in an abandoned mind shaft (and are the psychiatrists still digging out there?) and buried under tons of crushing self buried a back number: ‘They have parsed my hands and my feet, they have numbered all my bones’ now there’s a thought more noughts than crosses though a crucial difference that essential plus
Old numb copybones the headbone connected to nothing really the fingerbone maybe that digit in my nostril really is one and ‘hands and feet’ are measurements too they have me here the integers, trace, fear, sank, sex they (la enemy Hymeneal, read me any way I’m still an em wide) have fed me right into their number mumbling machine I’m