The Müller-Fokker Effect (21 page)

He switched on the video tape player and keyed in the cartridge Bradd had given him.

The first few images were ordinary enough. Bette in her kitchen. A square black dot appeared in the lower left corner, turned white, disappeared. Three red X’s flashed across the top of the screen, obliterating some written message, all but part of a word, ‘asserole’.

Myra called through the door.

‘Glen? It’s after seven—should I stick around?’

‘
SHUT UP
!’

Bette’s lips and teeth appeared, filling the giant screen. She stood by superimposition in the center of her own smile, flickering like a snake’s tongue. Light-show liquid shapes began to swim through the image; it dissolved back to the kitchen.

‘Mmmmmmmm,’ she said. ‘Sommmmmething
love
. It’s so
love
you’ll
LOVE
. Baby man easy. Oven
EASY
!’

A pair of dark green, glistening hands, red-shadowed, flickered in back of her. Kitchen gloves lying on a counter. Brightening, they sprang into the air and clasped each other.

‘Scrumptious! Yummy! Kids love licking the beater after. You’ll love deep down tender firmer banana goodness!’

The gloves grasped her waist and moved, without moving, up towards her breasts. There came a sound like the phone chiming. Bette bent, picked up a wooden spoon. The same spoon shape, crackling blue/orange sparks, moved in behind her and disappeared up her dress. Kitchen cabinets, stove, all surfaces began breaking up, boiling off clouds of fizzy colored dots. Bette kneaded a cornucopia, which shot boxed products offscreen, as parts of the scene began wriggling to the rhythm of the stirring spoon, the flapping gloves, the fluttering smile.

‘Take a tip from me, something for your love jelly from the man tonight. Pleases as no creamy goodness! Drop the beaters in your dish spread with spread spread, my instant loin chops! Yum! Tongue is no messy flank, just truss and whip until stiff, then quick rolls into the oven! Tempting! Fabulous wieners make this triple-layer dessert a real old-fashioned sweetened each piece perfect every time.’

Boiled images popped out of the cornucopia, the only stable part of the scene. Everything else was strobing madly in a dozen colors. There came a sound like the phone.

‘Ah! Mammy jammy dumplings! Gooooood and
PIPING HOT! MMMMMM! YES! GREAT AND
—READY!’

‘Glen? Glen!’

Gasping, drooling, shaking, he sat in a pool of sweat on the carpet. The third time Myra called his name from the doorway he looked up.

‘It was the hospital on the phone.’

‘Ah?’

‘The hospital. Glen, your mother’s dead.’

He stirred his legs and managed to stand up. Moving toward her, he said, ‘Yes, I know. Yes, but never mind about that hat. It looked like a dog turd. A dog turd…you know in a way that’s the most exciting thing…’

He reached her and ripped open the front of her dress.

She drew back her hand to slap him, but saw there was no need. Glen’s eyes closed. He slid to the floor and lay still. Her new Oriental eyes widened in terror. There was no sound but her own breathing.

A ghastly death-rattle sound came from his snarling lips. Then he coughed, rolled over and started snoring.

Marge was lying on the counter, wearing only her gingham apron, which had worked its way around to one side. She made a half-hearted gesture of modesty.

‘No use hiding anything from me now, love.’

Bradd was doing deep knee-bends on the table. Through a tear in the back of his underpants projected the handle of a wooden spoon, rising and falling with each squat like a pump handle. Chocolate cake batter ran down his leg.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you remember anything? Wow!’ He went on with the squats, breathing explosively. ‘Best piece of aspic I ever…’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘…all over the place. Don’t you even remember the electric mixer bit? Or what you put in the malt can so we could make the thickest malt ever slurped? No? How about that fresh hot donut bit? You know, when I burned myself and you put cocoa butter on it for me? Haha, and you with that lamb chop…’

He went on and on, detailing every little kitchen game, and exposing each half-remembered dream as a reality.

‘You bastard!’

‘I admit it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But that’s the way I am, so what can I do?’

‘I’ll bet you wished you could have tried me frozen, too.’ She found her clothes and started dressing. ‘I wish I were dead.’

‘Now that’s another handy thing about freezing, Bette. It takes care of all those nasty suicide feelings without the actual muss and fuss of…’

‘
ALL RIGHT
! All right, I’ll go in the damned freezer. I’ll go in right now—where is it?’

‘Not here yet. The freezer plan man doesn’t come around till tomorrow afternoon. Say, keed, why don’t you take the day off tomorrow, just come in about three for the freeze.’

‘I’m going away,’ she whispered. ‘About as far as I can get from you, until tomorrow.’

‘Good idea. Why don’t you…’

‘Why don’t you go and
—never mind, you already have.’

A man needed time to think, and a place. Sun, nature, solitude, a coke. Glen fled the Bitch Goddess in the morning.

She was getting to everybody: the frigid women, the unwilling women, the women who were only too willing, oddly enough. Even Myra was probably influenced. They conspired to keep him impotent, all of them. There was the photographer who’d locked him out of the studio while they were shooting Miss Monthly; the taxi driver who feigned ignorance about where to go for a good time; even the older kids back at school, hiding away with their exciting ‘Comics—the kind men like’ and never giving him a glimpse.

He’d tried—he’d really tried to fight the world of censors. When he was eleven, Glen had visited a friend who showed him the pictures in a ‘sexology’ book. Frightening diagrams with obscure names. Sectional views of man and of woman as split kidney bean.
Facts
of life? He turned from them, nauseated.

The literary method was no better. From books he built up an exciting but disappointingly vague picture—the thing was a kind of rose with snatching teeth, a labyrinth, a cavern, a V, a cleft, a single glistening eye.…For another twenty-odd years he had worked at the problem,
without once actually looking
at that eye.

And now it was time to quit. He packed a few things and crept out of the apartment at dawn, walking softly so as not to disturb the smashed, ripped remains of
Bertha Venus
, He drove to the lodge at Dull Lake.

Glen’s timer, which was also a tiny refrigerator just big enough for two martinis, warned him to turn over. He took the sun on every part of his body except the top of his head, covered by a
Stagman
antler hat. Lying face up in cool wet sand, he moved his arms and legs to make an angel. The sun worked its magic on his hangover and its other, levitational magic.

The worst self-recriminations melted away. Nearly forty years old, never had a piece of ass, tried to rape secretary, failed, mother dies on him, Utopi hat looks like a doggie novelty, psychiatrist is queer—all unimportant here and now. He rolled over, punctuating the angel.

As Glen was about to reach for the sun lotion a flash of light stopped him. Across the lake something dazzled in a clump of trees. He dug out the binoculars and looked again.

There was a car parked there, almost hidden by shrubbery. A spy? Were they even here? He scanned the beach frantically.

A woman stood waist-deep in the water, her naked back squared to him as if posing for a
Stagman
calendar. She walked out of the water and out of focus. A tune, some tune was playing in Glen’s head. He fiddled helplessly with the range adjustment; she had already turned toward him before he found her again. Rotating the little wheel, he turned her from a puzzle of light and shadow into a naked woman drying herself.

The tune wound up to a silent scream as he saw who she was. Then Bette dropped the towel and stretched her arms towards the sun. Glen saw what he had never dreamed existed, and everything else stopped dead. Mental transmission went off the air.

No rose, no eye, no cavern, no labyrinth of mystery—nothing but
a patch of dirty hair!

‘Like an armpit! Ugh!’ It picked up his limbs and threw him into the lake; without movement he pushed back water and flung himself toward her. Across the quiet lake.

Marge finished dressing and climbed back in the car. There wasn’t time to see Spot before she went back to the city. But then why had she ever imagined Spot wanted to see her?

She drove off with the radio up too loud to hear the shot.

The two hunters dragged Glen into the boat. He lay in the bottom, bleeding and thrashing around, while they argued.

‘How was I sposta know it was some nut in a…’

‘Yeah, but shooting at a swimming deer anyway, for Christ sake, that’s about the dumbest…’

‘Wait. Listen, he’s tryina tell us something.’

Through his strangled breathing Glen sang the tune that just wouldn’t leave him alone. ‘A pretty girl,’ he gasped, ‘is like a me…lo…dy…’ They took the body to the game warden, who passed it on to the county coroner.

A speck floated on the desert heat.

‘May be a god,’ said Seldom From. The others squinted at it.

‘May be a new car,’ said Three Dollars and Twenty Cents. ‘That we could use. A new god, no.’

‘Don’t blaspheme!’ Seldom From spat, and the scorched earth sucked it down. ‘You want things to get worse for the Utopi?’

Three Dollars and Twenty Cents sighed, and quoted the proverb: ‘What could be possibly worse than being a Utopi?’

That was on Wednesday. By Friday the speck was close enough to identify as a human figure crawling on all fours. Some of the younger men, those under sixty, offered to go out and help him.

‘No,’ said Seldom From. ‘If it is a god, it doesn’t need any help from us. This may be some kind of test.’

The young men grumbled respectfully. It was always the same with them, thought Seldom. Any excuse to leave the reservation, to go gallivanting off in the exciting and dangerous world outside. But what did these kids know of the world outside? It was full of temptations. It led them to forget their special place. It led them to forget that all white men despised all Indians, and all other Indians despised the Utopi.

Sunday morning the new god arrived. He was nearly naked except for a few scraps of what had once been a business suit and half a pair of glasses frames on which clung four or five sparkling stones. Besides suffering from sun and thirst, he was covered with welts and bruises—the kind arrested persons, all over the world, are known to acquire at police stations, by falling down stairs. Some of his teeth were missing and one eye completely closed. The other, bright blue, stared without seeing.

‘Some god,’ said Three Dollars and Twenty Cents.

They gave the stranger a little water, bathed him and put him to bed. Then Seldom From called a council of the elders.

Fake Sky opened the council in the traditional manner, by singing the tribal history to date.

When he had finished a list of all the tribes who had gods, and who therefore were entitled to fight wars, till the land, dig gold, hold splendid human sacrifices, etc., he recounted the creation of the Utopi.