Waiting for the Galactic Bus (5 page)

“That was a bad day,” Yeshua agreed with authority. “I was against it myself.”

So it went. Time continued to pass. More people arrived, prejudiced as Augustine. Barion was forced to subdivide his nebulous domain into different realities. Pagans were no problem so long as they had sunlight and greenery, nor the Jews so long as they could suffer and argue and Hasidim didn’t have to deal with the new Zionists. If you needed to feel Chosen or Elect, there were miles of exclusive high rises set aside for the purpose, and never a wait for vacancies. Only the most radical few made permanent residence there. A lifetime of extremity was one thing, eternity quite another.

With the Protestant Reformation and its spread to America, Barion’s problems became truly complex. In their passion for exclusivism and damning others, they gave his establishment so many names that Barion simply affixed a nonsectarian title that stuck.

Newcomers were greeted: “Welcome to Topside.”

Coyul could look to no more respite than his brother. Post-existent energy began collecting in his vicinity as early as in Topside. Like Barion, he was forced to maintain an office for some kind of organization. Barion’s taste in decor never got beyond functional government surplus, but Coyul’s office was more of a salon, reflecting the march of style through the ages — grand during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, a fine Athenian period. He went a little gaudy with Imperial Rome, overtapestried during the Renaissance. The seventeenth century grew a bit lacy, the nineteenth very busy and Pre-Raphaelite, the twentieth by turns Art Deco, Scandinavian, chrome-and-Lucite. The grand piano obligingly modified its finish to match changing styles.

Those lusty ancients who came to Coyul just wanted to relax and enjoy themselves. Romans were marvelous in this respect, especially Petronius and Martial, but eventually Coyul had to subdivide to accommodate the variety of human experience, prejudice and folly. Seeding Cultural Threshold so early had lasting repercussions; by the time of the late-medieval Christians, human notions of an afterlife were as violent as the one they’d suffered Earthside. Since Coyul’s neighborhood was clearly not heaven, they considered themselves damned and expected to suffer. Coyul found that they ultimately defined themselves by pain and were used to it. After a time he gave up trying to dissuade them and provided a space large enough but of no specific character — until he read Dante and comprehended their geometric and grisly expectations.

“These people are sick. Well... all right.”

Drama they wanted, drama they got with full staging, lights and stereophonic sound. Their subdivision hell was very German Expressionist — dark, windswept and romantically bleak. Coyul provided only scenery and props, leaving pain to humans with more talent for it. As with Topside’s high rise for unreformed ecstatics and the insufferably blessed, the reality of eternal penance quickly palled. The sector had well-lighted exits, and there use was encouraged.

Occupied with their own problems, the brothers saw less and less of each other as the ages passed. When Barion did visit he was appalled.

“What do you call this — whatever it is going on here? Looks like a cross between a procession of flagellants and a Polish wedding.”

“Hadn’t thought to name it,” Coyul said, stroking idle chords from the piano. “Topside is catchy; what should I be? Downstairs? The Cellar? No, it doesn’t ring.”

“I heard you visited Luther Earthside.”

“For all the good it did. I presume you got him.”

“Didn’t I just. Don’t meddle, Coyul.”

“Oh — the original pot blackening the kettle. Did you straighten him out?”

“I don’t try anymore,” Barion said unhappily. He no longer looked Byronic, just hassled. “Left off that with the Druids. They all think I’m sort of a janitor.”

Coyul surveyed his brother’s worn denim jeans and work shirt. “Can’t think why. Now, drama works very well here — below stairs, as it were.”

“But do they believe you?”

“No.” Coyul played a few minor chords. “Most don’t believe me, the rest don’t give a damn. I hope they find us soon — fun as this place can be sometimes.”

“Just keep your hands off Earthside. We’re in enough trouble —” Barion broke off abruptly, listening intensely. “There — you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“That sound. Voices. Been hearing them on and off for several years. Americans,” Barion concluded vaguely. “Don’t like it at all.”

“Wait. Where are you going?” Coyul asked hastily as Barion began to dissolve.

“Out...”

His curiosity tweaked, Coyul turned his ear Earthside, sifting the voices and spirits that echoed as energy from that violent little ball in space. He heard them soon enough: American voices that somehow didn’t
sound
American, like a sudden change of pitch in a smooth-running engine. Coyul sought out Barion’s energy, found him sweeping over American mountains and flatlands, a solitary hound on a scent. Blending with that energy, Coyul knew what his brother did, read the names though they meant nothing to him.

Charity Stovall. Roy Stride.

To Barion came the masses of simple folk, lost, neglected and ground down through history, bearing nothing but their bewilderment, injustice and the brutalized monotony of their lives. The passionate but inarticulate needers of a flaming God to redeem their humble faith or at least help them get even.

Coyul fared better for personalities. There were problems, to be sure: malcontents, injury collectors, bureaucrats (dull but useful for keeping records), fascists, reformers, assorted chauvinists and bigots. Coyul grew adept at fitting the right ambience to the individual spirit. As time went on, this rather than any schism became the difference between Topside and Below Stairs. Both were more or less efficient without much organization, but Coyul maintained the more colorful establishment. Along with the thorns of the professional sufferers came the occasional blossoms: the musicians, the stimulating thinkers from the Vienna coffeehouses. The artists, the newsmen with cynical eyes and large thirsts, rowdy poets and agnostic scholars. The actors like Edmund Kean, whose visceral
Othello
could thrill new generations of deceased... and the dashing, incendiary, utterly mad John Wilkes Booth, who came bathed in his own perpetual spotlight, ready as ever to be a star.

Early on, there came one man who wanted absolutely nothing except to be left alone. He lived in solitude on an isolated moor on the fringe of suffering, received no guests, troubled Coyul not at all. Now and then he drove a cab or did other odd jobs for the mislabeled Prince of Darkness, who knew him immediately but, out of courtesy, did not trouble him for a name.

“Jacob will do,” the newcomer said — a brooding, sardonic man with troubled eyes and a manner designed to keep folk at a distance. In later times, tooling his cab through the byways of Below Stairs, he simply offered, “Call me Jake.”

    5   

Management problems
among the mad

“No! I will not! Never, ever again!”

Wilmer P. Grubb was not an aggressive man, but driven by last-ditch frustration, he barged into Coyul’s salon, slamming a pale hand on the piano top to punctuate his passion. A slight, sallow academic who never looked quite kempt, his happiest expression that of a child forced to drink something good for him.

“I will not!” he bleated. “Excuse me for not knocking, Prince.”

“No one ever does,” said the inured Coyul, “but you might start a trend. What is it, Mr. Grubb?”

“Booth.”

“Again?”

“As ever, the bane of my existence.”

In life Wilmer Grubb had been a professor who wanted nothing more than to teach Shakespeare as a poet, not a playwright. The immortal lines, he felt, were fragile and unsafe in the braying mouths of players. Not choice but biology sent Grubb to a galley oar in theater. He had an ardent love for his comely wife, Elvira, and stated it redundantly with eight children, forcing him to earn extra money as a drama critic during Lincoln’s administration. In his jaundiced scholarly view, actors were declasse, plays the opiate of a benighted public — but the mad John Wilkes Booth, younger brother to Edwin, was Grubb’s bete noire. When Booth opened, Grubb quite often wrote his review before trudging to the theater as to execution, sometimes without bothering to go at all. He died of acute gastritis brought on by questionable oysters and Booth’s
Hamlet,
never once blaming the seafood. Wafting Topside to the requested strains of Handel, Grubb was told that his wife had preferred Coyul’s establishment. Before departing south, the scholar indulged the dream of a lifetime and asked to meet his icon, Shakespeare.

The meeting was unfortunate. The balding, bibulous son of a Stratford glove maker possessed a lyrical vulgarity that might tickle his tavern cronies but revolted the prim Grubb, especially when well-oiled Will did his uncensored Mercutio. Grubb fled the Mermaid and the neighborhood, arriving Below Stairs in profound cultural shock. He was greeted by an affable Coyul in a lilac chesterfield.

“Do come
in,
Mr. Grubb. Your charming wife is already with us, presently doing — uh — social work in the downtown area. We have lacked you, sir. Our actors, particularly Booth, need your critical rein.”

Grubb blanched and shuddered.

“House rules are quite lenient, though we discourage children and pets.”

After eight children, so did the Grubbs. They renewed their connubial passion unfettered by issue. Paris being worth a Mass, Grubb continued to review and flay the impossible Wilksey Booth — but enough was enough.

“Prince, I am, in most respects, a happy man. If I must review, I am allowed infinite space —”

“Infinitely employed.”

“But far too often” — Grubb’s tone went pallid — “I have to review that...”

“Booth. Yes.” Coyul struck an idle chord on the piano. “And you are driven now to Draconian measures? Miltonian depths? Want to review books?”

“Anything!” Grubb seized on the notion as on a life preserver in a maelstrom. “Even the new works of Hitler.”

“He’s Topside with Eva.” Coyul rippled an arpeggio. “Never sees anyone but Wagner, reviews his own books.”

“Possibly romance novels,” Grubb offered with waning hope — then, in broken tones, the final indignity: “Even epic fantasy.”

“Grubb, remember your pride. All those unicorns... I’m in a bind where Wilksey’s concerned,” Coyul confessed. “Groundlings dote on him, uncritical virgins swoon, older women pursue him with Merovingian intent. No one reviews that painful ham with any detachment except you, Mr. Grubb. My last, best critical hope. You can endure actors.”

“I don’t like actors,” Grubb complained in a voice like a damp sock. “I don’t like writers. They’re never as nice as their books. All they do is get drunk and arrogant and sick all over the furniture.”

Well, Coyul suggested, he might relocate Topside. “There’s Woolf and T. S. Eliot: they’re frightfully sane.”

“HA!
There,
villain!” They were transfixed. “There you are!”

“Booth!” Grubb paled at the sight of the vengeful figure in the entrance. “Protect me, Prince. He’s violent.”

“Nay, stand! Your next move is your last.” The hissed command became the
whish
of a rapier unsheathed, the lethal point on a line with Grubb’s pigeon chest in the grip of a black-clad, lithe young man. Still in his Hamlet costume, John Wilkes Booth crouched before them, malevolent and handsome, bathed in his ubiquitous spotlight. He advanced like a demented but purposeful cat. “Grubb, you ratcatcher, I have found thee.”

“Provincial raver!” Grubb retreated behind the piano. “Confederate assassin!”

“Prince, I entreat you.” Booth suited word to action, down on one knee. “Have you heard what this baneful scribbler wrote about my current Hamlet? Listen then: ‘a hyperthyroid mannequin,’ says he, ‘overstuffed with conceit as his codpiece with batting.’”

Coyul frowned at the cringing critic. “Now, that was mean.”

“Puissant Prince, hear the most loyal among thy liege men. Is’t not enough I had to live in Edwin’s shadow? Nor that I died for the Confederacy? Now in death must I suffer and create only to endure the calumnies of this unfeeling fungus on the fundament of art? The sword’s too noble for such as he.” Booth dropped the rapier, drawing a wicked dagger. “A bodkin’s work, by heaven!”