Yok (19 page)

When he recited his nonsense text I also knew he was this year's winner. He was distinct and credible, calm and factual, but in his voice there was an undertone of urgency that is common to all the foremost newscasters. Some have it while others never will. It's no more difficult than that.

Every year we have a few “wild cards” that we've run into between seasons, and who we think may fit the program. So Erik was not unique, and I took for granted that he would appear on Monday and read before the camera. In the TV industry we always assume that everyone wants to be on TV.

I didn't think it mattered that Gecko hadn't filled out any application forms and for that reason we didn't have his address or full name.

I am seldom present at the tryouts because, to be honest, it's unbearably boring to suffer through all the amateurs whose mediocrity is not at all entertaining. But because I had invited Gecko I was there that morning to meet him. He looked terrible. He was shaking with nervousness, and had put on a pillowcase that he'd re-sewn into a jacket. It was a striped pillowcase, and it made his already narrow shoulders almost disappear completely. I admit I regretted it then, and thought I'd been wrong, but then when he sat down in the studio, looked into the camera and started reading, I knew again I'd been right. Then I knew just as certainly as I'd known before the weekend that he would be the year's victor.

It came as a surprise when he got up and ran out of there. No one on the team had time to react, and I only managed to catch hold of his jacket, which of course fell apart, before he was gone. There I stood, with a bottle cap lying on the floor, which later would be my first clue, wondering what got into him. And during the days that followed I was so certain that he would contact the program that I didn't even bother searching. Then I realized that something had happened.

You didn't need to be a detective to figure out that the bottle cap came from Carlsweis, so we phoned the brewery and asked if they had any lizards working there. We got a list of five names, but no addresses or contact information, and it was unclear whether that was due to some internal policy or whether the information was lacking.

On the test video we discovered a burn mark on Gecko's striped jacket, and it looked as if the mark came from a cigarette. So we called around to the tobacco shops that were in the vicinity of Carlsweis brewery, and ended up at last with a mammoth who indicated she knew what lizard I was talking about, a gecko whose name was Erik. This detective work had not taken the office more than a couple of hours, and I decided to go down to the address, in the southern part of Yok, the following day.

That proved to be an absurd experience. I rang the doorbell at a little house on Carrer de Carrera, Erik Gecko opened the door but pretended not to recognize me, and also denied that he had ever been in the TV studio. According to our own files, both Leopard and Panther—with the same address—had applied for this year's tryouts without being chosen, and I admit I was a trifle perplexed. Was I mistaken? Something strange was going on in that house, and I had an ominous feeling of danger, so I decided to leave.

Later in the afternoon I had almost forgotten that foreboding, and when the following workweek began we had the usual problem of too many applicants, not too few, so I put the lizard aside for a couple of days. It was only toward the end of the week when we made an assessment of possible winners that he came up in the discussion again and I decided to make a final attempt. Deep down I was of course certain that Erik Gecko was our lizard.

I decided to return to the house on Carrer de Carrera, wait out the three brothers and snoop around in the rooms on my own to see if there was any evidence that Erik was the same stuffed animal we had on tape. It may sound melodramatic, but we had been on similar adventures before. I took a camera team with me and filmed the episode, with the ulterior motive of perhaps being able to use the material later on
New Mornings
if and when Erik Gecko advanced. I was thus neither alone nor directly worried.

We arrived in our van early in the morning, and first saw Erik leave, to his job at Carlsweis, we assumed. His older brothers did not leave the house until after lunch. Then we slipped in.

After only a few minutes I discovered the blue-striped pillowcase in the living room; it was surprising I hadn't seen it when I was there before. But it was only when one of my assistants found Erik's wrinkled jacket in a storeroom in the cellar, with a thread that showed where the missing button had been, that we knew we had the right lizard. We left the house and waited in the van with the camera ready, for Erik to come back.

I already suspected, of course, that this was about a sibling conflict. The two other brothers had tried but failed to be selected, and Erik had succeeded without even really wanting to. It must be hard for the older stuffed animals, so my plan was not to talk with the leopard or the panther before I had spoken with Erik.

When the Breeze again started blowing and the Evening Weather announced its arrival, the brothers came back, but there was still no trace of Erik. The panther and leopard stayed in the house for a while, perhaps half an hour, and then left again. The camera team and I gave up when the day started to darken and Erik Gecko had still not come back from work.

The following morning I decided on a new tactic. Perhaps it was easier to talk with him at his workplace, I reasoned, where I didn't need to worry about the brothers and their internal conflicts. Besides, we had already filmed his house. So I took the camera team and went down to Carlsweis.

At the workplace they informed us that Erik Gecko had not clocked in either yesterday or today. It was a polecat we talked to, and he let it be known that this was the last time Gecko would be absent; as of now he could consider himself unemployed. I am ashamed when I admit that I thought this would be really good on TV.

We identified the tobacco shop I had phoned, and the mammoth who said she knew Erik Gecko, but she had nothing further to tell us. I still refrained from bothering the brothers, but when two days later we had still not seen a glimpse of Gecko I went down to Carrer de Carrera in the evening with my team, and rang the bell. The leopard opened.

“Hello, my name is Sparrow Dahl, I work as executive producer for
New Mornings
and I'm looking for Erik Gecko.”

“Weren't you here before?”

“That's right. For the same reason, I'm looking for Erik Gecko.”

“Well, good luck with that!”

“What do you mean?”

“He split, the little creep.”

“Split? What do you mean?”

“He's not here, damn it. Get it? And if we find him, I promise he's going to get a beating you wouldn't believe. But he's gone.”

“Gone?”

Yes, the conversation with Leopold Leopard went on this way for a while, and I was forced to accept that Erik Gecko really had disappeared.

On a few occasions during the autumn I made renewed attempts to get hold of the lizard without success. I was disappointed, of course, but that was nothing compared with the brothers' reaction. I heard, in a roundabout way, that they were more or less on a full-time hunt for their little brother after he disappeared, but that led nowhere. Then I put the lizard out of my mind. If you want to, you can disappear in Mollisan Town, and modern surgery can re-sew a stuffed animal beyond recognition.

To be honest the ninth season of
New Mornings
was an off year, but it can be that way and I'm looking ahead. It feels like I still have things undone with the program. Even if I complain sometimes I intend to continue, as long as TV allows me, and as long as that moment with Erik Gecko on the bench makes me remember why I first started.

Corbod

 

1.

M
ike Chimpanzee held the slender neck with both hands, swinging the guitar over his head; the next moment the instrument shattered against a Lanceheimian gargoyle from the fourteenth century. Splinters flew, the strings sang and the ape's pulse was pounding in his ears. He was high on grass, low on booze, and feeling extremely sorry for himself.

At the same time, he thought a photographer should have been present. Now they would see him: Now he was rock and roll. In boots and worn jeans, his shaggy brown upper body bare and guitar parts flying through the room. He peeked at himself in the large mirror by the sofa bed: raw power, attitude, and energy. His bright blue eyes radiated pain. The dark interior of the antique store was an excellent stage set, with old rugs hanging on the walls and dark cabinets with carved doors forming narrow corridors where the light from dusty chandeliers barely reached. An enchanted, mysterious, and yet curiously glamorous place.

He collapsed onto the gargoyle, letting go of the guitar neck. He wanted to feel uncompromisingly destructive, but he had smashed the guitar he never used, while the guitar he'd been playing last night still stood untouched in its place over by the desk. Even so, his anxiety was sincere, there was no mistaking that. An antique plaster cat with a price tag for a thousand sat atop a turn-of-the-century drop-leaf table, smiling slyly at him.

The antique store had been Mike Chimpanzee's home for the past six months. He slept in a wooden sofa bed, used a tiny refrigerator in the cluttered office to keep beer cold, and didn't care that the restroom had no drying cabinet. He had moved around quite a bit the past year; as soon as his fans discovered where he lived, they set up camp outside the building in question. After his breakthrough Mike had become public property. Admirers of all sorts, ages, and genders pursued him night and day, heedlessly throwing themselves at him, asking for autographs, swearing their love, and offering him . . . most everything. At first it had been marvelous. All the love that came his way, all the adoration, had been bewildering and endlessly confirming. He was amazed by it and couldn't get enough of it. He abused it and surrendered himself to it.

The months that followed, on the other hand, were unbearable. The attention was so overwhelming that he felt ashamed. He was not worthy of their adoration. He was not worthy of their love letters, their underwear, or their unconditional trust.

And besides, love didn't pay any bills. He was a star, but an impoverished one. The advance the record company had given him was already spent. Good drugs weren't cheap. Ingratiating friends were expensive. With more money maybe he could have more easily handled the excitement he provoked as soon as he appeared on the city streets, but when you didn't even have money for a taxi . . . Better to stay out of sight.

No one had uncovered this humble antique store yet. The rhinoceros who loaned him the use of the store was a devoted admirer with many shops around Yok, and he didn't ask for any rent. Mike's only return service was to answer the phone when it rang, but so far it hadn't. At least, he hadn't heard it.

S
lowly he got up. He cast a disdainful glance at the pad and pen still lying on the desk, a reminder of the night's failure. With a deep sigh he went over to the row of sideboards, searching for the whiskey bottle he recalled having seen there some time around midnight. The antique store was chock-full of stuff, everything old, bad-smelling, and expensive; it was easy to misplace things in the excess. He hummed his newly composed chorus, still feeling satisfied. He often mixed up the latest attempt at a melody with one of its hundreds of predecessors—the ones that had always made him so disappointed—but this time it felt different.

Mike sneered to himself; it always felt different.

No, it wasn't the melody but the disastrous attempts to write the words that finally caused him to smash the old guitar. Lyrics were usually his strong suit, but last night he got stuck. He'd had an idea to write about the forest, making it dangerous in an exotic, seductive way, and in the chorus maybe list some of the trees and bushes whose names he always found lyrical. But when dawn came the lyrics just felt silly, and furiously he tore the pages with crossed-out lines, where “mist” rhymed with “kissed” and “willow” with “pillow,” out of the pad.

Mike sighed again. Absentmindedly, he picked up a small blue glass ink bottle sitting on a shelf with glass objects, and with his thumb he carefully wiped dust off its rounded belly. He hummed quietly:

Do you believe what they're saying?

Do you know how it feels?

'Cause freedom is / freedom is / freedom isn't here.

Where did that come from?

With the little ink bottle between his fingers, Mike let the echo of the words ebb away in the stuffing in his head. That was actually not that bad. Not bad at all. He sang the lines again, and found that they fit the melody perfectly.

In the meantime, his gaze was involuntarily caught by the swollen belly of the little blue glass bottle, and at first Mike thought he was imagining things.

When he sang, it was as though something was vibrating inside the bottle.

For the third time he repeated the lines about freedom, and now he concentrated on the ink bottle.

Yes, there was something moving inside.

In contrast to the other ink bottles whose caps were adorned with gilded penholders, a simple cork was in the blue bottle. Mike Chimpanzee didn't hesitate and pulled the cork out of the bottle.

There was a
pop
. A powerful
pop
, like a hard blow against a snare drum, and smoke poured out. Mike stumbled backward in a cloud that smelled faintly of ginger. He got smoke in his lungs, as he coughed in exasperation and waved at the air in front of him. It was impossible to see how such an intense cloud of smoke could come out of such a little bottle.

He turned around, and in the thick, gray fog he stumbled over to the outside door of the shop. He opened it, coughing out on the sidewalk until the Morning Breeze took away most of the smoke over indigo blue Calle Gran Via and he went in again. Back in the store, next to the blue bottle, a cloud in trousers was waiting.

This was Mike's thought, quite clear and definite:

A cloud in trousers.

The being—the cloud—was impatiently stamping his foot. His feet resembled Mike's, but consisted of white smoke. Around the smoke was a pair of simple, white sandals. The trousers were broad, thin, and blue; the same color as the glass of the small ink bottle. The upper body and arms were white, diffuse in their outlines, and the body seemed to lack substance. The face, too, was more cloud than matter, but there were features that resembled a feline, and the small puffs of cloud standing straight up from his head could easily be mistaken for a pair of ears.

“Mike Chimpanzee,” said the cloud. “Mike Chimpanzee, if you'll excuse me for saying it, but this wasn't a day too soon, was it?”

Mike stood frozen to the floor, as if he were one of the antique objects for sale. The cloud's voice was strong and deep. Pleasant, without a doubt, but also with a definite tinge of superiority.

“Mr. Chimpanzee,” the cloud introduced himself, “my name is Fredrik, and I am the best thing that has happened to you.”

Fredrik the cloud looked around the antique store with distaste, and nodded with emphasis.

“I am truly the best thing that has happened to you,” he repeated.

Mike stood quietly in the passage between the sideboards and let the cloud maneuver around him.

“Ah,” said the cloud with pleasure. “You can't understand how it feels to have a floor under your sandals after so many years in a bottle.”

“In a bottle? Was that you . . . in the ink bottle?”

“My usual bad luck,” said Fredrik with a friendly smile that was soon transformed into something else; his facial features flew around in an unpredictable way. “I haven't exactly ended up with the intelligentsia, have I? But, nonetheless, it was you who pulled out the cork?”

Fredrik the cloud made a stage pause, sitting down in the chair at the desk where Mike had been writing during the night.

The chimpanzee nodded. “I pulled out the cork.”

“Not that it sounds especially difficult when you describe it,” Fredrik said, as if he were talking with a mentally handicapped stuffed animal, “but one thing I can promise you, Mr. Ape, from inside it was impossible to open!”

Mike Chimpanzee just stared. In his hallucinatory moments, high on chemicals from dubious laboratories, he had seen stranger things than this. Could it have been the smoke he ingested when he opened the bottle?

“I would gladly make it easier for you in some way, sir,” said the cloud, “but this is how I look. I'm a genie. You'll just have to accept that. You know how it works, don't you?”

“Works?”

The cloud sighed theatrically and rolled his eyes.

“No? You have three wishes that I must fulfill as thanks for freeing me. Until that is done, I remain like this, in this . . . cloudlike form. It's only after I've repaid my debt that I become myself again.”

“Yourself?”

“And there's no point in asking, sir. After a couple thousand years in what you call an ink bottle I don't remember what I was. Exciting, isn't it? But, Mr. Ape, doesn't it smell in here?”

Fredrik the cloud sniffed the air. Mike did the same, but noticed nothing.

“When did you last scrub these floors? I mean, really scrub?”

Mike shook his head. Scrub? He couldn't recall ever having scrubbed a floor. Maybe put the bedspread on sometime in his teens when Mom yelled at him; cleaning was not one of his interests.

“I don't intend to live in filth,” Fredrik the genie explained, throwing out his hands in a gesture that included everything in the antique store. “We'll have to try to take care of this wish business quickly. Have you thought of anything?”

Was this a joke, some kind of
Candid Camera
? Mike looked around, as if he would find a concealed TV producer next to the three mosaic bathtubs.

“Maybe that's an idea,” Mike answered, going over to the door. “That you clean up here, scrub the floors?”

“Not that I want to make it difficult for us, sir,” the genie laughed haughtily, “but I suggest you think a little before you start. You don't need me for scrubbing floors. Try to be serious. You have only three chances.”

In the display window Mike had set out a small living room set. A round mosaic table from the early 1900s and around it four chairs designed and built by Cordodidier. The point wasn't to attract customers; on the door there was a large sign pointing out that you had to call to schedule a visit. No, Mike had put the furniture out for himself. The store faced north, and the display window was the only light opening in the long, narrow space.

He almost expected to see a camera team sitting in the chairs, but no one was there. Still, the cloud must be some kind of projection, maybe a hologram that clever technicians were able to maneuver?

“Listen, Cloud,” said Mike. “I don't have time or the desire to play games with you. I don't know who you are, I don't know if you're anywhere besides in my head, but can we see to it that you disappear as fast as possible?”

The cloud sighed audibly, again rolling his eyes and sitting down across from Mike. He seemed to hover over the chair rather than sit in it, but the intention was clear.

“Gold?” he said. “Let's talk seriously now, Mr. Ape. Jewels? Or a single diamond, forty carats or bigger? Or a glowing ruby, the most beautiful and largest that Mollisan Town has ever seen? That you can give to your dog?”

Mike started. How did the cloud know about Cocker Spaniel? Whoever was behind this trick must have done their research.

“Cocker Spaniel has all the rocks she needs,” said Mike.

“You are a truly naive ape, you know that?” The cloud sighed. “But I don't really have time to be a love adviser. Let's try something else. The biggest, fastest Volga the city has seen? Equipped with four-wheel drive, hydraulic shock absorbers, and a music system that will make any nightclub sound like a transistor radio?”

“For someone who's been trapped in a bottle for thousands of years, you're pretty up to date,” Mike noted drily.

“But you have a good idea there, sir!” Fredrik exclaimed. “A journey in time? Where in history do you want to go? A thousand years, a hundred years, ten years ago? What do you say? Possibly I can negotiate two trips for one wish? That doesn't sound bad, does it?”

“Give up. Do you think I'm an idiot? And that I'm going to make myself ridiculous in front of a camera that you've hidden up in the rafters? Listen, I'll tell you what I want: marijuana to last a month. Pre-rolled, neat joints. On this table. Now.”

Fredrik the cloud looked suspiciously at his liberator, shook his head so that all his facial features ended up in the wrong places for a few seconds, and then nodded curtly to put them back.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly, sir,” the genie said slowly. “You can wish for anything you want, exactly what you want, and you want marijuana for a month?”

“Stop talking,” said Mike. “You've heard my first wish, ‘genie.' And if I understand correctly, it appears you can't deliver.”

The genie sighed.

“And why should I make it hard on myself when I ought to be happy that . . . an unimaginative type pulled out the cork?” he muttered to himself. And suddenly on the table in the antique store's display window there were 120 narrow, white, hand-rolled cigarettes, packed with marijuana.

“They won't run out,” Fredrik commented drily. “If you manage to smoke all these in a week, there will be just as many left for the rest of the month.”