Yok (22 page)

The operations would prove to be the lesser problem. The display window had been smashed, and tiny, tiny pieces of glass had drilled in through the chimpanzee's fabric and disappeared into his cotton stuffing. Worried, the doctors had considered the possibility of totally re-stuffing him, but such an intervention was far from risk-free. Instead they let nature take its course, and during the weeks that followed the pieces of glass came out in a natural way. The pain and discomfort were mitigated by morphine, but somewhere inside his pleasant delirium Mike knew he had reached the end of the road.

When he was discharged after two weeks at St. Andrews, he made himself a promise: He would never betray himself again.

Now he was sitting in Gavin Toad's office, being humiliated. After rejection upon rejection Toad had finally thought of the solution with Lancelot Lemur.

“It's not done yet,” the chimpanzee repeated. “The song about freedom—”

“Go to hell, Mike!” Toad answered jovially, turning his attention to one of the many papers on his desk.

Mike left the office; he was stubborn, but not stupid.

 

4.

D
own on oil black Boulevard de la Vilette, Fredrik the genie was waiting.

“Finally.” The genie sighed. “Mr. Ape, I beg your pardon, but after thousands of years in a bottle one doesn't have much patience left. What were you doing? Did you take a wrong turn in the elevator?”

“Go away,” Mike answered, starting to walk south.

The Afternoon Weather was on its way in over the city, and Mike was longing to be back in Corbod; he wasn't made for the broad, clean streets and pulsating traffic of Tourquai.

“Sir, I realize that mental exertion is not your strong suit, and I have complete respect for that, of course, but can't we think of something?” the genie insisted. “Now that you've had a little time to yourself to think it over?”

“Shut up, Cloud,” Mike said. “Leave me alone.”

Deep inside Mike Chimpanzee's head sounded an ominous tone that was barely perceptible, but irritated him anyway. He was ashamed of himself. He had played the chorus for Toad, but couldn't stand by it. He had apologized immediately, and promised improvement. That was disgraceful behavior, and it was because far too much was at stake. Getting a song of his own on the record, a song that wasn't programmed out of one of Lancelot Lemur's self-playing computers, meant more to Mike's ego than he dared to admit.

Right from the start the record company had reduced him to a singing puppet, but now he got the feeling that this pointless floundering was exactly what they expected. That they were sitting in their skyscraper, laughing at his predictability.

With the faint sound in his head came a headache. Mike stopped by a crosswalk and let the seemingly endless stream of dark Volgas rumble past while he leaned the guitar against the stoplight and lit the joint that Toad had just denied him.

“Sir, isn't it true that drugs stimulate creativity?” the genie asked rhetorically.

The genie was hovering around in his impatient way, and the headwind from the cars caused him to sway even more.

“If material things don't interest you, you can always consider experiences. You, the one who likes marijuana? Only the imagination sets the limits?”

“My own dealer genie,” Mike mumbled, crossing the street. “Leave me alone now, then I'll—”

The genie took the opportunity with one motion to remove a couple of cigarette butts from the sidewalk to an ashtray hanging on the light pole, and then he caught up.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Ape, that's not how this works,” he informed him. “You make three wishes, I'm free. If you don't make three wishes, I'm not. So, you have two wishes left, and then I'll leave you alone.”

“Mm. But right now,” Mike said, taking a high step up onto the sidewalk on the opposite side, “right now I've had enough of you. If you leave for a while, I promise to think about it.”

“Given the short time we have spent together, I have a hard time attaching too much importance to such a promise,” the genie noted drily.

“Shut up,” Mike said. “Shut up, leave me alone. I've had enough of you right now.”

A vacant taxi was heading south, and Mike waved with his guitar in the air. As he sank into the backseat of the car with a throbbing headache, the genie was gone, of course, and Mike closed his eyes. He asked the driver to take him down to Yok and then just drive around for an hour; he needed to think. If Gavin Toad didn't want to listen to his songs, at least the record company executive would not escape his taxi receipt.

A
s the Evening Weather settled over the city, Mike Chimpanzee was still in his taxi, and he didn't want to go home. He was neither hungry nor tired. The thought of the genie waiting in the antique store nauseated him. The taxi had been driving in circles around Yok, and the ominous tone in his head refused to go away. At first he thought it was the tires of the car, but then he recognized it. A sign, he thought.

But he didn't know how he should interpret it.

At last he asked the taxi driver to drive to Scheherazade on sludge green Cle de la Bola, a crooked stone's throw from the antique shop on indigo blue Calle Gran Via, and ten minutes later he entered the restaurant with an imposing taxi receipt in his wallet. The genie was visible as Mike got out of the taxi, but disappeared just as quickly again when he opened the door to Scheherazade. The storm had abated, and night had officially arrived in Mollisan Town.

There were an unusually large number of stuffed animals in the restaurant, and Mike had to elbow his way to the bar. Since his breakthrough he was accustomed to always being noticed, but inside Scheherazade only rarely did anyone bother him. It was more likely that females at the bar pretended not to even know who he was, when they asked for a light or a little passion for their fading lives.

Tom-Tom Crow saw him at a distance, set out a large beer and changed the music to Nikki Lee and the Suspects. The grating electric guitars fell like a curtain behind the swaggering fortune-hunters drinking red wine in the bar. The cigarette smoke was like a haze over a battlefield. Tom-Tom had no time to give the rock star any further attention because other—paying—customers were making demands.

Mike managed to commandeer a bar stool, and sipped his beer. He recognized many, but knew no one. He was grateful for that, because inspiration was unexpectedly flowing. He picked up his black notebook and leafed quickly through it. The notes were written and arranged based on a flow of associations that was hard to re-create. Introverted song lyrics were juxtaposed with simple diary entries. Shopping lists, pasted-in receipts and dry-cleaning tickets for clothes he never had the money to pick up. Here and there addresses and telephone numbers without names, or names without addresses and telephone numbers. When there was no room, he wrote over things he'd written earlier. On other pages the blankness itself was the point. At last he found an unused page, and quickly wrote a whole verse without raising his pen:

Down South Avenue, as darkness starts to fall

in a car your Mama gave you when you turned twenty-one

You're the king of the bar, and you buy drinks for all

and later take home someone who'll have to leave at dawn

Scheherazade faded in the cigarette haze. Mike no longer heard Nikki Lee's scratchy, desperate voice, he was so absorbed by his verse making. The minutes flew past, the beer mug was emptied once and then twice, and soon there was another verse in place in the black notebook:

This life you want to live is getting too intense

planning is believing you know the way to go

but a little spark becomes a fire, a little thorn becomes a tear

freedom's letting go, say the ones who know.

He closed the notebook and nodded. This wasn't bad. This might be the verse to the song about freedom.

He looked around; the restaurant was quickly emptying out. Sam Gazelle came out of the kitchen, and only now noticed the chimpanzee.

“Mike!”

The gazelle dried his wet hooves on an apron where the food stains told the whole story: A little more than a year ago Sam, along with his friend Tom-Tom Crow, had taken over the restaurant on sludge green Cle de la Bola in Yok. It was no shopping street, but it had its charm. Across from the restaurant were the ruins of an apartment building from the fifties. Dark green, blossoming clematis had buried the razed exterior walls under billowing greenery, and when the Afternoon Rain fell and the sun was turning homeward, thousands of leaves glittered like stars in the night sky.

Rumor had it that an elderly widow had willed the place to Sam at a point in his life when more than ever he needed a roof over his head. So he moved in, with his chemicals and herbs, and realized after a few weeks that he needed help. The unusually large stuffed animal Tom-Tom Crow was not hard to convince. Together they painted the walls of the restaurant turquoise. The dark wooden tables and bar remained, while the crow set about sewing new white covers for all the chairs; on some he embroidered skulls with little red sequins. Besides the bar and the five window booths, there were a total of eight tables with room for thirty guests. They christened their restaurant Scheherazade.

Sam Gazelle went up to the bar and gave Mike a hug, whereupon Mike as usual felt uncomfortable. The poor chimpanzee could not defend himself against the gazelle. He had always attracted homosexual stuffed animals; perhaps it was his confusion that was enticing? Mike Chimpanzee pulled his shirt higher up on his hairy chest; Sam took a slender, hand-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket.

“Not the best quality,” he commented, handing it over.

“I've got my own,” Mike said, taking one of the genie's joints out of his breast pocket.

“You do? Did you get an advance?” Sam asked.

Chimpanzee not bumming drugs off the gazelle was a minor sensation.

“You might call it luck,” Mike answered hesitantly.

Sam took off the apron and set it over the back of the bar stool. Under it he had on a white ruffled shirt unbuttoned down to the belt line; the buckle depicted a withering rose. He had dark blue kohl around his large, round eyes, and he smelled of a perfume that Mike recognized but could not place. The limits of vanity, Gazelle maintained, were at repairing the broken-off right horn on his forehead. The stump of horn had become his trademark.

Mike's impulse had been to tell Sam and Tom-Tom about the annoying genie who had invaded his life, but now that felt impossible. The story was too ridiculous, and too unbelievable.

Crow set out two glasses of white wine, and Sam and Mike toasted in silence. Apart from a python who had curled up and fallen asleep in one of the booths, the restaurant was now empty. Nikki Lee's distinct voice was still coming out of the speakers, accompanied by a careful brush that caressed the cymbals.

“Be my guest, dears,” said Tom-Tom. “My goodness, damn, what a night!”

“We're talking record-breaking, darling,” Gazelle agreed.

Scheherazade, under its new owners, got off to a slow start, but because there were few customers, the crow and gazelle could practice their new roles as headwaiter and chef in peace and quiet. Soon they surprised themselves by managing to prepare and serve food from a solid menu; besides, the inexperienced restaurateurs paid the suppliers' bills with such regularity that the supplies didn't stop.

Now the crow disappeared into the kitchen to do the final cleanup before they could go home. Sam sat down at the bar next to Mike. They could glimpse themselves behind the forest of liquor bottles of various sizes and colors on the glass shelves in front of the bar mirror. Mike thought he looked lost. And the next moment the tone in his head was back.

“Oh dear,” said Gazelle. “Did something just happen?”

“No worries,” said Mike, trying to cheer himself up. “A dip. Already on the way up again. Maybe low blood sugar?”

“It has been better for a while, right?” Sam asked, sipping his wine.

Mike hated feeling like a mental case. True, Gazelle had become somewhat of a therapist during the past months, but that didn't give him carte blanche to console. The ape shrugged his shoulders.

“It's this damn neighborhood,” he said. “It's suffocating. It's like a closed room, an ecosystem under a big glass dome. Whichever direction I run, I hit my head against the wall. And if you don't want to sit still? It drives you crazy, thinking like that.”

“You shouldn't think that way, darling,” Sam suggested. “It sounds corny when I say it, everything sounds corny when I say it; I'm that sort of gazelle. But it's more profound than you think. Choose what to think about. And think about something else.”

The gazelle searched in his pants pocket and found a green pill, which he put in his mouth. He was full of chemicals, smoked tobacco, herbs, and powders, and seldom knew exactly what he was taking; he combined colors and forms in ways he hoped were balancing. Where alcohol was concerned he was very limited, however; a glass of white wine on special occasions, nothing else, which mainly had to do with his fear of gaining weight.

“You've had it too easy, darling,” Gazelle said, as he placed a consoling hoof on the ape's shoulder.

“That's good,” Mike said. “I'll remember that next time I'm considering drowning myself.”

“How old are you, Mike?” asked Sam, now less sympathetic. “Twenty? Twenty-one? Doesn't matter, you're too young to be bitter, honey, and to be honest you sound a little ridiculous when you want to be disillusioned. You know that I love you, but this has to be said.”

Sam slid down from his tall stool and rounded the bar. He moved quickly and softly.

“Sweetie, this is how it is,” said the gazelle, rooting in the drawer of the cash register, where he hid small, white tablets that made him melancholy. “You are loved by everyone. I love you, your mom loves you, hundreds of thousands of teenagers in this city worship the colorful asphalt you walk on. It's true that you've spent all the money, but, darling, there'll be more. You're making a new record with Lancelot Lemur and you're getting married to the love of your life. You're, like, not believable as suicidal.”