The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  Joe nixed that. After all, if she saved his life he would be indebted to her forever. And the point right now was to extricate himself from damning liaisons.

  Leaving—would you believe prayer?

  “Oh Mighty God, please don’t let me die. If you save me, I promise I’ll be good. Also, I’ll never ask you for anything else again. Just this once, have a heart, let me live. I promise, I’ll be a changed person. I’ll reunite with the family. I’ll give all my extra pennies to the March of Dimes. I’ll even go to an Up With America concert.…”

  Joe stopped. Aside from registering a full ten on the Maudlin-Meter, it was stupid to beg for mercy from a figment of humanity’s imagination in which he believed almost as intensely as he believed in Santa Claus.

  Another face, a slightly smaller dirigible than Diana’s, materialized overhead. Chubby cheeks covered with jelly, matted and dirty strawberry blond hair—her large blue eyes inspected him with childlike inquisitiveness.

  “Hi, Mr. Miniver.”

  Saved by a three-year-old peace-love-groovynik!

  “Hello, Om.” Hot dog, no horrific gurgles!—his voice sounded normal.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Somebody shot me. Now listen, Om. Listen very carefully.…”

  “What did they shoot you with, Mr. Miniver?”

  “With a gun. Now Om—” The face disappeared. “Om?” It reappeared, accompanied by the gun held in pudgy clumsy fingers. “Now listen, sweetie.…”

  “Is this the gun?”

  “Put that down, dammit! It’s dangerous. It might go off again.”

  Once more, the face retired. Joe dared not turn his head to follow it for fear a wounded disk might slip, killing him on the spot.

  “Where did you get shot?” Om asked, in sight again.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t important. But right now—”

  “Did they shoot you in the heart?”

  “No, Om. Now listen to me—”

  “Did they shoot you in the head?”

  “No—hey! Do me a favor, hush up a minute. This is very—”

  “My daddy says guns are dumb.”

  “Right, guns are dumb. God bless your daddy.”

  “He says if you mess with a gun it will turn around and shoot you because of all the bad vibes.”

  “Very true, very true. Now come on, Om, hear me out. Would—”

  “Did you shoot yourself?”

  “Jesus—hey, kid? Have a heart. Lemme finish a sentence. I might be dying.”

  “If you die, you go to a place that makes you very happy. You shun’t be scared of dying, it’s beautiful.”

  “Om, I need help. Go fetch your mommy and daddy. Tell them Mr. Miniver is hurt.”

  “My mommy’s not there.”

  “So go tell your daddy.”

  “He’s not there either.”

  “Well, who the hell’s over there? Call your baby-sitter.”

  “I don’t have a baby-sitter. Rama says I’m big enough to take care of myself ’cause I got good karma.”

  “Where did they go?—your mom and dad.”

  “The foodstamp office.”

  “But they can’t simply leave me lying here.”

  Om asked, “Do you have lots of money?”

  “I don’t know. Hey, look, listen, do me a favor—”

  “My daddy says you’re a filthy-rich dope pusher. He says you’re gonna build the biggest house in the neighborhood.”

  Fuck your father. “Om, go get help. Find Mr. Irribarren. Tell him that Joe is shot and lying in the tent.”

  “There’s lots of butterflies out there. My favorite is the one with the orange wings.”

  “I know, I know. Michael has a big collection, too.”

  “I don’t have a collection. You shun’t kill butterflies. If you kill them, all the flowers will die. You’ll get sick, too.”

  Butterflies! “Om, maybe I’m dying. I need help immediately.”

  The face floated away, but the voice remained. “Once I founded a butterfly in the bathtub. It stayed there and laid a egg—”

  “‘An’ egg.” Shit!

  “—and so we couldn’t take a bath for almost two weeks until the egg hatched into a teeny-weeny caterpillar. Then my daddy put the caterpillar on a matchstick and let it go outside, and we could take baths again.”

  “Om, no more small talk. Seriously, you have to find a grown-up.”

  “My dad’s got a movie camera.”

  “I know, I know.” He could tell she was growing bored and he didn’t want to drive the flaky little poseur away before his message was embedded in her kiddy noggin. “Please, I’m begging you, Om. Honest to God, I’m hurt.”

  “If you’re hurt, my daddy says you can fix yourself. You just pretend you’re not hurt and it goes away. The hurt isn’t really in your arms and legs and tummy; it’s in your brain. So nobody has to be hurt, ever—really.”

  A preview of things to come? Would Shanti Unfug, kneeling over his prostrate body, explain that the only reason Diana fired was his bad karma? No doubt she’d cure him by enveloping the bullet (embedded deep in his vital regions) with a pink cloud attached to a psychic thread. One jerk of the thread (by her mind), and the slug would pop clear. Then she’d heal the wound with a mentally created dose of color-coordinated chakra bullshit, crowing as she did so (and as he expired!), “There, see? It’s easy if your head’s in the right place, Joe. Joe…? Can you hear me, Joe? Oh jeepers—Joe!”

  Not to worry, however. A couple of Nikita Smatterling’s fluorescent-pink monkey duendis, trailing mysterious wisps of colorful mist, would accompany him safely to the Other Side, where, like a seventeen-year locust shedding its crackly exoskeleton, he’d discard his Joe Miniver disguise, and zip himself up into the identity of his next reincarnation. Which, given his luck of late, would probably be as a hunchbacked short-order cook with a cleft palate and secret yearnings for a sex-change operation so he could win tennis matches at Forest Hills!

  “Om—?”

  Om had split. No doubt she was back out there, skipping merrily through his field with dozens of butterflies perched on her chubby fingers, proselytizing their tiny souls, ascertaining that their insect karma was cool, that nothing but love radiated from their stupid little butterfly hearts.

  These ruminations were getting him nowhere. Yet what to do? How to act? Joe felt somewhat flushed, and aggravatingly unable to localize the place and extent of his wound. Was he bleeding to death, or so superficially wounded his eventual rescuers would titter and sneer while pointing at Joe the Shlimazl, who for eight hours mistook a mere powder burn on his left pinkie for a fatal injury?

  Double-checking, Joe wiggled his left pinkie: it appeared to be in perfect working order.

  He heard a rustle, fur rubbed against mosquito netting, then something sniffed at his cowlick. A National Enquirer headline flashed into his unaccountably lucid brain:

  WOUNDED GARBAGE MAN EATEN ALIVE BY SKUNKS! CHAMISAVILLE RESIDENT BECOMES SEVENTH MUTILATION KILLING OF YEAR! GUNSHOT VICTIM’S THROAT SLIT BY PET FERRET!

  But when two large gray ears appeared on the periphery of his vision, he realized that once again his imagination had played him for a fool.

  Eloy’s rabbit, Tuerto, hopped onto his stomach and sat there for a moment, its one good eye staring blandly at Joe. Heaping insults atop humiliation, the animal stiffened peculiarly, stretched its neck slightly forward, and (Joe could tell from the little blast of heat that tickled his belly) laid a bunch of pellets on his navel. Then it twitched one ear and hopped away.

  Not only would the doctors titter and point, but now the emergency technicians who arrived to pick him up for the ridiculing MDs would bust into guffaws over the rabbit shit on his stomach, laughing so hard they might lose hold of a stretcher handle, causing a lurch that would completely destroy his almost severed spinal column. Given their macabre sense of humor, if he survived they would probably arrange him on the operating table with that collectio
n of turds still intact. And then wouldn’t those damn physicians have a laugh at his expense?

  He wouldn’t pay the sons of bitches! Let them try and collect! For saving his life he’d tell them all to fuck off. Better yet, as soon as he could walk again (after years of Moscow steroid treatments and physiotherapy in Baden-Baden swimming pools), he’d go underground, return to Chamisaville, and methodically off every quack who had mocked his misery, killing them in grotesque ways, slowly, one by one, by emasculation, by evisceration, by cramming stethoscopes into their mouths, by stabbing rectal thermometers through their hearts, by shoving sigmoidoscopic instruments into their ears!

  For another hour he lay there, incensed by the ignominy that would be his fate if discovered with a bunch of rabbit turds on his stomach. By flexing his belly maybe he could bounce them off. But if his wound was there, any untoward strain could cause him to park it for good. Yet presentiments of humiliation gnawed at him like a hungry rat. “Psst, Mary, did you hear that when they found Joe Miniver, he had rabbit turds on his stomach?” Ever after, in this sick little village, he would be known as the Rabbit-Turd Kid. An invisible RTK would be emblazoned on his character. He would have to leave town, moving, say, to Quinter, Kansas. But even there his reputation would follow. In the local clinic after a near-fatal asthma attack, the attending physician would demand his records from Phil Horney in Chamisaville. And the truth—since Phil no doubt would have written: Patient arrived at ER with superficial dilation of pupils, a lowered pulsebeat of 57, a small bullet wound on left-hand side of the body just below the pectoral muscle, and a little pile of rabbit shit on abdomen approximately 13 centimeters above the navel—would out. Every time he walked down the street to buy a paper and eat breakfast in Cathy’s Cornbelt Café, dozens of big, beefy, Czechoslovakian wheat farmers, wearing Oshkosh, B’Gosh bib overalls, and seated at the wheels of their John Deere tractors, would point their blunt, calloused fingers at him and snigger in Slavic accents: “Dots him, Olaf, duh vun dey found mit der robbit turds on der pupik. Hee hee hee.”

  She she she.

  It it it.

  Ay, Dios!

  Weariness made his bones creak; his muscles sighed. A shadow—of an enormous bird?—rippled against the sunlit material overhead. And—was he dreaming?—an enormous thing landed outside. Joe waited—should he be apprehensive or terrorstricken?—for something to happen. Sure enough, the flaps parted, and, before he could say “Oh God!” the angel he had mugged earlier loomed overhead, grinning sadistically. It had a black eye, a raspberry on one cheek. The wings had been repreened, but several gaps, caused by missing feathers, existed.

  “Well,” said the bearded seraph. “We meet again. And in slightly different circumstances, I might add.”

  “What can I say? This time around I’ll admit it, I’m helpless.”

  “You can’t say you didn’t have it coming.”

  “‘You didn’t have it coming.”

  “You know, if I were you, Joe, I’d curb a little of my arrogance, at least for the time being. You aren’t exactly in the catbird seat, right now.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Who asked for fear? The point isn’t to be afraid of angels, Joe. The point is simply to be humble enough to listen when they bend close to the earth, their wondrous tales to tell. Who knows, you might learn something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—” But just as it appeared the apparition would drop a few pearls, it frowned, and leaned over, squinting to focus more closely on Joe’s stomach. “Hold everything, what’s this?”

  Here it comes, Joe groaned. Slavic wheat farmers, tittering doctors, and snide emergency-ambulance technicians aren’t punishment enough. Leading the whole retinue of jeering barbarians is a goddam moth-eaten angel that more closely resembles one of heaven’s flea-market specials than a figure of mythological potency!

  “Do me a favor,” he begged, “don’t say anything. I’m in no position to defend myself.”

  “You’ve got rabbit turds on your stomach.”

  “Bright deduction, Dick Tracy.”

  “Where did they come from, Joe?”

  Joe figured, I won’t answer: I’ll refuse to play the game. Only with silence can I salvage a shred of dignity.

  But he fumed and stewed, wanting to bag the clumsy beast riling him. Wiggling his right-hand fingers, he ascertained that they still functioned. Then, in a daring departure from the inertia he’d tolerated on the belief that absolute immobility might save his life, Joe let his hand stray a few inches until it reached the cool metal of Diana’s pistol. Gradually, he worked the pistol into his grasp. And, moving his arm but slightly, he pointed the gun upward at the angel and fired.

  Almost before the report, the angel disappeared, leaving behind a moderate turmoil of feathers that zigzagged like autumn leaves, except, of course, that they fell upward, gathering against the tent roof much as they had accumulated on Nancy’s living-room ceiling.

  Frustrated beyond rationality, Joe raised his arm higher and yanked off four more shots at that space where the feathers now congregated uneasily hoping for an exit hole to facilitate their return to heaven.

  Nothing happened.

  That is to say: Although loud gunshots brutalized his eardrums, no slugs tore through the fabric overhead, making the tent jerk and the feathers dance. And no tiny holes through which he could see the sky appeared in the slim cloth. In short, despite all the noise involved, no lead projectiles were leaving the gun barrel to cause havoc in the outside world.

  The goddam pistol was loaded with blanks!

  As soon as this information had properly sunk in, Joe sat up. Despite the dizzying rush of blood caused by the sudden elevation of his (ha ha) brain, Joe understood immediately that not only was he very hungry, but he had been bamboozled royally as well.

  A few rabbit turds were nothing compared to the humiliation engendered by his swallowing—hook, line, and sinker—this unbelievable farce!

  For a while Joe remained immobile, jaw agape, staring at the pistol. Then he patted himself all over, just to be sure, praying that, all evidence to the contrary, he might discover a bullet wound—but no such luck. This lad was hale and hearty, absolutely untouched by lethal lead. Old headlines paled beside new ones forming in his head:

  MINIVER MANGLED BY IMAGINARY BULLET! IDIOT SPENDS 8 HOURS FLAT ON BACK FROM NONEXISTENT WOUND! GIRL RIDDLES MONGOLOID BOYFRIEND WITH BLANKS!

  His watch said 3:00 P.M. There was probably nothing he could salvage from this rapidly deteriorating situation except, perhaps, with luck, his life.

  * * *

  JOE GRABBED DIANA’S little revolver and slipped it into his pocket. Very surreptitiously, he peeked out the tent flaps to see if anybody was waiting to hoot derisively as he emerged. But the coast was clear. So he exited into the midafternoon, cast about sheepishly, and scurried down the driveway.

  A group of precious geeks, outfitted in beards, ribbon shirts, marijuana smoke, and hipster piety, labored in Eloy’s front field, setting up the Hanuman unveiling. Ipu Miller and Egon Braithwhite decorated an aspen-branch gazebo with colorful crepe streamers; Nikita Smatterling and Baba Ram Bang crouched on the U-Haul’s roof, arranging more fruit and many flowers; and down at the west end, Mimi McAllister and her lesbian construction collective banged the finishing touches into a line of flimsy public outhouses.

  Spumoni Tatarsky stopped, leaning on the shovel with which he had almost completed a cooking pit, and waved. Joe snorted at the salutation, and focused on his bus.

  Four notes, tucked under the wipers, fluttered against his windshield. A fifth lay on the front seat. Blushing uncomfortably, Joe slowly perused each one.

  Diana’s was short, and to the point:

  You son of a bitch! You scumbag! You heartless coward! I wish I could have killed you! It would have been less cruel of you to beat me up, violate me, and leave me lying like a dog. I hope your conscience rapes you for the rest of your life. You can have the te
nt and all my shit. I’m never coming back!

  It was unsigned, of course.

  Nancy’s approached him from a different angle:

  Joe, what’s the matter with you? I could give you so much, and yet you seem incapable of accepting what I offer. I feel so sad for you, because you are such a rich person. You are sweet and gentle. You have a divine soul and a beautiful passion. Yet all this is crippled by your fear. How I wish I could discover a way to ease the tension that is debilitating you and lead you to an understanding of love. Can you even begin to comprehend what I’m talking about? Can you even begin to understand that I don’t want to take anything from you, I don’t want to control you in any way, I just want to make you happy? And I know you can be happy, I can see it in your eyes, I can feel it in your embraces. You are such an intelligent and beautiful person. If only you would give me a chance to help you see how easy it is to be loving, and gentle, and easy. I have knowledge that could help you, Joe. I know things that could open up your world and make you sing like you never sang before. I can lead you to peace of mind, I really can, if only you’ll let me. I am waiting for you always. Please come see me as soon as you can. Like the Beatles said, “Love is really all you need.”

  Nancy

  P.S. Don’t forget the Hanuman tomorrow. I hope we can go together. First there’s a lunch; the unveiling is around two.

  The death threat was witty, obscene, and—of course—anonymous:

  Hello again, asshole.

  Your minutes are numbered!

  Heidi, of course, had read the other epistles before composing her own:

  Hi, Loverboy,

  I see the ever popular all-American hustler is really accumulating the sappy doggerel and bitter drivel: congratulations on a difficult job well done.

  Michael cried all night, not so much from the pain in his nose, as from the pain of having the Marquis de Sade for a father.