The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  “It’s when they put machines inside your body to make you like Superman,” Heather said before Joe could answer.

  “That’s ‘bionic,’ you nincompoop.” Joe cuffed her head. “Ironic means, um, you know…” But he stalled. How did you explain it to a kid? “Ironic is kind of like when, well, suppose you were going to board an airplane for a flight to Denver. But at the last minute you couldn’t get on it because your mother was sick. So the plane took off and crashed, killing everybody in it. You would really be counting your lucky stars your mother was sick, right? But then, say, that on your way over to see her, your car hit a patch of ice, you skidded off the road, turned over, and died. Well, it would be real ironic that, having escaped certain death in the airplane, you wound up being killed anyway in a stupid car accident on the way to see the mother who saved you from a horrible death in the first place. Is that clear?” he asked feebly, knowing damn well it was about as clear as mud.

  Intellectual lazybones from the word go, both kids sagely nodded their heads. Their complaisance, their lack of curiosity, and above all their bland acceptance of such a piss-poor definition, angered Joe.

  “All right, so go ahead, Heather, explain to me what ‘ironic’ means.”

  “But you just did, Daddy.”

  “Yeah, but I wanna hear it from your own lips. Just to be sure that you correctly grasp the concept.”

  “It’s, you know, when a plane crashes and you have a car accident at the same time.”

  Through gritted teeth, Joe said, “What about you, Michael?”

  “It’s like Heather said.” He averted his face from Joe’s, obviously somewhat derailed by his father’s emotional instability.

  “No it is not like Heather said!” Joe roared belligerently. “It isn’t even remotely like Heather said. In fact, it isn’t even remotely like I said. That was a horrible definition! And you creeps just sit there, not even listening, nodding your heads like brainless automatons when it’s over. Don’t they encourage you to have any intellectual curiosity in school? If you don’t understand something, then raise your hands, dammit!”

  Heather said, “I have a question about something I don’t understand.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  Michael pointed his finger, pistol-style, at Joe: “Bang! Bang!”

  Heather pushed her brother’s hand away. “What I don’t understand, Daddy, is how come you’re kidnapping us?”

  “Because you’re such dear, sweet, adorable children I can’t live a minute more without you.”

  “We don’t want to be kidnapped,” Michael said.

  “Why—you hate my guts?”

  “Well, where are we gonna go?” Heather asked shrilly. “What are we gonna do? Are we gonna live in motels? I hate motels. We won’t have any friends. And anyway, Mommy promised to take us to the movies tomorrow night.”

  “Oh she did, did she? What’s playing? The Son of Flubber Meets Gidget? Honkies Versus Niggers in a Pornographic Race War? The heartwarming story of how a woman with a clitoris in her throat learned to off corrupt cops by jabbing them with hypodermics full of battery acid when their attention was diverted by her singular talent?”

  “Nuh-uh.” Michael genuinely wished to placate his old man. “It’s just about killer bees that take over America.”

  “Let’s call it the United States of North America.” Joe was really hitting his stride, here, as a carping SOB. “I don’t know where we get the arrogance to call our country America. Mexico is also America, Central America and South America are also America. And so is Canada. It’s absurd for us to call ourselves America, like we’re the only country that exists in America.”

  That did it. They lapsed into stony silence.

  A mile south of the plaza, Joe had to brake again. A small crane, a large unpiloted tar-laying machine, and a chauffeurless bulldozer blocked the route.

  For almost a minute they remained stationary, confronting this latest blockade. Joe could feel his adrenaline dissolving. All the fight, all the anger, all the determination to heist his kids and blow this manic burg drained from his body, trickled down between his toes, left behind a mere shell of a man—weary, demoralized, defeated. He clung to the steering wheel as if to a life preserver. His head buzzed, his ears rang. Life was hopeless. Nothing would ever work out as he wanted it to. Why not sign up for a spiritual lobotomy, accepting enervation as a way of life? I’ll eat nothing but taco chips and bean dip, I’ll grow fat and lethargic and stupid. A rebel no more, I’ll spend hours every day gooning at the boob tube: “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Gong Show,” and “The Waltons.” Ultimately, green leaves will sprout from my earlobes as I achieve a vegetal state, devoid of ambition and passion and intelligence and sexual desire. My only quality will be Placidity Personified.

  Heather broke the silence. “Why are we just sitting here?”

  Joe rubbed his aching eyes. “Because I’m tired.”

  “You’re wasting gas letting it idle,” Michael said.

  “Tough beans. Let them arrest me, throw me in the hoosegow, beat me insensate with rubber truncheons, I don’t care, I’ve had it.”

  “Well, what are we gonna do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m through making decisions.”

  “We wanna go home,” Heather said.

  “Fine. You get your wish. Tell me how to do it, and I’ll drive you home.”

  “First you gotta turn the car around.”

  Robotlike, eyes so glazed he could barely see, Joe alternately mangled reverse and first gears until he had the car aimed in the opposite direction, and off they chugged at a crawl.

  Michael said, “You mean we’re not being kidnapped?”

  “That’s right. You win. I give up. The forces of Reaction and of the Right defeat the Forces of Conscience and of the Left once again.”

  After a minute, Heather said, “You’re not a very good kidnapper.”

  Here it came, self-pity times infinity, pathos in a weak-kneed sniveling jellyfish: “I’m not a very good anything, if you want to know the truth.” Oh what had happened to that brash and brainy stud of yesteryear?

  For all the usual arcane reasons, no barriers, highway blockades, construction boondoggles, malicious detours, or other assorted neanderthal, progress-oriented snafus punctuated the return trip. Arriving home before dark, Joe parked beside the strange-looking gray van with a bubble top, a cow skull on the front grille, and a Chicken River Funky Pie sign on the side. Desultorily he ordered the kids to take their luggage indoors. While they negotiated the ladder, he remained seated in an apathetic daze, grateful that he hadn’t the guts to load the pistol in his pocket.

  This hedonism was getting him nowhere!

  In fact, he didn’t want to move, ever again. He hadn’t the energy, even, to raise one hand and scratch the tip of his nose. It had ended at long last—his life. I can will myself to die, Joe thought. I’ll just blow a whistle in my brain, ordering everything in there to stop, lie down, go to sleep. It would be like absorbing a hit from one of those powerful ray guns in science-fiction thrillers—instant atrophy! Afterward, he would stay forever in his rusty machine. While autumn leaves ticked and scratched against the roof, and while snowflakes piled atop the vehicle and along the window ledges, he would remain immobile, a statue, a monument to the tragic end that selfishness, narcissism, greed, and a lack of historical focus could lead a person to. Eventually, mice would nest in the glove compartment; chipmunks would filch the stuffing from seat cushions; rattlesnakes would hibernate in the engine compartment. Little carnivores such as lizards and egg-eating skunks would mosey around; they’d take tiny bites of his toes and flaccid calves. He would be somehow awake, but inert, unfeeling yet able to see, and possibly even think. Having sniffed him out, an enterprising weasel would commence munching in earnest. Another summer would come and go; another autumn arrive. By the time the new snows flew, he’d be a skeleton, a mute conglomeration of white bones still seated behind the wheel, testimony to the aber
rant lethargy of his comatose bourgeois sensibility.

  What the hell does that mean, “Aberrant lethargy of comatose bourgeois sensibility?” Heidi shrieked.

  That did it! He’d had it with her snotty iconoclasm. Joe grabbed a chair and broke it over her head. Then he knocked her down on the kitchen floor and tipped the refrigerator over on top of her.

  Ay, such violent thoughts. “I’m getting to be as American as cherry pie.”

  Four rather curious-looking persons crept surreptitiously around the corner of the house. They wore frog feet and skintight black rubber outfits with white piping down the sides of the legs and arms, plus rubber hoods and glass-visored masks and snorkels. One carried a shotgun; another delicately held a small chemistry-set tray with a dozen rubber-corked test tubes sitting upright in it; a third toted a long lethal-looking pole with a sharp triple-snag on the end that must have been a grappling hook. In either hand, the fourth lugged a galvanized barnyard pail.

  All of them were covered with shit.

  Joe’s fingers curled around Diana’s little revolver in his pocket. Remembering he hadn’t loaded the gun, Joe prayed he would not be called on to use it. How could he have been so stupid as to buy the bullets without inserting them where they belonged?

  Hunched over slightly, casting furtive glances to the right and left, their frog feet flopping up clouds of dust as they progressed, the weirdly outfitted personages scurried to the Chicken River Funky Pie van, opened its rear doors, and climbed in. One frogman advanced up to the driver’s seat, started the motor, backed around in the castle’s driveway, and leisurely drove away.

  Joe let out a sigh and faced his own haggard visage in the rearview mirror, telling his bewildered, demoralized self: “Now I’ve seen it all.”

  But he hadn’t, of course. Not yet. Not by a long shot.

  * * *

  HEATHER APPEARED ON the porch overhead, shouting at the top of her lungs: “Daddy! Telephone!”

  “Who is it?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  Kids! How he admired their resiliency. Snatched from the bosom of their family and dragged all over creation by a bushy-eyed wild man threatening to destroy their sweet innocence, they could nevertheless rebound in seconds to become their old saucy selves. Swinging painfully out of the bus, Joe didn’t know whether to have his daughter cast in bronze or to yank down her corduroy bell-bottoms and whack the living daylights out of her!

  On their knees in the living room, surrounded by jellied breadcrusts and banana peels, they were back to poring over jigsaw puzzles. On his way to the phone, Joe growled, “Pick up the torn magazines, dismembered doll, and smashed airplanes, would you please?”

  “But we didn’t do it. It’s not our responsibility.”

  Joe woke up. “I don’t care if God did it, you pick it up! Both of you! Jesus, sometimes I hate you kids!”

  This syndrome, the one in which neither child would take responsibility for any chore that hadn’t gone through a CIA-FBI check as to his or her absolute personal connection to it, infuriated Joe. If, their room being an unholy mess, they were ordered to clean it, each one would attack only that disarray incontrovertibly attributable to him- or herself. For example: Heather would approach a pile of records lying about outside their jackets collecting dust, gobs of glop, and scratches, and insert into their proper covers only those records which she had played. If asked to gather up filthy clothes for the hamper, Michael would select only vestments that he himself had worn. When Joe accused them of doing only half a job, they squealed like stuck pigs: “But I didn’t play those other records, Michael did!” Or: “But I picked up all my dirty stuff. Tell Heather to pick up her own clothes!”

  Capitalism!

  Joe’s incensed orations contesting such narrow-mindedness pretty much followed a formula: “I don’t give a good goddam who played those records, or whose clothes those are! You kids are sick! What would happen if we all only took responsibility for ourselves? You kids would starve to death, because I’d never bother to buy or cook any food for you! You’d never get to any dance lessons because your mother and I would refuse to chauffeur you there! You’d never get to Little League baseball, either, unless you walked the six miles into town on your own! You’d never get to see a movie, because why should we waste our energy and our bread taking you nerds along? You’d never have any clean clothes or plates to eat off of, because Heidi and me would just do our own clothes and wash only enough dishes for ourselves! Now dammit, if you two selfish little shitheel capitalists don’t start taking some kind of collective responsibility I’ll sell you to a Korean orphanage, that’s what I’ll do! I’m sick and tired of your selfishness and narrow-mindedness! I’m sick and tired of your me-obsessed, private-property-oriented Fascist personalities! So you better start learning to show a little communal spirit and consideration for others and responsibility that goes beyond your own mean little egos, you unnerstand? And you better do it fast!”

  On their own turf, confident that the snatch was off, Heather and Michael moved slouchily to do their father’s bidding. And Joe picked up the phone.

  Chamisaville’s answer to the Noxzema siren said, “Hi…”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Goodness, that was quite a tirade. You don’t really mean that you hate them, do you?”

  “Nancy, please, get to the point.”

  “Did you read my note this morning?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well…?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, what about the Hanuman unveiling tomorrow?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. I mean, I’d like to go, but I’m not sure yet. You know. Things are a little up in the air. How about if I call you around, say, maybe eleven in the morning, okay? I’ll know better by then.”

  “It’s not something I’d miss if I were you. I think it will be one of the most beautiful and intriguing events of the year.”

  “I’m sure it will. I’m not so sure I wanna be there, though. After all, I’m the father of the kid that shot your little simian gangster. Maybe my presence would blow the vibes.”

  “On the contrary. Everybody wants you to come. And your children, too. You see, there’s no vindictiveness among spiritual people.…”

  “You’re kidding. Mahatma Gandhi gains independence for India, and five minutes later a million and a half Moslems and Hindus die in a holy war. When God doesn’t like the way things are going, he wipes out humanity with a flood. In Northern Ireland the Protestants and the Catholics are machine-gunning each other on streetcorners in the name of a higher being. And Nikita Smatterling takes umbrage to Ephraim Bonatelli’s advances on his son, so he pokes a loaded revolver into the dwarf’s paunch and pulls the trigger. Whaddayou mean, there’s no vindictiveness among spiritual people?”

  No answer from the other end of the line.

  Joe asked, “You still there?”

  “Oh yes,” she said pleasantly. “I’m just waiting for you to get hold of yourself.”

  “Nancy, I don’t want to talk right now. I’m not in real good form today. I’ll telephone tomorrow.”

  “All right.” She continued brimming with cheerful equanimity. “I love you, Joe.…”

  But the instant he cradled the instrument, it rang again.

  Tribby said, “Where the hell were you? I’ve been calling your house for an hour!”

  “Oh, you know—here and there. How’s the helicopter business?”

  “Listen—first things first. For starters, Natalie’s frantic. Apparently you promised to deliver the coke before five?”

  “I ‘promised’? You’re kidding. For twenty-four hours I haven’t had any coke to deliver to anybody.”

  “Her version is that in Nancy Ryan’s bathroom this morning, right after the healing ritual, you struck a bargain.”

  “No way! I told her I thought Heidi had flushed it down the toilet.”

  “Well, listen to this. When I returned to my office, it wa
s turned upside down. My files are wrecked. My drawers were dumped upside down and smashed. Even my diplomas were slashed. They also knifed the couch apart: it looks like a cotton gin exploded in here.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Where’s the coke?” Tribby begged. “I want those particular monkeys off our backs. The whole caper business is getting congested. If we could locate the dope and either sell or give it to somebody, they’d figure we had played our hand and wouldn’t look for any shenanigans from us at the Hanuman festivities. So where’s Heidi? All day she hasn’t answered the phone.”

  “Out. Gone. Who knows where?”

  “Do you suppose somebody kidnapped her?”

  Joe let that sink in. “But how could … but I mean…”

  “She’s playing games,” Tribby said curtly. “She doesn’t understand what people will do for that stuff. Natalie admitted she thinks either you and Heidi are in cahoots, trying to throw everybody off the scent with that toilet story, or else Heidi and Scott Harrison are bamboozling you. Heidi already hired him to be her lawyer in your divorce settlement. Today, the oily bastard refiled papers making a grab for Eloy’s place in payment for legal services rendered. He’s hoping to make the heist before the grace period expires and the bank initiates foreclosure proceedings.”

  Joe mumbled, “So what? For the record, you should know that four guys wearing rubber suits and frog feet just crawled out of your septic tank covered in shit.”

  Tribby said, “You honestly can’t produce the coke?”

  “Neither honestly nor dishonestly.”

  “And you truly got no idea where Heidi went?”

  “Not even the faintest.” Again, Joe slipped his fingers over Diana’s pistol: fear chilled him thoroughly. Why had he still failed to load the weapon? It was happening at last—something evil, dark, irrevocably lethal. And no aspect of the charade would be funny ever again. His selfishness, amateur brainpower, amoral actions, and irresponsibility had forged a nightmare of Himalayan magnitude.

  Tribby said, “I’ll tell Natalie about the scuba divers.”

  “I bet she already knows. Those rubber zombies must be on Ray Verboten’s payroll.”