“Why are you so comfortable?” I ask.
Phil shrugs. “I’ve come to terms with some things. Your characters aren’t the only people who have stupid-ass epiphanies.”
“Yeah,” says Paco as he finishes his examination.
He again pats Phil on the shoulder, and this time squeezes the muscle beside his neck. He leans real close to my face. “He’s come to terms with some things. Leave him be.” Then he turns his neck and stares right into Phil’s eyes. “You guys want any hot sauce, or are you gonna be assholes about that, too?”
I hit the big time about three years ago with The Gesticulating Rock Cycle, and since then I’ve been doing some thinking. Here’s the deep part: loneliness is an important part of life, an important time during which a man cultivates his soul and grows and gets to know himself. Suffering. A prerequisite to the complete package. You learn to cook, you learn to clean, you learn to take care of yourself. You set your own schedule. You live for you. You get a good exercise routine going. And buried deep inside of that lonely guy, like a vein of invaluable Manacodavian Ore, is the true stuff of existence, a swath of magic. You need to get down pretty far and do the legwork, the real exploring, but once you’ve done it, then you’re in for something stellar. Real heart.
That’s me, that’s my theory, and I think, so far, it’s working. Its predictions have been accurate, this theory. I’ve got my place, my porch, my backyard. A nice little ceramic dog. I’m feeling things out. I’m not sure I have a real heart, but maybe. I could use a woman.
Phil, though. Depression’s not right for him. He’s been bumming around town for too long. He hasn’t gotten out and seen the world. He doesn’t know what loneliness is. Not the real kind. And I can tell that he doesn’t really want to, that this narcissistic hair impulse is predominant and unmovable, some boulder he will never be able to move. So he’s never going to learn.
The doorbell rings, and I walk through the kitchen to the front door. When I pull it open, Phil is standing in front of me, his jaw set. He is wearing a stocking cap, and it is too warm for him to be wearing a stocking cap. Bald people, I think.
“I drove by them,” he says, storming past me. “I just drove right by them.”
“Did you talk to them?” I ask, closing the door when I realize he’s not coming back to do it.
He has become distracted by the painting on the wall. He is leaning very close to the frame.
“What the hell is this?” he asks.
He turns and looks at me. “You know you’re just as sick as everyone else, right?”
“It’s a girl,” I say.
“What’s that?” he asks, tapping the tip of his finger on the glass. He looks at me again, now with a stupid grin on his face.
“That’s a big…phaser,” I say.
“Oh?”
“Let’s go out back and have some gin and tonics.”
“And what’s that?”
“That’s her holster.”
“Am I right to say that she has haphazardly strewn it in the corner of the room?”
“Artists have to balance colors and light.”
“Have we just entered her room, Danny? Should I think of this as a first-person perspective? Have we, as the observers of the painting, just stumbled in on this lovely and, might I add, sexy space-lady undressing? Would you call this alien erotica? Because I might! I might!”
FIGURE vb7009: “THE THOUGHT OF A FOREIGN CARESS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF §ŒʃΣθΓ” BY G.W GURGLESMITH
“That’s the color and light being balanced. Right in the corner there.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I feel sorry for you and you feel sorry for me,” he says. “That makes for a good friendship.”
He is very right about that, I realize. We go out back. After I bring him his drink he remembers that he is angry about seeing his brothers.
I let him bitch.
After he’s gotten it all out he turns his head and says, “Shit. Anyway, I’m doing it. I’ve decided to do the experimental procedure, Danny. Anyway.”
“Fine,” I say. “I don’t care.” I’m still smarting about his critique of the painting, which I just put up yesterday. It took me six months of cajoling the artist to get him to sell it to me in the first place. And then this fat, bald, nearly-unemployed, manchild basket-case walks in and tries to kill it to feed the monster of his neurosis.
I think about dropping my line about narcissism and the boulder, but I’m sure it will be lost on him. I also can’t remember the exact wording.
“Good,” he says, nodding. “Good. I know you’re just saying that, buddy.”
“And now I suppose you’ve come here for the money,” I say.
He’s quiet.
“How much?” I ask.
“I need around eighty-five thousand, even though it’s not entirely clear from the literature—”
I have drunk the whole lime wedge from my gin and tonic. Very soon after I get his attention with my waving hands, Phil is slapping me hard on the back, and I’m leaning forward, trying to push, and reaching down into my throat, trying to catch the lime by a little stringy piece of lime-meat, and I am also holding my nostrils together with my other hand, trying to create the pressure I need to launch the thing free. I believe that Phil is also behind me, attempting some creative interpretation of the Heimlich maneuver. He hurts me.
We remain locked in this mortal embrace for about twenty seconds. I begin to wonder if I will die.
Then, just like that, the whole thing slides down, and I have to slap at him to make him quit with the slaps.
“Stop it,” I say. “Stop it.” I breathe once, afraid that the lime wedge has fallen into one of my lungs, doomed to rot on the floor of the cave like a lost spelunker. How terrible.
“I’m okay,” I say.
We both sit down again.
“What do you think would happen if you had a lime wedge in your lung?” I ask.
“I don’t care,” he says.
“Do you have any idea how much money that is?” I ask him.
“Yeah, Dan,” he says. “It’s eighty-five thousand dollars.”
“I mean in relation to the economy,” I say. “To other things.” I am talking to a man who has made six dollars an hour at the grocery store for the last eight years.
“I don’t know,” he says, after a moment of thought. “A really nice car?”
“More.”
“A house?”
“A little one,” I say. “Yes.”
“But don’t you see how hair can be a house?”
“No,” I say. “I can’t.”
“Hey Danny,” he says.
“What.”
“What’s it like to be so successful, buddy? Remember how you and I used to be…kind of…on the same plane?”
“I need another lime. Get me another lime, please.”
I don’t get up to get more limes. Instead, I close my eyes, not able to believe what I’m about to do. He has tapped into my central guilt reservoir. There is a lot in there. I have done terrible things to several people. A lot to Phil, specifically, as tends to happen with old friends. A lot to other people, though. The difference is, most people don’t know how to tap into guilt in order to manipulate me. Phil knows.
“Phil,” I say. He looks over, bright-eyed. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the trilogy has recently been optioned for an astronomical amount of money, and that I can afford to lend you what you need. If it means happiness. For you.” Look for my work in theatres in 2013, by the way. They won’t let me make a cameo. Too stilted.
“Okay.”
“Can you answer some questions for me? A few preliminary questions?”
“Yes.”
“Why not a more traditional, less risky form of hair regrowth? Like the medication? Or Rogaine? Or even transplants? Or plugs? Where they put new follicles back up on the top?” I’ve been doing a little research. “The surgery has improved quite a bit in the last few years.�
� In my research I read that Terry Bradshaw, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, had attempted plugs in the early-80s, but they had nearly killed him via pus. Pus got trapped in his scalp. Things have changed since then.
“Hair University offers complete and permanent regrowth. You go back to around seventeen, hairwise. That other stuff is nowhere near as reliable. This is gene therapy, we’re talking about. This is not cosmetic stuff, Danny. This is the nuts and bolts. You know about all that stuff.”
“Seventeen?”
“Seventeen years old,” he says. “That’s what I want to be.”
I have never seen somebody so much in earnest. And to hear him say it like that, I realize that it’s not very complicated. This is not about hair. Paco would appreciate how simple everything has become, and all just because I haven’t let myself think about it too much. Phil has a wonderfully kind face, with round cheeks, and his soul is mangled. Time for his friend to step in.
He needs a roof.
We’re talking about mortality.
We sit.
There are no mosquitoes around because of my citronella candles. Am I right now inside or outside the simulacra bubble? And what have I ever done that’s really worth anything?
Since Hair University is on a small hidden corporate island nation in the Caribbean, Phil informs me that it will take a few days to solidify his travel plans. I have to drive over to Minneapolis to sit on a panel and to give a reading, so I get him to promise to have one more fish sandwich with me at Paco’s before he leaves. The moron is so excited he can hardly breathe.
The conference is at a swank downtown hotel in Minneapolis called Le Meridien. My reading is typical; a couple of yells, a couple of crying babies, a couple of screeches in Affruld’s special high voice which can disturb nearby gravitational fields. I read from a quiet chapter in the middle of the second book, one in which Affruld, who has just lost the love of two women, his mistress and his wife, contemplates throwing himself out of the airlock; he believes, irrationally, that all the pain will be unable to keep its grip on him as he floats away and suffocates—this is linked to his theories about God, space, and suffering. The crowd always wants me to go right to the Barrel Organ showdown, and to stop messing around with the pathos and the internal struggle bit, but I’m no pandering whore. As I’m reading, and I see the disappointment on their faces, I think: bear with me. I learned about pathos when I got my MFA.
Afterwards, during the reception, a grizzly, skinny old man ambles up to me with a smile on his face and pats me on the arm.
“Nice work,” he says. “I like that chapter. It shouldn’t have to be about the exciting stuff. Don’t pay any attention to them.”
“To who?” I ask.
“To that group making the catcalls. Or the fuckers who were hissing.”
“I thought those people were doing Affruld’s screeches. Like an homage.”
“Well,” says the man, nodding. “Don’t pay any attention to them.”
“I couldn’t,” I say. “I didn’t know they were insulting me. Are you sure?”
“Good,” he says. “Good. From one writer to another, though.” He leans close. “You think maybe you should lay off the adjectives? The big words in general? These people don’t care about that. They already think you’re smart. You don’t need to impress them like that.”
“That’s not always why writers use larger words,” I say. “Sometimes you need an exact, perfect description.”
He says nothing.
“I use too many?” I ask.
“Coxcombical and flagitious aren’t crystal clear to most genre readers. Especially when you’re describing a pair of pants.”
“I was trying for something with the pacing,” I say.
He nods amicably, pats again. “Don’t take it the wrong way. I liked everything else about it. Good for you.”
“You’re a writer?” I ask. “Do you write science fiction?”
He holds out a hand. “Norman Kletz.”
A big idiotic grin washes over my face. “Norman Kletz!” I say, pumping his hand up and down too hard. “I know your books! I own all of your books! Of course I know who you are!”
“I know you know who I am,” he says. “Everyone does. I’m not being humble. I don’t want these idiots to know it’s me. I’m too famous for this convention.”
He’s right. Not only that, but he’s a famous recluse. I’ve read maybe twenty of his books, and have never once seen a photo. All anyone knows about him is that he’s a humanist and he likes to bowl.
“We’re on the panel together tomorrow,” he says, after I’ve released his hand. “Just so you know.”
“The panel together!” I cry, taking his hand again. “The panel together!”
“Let go of me,” he says. “Let go.”
I apologize for my groveling, and Norman Kletz waves it off. “What are you working on now?” he asks.
“A short story,” I say. “About aliens who don’t know how to fly their own ship.”
“Why can’t they?”
“Too stupid.”
Norman Kletz nods.
“You like the concept?”
Norman Kletz says, “Eh.”
“I do it in a new way, though.”
“Sounds great, kid.”
Late that night, long after I’ve fallen asleep upstairs in my room, I get a call from Phil. He tells me that just before five o’clock, his brother was pulled into one of the paper-pressing machines at the plant, and was declared dead on site.
“Who?” I yell. “Which?”
“Sandy.”
“Sandy!” I try to taste the word. I can’t remember which one Sandy is. I am weeping.
“Calm down,” he says flatly. “It’s no big deal. They got him out and untangled him from the cogs and everything. But now no one’s talking to me because I said I can’t go to the funeral.”
I catch my breath and wipe my nose.
“Why can’t you go to the funeral?” I ask.
“Because I’m going to Hair University. You know that. You’re paying.”
I get out of the bed and pace, very calmly. I sit back down on the bed. I sip my water. “You can’t go to Hair University,” I tell him. “Your brother died. Do you understand the difference in degrees of importance?”
“No,” he says, obviously angry. “No, I don’t, Danny. That asshole tortured me growing up. Why am I supposed to go? Because I’m supposed to have loved him? Well, I didn’t. I don’t. I only loved my hair, Danny. And it left me. It divorced me. And now I’m going to get it back. And I’m not going to Greg’s stupid funeral.”
“Sandy’s.”
“To Sandy’s stupid funeral.”
“He’s your dead brother.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to make the travel arrangements? Do you have any idea how long I would have to wait if I backed out now? The shots! The visa alone—”
“I’ll withdraw my financial support.”
“The check already cleared, miser,” he says. “They’re waiting for me. I have to go.”
We argue for about ten minutes, and in the end, I essentially tell him that he’s psychotic and juvenile, and he says, “Juvenile! Yes! Ha! Affruld would know much better! Thanks for nothing, friend! Thanks for one more nice sting on my way to finally do something important!” And he hangs up on me. And it’s the last time I ever speak to him.
And I don’t fall back asleep.
Throughout most of the panel discussion, I am quiet. Usually I would be trailing after everything Norman Kletz says, trying to impress him with my autodidactic knowledge of astrophysics or my organic feeling for narrative, but I can’t do anything but stare at the blank piece of white paper on the table in front of me and think about Sandy, whose face I can’t even picture, getting sucked through a piece of machinery by his shirt, and subsequently losing all of his skin.
Norman Kletz, for a recluse, is extremely articulate and charismatic. He looks everybody in the eye a
nd cracks jokes and takes pains to understand questions before he launches into their answers. He never talks for too long. He winks at people and knows everything.
There is only one question directed toward me, and when the woman begins asking, I smile and watch her, and nod as she speaks, and when she finishes speaking, I realize I have not heard a word she has said, distracted as I am by images of Phil, with hair, smiling down at his brother’s dead body.
I ask her to repeat the question.
After she does, I say: “That depends on whether or not you, as an audience member, sympathize with the Dregtallers as a marginalized species. It’s an important distinction. You have a choice. An aesthetic choice, if you will, but an important one nevertheless. If you will. This goes back to my earlier arguments about the audience participating with the aesthetic of the piece via a kind of…mental interplay. I’ve thought quite a lot about this issue and I’m prepared to speak at length. Are you ready for me?”
There is silence. The woman looks confused. I am suddenly unsure whether she asked about Dregtallers at all.
“I think what Danny is trying to say…” says Norman, and the muscles in my back relax, and I let him take over from there. I don’t listen to what he says, either. I touch the paper. I imagine a whole roll on a big spindle, all of it red and brainy.
Whatever it is that he says, everyone loves it, and they clap, and the moderator comes out and calls it quits for the panel discussion.
And then when we’re all walking off the stage, Norman Keltz trips and falls down the stairs.
My heart breaks while he falls; I hear it tinkle. It is the fall of an elderly man, nothing more than a muscle failing to respond with 100% correspondence to intention. He rolls, he hits his head. People gasp and scream.
I run around in circles down on the floor. Keeping people back. I am too afraid to actually look down at him, too afraid that he has died, too, but I can hear other members of the panel talking to him, and eventually I hear him weakly discussing the various pains he is experiencing.
An ambulance comes, and the conference is over. I don’t talk to him again. All I’ve got, now, is the image of an old man falling, someone frail doing what it is that frail humans do, which is significant to this story simply because it is another one of the worst things I’ve seen. (The red paper, for example, but the worst is at the end.)
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