by Todd Grimson
It didn’t take long to get to the hotel… but then, time was losing its normal relation to events. It was smoothing out, flashing with little subatomic suns and glares of light. Microscopic nebulae and mirrored moons that could have been streetlamps or reflections in the pupil of an eye floated, revolved.
The next thing she knew, in Room 421, the needle was dipping into her vein, waking her up in a hurry, the cocaine making her feel like she was going to die yet flooding her with a new electric life. Ooh… she felt so good… ummmmm…
There was an arrangement of one couple on the bed, another on the floor. Kit was fucking Jean for awhile, but he seemed more interested in mathematically changing positions than in giving himself time to come. He had instructed her, while she was undressing, to leave on the garter belt, seamed stockings and high heels.
Fawn had frizzy red pubic hair and freckles on her upper back and lower arms. The more intoxicated she got the more in evidence was her Southern drawl. She was from Vienna, she said. Vienna, Georgia.
The radio was on. With the strains of an orchestra in the background, an announcer was saying, “Direct from the beautiful Bamboo Room in the Hotel Belton… in the heart of beautiful downtown Des Moines…”
“The Bamboo Room?” exclaimed Harlow, laughing like a four-year-old, helplessly and unaffectedly, the cocaine giving her a feeling of indescribable giddiness and wellbeing. The wig had come off, and she told them a story about her head having been shaved a month ago in New York because she helped get some gangster out of town the local mob was looking to knock off… a few minutes later she said that she was married but her husband was in Sing Sing…
“Giddy-up. Come on, horsey.”
Jean rode around on Dirk’s back. He had a good body, something was said about him once having been a prize-fighter, he kept himself in good shape. He could maintain his erection, doing Harlow doggie-style while Kit sat in the green chair, watching, fondling the skull and hair of Fawn as she blew him, working like a pro.
The needle… drawing up blood, the spurt of red… and then pushing it back down into the chemistry of the body, exciting the nervous system like a disease, white death… red and black inside the veins, a hundred miles an hour—faster, faster…
Some kind of big swelling liquid warmth built within Harlow’s lower belly, her private parts, flooding her deepest reaches, the hole of love bleeding all through her sex and down through her legs, stiffening and straightening out her bones, making her cry out…she didn’t know what she was saying… speaking in tongues like a Baptist handling snakes… oh God… interior rush of a swift black sea. Cresting, foaming… submerging an entire continent … making it disappear just like that.
It was Kit’s idea for the two women to get together. Actually, neither Fawn nor Jean were all that crazy about each other: Fawn was jealous, and Jean either sensed this or reacted to something else; perhaps, simply, in contrast to her relations with men, she was just a snob, stuck-up about her looks, in any case, Fawn knew what to do. Even if she didn’t care for Jean, she knew how to make her feel good. She got a feeling of power from what gave her pleasure in return.
Harlow enjoyed being the star. When she was a child, raised by her doting, wealthy grandparents, they had called her “the Baby” until she was 11 or 12. She had been pampered and spoiled, protected from the world. Her hair and face and early development had set her apart, gave her the sense of being special, a soft-skinned princess living in Kansas like it was Oz.
A cigarette with a long ash dangled from Kit’s fingers, virtually unsmoked. Dirk put his hand up between Fawn’s thighs, getting his fingers sticky and wet with syrup from a berry pie.
Jean’s blonde hair was parted on the side, short and wavy but long enough to comb, and she wore dangly gold earrings and had on the typical amount of makeup, black-lined eyes and ruby-red kewpie-doll mouth… amidst so much warm sweating flesh.
She saw lights, little white lights as though the ceiling had opened up and the sky descended, violet-black background for sharp-pointed, electric, dazzling stars. She saw three concentric circles of white girls on their backs, seen from above like in a musical, their platinum heads close together, legs stretched out, separating in rhythm, opening and closing in the contraction and expansion of a muscle being stimulated through sensitized nerves… diamonds and stalactites of unmeltable ice, glistening, gleaming, glinting silver and white, here and there a glint of blinding gold, beginning to melt or dissolve as the plum-black darkness folded away in the heat of throbbing lights.
Kit looked at her, and she saw him, his features smearing, face falling apart, coming together again… and then he fucked her… like a killer… and then… or maybe later…
Glimpses: Kit was combing his hair in front of the mirror, pants on but no shirt, a scar on his back… while somewhere else… somewhere else… something was happening, some kind of heat was being generated someplace soft, everything was so soft and moist and soft…
Dark streets and cars. She dreamed that she was in the back of a speeding car, on the run from gangsters with machine-guns, she and her boyfriend the killer, looking out the rear window as the car sped down twisting, slanting hills of blue cement. It was all right, everything was excellent—even if they didn’t get away it would be perfectly fine. They were in the train station, hiding in the public restroom, and both the nasty gang and the mean stupid cops knew where they were. They kissed one last time, star-crossed lovers, then slit their wrists. It didn’t even hurt, it was a luxurious warm damp feeling like being a small child in the … endless dark.
Harlow awoke to find she’d wet the bed.
“Oh, God,” she said aloud, shading her eyes from the daylight. She didn’t know what time it was, what day, where she was exactly… She didn’t know anything. She didn’t move, lying there in her urine-soaked sheets as they gradually cooled and began to chafe.
Flat on her stomach. Left knee slightly bent, right cheek pressed to the mattress. It was daytime and she was all alone.
“Shit.”
She was completely naked. Her thighs hurt. She had a headache and a sore jaw, and she felt like she’d bitten her tongue.
After a while, still somewhat out of focus, she got up and washed her face. She looked out the window through the blinds, squinting to avoid the greenish dreary light. She wondered what time it was. Kit and the others were long gone.
It looked like they’d cleaned her out. All of her money was gone, her empty purse thrown on the floor. Her jewelry was gone also—even to the paste pearl necklace and earrings. Her fur coat, her blue dress and shoes.
She couldn’t cry. She wanted to, consciously, but her eyes stayed dry. She felt too much… too much like she’d anticipated the whole thing, like it had all been in the script.
The smell of urine was pretty strong. She took the sheets off the bed, and, embarrassed to have the maid know she’d peed them, put them in the bathtub to rinse out. She could do nothing about the mattress, she realized, but at least she would do what she could.
Getting the water running and doing something manual helped get her mind functioning, to some extent, even though she still felt under the influence of the residue of alcohol and drugs, she couldn’t clear her head…
She looked around, not really knowing what she was looking for, and suddenly knew that they’d stolen her wig. She started laughing. She wondered if they knew who she was, or if they’d been too dumb to figure it out. They could try to blackmail her, she supposed, but she wasn’t very worried about it. After all, her reputation was that of a slut, a hot number and all of that… The revelations of some grifters wouldn’t mean much, even supposing that anyone would listen. She wouldn’t give them a dime.
Jean washed herself, slowly and thoroughly, groaning gently at times, lost in basic animal life. The numbness was gradually wearing off, so that emotions came to her a little more directly than at second or third remove. She felt a kind of astonishment wrapped in gauze, a muffled or subdued fascination
with what she had done with herself: she thought she ought to feel more different than she in fact did.
And then, as she finally got up the nerve to call Arthur Landau, her agent, collect at his home – she felt somehow amused, she could hardly keep from laughing out loud as she put through the call.
She wanted Landau to wire her $500 via Western Union. He said he’d send her the Pullman fare back to Los Angeles plus $50, no more. Jean asked to speak to his wife, Beatrice, who she thought would be a softer touch.
“Of course,” she said to Arthur, “I guess if I really wanted to I could earn a couple hundred pretty easy, hardly working up a sweat.”
Landau digested this, then said: “All right, I’ll send you a hundred. I give in, okay, but only to stop you from talking like that.”
“Then make it the five,” she said, using her tough-girl voice. “Or do you want to hear about how much I’ve already given away for free?”
“Christ, Jean, what’s got into you? Be reasonable. You hurt me when you talk like that. I don’t like to think of you doing these things to yourself.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“No you don’t, but that’s not the point. Listen, I’ll have the ticket waiting for you at the Southern Pacific ticket office by this afternoon, all right? Beatrice and I will be here at the station when you get off.”
“Arthur, you listen. I want three hundred, or else forget the whole thing. I’m not kidding. I know a Mexican guy who wants to take me down to Tijuana, introduce me to some people down there. I told him I don’t tan, but he says I’ll never have to go outside again.”
“I’ll send you the money,” said Landau, and Jean felt bad about having pushed him but pleased he had given in. She tried to smooth things over. She promised to be good.
When she got off the phone, her mouth was so dry it felt as if all of her bodily fluids had dried up. As soon as the money came, she needed to get something good to drink. In the meantime, she settled for some water.
The Buck Rogers Disintegrator Ray Gun was on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up and pulled the trigger, aiming at the mirror, but the toy had been broken sometime during the night.
She bruised easily. There were blue and violet marks on her skin, as if she had been roughly handled. Her thigh-muscles were sore.
Now everything was gray. As it got darker, the gray would turn to black. Once vision became obsolete, the other senses would have to be developed to a higher level of sensitivity. Hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Eyes shut tight, groping about in the pitch black. A noise, a taste, a smell. The touch of the earth.
P NOT Q
IT WAS THE BEST job he had ever had. Way out in the middle of nowhere, in an underground lab beneath the desert—he didn’t know if the site was in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or Nevada… but it didn’t matter, because he had no desire whatsoever to come up out into the air.
Pavel was supposed to be in charge of security, and he slept there, surrounded by video monitors of the console. The place was incomplete, funding had never been approved to finish construction or fill in the rest of the staff. Pavel sat, looking off into the cool darkness of the huge chamber, his cot and hot plate on a raised platform in a warehouse-like space empty but for giant spools of cable, scaffolding, and wooden crates of unknowable equipment, and he petted his cat, drank his tea, and was content.
In another section, there was some activity, some scientists and scientific types, but Pavel rarely came in close contact with them. To take a shower or fetch food from the pantry, he had to go through their area, and he nodded at them, they knew who he was, but he was not here to socialize. He got enough of their conversation from the surveillance devices, voice-activated microphones, and the like.
For some reason, when the engineers had built the showers, they’d built them outscale, so that the cubicles were some 15 feet deep and the water cascaded down from 20 feet or so up in the air… although the controls had been installed at a reachable level, perhaps as a last-minute stopgap. Pavel loved these showers, loved the smooth turquoise tiles: it was the kind of shower in which sacrificial Aztec victims would have washed themselves, with aloe soap, before climbing the steps of the pyramid to joyfully give their red hearts to the beating sun.
He waited, sometimes, until he was pretty dirty, to make the clean feeling more intense. He and his cat, a Siamese, communicated by a rough telepathy—rough in that sometimes it did not work—and Pavel waited, the distant ceiling a hundred feet above his platform, no lights up there, waited as his animal stalked mice and other small prey. He had an arsenal, but he hadn’t cleaned any of the guns in months. He had submachine guns, tear-gas, stun-grenades, and a rocket-launcher he’d built from a kit.
He made no effort to keep track of the days and weeks and months. He read no books, magazines, or newspapers, listened to no radio, watched no television… unless, of course, his monitors counted as television… as no doubt they did, in some sense, as he did watch them, if intermittently and erratically… those images formed on his retina, and were registered there, and back on through the nervous circuitry into his brain—though to what end, or, if waiting for something, waiting for what, he could not have said.
He had his irregular routines. Certain tunnels to explore, leading off into the old mine shafts; his austere meals to prepare; his tea; his important naps; time spent following his cat about. Time was like a viscous clear fluid, and if specks of matter changed shadow or shape within this fluid, metabolizing or undergoing metamorphosis, still the fluid was indistinguishable from what it had been before, even if there seemed added some faint sense of flavor, or tang.
So, when the terminal suddenly came to life with a clatter and printed a message, Pavel wasn’t sure how to respond. Certainly he was prepared to obey, to run through the drill, whatever the drill might turn out to be, but there was a good moment during which it seemed he had forgotten how to read.
Then the message organized itself into: P NOT Q. ACTION TO TAKE: PICK UP SCHULTZ AT AIRPORT, 0900. QUERY?
He had none. Since it was not the Q protocol, there was really nothing to ponder. The next morning, he would have to ascend, and drive in. He could remember Schultz, just barely. There was no reason to set an alarm. At 0600 he was up and about. None of the scientific crew seemed to be awake.
He took the elevator to ground level, and was not surprised that the battery in the pickup truck was dead. He fixed this, filled up with gas, and set out. The sun was on the horizon, the morning sky lavender, leaving shadows of tangerine and rose upon the peach-hued landscape of sand, rock and dust. He left a big plume of dust behind him as he headed toward the mappable roads. When he pulled onto the well-worn asphalt highway his mind was clear and clean, he saw a big truck pulling a double silver trailer that said PIKE’S, and he went the other way, caught up in the minute, instantaneous tensions of driving, trying to drive rightly as if judged by some higher law of harmony between vehicle, traffic, and road.
Pavel witnessed an early-morning shining lake mirage, and this blended into a real memory, the first in a while… he was in the distant mountains at the festival of Gobardan, with its displays of colored lights and huge puppets, the children begging candy. If you didn’t have any, they would sing a jeering little song at you, and harass you as much as they could, tolerated and even abetted, with laughter, by the adults. The cattle were painted, and decorated with garlands of flowers. Many people wore elaborate animal masks, and took part in various dances and rites. There was one ceremony which had made a tremendous impression on Pavel—in a sense he had been trying to figure it out ever since. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. There was a young mother, incidentally pretty, nude, with short dark hair… and she was lying down, in good humor, her belly rubbed with crimson ochre, and she drew up her knees as a tame male roebuck came and stood there in front of her, in a symbolic position, and all of this was taking place in a cavern, lit by hundreds of candles, the walls painted with figures—Pavel could still re
member some of the music, the women’s chorus in the thin air outside, as they all came out, Pavel spellbound, under a baroque profusion of stars, all blinking and counterblinking, in clusters and bunches, lively and shining, and he had caught the eye of the girl, the young mother, her dark eyes had looked into his, he couldn’t hold her gaze and looked down to the shark’s-teeth necklace she was wearing, it couldn’t have been shark’s-teeth so far from the ocean, more likely wolf or panther—and somehow, witnessing the shining lake mirage and recalling the ceremony made him realize, today, that an intention, or capacity of intention, was forming within him, that the muscle of will’s contraction was all but spent, ready to spring back… and, alert, he caught a glimpse of a road-runner amid the flat sands and cacti, the spiky flowers and rock formations, rocks turning carnelian or dried-blood red with iron, greenish with malachite, gray or bleached like bones.
Civilization: telephone wires, power lines, road signs, the occasional service station, a billboard or two, more and more automobiles—Pavel saw that he was nearing the airport, outside the city, and he looked at his watch and saw that he was on time.
When Schultz deplaned, the last passenger to do so, Pavel nodded, and Schultz recognized him too. Schultz was a big, heavy man, with glasses, a round, almost piggish head, receding dark hair, and red, meaty lips which seemed to evidence a need to eat and drink and talk. He would not have been an attractive man to women, but he nevertheless held himself with a certain arrogance, or spoiledness; and Pavel had seen this type before.
Soon they were in the vehicle, heading for the project, and Schultz reached over to turn on the radio: a country weeper commenced. They continued, but in a few minutes Schultz interrupted Pavel’s reverie by a question.