Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “We’re going out on the town, Bilker,” RuthClaire said. “Set the security alarms, lock everything up, and don’t sweat the traffic around here. I’ll ask the Fulton County police to make extra tours of the neighborhood. I need an escort, Bilker. Mr. Loyd, my ex, already has a date.”

  Even in the garage, Bilker squinted. “To where, ma’am?”

  “Sinusoid Disturbances. Wear some struttin’ duds, okay?”

  “For a trip to the doctor. Whose sinus trouble is it, anyway, yours or—” He jerked a thumb at me, unable to speak my name aloud.

  “Informal clothes, Bilker. Don’t worry about a thing tonight. Tonight’s for fun.”

  The Blaus arrived at a quarter past seven. David had dressed like a painter, not the beret-and-palette, but the extension-ladder-and-gallon-bucket, kind. His wife, Evelyn, although at least forty, wore a little girl’s party gown and patent-leather shoes with buckles. The Blaus liked costumes, obviously.

  Caroline Hanna, as good as her word, pulled up in front of the house at seven-thirty, in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. I helped her out, and the small boy in me responded approvingly to her neat, fairly conservative clothes. Her skirt, a beige wraparound belted with a chain similar to the hinged necklace still at her throat. Her jersey had stylized chevrons on its three-quarter-length sleeves, giving her the look of a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I walked her to the porch to meet the others.

  T. P., who was going with us, was natty in white shorts and a T-shirt with a polka-dot bow tie printed on the material. He reached for Caroline. She took him from Bilker and jogged him in her arms. Bilker looked relieved. After a bit more small talk, we split up for the drive to Sinusoid Disturbances, the Blaus taking their car and Bilker assuming my Mercedes’s wheel to chauffeur the rest of us.

  The sidewalk in front of Sinusoid Disturbances angled by at a daunting grade. As we drove past looking for a parking spot, I wondered if the bistro’s patrons had to walk around inside the club like sheep on a hillside, struggling not to topple. No one would ever mistake the crumbling, two-story building for Caesar’s Palace.

  “Uh, what kind of crowd do they get here?” Caroline asked.

  “A pretty weird mix, David says,” RuthClaire replied, her arms on the seat back. “Tech students, punk rockers, Atlanta College of Art attendees. It’s mostly the last group that gets off on Fire Sine Fridays. Some of the punks’ll go along with it, too, but the Tech students—the men, anyway—have a tendency to disrupt things.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Oh, it’s not so terrible. David sees the disruptions as part of the spectacle.”

  Bilker, stymied in his efforts to find a parking space, let us all out in front of the nightclub. A boy with an oversized safety pin through his cheek opened the front door for Caroline, who was carrying T. P. for RuthClaire. This door was a slab of stained oak with a window of amber glass featuring a sine-curve pattern etched into it in spooky crimson. I thanked the boy for his courtesy, and he replied, almost as if he were human, “You’re welcome.” Then the door shut behind us, and darkness settled upon our gingerly stepping group like a coffin lid. Criminy, I thought.

  But RuthClaire, who had my arm, directed Caroline and me to a teller’s cage from which a reddish glow emanated. We were in a foyer of some kind, and at the cage I bought four admissions from a woman in cutoff jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt—after the punk at the door, a paragon of Middle American normality.

  A few more steps put us on a concrete landing just beyond the foyer. Concrete steps descended from the landing to the floor, twelve feet down, or you could squeeze along the outside wall of the ticket cage to a mezzanine that projected from the bistro wall paralleling the interstate highway outside. Chairs and circular tables crowded both the mezzanine and the main floor below, and almost all of this furniture had the look of radioactive wrought iron.

  Higher than the mezzanine level on the club’s uphill side was a control booth for Sinusoid Disturbances’s lead disc jockey. It had champagne-tinted Plexiglas windows, and a big, acorn-shaped flasher that whipped strobes of blue and white light around the interior. Loud music played, and below us, flailing away in the noise storm, jitterbugged a host of damned-looking human wraiths. T. P. was as awe-stricken, or as horrified, as I. He clung to Caroline as if she might toss him over the rail into the cobalt chaos of the pit. RuthClaire pointed out a table on the club’s far side, next to the projecting runway of the stage on which live entertainers would perform, and said David had reserved it for us.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Backstage with Evelyn. They’re setting up. It’s probably going to be another thirty or so minutes before they come on.”

  A trio of dubious humanoids brushed past us on the way downstairs. One of them bumped me in the back. Her hairdo was by the très chic team of Friar Tuck and Bozo the Clown, but she hurriedly swung about to apologize. “It’s okay,” I said, startled by the depth of her anxiousness. “That kidney never worked very well, anyway.”

  “Oh, no! I really did hurt you!”

  I assured her that I was fine, that my allusion to a disabled kidney had been meant as a joke. But even in retreat the girl apologized, and soon Caroline and RuthClaire were laughing. “What the hell was that all about?” I asked them.

  “Really, it’s not about anything,” RuthClaire said. “David says this is the only part of the country where kids who go punk forget to stop saying please and thank you. It’s a cultural thing. Atlanta’s punks are polite.”

  “All of them?”

  “A lot of them. That one seemed to want to make up for those who aren’t.”

  Caroline shifted T. P. from one hip to the other. He waved a fist in time to the music, his head ticktocking—the sort of repetitive actions that wear out a person holding a child. RuthClaire noticed and took T. P. from Caroline, and we waited on the landing until Bilker swaggered up behind us. His gait seemed designed to intimidate anyone who took exception to his string tie or his undisguised contempt for Sinusoid Disturbances. Under his tan jacket (whose maroon back vents occasionally opened out like the gills of a gasping bass), he wore, I knew, his Ruger.

  On duty. Ready for action. Anticipating the heat.

  A little melodramatic, I thought again. Bilker clearly envisioned himself a latter-day Rooster Cogburn charging in single-handedly to rout the bad guys.

  Once on the main floor, I saw that some of the club’s patrons were not flamboyant punks but intelligent young men and women of student age. I was probably the oldest person on the premises. I felt a tad more comfortable here, among the kids wearing neat and modish clothes, but I was still a relic among these bionic space babies. Then the music stopped, and Bilker allowed that the only thing any noisier he had ever heard was a dusk-to-dawn mortar attack on his barracks near Da Nang. He was a country-music fan, a devotee of the no-nonsense article spun out by Roy Acuff and George Jones. Groups like the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama soured his stomach. The former did too many cutesy-poo songs, and the latter, God save their souls, he’d once seen at a country music festival wearing short pants—short pants, for pity’s sake. That was okay on a cookout, mebbe, but not on grown men making their living in front of the public.

  I’d never heard Bilker do so much talking. Through his tirade, I held Caroline’s hand, pinning it to my knee under the tabletop. Then the club’s DJ spoke, and the sound system permitted his words to reverberate over our heads like an articulate siren:

  “Welcome to another Fire Sine Friday at Sinusoid Disturbances, culture freaks! Comin’ atcha from his plastic cloud is Hotlanta’s answer to that silver-tongued sweetie in the White House, Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman! Ol’ Bitsy’s here to ease the strain ’twixt donkeys and heffalumps, honkies and cooler cats, menfolks and ladies fair, hetero and homo pairs, an’—Lawd have mercy, y’all!—’twixt your ever-lovin’ bodies and your ever-livin’ SOOOOOUULS!” This last word stretched out until it had five or six syllables and the pitch of a
freight-train whistle.

  The curtains on stage parted, and the Moog-warped melody of an old standard set to a fusion-rock beat surged back and forth through the bistro. Seven well-endowed young women in body stockings pranced into view, tossing their heads, rotating their arms, and trying very hard to unsocket their pelvises.

  “Prepare yourselves, culture freaks,” cried Bitsy Vardeman from aloft, “for a little heartstoppin’ boola-boola from Ess Dee’s very own sultry and sensual ballet corps, the Impermanent Wave Dancers!” The Impermanent Wave Dancers did twenty minutes of gymnastic splits, leaps, and buttock-flinching to louder and louder rock music. Bilker watched with the same clinical aloofness with which a police officer might watch a fight between pit bulls. T. P. clapped his hands. Caroline’s attitude was harder to gauge: a distrustful kind of wonder, maybe.

  RuthClaire shouted, “David hates this, but it always gets a Friday-night crowd to pay a three-dollar cover for an evening of performance art!”

  Finally, after a raucous eternity, the dancers departed, and Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman announced, “Okay, babies, here tonight from Abraxas, Atlanta’s Hall of Miracles and Mirages, David Blau and the Blau Blau Rebellion! Give ’em a hand, culture freaks! I say now, Give ’em a hand!” Applause was sparse, and the darkness that had fallen after the dancers’ exit persisted. Some students near us began to grumble.

  Eventually, though, David Blau’s voice spoke from behind the sequined curtain: “Let there be light!” Obligingly, Vardeman spotlighted the curtain, which parted to reveal a huge black tarp suspended like a movie screen at the stage’s rear. Blau, in his house painter’s costume, walked forward from the back, stopped on the edge of the projecting runway, and stared soulfully out over the heads of his audience.

  “And Adam knew Eve,” he declared in actorish tones. “And knew her, and knew her, and knew her. And so the generations of Adam evolved. They evolved, my friends, toward the many likenesses of God you see sitting at tables all around you.”

  An unexpected blackout.

  In this darkness, everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances could hear some hurried but efficient-sounding rolling noises. Then the footlights came on, and we could see a group of two-dimensional cardboard figures on wheels lined up in front of the tarp. Each cutout depicted a different representative of five early hominid species. The figures to the left looked noticeably more apelike than those to the right—although, anomalously, the figure in the middle had the most brutish physique. The oddest thing about the cutouts was that through holes corresponding to the figures’ mouths, there hung limp blue balloons. Suddenly, all five balloons inflated, obscuring the painted faces behind them, and each balloon jiggled against the head of its cutout as if yearning to escape skyward. Because of the frank frontal nudity of the five hominids, this was an especially ludicrous sight, and many of the kids around us sniggered.

  A man of Oriental descent stepped out from behind the figure on the far left. “Australopithecus afarensis,” he said. As soon as he had spoken, he reached behind his cutout, and the balloon hiding its face floated straight up, four feet or so, and bobbed to a standstill on its string.

  Pam Sorrells’s head appeared above that of the second figure in the line. “Australopithecus africanus,” she said. Its balloon also climbed ceilingward, halting about a foot above the balloon of the A. afarensis cutout.

  Then David Blau peeked mischievously from behind the third figure. “Australopithecus robustus,” he said. The balloon attached to this cutout—the most massively built of the five—ascended barely over a foot. The incongruity of the balloon’s brief ascent, after the audience had been led to expect something else, provoked laughter—as did the creature’s resemblance to a squat, semi-naked gorilla.

  Evelyn Blau popped up behind the fourth figure. This one bore an uncanny and obviously deliberate likeness to RuthClaire’s Adam. Said Evelyn distinctly, “Homo habilis.” The helium-filled balloon in front of this cutout’s face rose to a height of six or seven feet.

  A black man in painter’s coveralls—a young artist with a studio at Abraxas—stepped from behind the final cutout. He said, “Homo erectus.” The balloon belonging to this creature, the tallest and most human-looking of the lot, floated upward a foot higher than the habiline’s, and the black man strolled to the stage’s apron, looked out, spread his arms, and haughtily said, “Homo sapiens sapiens.” Man the wise the wise: the culmination of God’s evolutionary game plan.

  From the pocket of his coveralls, this man took a pellet pistol, an act that prompted Bilker Moody to reach for the shoulder harness under his coat, but RuthClaire patted his wrist and shook her head. Meanwhile, the performance artist with the pellet gun turned toward the cutouts, aimed his weapon, and, squeezing off a shot, popped the balloon belonging to A. afarensis. The cutout’s human attendant rolled it off-stage. Then the nonchalant black man popped the balloons of the remaining hominid cutouts, giving the person behind each figure just enough time to push it into the wings before firing at the next balloon. When he finished, he pocketed his weapon, walked to the Homo erectus cutout, and, like a hotdog vendor pushing a cart in Manhattan, guided the last of the extinct hominids into the wings.

  Blackout.

  A bewildered silence gripped everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances. Someone—a football player from Tech?—shouted, “What the fuckin’ hell was that supposed to mean?” Others at their tables began to boo, a din that swept tidally from one end of the club to the other. Some of the art students near us, though, were on their feet applauding and shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!”

  Bitsy Vardeman averted a donnybrook by spinning Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” a hit even before Adam’s appearance at Paradise Farm. Many in the audience clapped their hands, sang along, and boogied around their tables.

  The lights in the club came up full, and all five members of the Blau Blau Rebellion were revealed on stage, each one clutching a bouquet of ten or fifteen lighter-than-air balloons. David, Evelyn, and their fellows handed the balloons to various people in the crowd, beckoning folks toward the stage or ambling out the runway to make the transfer. T. P. stood up in RuthClaire’s lap, his arm stretched out for a balloon. Pam Sorrells, I saw, was coming down the runway toward us, Sister Sledge continuing to chant the lyrics of their repetitive anthem and dozens upon dozens of people now surging forward to intercept Pam.

  “Remember,” she cried over the music, “don’t take one unless you believe—”

  “Believe what?” a male student shouted.

  “Unless you believe you’re immortal! And if you take one, don’t let it pop!”

  “Why the hell not?” shouted the same young man, who had cleared a path to the end of the runway.

  Pam replied, “Because if you let it pop, you’ll die.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “This is your soul. If you let it pop, you’ll die within three days.”

  “Bullshit!”

  David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro, “It isn’t bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for it and lets it pop, well, you’ll blow away on the wind as if you never existed.”

  The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of effect—just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of those who had come forward for balloons. David had uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired result: an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who ordinarily took pride in their hardnosed pragmatism. Even I found myself believing David’s weird formula. Some folks backed away, others shoved forward to replace the faint-hearted. T. P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon.

  “Hunh,” he said, almost toppling from RuthClaire’s arms. “Hunh, hunh, hunh!”

  “Go get him one,” Caroline Hanna urged me.

  Pam Sorrells had just about given out all her balloons, while the black man who had shot out the bobbing souls of the cardboard hominids was distributing his dwindling supply on the runway’s opposite s
ide.

  “That’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “Bilker’ll get him a balloon.”

  “No, ma’am. I got other work.”

  “I’ll do it, then,” Caroline said.

  “You’ll get an elbow in the lip,” I warned her.

  Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail creature in a vest lacing across her midriff, she extended her arms to T. P., who went to her as if she were an old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the kid to the newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as to humor T. P. “I’ll get him a b’loon,” the girl growled, screwing up one eye to look at my godson at such close range. “Friend a mine round there’s got one awready. He don’ want it. I’ll give it to your nipper. Be rat back.” She sounded as if she had a mouthful of cornmeal. Half stupefied by surprise, half grateful to her for calming the baby, we watched as she backed away to fetch the “b’loon” from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move her feet.

  Then Bilker awoke: “Hey, wait a minute!”

  “I think it’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “She seemed familiar. She’ll get Paulie a balloon and bring him back in a better temper.”

  “I’d better go after her,” Bilker said.

  Something in me was belatedly alerted to the situation’s queerness. “Look, Bilker, you stay with RuthClaire and Caroline. I’ll go after her.”

  “What’s the matter?” Caroline grabbed my arm. Patrons near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were no more useful as markers than clouds.

  “I think I know her,” I said, shaking free. “That’s what’s wrong.” I plunged past Bilker, rebounded off a Tech student heading for the stage, squirmed through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled around the end of the runway. Spotlights continued to rake the club’s interior, and behind me RuthClaire cried in anguish, “Paulie!”