Izzy and the Father of Terror

by Eliot Fintushel

  Izzy and the Father of Terror

  Eliot Fintushel

  Eliot Fintushel

  Izzy and the Father of Terror

  First appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 1997. Nominated for Best Novella.

  He who feels punctured

  Must once have been a bubble.

  -Lao Tze (trans. Witter Bynner)

  One

  1. A Hole in My Mind

  I was thumbing through New Mexico with nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in with a shaman named Shaman who pricked a hole in my mind. A little prick it was, but everything gushed in through it, and everything spilled out. Suddenly, I could not tell the difference between myself and others or between my body and the rest of the world.

  "Don’t be afraid, Mel," Shaman said. I was very afraid. We were sitting inside a long canvas tent, the communal kitchen of the Space People. All the other Space People were asleep. They had picked me up outside of Albuquerque and driven me out onto the desert to their little spread. Because Shaman liked me, they had picked me up. Even though there were Chicanos in those days who hated hippies, who conned their way into communes and shot them up, and I am as dark-skinned and small as a Mexican, they had picked me up.

  It was dark in the tent. Flaps open, stars filled the big triangles at either end; feeble candlelight unsealed the night between us, loud with cicadas and dead souls crying. There was a votive candle in a shot glass on the dirt floor. Rococo shadows angled and sprawled across chairs, long table, canvas, and ourselves.

  "You’ve broken me." The words jumped where my bones should be. Something in me arched and bristled like a frightened cat. Were the words mine?

  Shaman took them for mine. "I’m you," he said. Incomprehensible. "Relax."

  I left that place. I left the Space People sleeping. I left Shaman with his kit of tropes that killed or cured or pricked your mind and left you to bleed to death or to drown in the world’s blood, bleeding into you through a tiny hole. The last thing I saw there was the candle flame reflected in Shaman’s eyes, two little flames dwindling as I stumbled out into the desert, out into stars and the cries of cicadas and dead souls, which might have been my tongue, my voice, my limbs, or my self, since Shaman had pricked a hole in my mind.

  2. Talk with a Joshua Tree

  I had a talk in the dark with a Joshua tree. I said, "Everything’s okay. I have a mother in New York. I have brothers and a sister. My father left us, but he’s still in my mind. In there, I can see the faces of all the people in my life, I know the names of everything, and no one on Earth would disbelieve me." The Joshua tree was unconvinced. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face. I stood there, out of sight of any highway, lost to the Space People, stars in my skin. Someone had just spoken. It might have been the Joshua tree. It might have been the sand.

  3. Izzy

  Finally, tears gushed. I was sitting on a curb by the highway before dawn. I was dawn, not quite risen over a small, dark man on a desert highway. I was a pool of tears splash-fed by a biped above my gutter. I was a tremble, a sob, a cicada, a dead soul listening in. I don’t know what I was. I was a car coming, high beam illumining tear-slicked face, driver coming in earshot of moaning figure, alone in the desert, in the dark.

  The car stopped a few yards past me, then purred back. The passenger door flung open, and a man leaned out, balding, single-browed, a skinny man with a nasal accent: "Get in, Jack. We ain’t got all day."

  I smelled jasmine, sweet and piercing. Inside, beneath a red tassel hanging from the rearview, a small soapstone elephant was lit by the map light above the dash. My tusks curled into the tangle of threads. I had many arms. In my hands were medicine bottles, knives, diamonds, skulls, crushed demons, and snakes. A naked woman scissored me.

  I was sitting in Ganesha’s lap. My legs embraced the elephant’s hips. My heels massaged his buttocks. My nipples rubbed his chest. I smiled, but held my lips enticingly distant. The Indian behind the wheel stroked my back.

  Or perhaps I was from Pakistan. I was irritated at Izzy. I, the driver, said, "If I had wanted like this, I would have stayed at my motel, Izzy. Do we have to pick up everybody?"

  "Exactly, Sarvaduhka," One-brow shot back. "That’s who this piece of merchandise is: everybody! Ain’t you, Jack?"

  I pulled my sleeve across my face to erase the tears. The car, a warm shell of light, seemed heaven, but I couldn’t find where to say yes from. When I tried to speak, the car door groaned instead. It closed. I was inside, in front, squeezed between the door and the man with one long eyebrow. "How did you know?" I tried to say; instead, the sun rose.

  4. Relic Background Radiation

  Sarvaduhka pressed a button, and there was the United States of America: news, music, tractor pull ads?"SUNDAYYYYYY!"?static, evangelist patter, a song by Johnny Abilene…

  There’s a splash across the southern sky

  Named "I love you-oo!"

  And I know just what a big man

  Ought to do-yodelayhee-do.

  I’m sorry I left you somewhere in the blue-boo-hoo-hoo

  With your mama singing lullabies to baby-boo…

  … used automobiles, paid political announcements, weather reports…

  "Wait a damn minute," Izzy said. "Turn it back to the Haymakers, Duke. I wanna hear that song."

  "Haymakers, Izzy?"

  "Gimme that." He pushed Sarvaduhka’s hand away and manned the radio dial himself. I felt as if someone were reaming my navel. The smears of sound as the needle skimmed the tuner scale were gurgles of cud surging up my throat. Finally he found it. There were the slightly off-key notes and bad mixing that signal a live performance:

  I’m gonna bring you right back some day.

  Though you may be far away,

  I can always pull a little stunt

  That the folks call "epoche"

  "Epoche?" Sarvaduhka took his eyes off the road?me, a flat, black triangle long as the desert, wide as the squareback here, beetling to a point out there, and dotted with my Bott’s dot vertebrae?to frown at Izzy. "Did the Haymaker say epoche, Izzy?"

  "Shut up! I gotta hear this."

  Take a long lost dad’s advice:

  Though yore mama’s Guldang nice,

  Save a little bit of love for yodelodelayhee-me!

  Just then Izzy’s beeper went off. I’d never seen one before. I don’t think anyone had at that time. But Izzy’s was beeping. "Not good," he said. He pulled it out of his belt, then held it up close. "Four degrees Kelvin. Shit. It’s up a whole degree. He’s actually tried it."

  "Tried what?"

  "Epoche, for crissakes. What have we been talking about?salami? Sarvaduhka, who’s President?"

  "McCarthy. Why?"

  "McCarthy? Still? What color is the American flag?"

  "Red, white, and yellow."

  "Unchanged. Okay. This wasn’t the big one. He didn’t manage it. And Mel’s still here beside us. Okay. Good. We got time. Johnny’s out looking, and we’re in the pink. I’m taking a nap."

  "Wait. What is four degrees that was three before?"

  "Relic background radiation, Savvy. I never told you this? It’s like a pilot light. It flares up when somebody does an epoche. It didn’t work though. I’m taking a nap." Brooking no protest, Izzy turned off the radio and scooted down in his seat.

  "I am driving with a mad man, and still no female action."

  5. The Temporary

  Thoughts smoked from my skin.

  "Is he a werewolf, Izzy?" Sarvaduhka whispered.

  Izzy said, "Let me snooze."

  I squeezed Mel’s eyes shut to keep from slashing too brutally the delicate inner membrane, with my light. Rising open-armed before Sarvaduhka
’s VW Squareback heading east out of Albuquerque, I bathed them, squinting in the munificence and splendor, till Izzy yanked down the visors.

  "Snooze, he wants to snooze!" Sarvaduhka said. "Snooze, Izzy, but when do I get my female action? Everything you want to do, we do. Now we have the boy and you are satisfied. But I still have no female action. I never should have left my videos." He pinched a cone of incense from a slot under the ashtray, stuffed it into a compartment in Ganesha’s back, and lit it clumsily with a cheap butane lighter. Smoke spouted from Ganesha’s trunk.

  "You horny bastard," Izzy grumbled, "didn’t I tell you, you get some nooky in Memphis? We gotta finish with the kid first, but I’m too tired now. I gotta cop some Z’s, Sergeant Ducky. Can you clam it?"

  I was terrified. A slug in the kill jar?the sting of jasmine like carbon tetrachloride?I curled away from Izzy’s body, my skin electric with loathing. He yawned and stretched. His arm looped across my shoulders. His head lolled against my chin. The feel of that clammy bald spot. I tried to be the sun, huge, distant, omnipotent.

  Through the hole in my mind images stuttered: Mayan priest pederasts; surgeons, masked and gloved, their hands in my bowels; Shaman shaking and shaking his head; the Space People, the desert, my father?Run! "Please let me out," I said, one of me.

  "Shit!" said Izzy. "I forgot this happens." He stopped the hole with his finger.

  How did you do that? He didn’t hear me.

  "Savvy, stop the car," said Izzy One-brow. Sarvaduhka groaned and pulled onto the shoulder. "We get no rest until he’s cauterized."

  I felt as if I were being buried alive. The sudden constriction, even though it produced a more normal-sized, more workable mind, was suffocating. Izzy amputated the world. As soon as the car stopped, he pushed open the door and shoved me out. He fell out on top of me, wrestled me down. "Sarvaduhka!" he shouted. "Help me."

  "Is this legal?" the Indian said. I heard his door open, then slam shut. He was pressing me down. I was scrambling and wheezing after something like breath or like my name, or else I was trying to cough it up. My name, too small for me, was wedged in my windpipe. Izzy was butterfly-bandaging Shaman’s hole. Or plugging it. Or welding it. Or sewing it closed.

  "This is just a temporary," he said.

  I coughed up my name. "I’m Mel Bellow!" I said, astonished, I who had been the sun, the sky, Ganesha’s shakti, wind-blown sand.

  "We know who the hell you are," Izzy said. "You left home the day after the US pulled out of Vietnam and President McCarthy ended the draft, May 6, 1970, right? Happens to be one of my bench marks. No more sitting by the mailbox chewing on your lottery number, right, Mel? Slam goes the door. Up goes the thumb. Izzovision, case you’re wondering."

  "Izzy, be civil. He is traumatized," Sarvaduhka clucked.

  "Sure," said Izzy. Now I could see he was sweating, exhausted, still straddling me on all fours. His sweat fell into my eyes and made me blink. I knew which one of us I was! He said, "I’m Izzy. This guy here is Mr. Sarvaduhka, the motel mogul. We’re pleased to make your acquaintance. Now let’s haul ass back into the vehicle, because we got a lot of miles to cover before we hit the launch site, and the Duke is hot for nooky."

  6. Certain Responsibilities Accrue

  "My name is Izzy Molson," he told me over watery coffee from a machine at a rest stop outside Amarillo. Sarvaduhka was looking at magazines. "Some people think I’m psychic, other people think I’m psycho, but I’m here to tell you that I’m just an ordinary Joe with his ear to the ground. I’m currently employed at the Gibson plant in Lockport, New York, setting up tool machines, which I got because I lied about my medical history, which you would too if you had a back like mine, and I’d appreciate it in consideration of which, if you didn’t wrestle me quite so vicious next time I do you a favor."

  "Sorry." I sipped my coffee slowly, just to feel the warmth spread, like dye staining the part of my world that was me.

  "Forget it. Anyways, I happen to be able to see inside things, like your noggin for example, past, present, and future, regardless of distance?sometimes. Certain responsibilities accrue. Which is why I am spending half of this vacation, which I only get two weeks of at my present level of seniority at Gibson, and my next vacation also, when it comes up, on you. Gawd, I guess there’s no limit to how bad you can make a cup of goddamned coffee." He wrinkled his nose and swallowed the rest of it at a gulp. Then he squashed the Styrofoam and threw it down with a shiver.

  "Spending your vacations on me? What’s going on? A guy did something to my mind…"

  "Shaman."

  "Yes! Then you fixed me somehow. That’s all I know."

  "How can you drink that stuff so easy? You look like you like it! You know, you can tell a lot about various civilizations by the kind of coffee they put up with; that’s what I find… Listen to me. Shaman is trying to set you up to be his pabulum, Mel boy."

  "He wants to eat me?"

  "Yes, Mel, he wants to eat you, farm you and eat you. He’s tired of hunting and gathering, let’s say. He’s been living catch-as-catch-can for five, six thousand years, and now he wants to cultivate, raise a family, like. Between you and me, he doesn’t know what he’s in for in that department, but try to get Shaman to listen to my say-so.

  "Now, I’m just a little guy, see, but we can play the star guys off against him, because they want you back on Sanduleak."

  "Ah."

  "Listen. Shaman’s gotta start fertilizing now to plant seeds next year and harvest the year after that, when his larder gets echoey. This is why I have committed two vacations, though God knows there are things I’d rather be doing, named Fay in East Tonawanda. You kapeesh, Old Lower Forty?"

  "Why do I believe you’re not crazy?"

  "It is written."

  7. Shaman’s Farm

  Many things were written of which I was unaware then, but where I now live, folks know everything. Time flows differently two hundred thousand light-years from my old galaxy. I look up at the sky from Sanduleak, rotating five times a second, and I see there the histories of all the worlds, compiled by epoche…

  Shaman chose the womb of a twentieth century North American woman to be born from. Egyptians, he had found, were too hard to proselytize, Indians too easy, Japanese too slavish, Australians too anarchic, but the American bourgeoissie?perfect. He magnetized their children, told them tales of Pharaohs and extraterrestrials, himself always in the middle, Tuthmosis, seed of Chephren, son of the Great Sphinx. Compare Chephren’s statue and the Sphinx: were not their faces the same? Anciently, as Tuthmosis, he had excavated and restored the man-lion from the stars.

  To prove it, he brought down lightning, made stars dance, grew younger instead of older, humped or killed, without compunction, everyone, high and low, male or female, drawing his strength, he declared, from the Father of Terror, Abu al-Hawl, the Great Sphinx. He visited the Father of Terror yearly, in El Giza. Travel was difficult, but he had an easier way in mind, more present and more permanent. That is why he gathered his Space People. That is why he drilled a hole in my mind. Many holes he drilled, to no effect, in many souls: the Space People. But at the bottom of the hole in my mind he glimpsed Abu.

  8. Oil of Cloves

  "What do I do? What am I supposed to do? You haven’t told me anything!"

  They were pulling away, about to leave me at the rest stop. Sarvaduhka’s squareback screeched to a stop, sending a cloud of dust back into my face. I ran to Izzy’s window. Sarvaduhka was gritting his teeth and peevishly chanting, "Female action, female action, Izzy. This is what you promised me. This is what my vacation is about. Female action, female action, female action."

  "Never mind Sergeant Ducky," Izzy told me through the window. "Jeez! We’ll see you next year. You’ll live till then, don’t worry. I plugged you; that’s all I do this time. Just remember, that thing is a temporary. If you start to feel pressure… what can I say? Oil of cloves? The Lord’s Prayer? My hands are tied, kid. I gotta be back at the plant in a few
days or they’ll fire my ass, and kimosabe here still has to get his damned female action, and guess what: I just got this. The North Vietnamese just overran the South. A rout. It’s all over. Keep this in mind, Mel. It’s a good bench mark. Next year we’ll plow you up and sow salt, don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna farm you."

  They were speeding away down the on ramp. The sun was so hot, everything was white. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. I stared at the place where Izzy had been, until my neck got sore. Then I headed back toward the vending machines and rest rooms.

  9. Duck-Rabbit

  They came back, not in person, but on the juke box. The juke box was in a cafe on the westbound side of the highway. Once I had urinated, there was nothing further to impel me in any direction whatever. So I wandered across the glass-shelled pedestrian overpass, still dizzied by the physical sensation of something (my piss) actually leaving my body; I had contained everything for nearly twelve hours.

  There was a juke box at every table. I sat down at the nearest one and fished out a quarter I’d never had. I pushed my quarter into the slot and pressed A-1, "If You Want Some Food for Thought, Take a Bite of This," by Johnnie Abilene and the Haymakers. Out came Izzy.

  "Put your tongue back in your mouth, Mel, this is not a drug experience," he said. Everyone kept right on eating, while Izzy’s voice spilled from the jukes. A lean, sunburned trucker with faded tattoos on each bicep was drinking coffee in front of me, staring meditatively into his own cigarette smoke. A few tables bubbled with tourist families, whom every twang and gewgaw set chattering. A very fat old hippie in tie-dyes and cut-offs walked in and leaned against the mother juke near the cashier; he scanned the listings, the families, the trucker, and me. Nobody but me heard Izzy.