Izzy and the Father of Terror

by Eliot Fintushel

  "Can you hear me?" I whispered into the Wurlitzer.

  "No," he said, and laughed. From the left speaker?Izzy was in stereo?I heard an angry cadence, Sarvaduhka’s. "Okay, okay," Izzy told him, "I’ll be nice. I couldn’t help myself." Then to me: "The guy that just walked in, the zaftiger in flip-flops, he’s from Sanduleak, but he’s on our side. Just be careful about giving him anything of yours." Static. "… in Memphis, I told you. Give me a break, Vaduhka; this is intergalactic stuff here for crissakes and after all you said and done, put me flat out on the run, now you think you got a mess of love to shove in my face?well, take a bite of this!" It was Johnny Abilene. Izzy’s voice was swallowed into the pedal string guitar. I seemed to get a whiff of Sarvaduhka’s jasmine, then nothing. The Haymakers.

  The big man came to my table. "Mind if I sit down here?" I shrugged. He sat. Maneuvering into the chair, he had to push against the next table to accommodate his gut.

  The table slid back into the tattooed trucker. "Hey!"?as his coffee splashed onto the table.

  "Sorry," my Sanduleak contact said, turning meekly.

  "Just watch it, okay?" The trucker threw a napkin onto the spill, then lapsed back into samadhi.

  "Sure. Sorry." My hippie turned back to me. "What’s your name? I’m Gypsy. I’m waiting for my sister, is all. She’s in the head. She takes a long time, I don’t know why; she just always does. What did you say your name was?"

  "Mel," I said. There was a floating astigmatism, like a skyflower before me, the kind that is pushed away by one’s looking, so it’s never quite in focus. At first I thought it was in my field of vision, but the more I tried to sweep it to center stage, the more I realized it was a sort of thought. A name on the tip of one’s tongue. A half-remembered face. An inkling, an intimation, but of nothing.

  It was Izzy’s temporary. My mind-tongue stroked and stroked it with instinctive curiosity, like leukocytes casing a virus, something hard and foreign patching my mind.

  "You’re looking at my beard," the Sandulean said. "Is there something stuck in it?"

  Stroked and stroked it. My father was in there, Gone Joe. Stroking and stroking Izzy’s amalgam, it was Gone Joe’s fingers I stroked with. He was digging his fingers into Izzy’s bung, trying to flee my mind; the rest of him had vanished when I was two, left Mom and me at the gift shop in Niagara Falls. Only this shade remained behind, Gone Joe’s shade feeling guilty in the mind of his abandoned son.

  If you fiddle with the tracking on a VCR, sometimes you can see another movie just under the one you’ve been watching. It flirts between the scenes, steals outlines, blurs faces, commandeers bits of dialogue, makes a lawn into a lake, a domestic comedy into a primeval horror?duck-rabbit. Gone Joe’s old, blue watch cap wanted to preempt Gypsy’s beard.

  "Did I get some butter in there or something? Robins lay an egg? What?"

  "No. Sorry. You’re from Sanduleak, right?"

  Gypsy’s jaw dropped. I mean, it really dropped; it hit his sternum, then sprang back, like a bungee jumper. The whole thing took maybe two seconds, during which I glimpsed Gypsy’s real body. In there, behind the phony jaw, a yellow snake bristled and shifted. There was a gasp from one of the tourist tables, babble, then hush. Gypsy stood; his hams shoved back the trucker’s table.

  "Goddamnit, you fat slug!" The trucker slammed down his coffee and stood up. Gone Joe had penetrated the seam up to his elbows.

  "I’m terribly sorry," Gypsy said. "I’m just fat, see? I’m big. I’m clumsy. I can’t help it."

  I could see the trucker’s face cloud. It was a new one on him. He paused. He frowned. He said, "Ain’t you got no pride whatsoever?" He sat down again and mopped up spilled coffee with another paper napkin. He cussed under his breath, then said, "Just be careful, get it?"

  "I get it," Gypsy said. "Thank you very much."

  "What in the goddamned State of Texas you thanking me for, fat boy?"

  "Here’s my sister, Nora," Gypsy said to me, sotto voce. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life came right up to our table. She stood there next to Gypsy, with her hip in the cleft of Gone Joe’s chin. She looked impellingly familiar, but I was drawing a blank; whatever she had been to me was occluded by a sliver from Izzy’s bung.

  10. What It Feels Like to Be an Angel

  Even the trucker had to stop mopping and look. How could a brother like that have a sister like that? It wasn’t her cup size or complexion. Oh, she was pretty. She was very pretty, in a domestic sort of way. She wore boot jeans and a large T-shirt. Her hair was a tangle of brown cascading halfway down her back, with here and there a strand of silver. Her mouth was wide, the lips full, her dark eyes clear and intense. Her face was washed by sorrow, like a stone worn smooth by water. Compassion, it said. There was her beauty.

  The way Nora walked, the way her eyes moved, effortlessly, without a trace of affectation or desire, everything about her won me. Hers was the secret face I put myself to sleep by. I loved her immediately.

  Even Gone Joe stopped clawing for a moment. A cool wave spread through the cafe. The tourists stopped jabbering and breathed. The trucker stubbed his cigarette.

  Gypsy pulled out a chair for Nora, and she sat down. Gypsy sat again, carefully. He said to her, "He knows."

  Our eyes met. When she breathed, I breathed. She seemed to nod, and I understood that she was acknowledging our kinship. "How?" she said. "Please tell me how you know about us."

  Her voice thrilled and pacified me at once. I thought, This is what it feels like to be an angel. Through her voice, as through a channel, I felt down inside her, to where her voice came from. I felt the blood bathing in oxygen inside her lungs. I felt the quiver of her vocal chords, the undulations of her tongue, the way the cartilage in her nose resonated with each vowel.

  "I’ve been through a lot," I said.

  Nora’s forehead wrinkled ever so slightly. With exquisite concern she sighed, "Oh!" She reached across the table and laid her hand on mine. It was all I could do not to burst into tears. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me, Mel. Tell me everything."

  11. My Debriefing

  "I’m twenty-three. I’m from…" I couldn’t remember where I was from. "I took off because I wanted… you, Nora." Saying that was like coming. She just kept looking at me, unruffled, like a calm ocean, a sunset, a mother, the moon. "I wanted you, and you weren’t there in…" I drew a blank. "So I started hitching around. My mom is…" What was Mom? "Well, of course, I didn’t tell myself I was looking for you. I was headed for Yucatan to see the eclipse. I was headed for Atlanta to visit the Coca-Cola factory. I was headed for British Columbia to live off the land. I was headed for the Grand Canyon to learn the ways of the Havasupai Indians. That’s how it was. I remember once…" I hit a cul-de-sac; my sentence had nowhere to go. "Anyway, I love you. When Shaman picked me up…"

  "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!" Gone Joe was punching and prying Izzy’s bung but making no headway. Detritus from the operation was scattered all over my mind, I realized. There were little lacerations too, creating lapses and blind spots randomly. It had been a quick job.

  "Go on," Nora told me.

  I concentrated. "Go on," I echoed. "Yes. The Space People picked me up and gave me something to eat at their place, just tents and a few goats and chickens out in New… New something. York or Hampshire or Mexico. Orleans, maybe. Did I say I want to be one with you, utterly and completely, forever?"

  She nodded.

  "Mm. Then I was alone with…"

  "Shaman," Gypsy said.

  "Thanks. With Shaman. And he said some words that made a hole in my mind. But Izzy fixed it."

  "Izzy!" The word sprang from Gypsy’s mouth like air from a burst tire. As he stood, Gypsy’s jaw dropped again, this time to his knees. The flesh unpeeled from his chin to his navel like tape rolling off a dispenser. There was the snake, yellow and glistening. It turned inside Gypsy’s human facade like an uncoiled intestine. A shadow of displeasure crossed Nora’s face, and she reached over to roll up Gyps
y’s chin. She just started it, and Gypsy was shamed into finishing. No one had seen that one but us. Looking at the blithe tourists checking out at the cashier’s, I thought of all the bizarreries I might have missed in my life, just in my peripheral vision.

  Look, and it’s rolled up.

  Gypsy tucked his shirt in and sat down. Nora said, "Mel, tell us how you know Izzy."

  "He and Sarvaduhka,"?Gypsy didn’t stand up?"they picked me up back in New Whatever, in a helicopter or a car or a train or something. It had an elephant in it. Jasmine. He sealed up Shaman’s hole. I feel a lot better now, but I’ve got like shrapnel in here… Yes, it was New Mexico!"

  Nora smiled at me, and my heart turned to Silly Putty. "Don’t you have something you want to give us, Mel?" she said.

  "Not that I know of. And Izzy said be careful."

  "That’s the limit!" Gypsy shouted. He slammed his fist on the table. The hand flattened and cracked away from his wrist. No blood. A grey tendril, like an octopus’s, poked through. "He has to have his nose in everything. I’m gonna kill him, Nora. I’m gonna eighty-six that scum bag. We come nearly two hundred thousand light-years to this backwater solar system, and Izzy has to gum things up, put in his two cents, jimmy everything in his direction. No, Nora. No, no, no! No more!"

  Suddenly, Gypsy remembered where he was, and he froze. Moving only his eyes, he sneaked a glance sideways. The tourists were watching. The cashier was watching.

  The trucker had just returned. He was sidling up to our table with a fresh, long-stemmed red rose in his hand. He gave Gypsy a nasty squint, then turned to Nora. "This is for you, ma’am. I got it in the gift shop. You’re the nicest dang little thing I seen on this highway since 1957."

  12. Liftoff

  I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this out loud: "Help me, Gone Joe! Please don’t go. Help me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. Things are turning strange." I often prayed to Gone Joe when I was in a spot. Once I was alone in my high school locker room with a fullback who wanted to kill me for correctly naming the capital of Massachusetts, after he’d embarrassed himself by saying, "Idaho." Another time I was alone with a girl in her bedroom, during a sweet sixteen party with no adults around. In both cases Gone Joe gave me the same advice, and I took it; he said, "Run!"

  But now things were different, because Gone Joe had his fingernails at the edge of my mind, and there was a chance he would escape completely. "Don’t bother me, kid," he said. He was in up to his shoulder. I was looking right through Gone Joe’s cuff, squeezed up his arm past the elbow now, at the trucker’s back. The trucker had gotten his smile from Nora and was walking away. The tourists, alarmed by Gypsy’s sforzandi, were pushing through the door into the glass tube over the highway, right through Gone Joe’s overalls.

  I must have been mooning at Nora, my brows bunched skyward, head cocked like a dog’s at the table. My Gone Joe was getting goner. "Poor Mel," Nora said, straight to my heart. "You’ve been very brave. We knew you were being harrowed. We’ve come to stop it, to help you. It isn’t right. Shaman is a bad man. And powerful. How did you ever get away from him, Mel?"?her hand on my forearm, her thumb stroking the inside of my elbow.

  "I just left."

  "He didn’t follow?"

  "No."

  "I don’t like this," Gypsy growled.

  "You’re right," Nora said to him. "We should leave. We don’t know what Shaman might be up to. Get rid of the other human. We need to take Mel up with us."

  "Right." Gypsy shook off his clothes and skin, steamrolled to the cashier, opened his hingeless snake maw and swallowed the fellow whole.

  "It’s all right," Nora cooed, making it all right.

  The cashier was a great lump in Gypsy’s throat. Gypsy slithered upright to the walkway door. His human body dragged along the floor like a pair of half-discarded Doctor Dentons. He licked the jambs and the seam between the glass doors, causing them to melt together. Where his tongue touched, smoke shot out. I saw the passage accordion away from the cafe like a portable airplane tunnel. Cars were braking and screeching below. Then the liftoff.

  "You worthless fool," Gone Joe said. "Izzy told you not to give them anything, and now they’re boosting your ass to Sanduleak." Gone Joe was catching his breath, double, in Nora’s eyes.

  Gypsy undulated back to the table and pulled his skin back on, just like a scuba diver stretching into his wet suit. The cashier was less prominent now; Gypsy’s digestive juices must have been formidable. "Forgive us if we don’t do a ten-nine-eight," he said, once he had his mouth back on. The floor shook. "Goddamn Izzy Molson. One of these days I’m gonna put him right here." He tapped the dwindling lump in his midsection.

  Nora clucked and shook her head. "Gypsy!" she moaned.

  I looked through Gone Joe at Gypsy. "But Izzy said you were on our side," I said.

  "I am," he said. Outside, through the window, Earth was a smoky, blue agate, then a dot, then invisible in the solar blaze, and the sun too was dwindling.

  13. What You Can See in Texas

  It’s amazing what you can see from a highway rest stop table, especially in a place like Texas, where people tend to let it hang out more. Hitching west, that’s one of the first things you notice: how much more at ease folks seem to feel with themselves out west. They let you catch them scratching their navel or adjusting their hang or spitting or mopping sweat from a cleavage. It’s okay by them. There’s so much more space out there, west of St. Louis, and people are a lot more self-contained. They know they can just get up and go somewhere else if they damn well feel like it. Listen to western music. Listen to Johnny Abilene and the Haymakers, for example. They don’t take shit from anyone, bosses, lovers, fathers, children… "take a bite of this."

  Once, over a Swiss Miss, in a Panhandle rest area, I saw a woman and her husband duking it out on the back of a flatbed pickup. That was the best cocoa I ever had. Nobody got seriously injured, though their five kids, pasty, bleak, skulked in looking like war orphans. In New York, you’d see couples swap looks, and you’d notice their kids squirm a little?that’s it, that’s all. If one of them raised their voice slightly, everybody in the restaurant would turn and stare. Somebody would dial 911, sure. In Texas, three people would have to be murdered first.

  You see more.

  14. So Was the Sphinx

  They were talking about me.

  Gypsy said, "You see? He’s paralyzed. He can’t do anything. Everything goes in, and nothing comes out. He has no idea what he is. He doesn’t remember anything deeper than the Milky Way."

  "Shush," Nora said, "He can hear you. You’ll upset him."

  "So what? It doesn’t make any difference. Look at him. He’s not even here."

  "Poor baby. Still, that’s it for Shaman. He can’t do this twice. Mel is his feed hole. Shame’ll starve down there. You can take Mel back to Sandy. He’ll be a hero."

  "What hero? They’ll build a museum around him. Put him in a glass case. He doesn’t know what he is, Nora. There’s nobody in there."

  "That’s because of Shaman. He blew Mel’s mind, is all. It’s like the Sphinx before Tuthmosis: half-buried in the sand."

  "What mind?" Gypsy said. "I’ll bet he cut it off himself when he was a baby, like a trapped rabbit gnaws its foot off. Maybe it’s an impediment down on Earth to be what he is. That’s what made it so easy for Shaman to put a hole in."

  "Izzy tried to patch it. Look."

  They leaned into my face like oral surgeons. Gypsy waved his phony fingers in front of my eyes. I just felt numb. I didn’t want to respond to them yet. I wanted to keep thinking about things I’d seen at rest stops in the west, on Earth I mean.

  "It’s a temporary," Gypsy said.

  "Yes. Sloppy work."

  "Goddamn Izzy Molson!" Gypsy said. "Hey, wait a minute! What’s that?" I felt Gypsy’s finger come straight in through my eye to nudge a spot near the filling.

  Nora said, "Gone Joe. Guy in Mel’s
mind. Looks like he’s trying to squeeze out."

  "Typical. Lot of damage in there, but it’s small stuff, non sequiturs, lacunae, causal gaps, the usual. It’ll heal. Izzy’s bung won’t last more than a few months though. You want to insert anything while we have the chance?"

  "For heaven’s sake, no! This is a sovereign person, Gypsy."

  "The hell he is! He’s just an extremity, Abu al-Hawl’s blow hole or something. The Mel Bellow personality thing is just static, a TV ghost. Shaman’s feeding through him, Nora. The guy’s nothing but a junkie’s vein."

  "You’re beginning to sound like Shaman… Look! He’s coming round. Get your hand out of there!"

  I started to "come to." I had been reluctant. You don’t try to land in a volcano. I had plenty of fuel left inside my mind, plenty of things to think about, vivid, fascinating. I didn’t have to join Gypsy and Nora in this impossible reality. But then I heard Nora defend me to him? "a sovereign person"?and things felt much safer.

  I made my entrance: "Where are we? What’s going on? Why is it so black out there?" I pretended to be woozy at first, for the sake of continuity. Discontinuity is a terrible enemy of one’s sense of selfhood.

  Gypsy looked at his wristwatch, if it was a watch, which hung half through his wrist, if it was a wrist. "Fifteen minutes," he said. "We’re about a hundred million miles out."

  Gone Joe said, "Run!"

  "I don’t want to be here," I said.

  For some reason, this sent Gypsy into a rage. He stormed over to the bus tray station and overturned it, shattering dishes and launching silverware. "Sure. Let’s just turn around. Let’s take you back to Shaman. Maybe we should garnish you with parsley first. I think there’s some in the goddamned kitchen."

  "Careful, Gyp, or you’ll jar us off course," Nora said, like a nanny admonishing a fractious toddler. "Have we reached the Magellanic Stream?"