"Not quite." Gypsy stood stock still and glared at me. His fury had distilled itself into a poisonous timbre.
"Let’s do an epoche. We want to make sure Shaman can’t catch up. Go into the kitchen and use the automatic dishwasher."
"But Nora…"
"An epoche, Gypsy. I’ll see if I can get the rabbit’s foot."
"Ah!" Gypsy turned on his heel, on his fake heel, and shouldered through a padded, swinging door into the kitchen.
"You’re safe with us, Mel," Nora said. "You know what Shaman would do to you on Earth. Izzy told you, didn’t he?"
"Izzy’ll be back in a year," I said. "That’s what he told me. On his next vacation. He hasn’t got much seniority."
I felt better with Gypsy gone. I looked around. Except for Gypsy’s mess and the fact that a few tables remained to be bused, everything looked fine. There was a map of U.S. Route 40 on the wall nearby, with colored lights at the rest stops and interchanges; ours glowed red. The condiments station had plenty of ketchups and mustards, though the relish was getting low; maybe a few more of those tiny paper cups would help, in case of a rush. There were kitschy oil paintings of long-horned steer and cacti over the empty tables. The one over ours had a campfire in the foreground with a circle of chiaroscuro bronco busters; one of the cowpokes had a guitar in his lap. Near the stack of salts and peppers at my elbow, there was a display explaining how you could get prints of the Western Landscape Series for your very own. Everything was fine. Everything was okay.
But out the window…
"Mel…" Nora said. What is that moment between a man and woman when he starts to see her face as skin, the pores, the sweat, the small swells and hollows that he will fill, swell for hollow with his own? When his eyes become tactile organs? When her breath warms the air between them, and they feel themselves drawing nearer, like buns proofing under a warm, wet towel?
"Nora, do you look like him underneath, like a snake or something?" I said.
"Didn’t Izzy tell you?"
"No."
"Run!" Gone Joe clamored.
We were leaning together like tin leaves in an electroscope. Our knees touched. "Mel, why don’t you know what you are?" Her nose grazed mine. We rubbed. I groaned.
"Shaman wants to eat me," I said. "How do I know you won’t eat me too?"
"Why would I eat you? I love you, Mel." She kissed me. A purple dye seemed to swirl through the room, tinging everything. The walls, tables, paintings, juke boxes, bus and condiment stations, cashier’s desk, melted as they changed hue. Everything shrank and became cylindrical. I felt her kiss in my stomach, in my toes.
She peeled her lips away slowly. I wanted to cry. She was tearing my heart out. She never broke eye contact. We were in some sort of space vessel, it seemed like. I was a hundred million miles from home, I think. There wasn’t a single fact I could rely on. I looked around. As soon as Nora stopped kissing me, the spaceship looked like a rest stop cafe again.
I said, "I was hitchhiking…"
She said, "So was the Sphinx."
15. Your Mother Never Did This with My Belt
Gone Joe was like a man half-buried in the sand. He had grunted himself into the hairline fissure between Izzy’s bung and the lip of Shaman’s puncture. The tip of one fingernail?the ring finger of his right hand?was actually protruding from my mind. It dipped in and out of my field of vision like a phantom scimitar, like a crescent moon, or like a glint off troubled water, half-hypnagogic, half-real. Sometimes, pressing hotly against Nora, my cheek slid against her cheek, and I was lost in the jungle of her wavy hair. I opened my eyes, as if to breathe through them, so breathless did normal air leave me then. I blinked out the window into the daunting black, star-speckled and streamered with burning lights, and I caught Gone Joe’s moon, at home in the cosmos and traveling with me as the moon follows a traveler on Earth. It seemed distant and large; really, it was near and small.
Gone Joe’s nail scratched things. It scratched Nora’s long, perfect flank. She seemed to like that. She uttered a small cry that I could feel vibrating right through my breast bone as we undulated together. I was straddling Nora on her chair, like Ganesha’s shakti. I lapped her and thwucked breast to breast and belly to belly with my shirt pulled off. We were tongue and palate smacking. I tore her T-shirt up over her head; during the seconds of eclipse, when Nora’s face was inside the T-shirt, I was panic-stricken, desperate to see her again. Without her eyes, I was perdu. Embracing her, I tried to swallow her through my whole skin, to engorge her like an amoeba. It enflamed and infuriated me that she was outside me. She groaned and kissed.
Gone Joe kept appropriating parts of Nora. He was superimposed on her, like shower screen lilies on a bather. Once, when she smiled and blinked?I had made hungry babies’ mouths of my palms, pulling at her breasts?the movement of one eyelid was Gone Joe’s mouth: "Run!"
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," I said. "I love you, Nora. I’ve always loved you."
To Gone Joe, inside, I said, "Stop it! Shut up! Go away."
"You’re crazy," he said. "This chick is a geek. You saw her brother. She’s a pit viper inside, and yellow! Not to mention, we’re in outer fucking space. She’s using you."
"What do you want me to do?" I said inside.
"Is something wrong?" Nora asked me. She started unbuckling my belt.
"Kill her. Strangle her. Get away. Get that boa constrictor in the kitchen and run us home with the automatic dishwasher, right? That what she said, the dishwasher? You know how to use a dishwasher?"
"Dad…"
"Don’t call me that. What’s she doing with your belt? Pay attention to me, will you? Get control. Pull your pants back up, damn it all to hell! Hers, too! What’s she doing with your belt? Your mother never did this with my belt. Mel, if you don’t stop this and get us out of here, I’m going to give you a headache you’ll never forget."
Suddenly, Nora jerked backward, toppling the chair, with me on top of her. "There’s a finger in the air," she shrieked. "It’s pointing at me!"
16. Planting My Flag
"Please, Dad, get back in here," I said out loud.
"Don’t call me that," he said, inside me. He was out, though, from the tip of his right forefinger almost to the knuckle. It was hairy near the bottom. It was heavily callused, a workman’s finger.
The finger did not come out of my head. If you followed it back from the edge of the nail, across the lunule, the joints, and the knuckle, it didn’t terminate anywhere; you just eventually found that you were looking past it toward something else. It wasn’t distinctly placed in three-dimensional space, but hovered somehow against it, solid, yet incommensurable. Gone Joe’s finger was not coming out of my head. It was coming out of my mind.
"Gypsy, what is this?" Nora squirmed under me on the floor.
Gypsy poked his head out the kitchen door, the human head, the one with eyes and whiskers. "It’s Gone Joe!" he said. Gypsy pushed through the kitchen door. It snapped and swung on sprung hinges, creaking as he strode to us. "God damn Izzy! He really botched it. A guy’s leaking out of the kid’s mind."
"Mel, Mel," Nora said. She held my face between her two hands. "Make love to me, Mel. Make love to me now." The finger was playing mumblety-peg around her head. She turned to avoid it, back and forth. "You don’t need Gone Joe, Mel. You don’t need Izzy. You don’t need anybody. Take me, Mel."
"Yeah," said Gypsy. "You’re the only Earther for half a billion miles. Plant your flag, Mel."
Gone Joe’s wrist showed, his forearm, his elbow, one shoulder, then his neck, chin, face?scrunched like a newborn’s?and the watchcap, drenched with my thoughts. "Run!"
Holding me on top of her, Nora nudged the chair away with her hips. Gone Joe was someplace indeterminably near, in our way, but not fatally so. I had to have air. My senses burned and beat as if on smelling salts. I wanted to toss like a netted fish. When I arched up to take in more air, I saw the window above our table fill with rosy, supernal
light.
"Shit," Gypsy barked. "It’s Shaman."
17. Smiling and Serving
Shaman had a voice like incense. It permeated us. His words were not the main thing. The words were trails in a cloud chamber. It was something else that moved us, the things that made the trails, powerful, terrifying, small. Waves of meaning effulged from Shaman. Striking our minds, they crystallized into words:
"He’s mine. You know that."
Gone Joe was out up to his navel. "Run!" Both arms were pushing against the edge of my mind, the meaty part of him making no way, but the part still cerebral gaining purchase and levering his body still farther out.
Gypsy pranced idiotically from table to table, reaching high and low, trying?impossibly?to place himself between my eyes and Gone Joe. Where Gypsy stretched, an occasional crack formed, revealing the slither inside his clothes and skin. But he didn’t want me to be distracted by Gone Joe. He wanted me to concentrate on Nora.
"You love me, don’t you?" Nora bumped her pelvis up against mine.
"Yes!" Despite everything, I started humping. The floor was cold, hard linoleum. My knees hurt from pressing and jamming with Nora.
Shaman thickened among us. "Stop this," he said.
Gone Joe said, "Stop this!" too. He was out up to his knees. He was wearing his blue mechanics’ overalls with the embroidered tag on the breast pocket. In the middle the tag said, "JOE," and around the perimeter, "SMILING AND SERVING!" There was a Niagara Falls souvenir pen behind it. It had an illusionary moving picture of the Horseshoe Falls on the barrel.
Shaman wasn’t ruffled a bit. He sounded like someone trying to talk a suicide down from the ledge: deliberate, calm. I heard him with my skin, between pulses of blood, between breaths, between thrusts and red thoughts as I mortar-and-pestled Nora: "Now, Gypsy, now, Nora, you must stop. You know this. The Earther’s one of my Space People now. He’s a part of me. Don’t fuck with me, Sanduleans, or there’ll be hell to pay."
Nora was fondling something besides my buttocks. She was stroking something inside my mind, a part of my mind invisible to me, as the nose is to the eyes. She stroked as you might stroke a dog to make it let go a ball. Of what ball did she want me to lose hold?
Shaman said, "Does the Earther know what you are to him, Nora? This isn’t Sanduleak, you know. Some things are frowned upon in this galaxy."
Gypsy emitted a blast of red vapor. His skin ballooned outward like a swollen calf’s belly, and exploded. The wet shards settled. Some stuck to the ceiling and walls, where they slid and dripped. He was the snake, or a gigantic yellow neuron, more like, bulbous at the bottom, grey dendrites like Medusa’s hair tangling on top.
"Run!" Gone Joe rasped. He was out.
And I was out. I couldn’t stay inside Nora any more. Soul and body were shriveling to a bead. I couldn’t act. Nora groaned disappointment and withdrew from my mind, leaving the ball in whatever jaws held it there. Gone Joe took one look at Gypsy and beat it into the kitchen.
"Did you get it?" Gypsy asked Nora. He used his whole reptilian body for a tongue.
"No," she said.
"You see," Shaman gloated, "the boy’s not like you Sanduleans, Gypsy. You’ll come in anyone, won’t you, even your mother? In fact, especially your mother, ey, Gypsy?"
"Damn! How did you get here, Shaman?" Gypsy yelled. "I know you can’t epoche worth spit."
"Didn’t have to," he cooed?from the kitchen, sounded like. And there, at the swinging door, where Gone Joe had been a moment before, stood Shaman, his features melting from Gone Joe’s into the ones I had seen in the New Mexico tent, by candle light, like a dry, crushed sponge duck springing out in water. "I came along in him, Gyp. A little reconnaissance. I figured someone like you would try to spoil my party. You’re trumped, Sandulean. Thanks for the ride, Mel."
"Are you my father?" I said.
"I’m you." Incomprehensible.
18. You Are My Sweet Burrito (Please Be True)
Many years later, on Sanduleak, collapsed by then to a neutron star, a pulsar, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, I happened to hear the following song by Johnny Abilene and the Haymakers. Folks live on bebop there, always have, always will, but on the station I was tuned to they liked to interrupt the Top Million every now and then for a little down home Country Western, especially tunes that have to do with me, since I am a sort of galactic hero there, or mascot, more like.
The Sanduleans are funny that way, like Bible thumpers on Earth who like to pepper every exchange, however secular or banal, with references to the Gospel:
"Can you believe it, Ethel? They charged me three-fifty for one pair of athletic socks at the Spend-and-Save. I felt like turning over their table."
"Render unto Caesar, Georgette."
"Praise the Lord!"
On Sanduleak they say things like this: "as tight as Gone Joe in Izzy’s bung." Or when they just almost get something they want, but fail at the very last moment, they often say, "It was like Mel and Nora in Texas."
The number was announced as "You Are My Sweet Burrito (Please Be True)," I think. Things go by very fast on a neutron star, and the news came on right after:
I won’t call you "honey," ’cause you know you’re not that sweet,
Or "knockwurst," though you knock me offa my feet.
You’re a sight too lumpy to be my "cream of wheat."
Yes, you’re just my salsa verde sweet burrit-
O! Please be true.
Don’t leak on my place mat.
Just be you
Underneath that space hat!
You popped from my heart like refries out a tortilla.
Pretty mama, I’m hoppin’ happy to be here and see ya.
Just like Mel when Shaman popped outa his mind,
I’m a durned sight spun-around, run-around loco behind.
But if you’re true to my dream,
I’ll be your sour cream,
My roly-poly holy guacamole sweet burrito queen!
Please be true, true, true!
Won’t you please be true?
(The phrase "space hat" in the eighth line refers to the pleated headdress popularized by Abu al-Hawl, the Great Sphinx at Giza, a sort of interstellar thinking cap he used for performing epoches. It became quite fashionable among Earthers of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty [circa 2500 b.c.] who lived in the vicinity of his landing site. On Sanduleak, it’s still la look.)
By the way, what Shaman said is quite true. On Sandy, when a singer calls his loved one "pretty mama," he generally means just that.
19. Lingua Franca
"Let’s be human, shall we?" Shaman proposed. Diplomats settling on a lingua franca. "You have a spare somewhere, don’t you, Gypsy?"
The big nerve undulated to the cash register and punched "NO SALE" with one of his dendrites. He pulled up the tray inside the cash drawer, where the big bills are usually kept, and produced a squeaking mass of rubbery material that looked like a deflated beach ball. He started to pull it on like a pair of pants. When he was done, he was the rotund, superannuated hippie I’d met down on the highway, and fully clothed.
Nora squeezed my hand, then headed for the little girls’ room to tidy up. "You’re okay, Mel," she said. "We’ll get through this together." Then to Shaman: "The toilet?"
"Go ahead," Shaman said.
"I’ll be a minute. We’ll sit down together when I get back. You’ll let him be till then?"
"Of course, Nora. What do you take me for?" He was wearing Gone Joe’s overalls. It still said "JOE" on his pocket, and "SMILING AND SERVING."
"Oh, stop it!" Gypsy said. "Just because she’s an Earther doesn’t mean she’s stupid. She was thoroughly briefed when we recruited her, Shaman. She knows all about you, old Tut. She knows all about everything."
Gypsy offered me his "hand." He helped me up off the floor, then sat down at the table with me. Shaman joined us.
Nora was in the bathroom. She had been in the bathroom when I first entered the cafe, when I saw Gy
psy, when the juke box played Johnny Abilene and Izzy? "Take a bite of this." What did she do in there? Maybe she slipped in and out of fake bodies the way Gypsy did. I still ached for her, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a small, brown nothing. Shaman was tall and muscular, with strong, chiseled features, a square jaw, clear blue eyes, thick black hair neatly trimmed. He wore a white caftan and loose white linen pants; one leg was still soiled by errant thoughts?e v a p o r a t i n g?from my mind. Shaman could have Nora whenever he wanted to, and finish the job, I thought. My mind was a barber pole, thought-blood, endlessly supplied, spiraling endlessly down.
I listened to Shaman as a radio "listens" to a broadcast. It went through me. I should have been crying, but, though I looked and looked, I couldn’t find my tears.
* * *
20. Inoculation
"Izzy Molson can’t help you, Mel," Shaman told me. Gypsy twiddled his thumbs and snarled under his breath. "I’m you. And you’re not what you think you are, Mel. I’m you. You didn’t consummate with Nora, Mel, or you’d know how right I am. I’m you. She wanted you to explode inside her, and not just your sperm, Mel. I’m you." I felt like a cow being milked, helplessly and dumbly chewing cud. Shaman squeezing my udders, his fingers sticky with my milk. The hiss of milk spray into Shaman’s bucket. The pressure inside me dwindling. Chewing and chewing.
Then Shaman whispered: "I’m you, Mel. They want to pull the Sphinx up through your mind like a baby gorilla out an aphid’s pussy, so they can install him in the Magellanics. I’m you. Is that what you want, Mel?"
"You make me laugh." Gypsy turned on Shaman suddenly. "The arrogance! You think you can bore into him right here in front of my face!"
"But I am. He’s mine, old Gyp. You can’t do squat zip. Look at the poor worm. Even if you got him to Sandy, he’s not Abu. You make me laugh, Sandulean."
Izzy and the Father of Terror Page 3