"It so happens," Izzy crowed, "that if we can take him through during the hour just after sunset, the customs official lets it right by. He just thinks maybe something’s kind of funny, but he can’t put his finger on it, see what I mean?"
"Why do you have to move him at all," said Sarvaduhka, and he thought, "… you stupid, back-stabbing fornicator?"
"I’ll ignore the last part, Marmaduke, but the fact is, I gotta take him into the shop. I can’t finish fixing him against Shaman out here in the Sahara. My skin’s too pale, okay?"
"I will not bother to ask how you expect to move a sixty-five-foot-high limestone statue across the desert, through customs, and up the gangplank onto an airplane, and convince everyone that he is simply a mid-level executive at Coca-Cola. Two hundred forty feet long, Izzy!"
"Good work," said Izzy, "you’ve been listening to the Son et Lumiere. I get his peanuts and that on the airplane, don’t forget. I called it at the Cairo Khan Suites."
They were gathering under my chin, where my plaited stone beard used to hang, the Pharaonic sign that shaded Tuthmosis when he dug me out of the sand. My father, Johnny Abilene, passed around his canteen; it was a scrotal second-hander from Death Valley. "I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, Your Majesty," he said to Izzy.
"Don’t call me that," Izzy hissed, "not in front of him."
34. Peripherizing the Sphinx
"Okay, Johnny A.," said Izzy. "I think you know what to do."
The Haymaker produced a ukulele and started strumming backup, while Johnny tightened his bowels as if he were about to defecate. Johnny pursed his lips and squinted. The sky blinked black and then shone so brilliantly that they all had to squint and shade their eyes. There was a faint rumble from deep below.
Johnny was peripherizing. "I’m gonna impossibilize that gigantus right down to a midgy," he grunted. "He can walk among us like a regular man, as long as we don’t look too hard, and I’m gonna fix it so’s we can’t, and so nobody can, till he gets to Izzy’s shop."
Sarvaduhka was unimpressed. "What about the plane? It won’t hold him."
"Anything that touches old Abu, once I’ve peripherized him, is gonna fall down into the same squint and follow along."
"Do it, cowboy," Izzy said, sweating under his pith helmet as the sun crossed over the zenith.
Johnny gave one last push, "Ee-hah!" Nothing had changed, but suddenly, everyone was looking at me differently, that is, without craning their necks! It was no longer possible to focus directly on the Sphinx; I was quarantined to the corner of everyone’s eye, where a lot can pass, believe me, that would terrify down center. I was as if man-sized. Johnny patted me on my stone shoulders, gave me a kiss, they all remounted, and we headed out.
35. The Space People
came across the desert like a swarm of locusts. They were swinging "spirit catchers" over their heads, dowel-and-rubber-band doohickeys furiously buzzing.
We had left the Sphinx enclosure. Dad had given me sunglasses and a white polyester suit to wear. Izzy stuck a briefcase in my paw and hoped that the headdress would pass for a touristy gewgaw. For reasons unknown, the headdress, unlike my gigantic size, earthen complexion, missing appendages, and leonine corpus, could not be easily camouflaged. I walked in the middle, flanked by Johnny and the Haymaker, a baritone in a bolo tie, with Izzy and Lila Kodzi in front and Sarvaduhka bringing up the rear.
Dad and the baritone Haymaker had been singing:
Halfway home, boys, halfway home!
Jimmy jimmy jimson weed,
Nono nono no m-
Ore alone!
With my little bitty buckaroo baby
Sa-sa-saddled by my side,
My honey bunny sonnyboy,
Let’s ride!
Halfway h…
And there they swarmed, Shaman’s Space People, a dozen humans swathed in what looked like twisted bedsheets. They swept straight for us over the sand. Dad and the Haymaker fell silent. Izzy started beeping.
"No!" Izzy pulled out the beeper and examined it. "Three point five and rising. Damn! Shaman’s trying an epoche." The air shimmered with heat waves. The Space People advanced through a mirage of shining sand that looked like the Great Salt Lake. As we continued to advance, it cleared, and behind them, suddenly, nearer than the chotchke market of Nazlet El-Semman, there appeared a large concession complex that had not been there a moment before, although everyone in the world except Izzy, Johnny and I?and Shaman?remembered its being there.
The Texas state flag hung limply from a huge pole beside it. In addition to the entrance at the base, there was another entry on the upper story, a pair of glass doors opening into empty space. It looked exactly like a highway rest stop cafe, with the overhead passenger walkway amputated.
"Lila," Izzy asked her, "how’s the Vietnam War going?"
"The what?"
"The Vietnam War. This is important."
"Well, Iz, last I heard anyway, the VC were still holding onto Manhattan, Washington, and most of the American east coast, but the government in Memphis is making them fight like hell to advance inland. Why?"
36. Plan B
"And who’s president? C’mon, Lila, honey, I gotta know the score before Shaman leaves the dishwasher."
"What president?" Sarvaduhka interjected. "The last president was Kennedy, in nineteen hundred and sixty-three. Since then, it’s been a monarchy. Are you completely crazy, besides being a back-stabbing fornicator?"
"Well, boys," Izzy said, "better switch to Plan B. Looks like we’re not gonna make it to customs before midnight?Do we still have midnights…? Hey! Where’s the baritone?" The Haymaker’s horse was snorting nervously. Its saddle was empty. At its hooves was a dead asp with a bolo tie around its eyes.
"Dang!" Johnny said. "There goes the best Earther baritone you ever saw."
"Phooey!" Sarvaduhka spat and tramped forward, biliously abreast of Izzy. "It was stupid to bring a horse to carry that asp in the first place."
The Space People huddled about two hundred yards away. Someone had appeared against the double doors of the cafe. "That’s Gypsy or I’m a mute coyoot," Johnny said. "I ain’t seen that boy since we chain-ganged together on the Magellanic Stream." Gypsy was banging on the glass. Banging, banging. Then sliding down slowly, leaving a trail of ichor. And revealing behind him, as he fell, a tall figure dressed in white. There was a catch in Johnny’s voice: "And that’s gotta be Shaman."
Where’s Nora? I thought?I Mel?eyes closed, swooning at the cafe table. Is she okay?
"Sure she’s okay," Izzy said, down on the desert. "She’s batting a thousand, kid, only we may not be doing so good. I don’t like the way Shaman’s smiling."
Johnny Abilene was unzipping his human skin. My father! The big hat fell down around his dendrites. The spurs and boots slid down his horse’s flanks and slithered, still stuffed with feet, to the sand below. The horse, spooked, took off toward the Pyramid of Cheops, leaving Johnny hovering there for a moment before he fell to the ground, at noticeably less than 32 feet per second squared.
Lila Kodzi petitely threw up.
Sarvaduhka dismounted, ran to Izzy and fell on his knees. "Izzy, we are okay, yes? The Space People will not hurt us, yes? You have Plan B? Izzy, what is Plan B?"
Izzy slapped the Haymaker’s mount on the rump and watched it gallop toward the Space People, followed by Sarvaduhka’s horse. "Let me think a minute," he said.
37. Drunken Tarrier
"Nora?" It came out of my throat like a death rattle. "Mom?" I lifted my head from the table. My cheek was wet?I had been drooling. She was cold. She didn’t move. I saw Shaman standing at the glass doors, Gypsy slumped at his feet. An acrid vapor rose from Gypsy’s flesh. The color was steaming out of it, yellow to grey to black. "Nora?"
"I’m you," Shaman said. He was looking out into the desert, not at me. He drilled without spirit, like a drunken tarrier, never noticing how dull his bit was since my epoche. "I’m you"?a tired song, water on water; I�
��d seen my fulcrum, I’d glimpsed who I was, though I too was tired.
Shaman angled and bobbed his head, peering past his Space People at Izzy’s band. "Peripherized," he muttered. "The sly dog!"
He turned toward me and lifted his chin; I knew he wanted me to come to him, to stand at his side. My body felt leaden. My pulse echoed in my skin. I had to leave Nora and go to him. He put his arm around my shoulders.
Down below, the Space People leaned toward us like heliotropes to the sun. Sarvaduhka was hugging Izzy’s saddle bags. Lila covered her eyes and drew her head down between her shoulders as if she could withdraw like a turtle into its shell. The force of Shaman’s thought flung Johnny Abilene into the sand; posing there before the glass, Shaman spoke to everyone?inside their own heads.
"This is my property. He’s me. Here is my fountain, my ancient spring. He’s me. His deep waters sired and nurtured me until I ripped out my umbilicus and dammed Abu for my own pleasure. He’s me. Abu will remain on Earth forever. Abu?He’s me?is my eternal life."
"But Shaman," I said, "I’m not you."
38. Officer Domingo’s Conclusion
Izzy was ransacking his saddle bags, as if Plan B were in there. Lila had climbed down off her horse and was sitting on the ground, her head lolling against Sarvaduhka, who still knelt beside Izzy, begging him to think of something to save them. Johnny, his slimy Magellanic body glimmering on the sand, struggled to lift himself.
"I got a feeling," Izzy said as baggies of moldering Danish, maps, sun tan lotion, airline tickets, ephemerides and sen-sens flew from his saddle bags. "I got this feeling, Ducky!"
I, Abu, had lived through many things. I had seen civilizations come and go. The Space People could scythe Izzy and the others into the dunes, and I need barely notice. But I, Mel, was so new to this world?twenty years of it?that every flutter was still a revelation. Oh, Izzy, come through!
"Ah!" Izzy thrust high a travel brochure he’d picked up at the American Embassy in Cairo. Then he riffled through it till he found the paragraph he’d been looking for, the one that hadn’t been there before Shaman’s epoche, the one he’d sensed via Izzovision. "Look at this, Sarvaduhka."
Sarvaduhka read as Izzy held the page open before him. "So what?"
"The motel business has really dulled your brains, Duke." Izzy ran toward the Space People waving the brochure over his head. "Hey! Look at this. Hey! Did Shameface show you this?"
The Space People were leaning to see Shaman through the glass doors above. Izzy had to swing them around, one by one, bodily, to make them look at his paragraph. When they did, some gasped and seemed immediately stricken, others became angry and denied it, pushing him away, while still others started to argue with Izzy and with one another.
Above, Nora stirred. I ran to her. "Mother!"
"I’m you!" Shaman protested. I ignored him.
"I am but a remote descendent of your creature Chephren," Nora told me. Her face was coloring again, the eyes filling with light.
"No." I kissed her forehead. "You are the Queen of the Pontius, the land of incense ladders, my beloved consort. I never made Chephren. I have nothing to do with Chephren."
Shaman boiled. "Chephren came to me in a dream. He told me to dig you out, you ridiculous ingrate. Are you disowning Chephren?"
"It was your own epoche that changed things, Shaman," I said.
Down below, Izzy was trumpeting it for everyone’s ears: "See, it says so right here, folks:
‘Visitors to the Valley of Kings may be interested to note that, contrary to previously held theories, there is no relation between the Sphinx and Chephren. Frank Domingo, a senior forensic officer of the New York City Police Department, has concluded, after rigorous examination and analysis, that there is no actual similarity between the face of the Giza Sphinx and the face on the statue of Chephren previously supposed to be its model.’
(Or vice versa.) There it is, boys and girls. Your Fearless Leader lied to you."
"I warned you, Shaman," Nora was saying. "You can’t control the epoche. You’re nothing now. The Sphinx never sired our race. We came up out of the mud all on our own. The Sphinx is just hitching through. You’re just another human, like me."
The Space People were pelting the glass doors with rocks. With his mind, Shaman commanded them to stop?to no effect.
39. The Death of Gypsy
The ice pick with which Shaman attacked me was no less lethal for being non-physical. He hacked at Izzy’s bung. Thoughts hissed from me like leaking steam, but the patch held. "You!" he screamed at me. "You laid your own mother. You want to kill yourself, don’t you?"
"You forget I’m only half human," I said. "We Magellanics mummafug all the time, didn’t you say so?"
The glass cracked and collapsed, littering jagged fragments behind Shaman. Space People chinned up and climbed through. Izzy was there, on what would have been Johnny Abilene’s shoulders, were he wearing his Earther skin. The Space People grabbed Shaman’s arms; Johnny grabbed his mind.
I stood by Nora, watching it all.
I stood below, on the desert, behind Lila Kodzi and Sarvaduhka, bursting out of the sunglasses and synthetic suit as the peripheralysis wore off and I was once more a gigantic monolith from the stars.
Johnny Abilene knelt beside Gypsy, his brother Sandulean. "Bodies aren’t important," Gypsy gasped. Then he saw Izzy. "Your Majesty!"
The Space People were tying Shaman to the condiment stand. Izzy stroked Gypsy’s wan anterior bulge. "You been bad-mouthing me, Gypsy. I can tell. Izzovision."
"Why didn’t you trust me, Your Majesty? You sent me here to do a job. Then you came yourself and never let me know."
"I didn’t think things would go so fast, Gyp. I had to epoche on down in a hurry when the Space People killed Shaman."
"Killed Shaman? Shaman’s not dead."
"We got past and future mixed around here, old Giblet. Anyways, I’ll confer with you before the whole thing ever happened?retroactively?once I get a minute."
"I hate your guts, Izzy," Gypsy said, and he kissed him, the way Magellanics do, thwucking their nodes against each other, then expired in Izzy’s arms.
Johnny shook his dendrites. "Well, my Lord, there goes the best dang Sandulean operative you ever want to see."
Izzy heaved a sigh. "When we get back to the Mags, I’ll name a couple weeks after him."
"I thought you didn’t want me to leave Earth. I thought you worked at Gibson’s in Lockport," I said.
"Yeah, that’s just part-time," Izzy said. "I’m also the Emperor of the Magellanic Clouds."
40. Beyond Oedipus
"That still don’t let me out of having to be back at Gibson’s 8:30 a.m. Monday morning though," Izzy said, "unless I want to be docked for the time, which I don’t."
"Dualism!" cried Lila Kodzi. With Sarvaduhka, she had found a way up from the base of the rest stop cafe rocket ship desert concession. Sarvaduhka had become too frightened to remain in my shadow below. "Dualism! You are not both here and there, liar! If you are an Emperor, you are not a lathe setup man as you claimed to me in our conjugal bed at the Cairo Khan Suites Hotel. Izzy Molson, I abjure all past relationship with such as you."
"That suits me okay," said Izzy. "I’m working on a little something in Tonawanda, anyways, name of Fay."
"Creep!" She abruptly turned away, grabbed Sarvaduhka’s jaw and kissed him passionately and long. He squealed. He stopped squealing. He kissed her back.
I stared at Nora, and the world dissolved. Let the Space People devour Shaman. Let Izzy install Johnny Abilene on the throne of the SMC and himself take up the Imperial Scepter of the combined galaxies, while punching in and out at his Lockport factory. Let Sarvaduhka have his female action, and Lila her one divine nature of Christ. Gypsy was dead, but bodies aren’t important. Nasser was dead too.
"Nora…" I said.
"It’s impossible, Mel," she said.
"Why? We’ll go to Sanduleak together and live there forever, Abu al-Haw
l and the Queen of Punt, Mel and Nora Bellow."
"You know it’s impossible, even by epoche. You have to go back to Sandy, to release Abu, to return, to become one again on the neutron star. You’re half-Magellanic. I’m just an Earther. And I’m pregnant."
"I love you, Nora."
"I’ll raise our child, my grandchild, your sibling."
"I won’t poke my eyes out, Nora."
"I’m not asking you to. Keep them open. Keep them wide open."
"I will… Hey!" The cafe was shaking and whipping like a flame in the wind. Izzy was beeping again. "Izzy, who’s doing an epoche?"
"I am, Melba," Izzy said. "There’s a number of things wrong here. I don’t like monarchies in North America, or Vietnamese troops either, not yet; also, this rest stop belongs in Texas, and Abu?which means you?better haul ass back to the Magellanics right now, if I’m gonna have time to patch you permanent and still make coffee and Danish before the morning shift. Keep a tight ass now, Melly, but don’t bother to buckle up. Ten… nine… eight…"
"Take this, son!" Johnny threw me his guitar.
The relic background radiation spiked to three point eight, then dipped to three again, and we were gone.
Epilogue
Izzy’s epoche left Nora standing between the zucchinis and the cherry tomatoes behind the house Johnny Abilene had built her in upstate New York. Somehow, a year had passed, and her mouth was full of clothespins. She found herself hanging diapers to a yellow nylon line while she stared southwest at dusk’s rosy fingers. She was in the wrong hemisphere to see the Magellanic Clouds. But I could see her?and Junior too, inside, in the wicker basket next to Nora’s bed:
Izzy and the Father of Terror Page 6