Bluebottle

by James Sallis

  Had I ridden my bicycle here? Apparendy so. And left it outside the bar, where now someone briefly squats down to remove the rear wheel and tucks it beneath his arm as though this were his usual morning baguette, striding away untroubled. I follow him into a nearby art gallery where he's about to hang it around the neck of a bronze ostrich and demand its return. He shrugs and hands it over: no big thing.

  But now the bicycle wheel's become a reel of film, and in the passover it's come partially unwound. Thumb jammed at the center, fingers dialing, I start rewinding. Images click against my wrists.

  "Guess you must show that to your wife, get her primed and wet, huh?" the bearded man behind the counter says. "Have to tell you: I've handled my share of erotica through here over the years. But that damn near made me wet."

  When I grope for bus fare back out on the street, film tucked beneath my arm the same way he'd carried it, I drop the reel. It hits the pavement and begins smoking. Burns its way through like a cattle brand, making a kind of patterned manhole. I lean over and look. There's a whole subterranean city below. Streets, buildings, cars. Someone walking by down there looks up at me. Our eyes meet.

  I awake lying on the floor, eye to eye with Dana, who's just stepped into view above me, naked except for the press pass alligator-clipped to one nipple. Swampy, mothball smell off her body.

  'You're ready, aren't you, Lewis?" Definitely I seem to be ready. She lowers herself onto me. "News at six? Good news for a change?" Body warm as a bath. Completes itself with my small emendation. Press pass swinging gaily back and forth as she moves above. "Don't forget me, Lew." Moving ever faster as a long moan escapes her. "Whatever happens, don't forget me." She throws her head back in abandon. When she brings it forwards again, her head has become a grinning skull.

  "Jesus!"

  I started awake—really awake thistime—heartpounding, fingernails pushed hard into palms. Probably crescents of bright blood there.

  "Bad dreams, my boy?" Standing by the window, from the sound of it.

  I heard the tab rip from a beer can, which cinched it. I was getting pretty good at this. Think of men in old movies sitting faithfully before their sonar screens listening to blips.

  "My boy, your black ass," I said. "Been reading those damn British novels again, haven't you. Thought you told me you were done with those."

  "Yeah. But sometimes what we're done with isn't done with us, you know?"

  Time rolled itself millimeters thinner.

  "You're a Trollope, Slaughter. A slut, just like Molly Bloom. I ever tell you that?"

  "As well you as another."

  "Good to see you, Hosie—in a manner of speaking. Thanks for coming."

  "How you doing, boy."

  'There you go with that boy shit again."

  "What can I say? Three generations—"

  "—out of slavery. I've read Himes too, remember?"

  He pulled the tab on another beer and held it out to me. I reached and found it. Always had his shoulder bag with him those days. Never far from a corner store here in the civilized swamp.

  "I most assuredly do remember," Hosie said. "And I'm here to tell you I can groove on that. Know where you're comingfrom. I hear you."

  Once he'd written an entire column on local government in current catchwords and cliches, another time a whole essay in song tides. Hung out in cafes and bus stations and bars just to listen to people talk, then he'd go home afterwards and write it all down. I often wonder what Hosie would have thought if he'd lived into the rap era. He'd have loved hip-hop's special language—flavor, down on, up for.

  'What time of day you think it is, anyway?" he said. Man never did have any sense of time. Forever ringing doorbells at three in the morning only to say, authentically surprised and apologetic: Hey, I wake you up? I could hear his hand rubbing at the window.

  "Everything gray out there. Tops of buildings look the same as sky."

  He downed most of the rest of his beer at a gulp and belched magnificently.

  "Raining," I said.

  And hard, from the sound of it. Water would be rising inch by inch towards midtown porches, trash at curbside all over the city levitating, the Corps of Engineers' clever pumps chugging away at their efforts to push water out of the city and back up to sea level.

  "Weather will continue bad, yes. More calamities, death, despair. Not the slightest inclination of a change anywhere. No escape. The weather will not change."

  "Henry Miller."

  Very good, sir. Your prize."

  He set another beer, cracked open, on the nightstand. Three there now in a perfect row. I'd counted them the way movie cowboys count expended bullets.

  "You love them so much, Lew. Literature, the language itself."

  "You taught me that, Hosie, a lot of it."

  "I did, didn't I? I did." He was quiet a moment. "And I wish like hell they'd never let you down. Everything does, you know, sooner or later."

  No answer to that. I didn't try. Rain bucketed down outside. Somewhere a phone rang unanswered; stopped; started up again.

  "You've all been taking turns, standing watch," I said.

  "Guess we have at that."

  "Why?"

  He didn't answer, but walked back to the window. I tried to imagine, to summon up within myself, what he was seeing out there. Pinpricks of stars. Diminutive fires of the planet. Everything, as he said, gray. As though we were in some reverse aquarium, a cube of air complete with its own strange creatures, with water all around.

  I never found out exacdy what it was that had hurt my friend so—something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.

  "We care about you, Lew. That's not enough?"

  Guess it would have to be.

  "I've got a story to write," Hosie said, and left.

  DAYS MARCHED IN and out much as Hosie had, appearing unannounced, just as suddenly gone, banners bright or damp. Elsewhere in the world, wars were declared or fought undeclared, sons left home, workers tore open fingers and drove steel rods into their eyes, history smoothed its skirt in place over lap and legs. LaVerne and Hosie brought me tapes: T. S. Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas reading their own work, a five-cassetteDead Souls, Francois Villon.

  Two times a day someone appeared, generally an intern or resident, infrequently a nurse, to clean and dress wounds in chest and thigh. Med school professors swept through with students like so many gulping pilot fish in their wake. Meals arrived on covered trays, medications came, phlebotomists entered apologetically, social workers asked about diings that were none of their business and went away when I made no response.

  LaVerne, Don and Hosie were there frequently, from time to time others: Sam Brown from SeCure Corps, Frankie DeNoux, Bonnie Bider, Achilles Boudleaux. Doo-Wop even stopped by one morning on his rounds. Things awful slow out there, Captain, he told me.

  I listened to the Folkways poetry tape till I'd got it mosdy by heart.

  One morning LaVerne climbed into bed beside me as the tape played. We'd done this before. Basically the nursing response was threefold. Some thought it was great, no problem. Others insisted it was against hospital policy. (One foot on the floor at all times?) A handful thought it abominable. Nurses in this last category had a penchant for wheeling about and storming back through the door.

  "What do you think, Lew? Enough time out? Dinner's been on the table awhile now. Getting pretty cold."

  I could smell her perfume, the scented shampoo she'd used, breath sweet with champagne and cheese. Her sweat, that smelled like no one else's. That distant odor she always insisted I imagined, of other men.

  "Sooner or later—some things—you have to decide, Lew."

  She burrowed closer against me, as into covers on cold mornings.

  "I miss you so much, hon."

  Some code in their bod
ies, in our own, stamped and trampled deep, a code we never understand, never learn to read, but respond to.

  "And I'm sotired, Lew."

  We listened to traffic build outside. How many mornings had we lain like this, LaVerne newly home from work, light filling the world's wide-mouthed jar, all our city's good citizens slipping back into their lives.

  Must have been a hard night. LaVerne's breathing slowed, her hands twitched a few times and were still. Within moments she was snoring.

  "Love you," I told her.

  BOUDLEAUX HAD PICKED up whatever jobs stumbled towards me, handling most of them himself, farming out others to Sam Brown, still with SeCure as consultant but mostly freelancing now.

  Once the thought came, I realized it had been at the back of my mind for some time. I tripped the call button.

  Moments later a nurse's aide entered. "Yes, Mr. Griffin?"

  I held out the card I'd fishedfrom the nightstand.

  "Cindy, can you have a look at this, let me know if it's Lee Gardner's card, New York?"

  She stepped close to take the card. Her body smelled faintly of garlic and recent sex. It occurred to me that with a peculiar sort of intimacy I knew her voice—and absolutely nothing else about her. Was she twenty, forty? Fat, thin? Plain, pretty? Did she live alone, have a family, kids? Happy to go home at the end of the day, or were nights and days alike just things somehow to be gotten through, endured?

  I think that was when (though still I could discern only light and shadow, movement, mass) I knew I was back. Hello world. Miss me?

  "Park Avenue. Yes, sir." She read off die number for me. "Would you like me to get it for you, Mr. Griffin?"

  About to say I could manage, I thought better. "If you don't mind."

  "No sir, I don't mind at all." I sensed her bending beside me for the phone, could see the darkness of her body move against window light. She spoke briefly to the hospital operator then dialed, handing the phone to me.

  "Thanks, Cindy. I appreciate it."

  "What they all say."

  Without visual cues, even the most ordinary social interactions could become problematic. What, exacdy, was intended, implied? Confusion must have shown in my face.

  "Joshing you, Mr. Griffin. Don't you pay me any mind. I'll check in on you later."

  I'd have continued, but just then someone with a clarinet voice said thank you for calling Icarus Books, could she help me.

  "Lee Gardner please."

  A pause.

  "I'm afraid Mr. Gardner is no longer with Icarus Books, sir. Would you care to speak with another editor?"

  No.

  I see. Well.

  Might there be anodier number at which I could reach him?

  Well. Unofficially, of course, you might try reaching Mr. Gardner at 827-7342. Thank you for calling Icarus Books.

  Alto sax this time, reed gone bad: "Popular Publications."

  "Lee Gardner please."

  "May I say who's calling?"

  I told her.

  "Hang on, Mr. Griffin. Lee's probably at lunch. Most everyone is. But I'll give it a shot." She clicked off the line and back on. "Hey. You're in luck." Then her voice sank towards some phonal purgatory, half there, half not: "A Mr. Griffin for you on line two, Lee."

  "Yes?"

  I didn't often have a phone those days, phones requiring such middle-class imponderables as references and credit, but when I did, I often answered the same way. Or else I'd just pick the thing up and wait.

  "How are you, Mr. Gardner?"

  "Busy, thank you."

  Nothing more forthcoming. Momentsticked like tiny bombs on the wire. I heard his radio move from the Second Brandenburg with screaming pocket trumpets to a jazz station, vintage Miles from the sound of it. Pure jazz stations still existed back then.

  "Lew Griffin. We met here in New Orleans. You were looking for one of your writers. Amonas, Amana, something like that."

  A brief pause. "Latin."

  "Guess it does sound that way, now you mention it."

  "You hate Latin much as I did?"

  "Never had a chance to. They stopped teaching it the year I hit high school. Stopped teacliing all languages that year. No money for it, they claimed. No money, no teachers, no interest. Has to be some advantage in knowing what words like tenable really mean, though. Not many do."

  "Hell, most don't even have a clue where commas and periods go. Let alone that subjects and verbs should agree."

  We fell silent. His radio spun combinations: news, country, rock, something Perry Comoish. Finally came to rest on what sounded like an adaptation of Karel Capek's R.U.R. Back a few years, I listened to programs like that every night. Still remembered one about this doctor treating lepers on an isolated island, trying to atone for wrongs he's done. I'd fallen asleep halfway through and, three in the morning, still half drunk, woke to its conclusion, when a ship comes to retrieve the doctor and he sees in the faces of its crew that he's become a leper.

  "Ray Amano," Gardner said.

  Behind him on the radio someone said "You've cleared this with the family, I assume," someone else "But he is long dead, in the war."

  "Just a moment. Let me jot this down. There. For a project of mine, images of war in popular culture." The radio shut off. Gardner's voice seemed of a sudden eerily loud. "I'm afraid that I don't represent Mr. Amano anymore. Or publish him, for that matter."

  When he stopped speaking, static rushed in tofill the quiet.

  I waited.

  "I do know he's still not been heard from. Kid name of Gilden's editing an edition of Bury All Towers for one of those subscriber-only paperback clubs, talking about doing others. He's called me up a couple of times. The Hollywood interest is long gone, of course."

  "Can't be too long gone. Everybody in such a hurry to let go?"

  "It's been almost two months. Burners cool quickly in this business, Mr. Griffin."

  "YOU COULD HAVE told me," I said.

  "I did tell you, Lew. I told you, the doctors told you, LaVerne told you, Hosie told you. We told you two or three hundred times. Every other way, you were fine, but you just couldn't hold on to time. Time passed right through you, left nothing behind. Doctors say it's the kind of thing that can happen with concussion, severe trauma—or with hypoxia. One of the rounds nicked your femoral artery, Lew, you remember that? You'd bled out pretty bad by the time the paramedics got there."

  "Of course I remember." Remembered them telling me about it, anyway.

  "Physically, you were well enough to be released some time back."

  "But it's only been a few days, a week at the most. I know that."

  "That's how it seems, Lew. To you—which is precisely the problem."

  I'd been Doo-Wopped. Every day was today. I was on Hopi Mean Time.

  "Doctors held off discharging you because of that. They say usually the sensorium rights itself, gets back on track without much help from diem. Just a matter of time.

  Or in the case of hypoxia, other parts of the brain learn to take over."

  "Or maybe they don't."

  "Yeah," Don said. "Maybe."

  After a moment I tripped the call bell. Cindy responded.

  "I'm leaving, Cindy. Any paperwork has to be signed, they need to get it up here."

  "Head nurse'll flip out over this, Mr. Griffin." Her tone suggested that this was not an altogether unwelcome prospect. "Course, she flips out over almost anything."

  "Closet's to your right, about five paces," Don said once Cindy was gone.

  I found it and fumbled the door open, one of those push hard and let go affairs. "Anything in there?"

  'Ten or twelve empty hangers. Clothes—T-shirts, jeans—folded and stacked on the shelf above, to the left. Socks and underwear right."

  "Thanks, Don. I don't suppose there'd be a suitcase, anything like that?"

  "Matter of fact there is. Same shelf, far right. I brought one up a couple of days ago. Had a feeling you might be needing it soon."

&n
bsp; Within moments clothes were stowed away. Retrieving razor, shaving cream, toothbrush and toothpaste from the phonebooth-size bathroom—not to mention a fifth of Scotch Hosie had smuggled in—I threw them into Don's suitcase and zipped it shut. The suitcase bumped against my leg as I started for the door and walked into the corner of the nightstand. I'd go on collecting bruises for some time.

  "Nothing fair about any of it, is there, Don?"

  "You ever thought any different?"

  At which point Head Nurse pushed imperiously in to begin reciting the litany of reasons I could not, absolutely could not, leave.

  "Probably shouldn't block the door," Don said. "And I'd stand back if I were you. I know this man."

  She ignored him. "You insist on this, I'll be forced to call Security."

  Her beeper went off. She ignored that as well.

  "Call whomever you want. But you'd be well advised to call your administrator first, to check on legalities."

  Exasperated: "It's five in the morning."

  "Hey, he'll appreciate it. Let him get an early start."

  She swung about and fairly steamed out of port.

  Hand against my elbow, Don guided me to the door without seeming to do so.

  "What do you think, Lew? Deal with paperwork later?"

  "Man after my own heart."

  We went down halls smelling of disinfectant, defecation and despair. Stood in a kind of lobby area, voices all a jumble, waiting for the elevator. "Take care, Mr. Griffin," Cindy said as the doors closed. I hadn't known until then that she was there.

  "Heading for LaVerne's, I assume," Don said.

  "Ifshe'llhaveme."

  Elevator doors whispered open.

  "Oh, she'll have you, all right. Fact is, we shut down your apartment, hope that's okay. Your things are in my garage. Didn't think you should be alone—for a while, at least. You okay, Lew?"

  "Fine."

  "Car's just over diere."

  His trusty Electra, Don took the suitcase from me, stashed it in the trunk among jugs of water, half a case of oil, jumper cables, medical kit, sheathed shotgun, as I climbed in the passenger door.