Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  Caged radium. A dappled pair of sunlit leaves beneath a darkening canopy. Tracers of uncorrupt light. “Stanley,” she said again.

  The sound of his name calcified his rage into a single, tight-lipped, “What.”

  “Lighten up, Stanley.”

  “Yeah,” said the bartender, from down the bar.

  Stanley shot him a glance.

  The woman released his hand and pulled a twenty out of her jacket pocket. She showed it to the bartender. “Bring the man another drink.”

  “On the house,” said the bartender, reaching for the quart of Bushmills. “It’s about time I had a laugh in this morgue.”

  She pushed the twenty across the plank. “I’ll get the one after that, then. Won’t you join us?”

  “That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day.” The bartender upended a shotglass on the rubber-toothed mat in the gutter beyond the twenty and topped it.

  “Here’s to jokes at other people’s expense,” he said, raising his shot.

  “And all other mitigating traumas,” the woman added. She removed the straw from her drink and dropped it on the napkin.

  The bartender hesitated, his glass halfway to his mouth. “A big vocabulary makes me paranoid,” he said.

  “Let me rephrase.” She raised her Tom Collins.

  The bartender waited. Stanley raised his glass, too.

  “Whiskey river, take me down,” the woman said.

  “And sure but a neater corrective was never issued by the State Department,” the bartender said. He threw back his shot.

  Stanley did likewise.

  Green Eyes had a healthy swallow of Tom Collins, and pushed the twenty a little further over the bar.

  The bartender covered Stanley’s ice with whiskey.

  “Yours, too, if you like,” she said.

  “I like,” said the bartender, who topped his own glass again and raised it. “Yours,” he indicated to Stanley.

  His temerity, if not his eloquence, awakened by the whiskey, Stanley turned to Green Eyes and said, raising his glass, “May I remember your name tomorrow morning.”

  “Frank,” said the bartender.

  Stanley grimaced.

  “Vivienne.” She smiled and touched her glass to his. “May you remember it five minutes from now.”

  “No problem,” said the bartender, throwing back his shot.

  “Any second name?” Stanley asked, emboldened by quip and the knowledge that the bartender’s mouth was full.

  “Carneval.”

  “As in the Brazilian segue from fast to carnality?”

  “Sí.”

  “Or is it the other way around?”

  She smiled. “Take your pick.”

  “Spanish?”

  “Portuguese and Swedish.”

  Stanley was staring again. “Why does that turn me on?”

  She stared back. “Which way is on?”

  They drank.

  The bartender was staring, too. “You can make another Tom Collins, now,” Stanley suggested.

  The bartender blinked, as if saddened. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess my chestnuts is burning.”

  “Christmas again already,” Stanley said. “Maybe this year they’ll do a chestnut beer.”

  “You could leave the bottle,” Vivienne suggested. “As a present.”

  “You could pay for it,” the bartender replied, “as a matter of fact.”

  “I did pay for it,” confirmed Ms. Carneval, indicating the twenty.

  “What about the Tom Collins?”

  “I’d rather switch than go into shock.”

  “Hey,” said the bartender suspiciously. “Something wrong with it?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Perfectly good drink for a fairy.”

  “You ordered it.”

  “I wasn’t sure what kind of joint this was.”

  “What kind of joint is it?”

  “A regular joint. It reflects its clientele.”

  “You got something against fairies?”

  “Not so long as they buy me drinks.”

  “Hey,” said Stanley.

  “What about those chestnuts,” she said.

  “What, you want some?” the bartender said. He moved down the bar without waiting for an answer.

  Vivienne pushed the Tom Collins aside. “And bring me a glass. With ice.”

  The bartender returned with the setup and went away with the remains of the Tom Collins and the twenty-dollar bill, leaving behind the half-empty quart of whiskey.

  Stanley poured her a drink.

  “What are you doing in this joint?” he asked, setting aside the bottle.

  “Same as you, I’d guess. Having a drink where they don’t know me.” She picked up her glass, touched it to his on the bar, and had a dainty sip.

  Stanley suddenly became shy again. He’d neglected to realize that the bartender’s contribution to the social equation had made things easier for him.

  “They don’t know me any place.”

  “Yeah? So start fresh. What’s your name?”

  “Stanley. I told you.”

  “No. Your last name.”

  “Ahearn. Stanley Clarke Ahearn.”

  “Why, that’s the gentlest, most solid name I ever heard,” she said earnestly. “It sounds like a building standing all alone against a record number of snowflakes falling on Minneapolis at two o’clock in the morning a week after New Year’s Eve.”

  Stanley was so amazed by this remark that the smile it elicited from him hung between a grimace and a smirk.

  “Plus or minus a little pollution,” he managed to mumble.

  “They’ll get it cleaned up,” she said. “They have to. Ever read Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth?”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Stanley. “She’s going to do the eco-dozens on me. Let’s get this over with: No, I haven’t read it. And I’m not going to read it. For the last three years I’ve done little beyond watch Star Trek reruns and drink this particular brand of whiskey and drive a delivery truck for a grocery wholesaler in Chinatown. I live alone and I like it that way. I have no friends. My only ecological requirement is that there always be a large bottle of aspirin in the glove compartment.”

  “So demanding,” she said. “So forward-thinking.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I can’t talk about Star Trek,” she said. “I get vertigo in space, televised or not.”

  “Maybe it’s morning sickness.”

  She shot him a fierce glance. “Mind your own fucking business.”

  Stanley’s jaw dropped a little.

  “Sorry.”

  She took a sip of whiskey larger than her previous one.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He sipped his whiskey, racking his brain for the conversational tag immediately preceding the subject of morning sickness.

  Suddenly compliant, his mind sent televised space scrolling across the foreground of his perception, like the sign above Times Square, big enough to read without glasses.

  “I probably would get it, too,” Stanley ventured charily. “Vertigo in televised space, I mean. I’ve seen them all, every episode, and I can’t remember a single damned one of them. Except for one time they have to go to Altair, see, and —.”

  “So let’s change the subject.”

  “Well,” he began again. “I hear they’re translating the King James Bible into Klingon.”

  She straightened up, looked toward the back bar, then at him, then away again.

  He smiled wanly. “So let’s change the subject.”

  In fact he remembered dozens of Star Trek episodes. The enormity of the lie squatted on the bar between them like a ruptured Tribble, enforcing an additional silence. Vivienne toyed with her drink without tasting it.

  Stanley became uneasy. “So much for our first date,” he said at last.

  “Hey, no pressure from me,” Vivienne said. “You want to look at your little round face in that little hexagonal pool of whis
key all night, help yourself.”

  “The trouble is, it’s a habit,” Stanley admitted morosely. “Habits are hard to break.”

  “Especially for a lousy reason,” she added acidly.

  Stanley nodded. “Especially for a lousy reason.”

  She smiled, just a little.

  “Is this becoming self-flagellant?”

  “Pan-flagellant,” she said. Her tone hinted that she already knew all she needed to know about such habits.

  “Married?” Stanley said abruptly.

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “Divorced?”

  “That too. You?”

  “Never married.”

  “Really? How old are you?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “How’d you miss the banana boat to bliss?”

  “It left without me.”

  “Either you’re whining, or you’re better off.”

  He looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  Caged radium. He hadn’t shaved. “Yeah?” he said. Turning away he tipped a little whiskey over his lower lip, staring over the glass held by both his hands.

  “Yes,” she said. She ran a fingernail around the rim of her own glass. “It’s an institution designed to eat you alive, husband, house, kids and all. It turns your mind into a La Brea tar baby. It turns your heart into a suppurating retaining wall. It turns your soul into a firefly in a jar. It turns… It turns…” Her voice stopped. After a moment she added, “I guess you could call me biased.”

  Stanley shrugged. “First off, I wouldn’t have to live with a husband. I’d have to live with a wife.”

  “That’s a good point. We girls got that strike against us. Right out of the box. As it were.”

  “Second… I never took the chance.”

  “Stop whining. You’re better off.”

  “Or maybe I should say…”

  She finished it for him. “The chance never took you.”

  He shook his head. “I never took the chance.”

  “Like I said—.”

  “I’m better off?”

  To Stanley, who thought he must by now be somewhat drunk, the repartee sounded like the same old ping-pong. Pock: Husband this. Pock-pock… What wife? Pock… Had your chance. Pock-pock… You call that a chance? Pock… Anything beats waiting on tables. Pock-pock-pock: Except getting beat yourself. Pock… That’s the truth. Pock-pock-pock… I was lucky to get out with all my teeth. Pock… That rough? Pock-pock… All I ever did was darn his socks and wait for him to decide he had time to fuck me. What? You heard what I said. The guy must have been crazy. Drunk, mostly. He ignored you? Like an empty mailbox on a dirt road to nowhere. How existential. Nothing to shoot at, even. He never, ahm, he never made love to you. No, and he never fucked me, either. I find that very hard to believe—. So fuck me. Fucked you? Fuck me. Fuck you? Me. Here? Why not? What, in the toilet? That’s right: why not? Can’t I finish my drink first? You see? Fuck me, stupid. Why? Why not? I’m shy. So am I. Shy but desperate. Besides, I-I don’t have a condom. What about—you don’t even know me. I feel like I know you. A thousand years, right? That time on the Nile you poured wine into the pasta instead of olive oil? We were oxen together, with a common yoke. I don’t know you, either. What’s to know? Pock.…

  “So she had red hair, huh?”

  Stanley abruptly looked up. Had he been maudlin out loud? What had he said? He looked at his glass. Had he blacked out? He looked at the bottle, at her glass. They all had some whiskey in them, though less than before.

  More to the point, what had she heard him say?

  “Ahm, look,” he began. “If I’ve been rude…”

  “That red hair’s a known killer,” she said. She came a little closer. “That’s only if you’re particular, of course.”

  Caged radium.

  Had he blacked out and mentioned the red hair?

  They would look good with red hair, those green eyes.

  They looked damn good with black hair.

  He turned away from the green eyes to refill his glass and to cling to it, along with his clichés about barroom conversations. Pock… Boring, metronomic, concentric, claustrophobic, taking no chances, revealing little. Pock pock… All the same after ten o’clock. Pock… Maudlin blurts. Pock… Based on country-western songs. Pock-pock… Premature ejaculation, that would sting. Pock… Nothing so existential as trying to impress a woman who doesn’t love you anymore… Pock… Backfire of all backfires… Pock-pock… But its subject unrepressed a strange feeling in Stanley and, he eventually realized, staring at his drink, that this red-haired feeling in his breast, unexpectedly freed by this green-eyed presence, but more likely by the alcohol, although probably by the combination of both, had managed to fill his eyes with moisture.

  He curled his lip and breathed heavily. The air around him turned ochre. Let not one tear fall, he thought, not a single one, lest I destroy this bar completely. Everything in it. Between his two hands the drink trembled a little. Through the moisture in his eyes he could see the viral filaments conspicuous to strong alcohol adrift in his whiskey, like malaria in a bloodstream. And somewhere, similarly adrift in his neural sea, a voice, long-unheard, unexpectedly called his name.

  He almost answered it aloud. But something arose in him, dignity perhaps, for lack of a better concept, which forced him to say something—anything—else.

  “I’ve always suspected,” he croaked, “that a life lived within an uninterrupted field of television, alcohol, and a dumb job would leave a man right where he started, emotionally speaking.”

  “I’d suspect,” she said, “it’d leave him with even less.”

  “I’m beginning to believe it.”

  The back of her ringed finger almost managed to brush the tear off the cheek below his right eye before he jerked his head back, like a startled horse.

  He looked away and wiped his cheek himself.

  “I’m drunk,” he said, turning back to her after a moment.

  She smiled boozily. “The chemistry is mutual.”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s like a time machine. You get in with a certain set of problems and it seems like maybe five minutes have passed while the lights on the dashboard go on and off and maybe there’s a little vibration in the chassis while you’re watching the news. And then something clicks and you open the door and stick out your head to look around and it’s a week or three months or a year later. It doesn’t seem so long to you, though. But you get out and stretch anyway because if that much time has passed you better get a little exercise.

  “The days are longer or shorter than you think they ought to be because the season has changed; all the kids tell you they’re seniors in college but look too young to be in high school, which you attended with their parents; the cars have changed subtly, they’ve gotten smaller and more alike; there are many, many more places where you can’t smoke; and the corner grocery doesn’t sell anything made with meat anymore either: they’ve even changed the President.

  “But you? You’ve got the same set of problems you got into the machine with, when those kids maybe weren’t even born yet, when the guy those kids elected President was two classes behind you in high school, and you realize that it’s true, that television puts you into a dream state very like the real thing with this important difference, that when you’re dreaming you’re metabolizing, and when you’re watching television you’re not. In psychic metabolism real-time experiences are broken down into energy-yielding substances for use in vital emotional processes. Other constructs, necessary for mental health, are synthesized by dreaming. Under the influence of sleep and work and play and, uh, sex, psychic metabolism gets to do its beneficial thing. But under the influence of television it doesn’t. Under the influence of television your experience just sits there, letting all that fake, pre-masticated pseudo-experience television serves up to you, that nutritionless pap, pile up on top of whatever slender, bona fide, unresolved experiences you might have m
anaged to accrue under your skullcap, right up until the time you picked up the wand.”

  “The wand?”

  He held thumb above forefinger in front of him and made the clicking motion.

  “Zap,” he said softly. “Zap, zap.”

  “The remote control,” she concluded.

  “The wand of non-awareness,” he confirmed, as if to himself.

  She nodded, ever so slightly.

  Stanley sighed heavily. “You’re up on the latest football scores. You know what they’re doing to each other in Rwanda. But you’re way, way behind on vital matters of psychic metabolism. And it’s so scary or disheartening or whatever that non-emotion is that you close the access port and fire up the television if it was ever fired down and crack the cap on another quart and hope that urban development doesn’t deprive you of cheap rent and they don’t raise the price on this Irish whiskey because you came down a notch or two for economy’s sake already just last year and maybe that rickety little operation you’re working for can hold on until the day your social security kicks in, if that new President whatshisname knee-high to the wand of non-awareness doesn’t spend it all first, and they don’t…”

  “Stanley.” She put her hand on his arm.

  “…blow the whole goddamn place to kingdom-come unless of course it’s the day before you’re in a bus on the way to the discount liquor store and you see her, walking through the crowd on the sidewalk in Chinatown, a full red head taller than everybody around her, just before the bus roars into the Stockton Tunnel—.”

  “Stanley,” she said again. “You mentioned sex.”

  “Too soon would be right on ti— I did?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I—. No, I didn’t. You did.”

  “No, no. It was you. You mentioned it.”

  “No, it can’t be. I can’t bear to think about it. You, it was you. You mentioned sex.”

  “You mentioned it first.”

  “No, it was you who brought it up. Then I mentioned it. I would never—.”