The Octopus on My Head

by Jim Nisbet

  Lavinia got it. “The Conquistadors called the Incas plunderers?”

  “So it would appear.”

  “I’m changing the climate,” she said. “Ask me how.”

  “There’s nothing like a little etymology for fetching up the odd, telling epistemic relativism,” I observed.

  “Is that the same as irony?” Lavinia asked.

  “Now for the ’aitches.” I turned pages. “‘Heroin. A white, odorless, bitter crystalline compound, C17H17NO(C2H3O2)2, that is derived from morphine and is a highly addictive narcotic. Also called diacetylmorphine. Etymology: German, originally a trademark.’”

  Even Ivy took note of that one.

  “I did change the climate,” Lavinia marveled. “Ask me to do it again.”

  “There’s nothing like a little etymology for fetching up the odd, telling je ne sais quois,” I reminded them.

  “Those fucking Nazis might win yet,” Ivy observed darkly.

  “It’s always a possibility,” I agreed. “One more?”

  “This is almost as interesting as the drugs themselves,” Lavinia suggested.

  “Speak for yourself,” Ivy suggested back.

  With the blade of his clasp knife Ivy carefully began to mix the heroin and cocaine, drawing inscrutably calculated amounts of each from their respective heaps, thoroughly dicing them together, then organizing the result into long, thin lines. The table in front of him began to take on the qualities of an aerial photograph of a turkey farm.

  Lavinia requested another definition.

  “Sure. How about…. ‘Alkaloids: Nicotine, quinine, cocaine, and morphine are known for their poisonous or medicinal attributes….’”

  “Mostly poisonous, you bet,” Lavinia commented.

  “But oh so medicinal,” Ivy reassured us.

  “Last etymology,” I promised. “‘Alkalai. From Middle English, from Medieval Latin, from Arabic al-qalIy, the ashes of saltwort, which comes from al, the + qalIy, ashes, which in turn is from qalAY, which means … to fry.’”

  “Perfect!” Lavinia squealed.

  “Ah to fry,” Ivy agreed appreciatively, “lonely as a bird.”

  “Lonely as a crowd,” Lavinia corrected, “and,” she reflected, “Arabic.”

  “Sons of bitches might win yet,” Ivy speculated.

  “On the other hand,” I closed the dictionary, “heroin is Old World, while both nicotine and cocaine are New World. So the score’s two to one. Who knows?” I rapped my knuckles on the floor. “The Last Superpower Standing might win yet.”

  “Globalism!” said Lavinia. “Cigarettes and cocaine all round!”

  “It’s no wonder we are the last superpower,” put in Ivy.

  “I like the emphasis on ‘we,’” I told him. “It conveys solidarity.”

  “Always glad to be of service. Although,” Ivy added thoughtfully, “when that superpower is nothing but one big we, when there’s nobody left out, when it’s truly global, then we’ll see what’s what.” He produced a candy-striped drinking straw and set about knifing it into three equal lengths. “Marx predicted, a century and a half ago, that when capitalism goes global, it will destroy itself.”

  I frowned. Hadn’t this idea come up already? “It sounds like Marx had more faith in capitalism than I do,” I remarked suspiciously.

  Lavinia narrowed her eyes. “How the fuck did Marx know that?”

  “Better you should ask,” I suggested, “how does Ivy Pruitt know it?”

  “I’m going to be more specific than that,” Lavinia said, as we gravitated toward the table. “How can we sit here doing drugs knowing, as we now know, that dedicated, talented, intelligent and well-funded people are determined to destroy us and our way of life?”

  “Same way we sat here doing drugs before we knew it,” Ivy pointed out. He handed a two-inch section of straw to each of us. “Keep your straw to yourself because, you know, Hepatitis C is extremely communicable.” He snapped a finger.

  Transgressing the boundary between cosmetics and flesh, Lavinia inserted an end of a straw into one of her petite nostrils and bent over the array of lines.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “A mere fleck of contaminated blood in a dollop of mucus,” Ivy replied, watching Lavinia, “is all it takes to transmit the virus that causes Hepatitis C.”

  “Ivy,” I said. “Are you—?”

  “If a straw has your number on it,” Ivy interrupted, leaning into his own pair of lines, “then it has your number on it.” He snorted twice, smoothly and deliberately, then sat back in his chair with a satisfied air. “Son of a bitch, at fucking last, I am one with my numinosity. Curly, you’re on deck.”

  I felt like I was on a deck. If that stack of books from the sixties had tampered with my equilibrium, the idea that Ivy Pruitt might have an incurable and fatal disease seriously moiled it.

  As I leaned over the table to do my pair of lines, however, I gave everybody else a reason to be nauseous, for a steady stream of glass particles cascaded out of the cuff of my shirt, littered the surface of the table, and polluted every single line and heap of dope upon it.

  I jerked my arm away, but that reaction only sewed additional fragments over the table, more or less as if I were seeding it for a crop of martini glasses. I couldn’t have contaminated the scene more thoroughly if I’d done it deliberately.

  The room fell silent.

  Earlier, in the street in front of Ivy’s place, Lavinia had kindly brushed the glass off my clothes with a folded road map. I had removed my jacket to shake it out, but not my shirt. While there was no hair on my head to capture glass fragments, quite a few had fallen out of the ear that had been uppermost when the window shattered.

  If twisting the tip of a finger in that ear would not have been a good idea, snorting speedball cut with the odd particle of glass seemed a worse one.

  I straightened up, carefully laid my straw on the table, and stood away.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Oops?”

  “That,” Ivy said, staring dully at the table, “does not count as positive feedback.”

  Lavinia sniffed. “We are experiencing technical difficulties.” She looked hopefully at Ivy. “Should we stayed tuned?”

  “I might be able to think again in about sixty seconds,” said Ivy. “Stand by.”

  “We could cook it up and geeze it,” Lavinia said hopefully.

  “That’s bright,” I said. “Even supposing that you enjoy needlework, a single particle of ground glass is bound to give you a rush, as it courses through your bloodstream.”

  “Hell,” Lavinia sniffled defiantly, “if impurities in drugs killed junkies, there wouldn’t be any junkies.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest it would kill you,” I said patronizingly. “I meant to infer that it would be an unusual experience. Sensational, possibly.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “Don’t mind me. Help yourself.” The room fell silent again.

  I looked toward the front door. “Was that a rooster?”

  “Every day,” Ivy responded dully.

  Lavinia brightened. “That’s what we’ll call it. The Oakland Rooster. A speedball cut with ground glass. We’ll be famous.”

  “The sun is coming up,” I said. “Coining argot is inappropriate.”

  “Safeway,” Ivy said.

  “Why would you call it a Safeway?” Lavinia said. “Oakland Safeway?”

  “Open 24 hours.”

  “Does that include now?” I asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Lavinia said. “Answer it, Ivy.”

  Ivy spoke in a monotone, as if he were in a trance. “Go to Safeway.” He extended his hand. “Buy an egg poacher.” He twisted his hand and retracted it until it touched his chest. “Bring it to me.”

  “Egg poacher?” I asked.

  Lavinia blinked. “How much of that shit did you do?”

  “Ten or twelve blocks.” Still staring straight ahead, Ivy extend
ed his arm toward the east. “Straight past the columbarium.”

  “An egg poacher,” I repeated.

  “You’ll pay for it,” Ivy suggested tonelessly. “Get on your hoss.

  “But if it works,” he added, addressing me directly, “we’ll split it three ways.”

  Chapter Nine

  NYCTALOPIA IS THE TERM FOR NIGHT BLINDNESS. A PERSON WHO is nightblind might be a nyctalope. So, what is a person with day blindness? Or a person who won’t work? Jobalope?”

  “That would be Ivy.”

  “We’re both squinting. How about diurnalope?”

  “If it weren’t for these shades,” Lavinia said, “I’d have driven straight into that cemetery wall.”

  It was one of those mornings we Californians like to think happen only in California, which may be one thing we’re right about. No humidity, of course: none. Which means cool in the shade, warm in the sun. Predawn, it’s cool with the certain prospect of future warmth. A few wisps of coastal fog remain in the east, as if deliberately, a small committee to welcome the tangelo hues of the ascending dwarf star. The blues of the sky run a gamut from cornflower, backlighting the wisps, to blueberry, straight up, and violet as you move west, all the way to the contusive horizon, where sky and sea can’t be determined as agreeing on a boundary. The latter color is a disturbing one, as of an integument having sustained a mighty pummeling in the night, implying that now, as of yore, we have no idea of the terrible machinery that animates it.

  Still, with the exception of maybe a half-hour’s shuteye grabbed in the back seat of the Lexus while we waited for Ivy Pruitt to get himself processed out of jail, and my twenty minutes on the floor of Ivy’s kitchen, Lavinia and I had been up all night. Despite a couple of pairs of shades retrieved from the glove compartment, which I gingerly teased past the black nine-millimeter that lived in there like a hibernating puff adder, the daylight hurt our eyes. And though she was driving quite reasonably along the back streets of Oakland, the slipstream, tugging at the hole where the back window used to be, tugged also at our few remaining calories. We hadn’t gone a block before Lavinia had the heater on. That Lexus was some kind of luxury car. Everything in it ran quietly. Though the fan was on full blast KCSM didn’t have to work very loudly to serenade us with Cannonball Adderly’s exquisite cover of Autumn Leaves.

  “Are people who wince at daylight universally called musicians?” Lavinia asked, apparently just to make conversation.

  My answer was, “That guy didn’t have shoes on.”

  “What guy?”

  “Stepnowski. In the warehouse.”

  Lavinia frowned. “He didn’t?”

  “The socks on his feet were white but not very dirty and seemed randomly dispersed.”

  “Randomly dispersed….”

  “Like a pair of shotgunned puppets.”

  She thought about this.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have shotguns on the brain this morning.”

  “He was on a loading dock….”

  I nodded automatically, though in fact I was mulling something else entirely, namely the fact that, having counted out our money, we hadn’t spared the time to take a look around the rest of that De Haro Street warehouse. But I said, “That’s a very interesting point.”

  “…Because the next conclusion would be that Stepnowski was killed someplace else.”

  “And dumped on the loading dock.”

  Stopped at a red light and facing directly into the sun, we thought about it. Lavinia dialed down the heater fan. “He was a little guy. Could one person, alone, have deposited him where we found him?”

  “A hundred pounds is still a hundred pounds.”

  “He weighed more than a hundred pounds.”

  “Very likely.”

  “So, two guys with a watchamacallit left him there.”

  “A dolly? A handtruck? A forklift?”

  “But what about the pool of blood?”

  “What about it?”

  “How much blood in an adult human?”

  “Ten pints.”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “How do you know that?”

  I shrugged. “You can only practice so much. Since I don’t drink seriously, never watch television, and can’t afford a social life, I read.”

  Livinia kept on watching me for a bit, then turned to face the windshield. “Huh.”

  “The real question is, can you be an adult human, and a drummer, too?”

  The light turned green and the tune was over. I turned off the radio. Driving, Lavinia said, “If only we’d had a look around.”

  “I was just thinking that thought.”

  “We might have found his shoes.”

  “Or no shoes.”

  “How much is ten pints, anyway?”

  “Fifty bucks, if it’s Guiness….”

  She wheeled us into a Safeway parking lot. A neon sign atop two concrete pillars high above the store remained illuminated: OPEN 24 HOURS; poppy red letters against the robin’s-egg blue of the sky.

  “Why didn’t we have a look around, again?” she asked, as she guided the car into a parking space.

  “We got what we came for, and there was a dead guy on the floor.”

  “Right.” The parking lot was nearly deserted. Delivery vehicles of every size and description, from bakery vans to Safeway’s own tractor-trailers, surrounded the store. “Nothing about us being chickenshit.”

  “Not a cheep.”

  “Yeah. We got what we came for and we left.”

  “That’s my take on it.”

  The supermarket’s doors opened automatically. The lighting was very bright. Lavinia took a shopping basket from a stack inside the door and handed it to me.

  “We’re just here to get the egg thing,” I pointed out.

  “What the hell,” she said. “When’s the last time you had something to eat?”

  I considered this. “I can’t remember.”

  “So what comes immediately to mind?”

  “Orange juice, coffee, hash browns, toast, butter, jam, and … eggs.” I looked at her and she looked at me and we both said, “Poached eggs.”

  “Sounds good to me, and I don’t even eat breakfast.”

  “A lot depends on what Ivy wants an egg poacher for.”

  “We can always fry them.”

  “I bet he doesn’t own a frying pan. You’ll have to get salt, pepper, sugar, paper plates, cups, forks and spoons, too. He has a couple of knives.”

  “How about a coffee percolator?”

  “How about running water?”

  Lavinia made a U turn and came back with two liters of bottled water, which she placed into the basket.

  “Gas,” I said. “I know he has gas.”

  “I’ll bet a gas stove was his single requirement for signing the lease.”

  “The back-porch view of the Inevitable was just a bonus.”

  “He didn’t think twice about it.”

  I followed Lavinia as she selected a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, a quart of milk, a variety of picnicking products. As she added paper towels to the basket, I said, “Maybe we should just go out for breakfast.”

  “Don’t fuck with me; I’m waxing domestic.”

  We rounded an end cap of tortillas stacked five feet high. “Corn or flour?”

  “Corn.”

  “How about ground pork sausage instead of bacon?”

  I shrugged. What the hell did I care? Despite the three-way split, I was still holding more cash than I’d held in a very long time. In years, maybe. Why not go for steak?

  Lavinia gathered enthusiasm as she accumulated groceries. She crossed over the back aisle to a wall of meat products and retrieved a pound of ground sausage. “You are in for huevos rancheros like you never had before. For which we need salsa.”

  “Right here. I guess those Mexican kids leave a little culture behind them every time they get deported.”

  “And all we offer in return is NAFTA. Excuse me, sir.”

&nb
sp; A man wearing an apron with a feather duster in one back pocket and a price-sticker gun in a hip holster didn’t turn around from a pyramid he was constructing with half-pint cans of peas. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Do you have such an animal as an egg poacher?”

  He was a big man with dill pickle fingers that dwarfed the cans he was stacking. “Aisle Six.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder as he turned to look at us. His bloodshot eyes and ragged voice betrayed the fatigue unique to the middle ground between the end of a night shift and the beginning of a second job. It was obvious that the man was exhausted. We should have been helping him, instead of the other way around. Lavinia noticed it, too. “Thank you, sir,” she said tenderly.

  I glanced at a sign overhead. “This is aisle Four.”

  The man acknowledged Lavinia’s civility with a tired smile and turned back to his pyramid. “Enter Six from the front of the store,” he advised us. “Get your egg poacher and exit the way you came. That way, you’ll avoid a direct encounter with the man who’s taking a shit in School Supplies.”

  For once Lavinia was nonplussed. “School Supplies?”

  “It’s at the other end of Six.”

  “Ahm,” I hesitated, “is this a regular customer?”

  “He’s real regular,” the clerk said.

  “Where are your security people?” Lavinia asked.

  “Security don’t want nothing to do with him.”

  “What about the cops?”

  “Cops got real crime to attend to.”

  “Where’s the manager?”

  “Crying in his office.”

  We walked to the row of cash registers at the front of the store, crossed over to aisle Six, and peered cautiously around its end cap, which consisted entirely of pineapples.

  “He wasn’t kidding,” Lavinia said.

  “I never thought so. There’s the kitchen stuff. Only twenty feet in.”

  A speaker overhead reproduced Hello Goodbye, by the Beatles.

  “Let’s go.”

  We had to scan the display. Salt shakers. Knife sets. Chafing dishes. Can openers. Sauce pans. Fondue forks. Wooden-handled barbecue spatulas. Refrigerator magnets. “Get a pot-holder,” I suggested.