Nine Kinds of Naked

by Tony Vigorito

  Elizabeth continued trailing Diablo and his companion as they crossed the street in front of a black pickup truck with a giant NO FEAR decal emblazoned across the top of its windshield. Whereas before she would only have seen an ostentatious admission of insecure masculinity, now she saw a mystical memorandum: No fear. Not an all-caps braggadocio, in other words, but a straightforward wisdom. No fear.

  No fear, Elizabeth repeated to herself as she crossed the street in front of the fearless pickup truck. Its turn signal clicked in cadence to her footsteps, and its radio crackled some commercial specifically at her: “It’s a big change,” barked the gaudy announcer hawking whatever unknown consumer crapola, “and now it’s up to you . . . ”

  And then it all came together. The marquee in the front window of the jazz bar across the street flashed LIVE IN CONCERT at her, and she knew that live rhymed not with hive but with give. Live in concert, yes of course, and as she reached the curb, a shining couple stepped halfway into her path and asked, in unison, “Real quick, yes or no?” and without even breaking her stride, Elizabeth decided what seemed to her to be the fate of the rest of her life.

  “Yes.”

  84 ACTUALLY, ELIZABETH had just decided for the couple that they would go out to lunch rather than go home for lunch. But such mundane affairs were unknown to Elizabeth. From her point of view, a pair of angels had just presented her with a decision as to her destiny, and she had answered in the unmistakable affirmative. Yes. Yes! Yes I said yes I will Yes.

  Yessing along thus in the yesness of existence (and Elizabeth had discovered one evening while poring over her dictionary that this is no mere wordplay, that the word yes itself derives from the same root as to be, that yes is the emphatic contradiction of nothingness, that yes is the very essence of being, that yes is the inescapable act of life itself), Elizabeth continued to follow Diablo at a distance, yes she did. “What do you think will happen?” a passing pedestrian asked his companion, but Elizabeth knew he was really talking to her. She grinned, yielding to the yes, realizing that whatever was happening had already happened, that she was and could only ever be along for the ride.

  And what a ride it was! The sheer unlikelihood of life, the vastness of its scale and our own peewee points of view, can such a trifling glimmer of perception really carry any significance? Can there be such an audacity of awareness? Dare we answer yes?

  Oh yes we dare yes, thought Elizabeth, and she twirled around and suddenly sang at the stern man with a black eye she found a few feet behind her: “If the universe bangs big and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” She touched the side of her nose as she did so, oh yes she most certainly did, momentarily noticed the Day-Glo orange Frisbee he was carrying under his arm, then pointed at him and said, “Walk away.” It was an impulse, bona fide and beautiful, her victory over quiet desperation, her invocation to riot and exaltation. For his part, the stern man with a black eye and a Day-Glo orange Frisbee under his arm appeared irritated by her outburst, but at least he seemed to find some contentment when he glanced down at her breasts.

  Pleased with her fluster at every level, Elizabeth carried on with her tailing of Diablo and the crusader and immediately noticed that a black-and-white cat had been trotting along just next to her. She hadn’t paid it any heed at first, though now it appeared to her as though the cat was not so much matching pace with her as it was following Diablo on its own predatory quest. The cat, in other words, seemed absolutely oblivious to her and concerned only with its objective of keeping up with Diablo.

  Elizabeth scarcely had time to muse this over before the cat suddenly took off ahead of her, racing nimbly through the gauntlet of pedestrian legs. Looking to where she’d last spied Diablo, Elizabeth was momentarily startled to see that neither he, the crusader, nor the mule were anywhere to be seen. But she did happen to see the black-and-white cat dart down an alley, and so the obvious path forward seemed to be to follow the cat following Diablo. She hurried to the alley, and when she turned the corner was pleased to spy the cat making its way up a flight of access steps off the alleyway. There was an awning over the stairs, and Elizabeth was not surprised to see a sizable number nine printed upon it.

  She did not notice that the stern man with a black eye and a Day-Glo orange Frisbee under his arm was still behind her.

  85 “APOPHENIA!” Diablo yelled at Billy Pronto, not caring that from all appearances he was barking jargon at nobody at all. “Borderline schizophrenic, as a matter of fact!”

  Billy Pronto snickered. “You are hardly one to judge, Mr. Imaginary Friend.”

  “Yeah whatever, Mr. Imaginary Asshole. Who cares if I open a book and it seems to be directed at me? It’s still nothing more than a delusion of reference, seeing random connections amidst unrelated phenomena. Type I error, it’s called. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Solipsistic, even.”

  “You can gavel your skepticism or you can do it again,” Billy Pronto dared.

  “No, not with this one,” Diablo replied soberly. He had purchased the copy of The Collected Short Stories of Jim Azmeyer.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want to read it first and find the context for the first phrase, that’s why, fer chrissakes.”

  “Oh, well I can tell you that,” Billy Pronto jovially replied. “It’s from the short story ‘Nobility.’ Basically, there’s this writer who notices that everything he writes happens to his neighbor, whom he dislikes after some minor disagreement. So he gets increasingly vengeful and mean and writes all kinds of random adversity for his neighbor to suffer. A tree falls on his house, someone keys his car, his girlfriend dumps him, you name it. But then a strange thing happens. The more adversity his neighbor suffers, the more humble—and the more noble—he becomes. His eyes shine brighter with each passing day, his insurance overpays for the repairs on both his house and his car, and he soon meets and falls in love with another woman. Meanwhile, as his neighbor grows more and more noble, the writer grows more and more depraved, desperately trying to control his neighbor’s life but watching every adversity flip into a blessing in disguise. Finally, the writer goes mad when he realizes that he is not in control after all, and that he is recording the events of his neighbor’s life rather than creating them.” Billy Pronto paused contemplative. “The illusion of control is what ruins the human soul. That’s what that line means.”

  Diablo had listened intently to this summary. “Interesting,” he said, noncommittal.

  “So,” Billy Pronto goaded. “Now that you know the context for the first line, try it again.”

  “Nah.” Diablo waved him off, offering no excuse as he stuffed the The Collected Short Stories of Jim Azmeyer deep into his pocket. “Not with this book.”

  “Then do it again with this one.” Billy Pronto suddenly produced an heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible.

  Diablo stopped in his tracks, pointing at the Bible. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Open it,” Billy Pronto replied, ignoring his question. “I dare you.”

  Aggravated at this hallucinatory harassment, Diablo grabbed the Bible and let it flop open. Glancing down, his eyes fell upon Isaiah, chapter 24, verse 17:

  Fear and the pit and the snare are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

  “Jesusfuckingchrist,” Diablo muttered, dropping the Bible as if he suddenly realized he was holding a flaming cowshit casserole. The only way Diablo could have been more freaked is if he had also hallucinated the lake of fire flickering behind the words, which upon reflection he was never quite sure he had not.

  He stalked off, leaving the Bible behind and shaking his head. “In the law of truly large numbers, any outrageous coincidence becomes likely in large enough samples.”

  “Twice in two minutes?” Billy Pronto pressed.

  “Ever hear of Little wood’s law?” Diablo retorted, turning into an alley. “If a miracle is a one-in-a-million occurrence and if we can accept a second as the smallest unit by which life
occurs—”

  Billy Pronto interrupted. “A second may be the smallest unit by which life occurs for the immensely distracted, but for those open to love, then as Juliet says to Romeo in the Capulet orchard, in a minute there are many days.”

  “Well, that’s very beautiful, Shakespeare, but never mind that. Even for the immensely distracted, if a miracle is a one-in-a-million occurrence, and if a second is the smallest unit by which life occurs, then there are thirty-six thousand occurrences in a single ten-hour day, and over one million occurrences within four weeks. Thus, miracles are fairly commonplace, about once a month, as a matter of fact and goddamnit.”

  “That debunks nothing,” Billy Pronto replied. “For those who slow down their experience of life—which is what happens when you open your heart to universal love and every blink becomes a blessing and a beatitude—they get a miracle every few minutes. This is the technology of magic and the deepest force in the universe. Don’t just seize the day, my friend. The day is long. Seize the second!”

  “Seize the cliché, that’s what I say,” Diablo chuntered up a set of access stairs off the alley. “The path less traveled by has been trampled into a trodden truism. Please just leave me alone.”

  “You are already alone,” Billy countered. “That’s the nature of existence, one consciousness dreaming infinite points of view. Life is but a dream, right? You know this.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Diablo monotoned, inserting his key into the lock.

  “There’s no time to waste,” Billy Pronto replied, but when Diablo turned to tell him to shut up, he was startled to find him gone.

  86 A TORNADO is the most intense, most focused force on earth. It is estimated that the average tornado unleashes enough energy to power all the streetlights in New York City for one night. This is, ultimately, an unimpressive fact, especially if you have ever resided in the vicinity of an unprecedented hypercane (or a runaway tornadic singularity or whatever) so omnipotent that it could probably power most of the United States indefinitely.

  Under such skies, you know very well that you cannot escape the realization that life—under any circumstance—is an ongoing near-death experience. The inevitability of this encounter with merciless truth perhaps accounts for the manner in which so many who witnessed and meditated upon Laughing Jim were abandoning every disgruntling aspect of their lives and insisting upon nothing junior to joy. Joy in spite of the collapsing global economy, in spite of resource wars, in spite of global hotting. Joy in spite of starvation, extinction, corruption, disease. In spite of the collapse of everything familiar and secure, joy. As it turns out, the final frontier of freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude, and in the face of one’s own mortality, the only conceivable choice is joy.

  This collective meditation upon death also emphasized the otherwise invisible contours of life, the golden threads of synchronicity that sparkle in the eyes of those who see beneath the veil, the meaning, the magic, the awareness that human life is so much less a monkey drama than it is a spiritual unfolding.

  Of course, this orientation toward life was also facilitated by the ionized atmosphere generated by the fantastic electrical storms arcing throughout Laughing Jim. Atmospheres charged with negative ions of oxygen, such as the air around waterfalls, turbulent seashores, and lightning storms, have a measurable influence on the body’s hormonal balance, generating feelings of invigoration, enthusiasm, and love. Specifically, ionized air raises dopamine levels in the brain, which ultimately enhances the tendency to see patterns and meanings where allegedly there are none. Hence, apophenia.

  This factoid bobbed around the social currents of New Orleans and furnished Special Agent J. J. Speed with a tremendous and self-righteous satisfaction. Along with the deionizer he ran in his hotel room every night, here was his cynical inoculation from the general social sentiment that had come to characterize the tremendous synchronicity zone of New Orleans—namely, the notion that every encounter was meaningful. For fuck’s sake, who has time for that? And walk away? Why would I want to do that? Man is wolf to man, and civilization is the only thing keeping us from killing the crap out of each other. Good thing I’m here to get control of things. It was like the whole goddamn city had gone mad, and worse, was infecting everyone who sniffed at the air with its wild-eyed absurdity. Fools, he thought as he ambled along gnawing on a toothpick and monitoring the signal from the homing device on Wilhelmina’s collar.

  Naturally, Special Agent J. J. Speed did not really have to be monitoring the signal from the homing device. He had caught up with Wilhelmina blocks ago and she was only a few feet ahead of him in plain sight. But he had not had occasion to use his supersecret night-vision goggles lately, so he was getting his gizmo kicks with his homing device instead. If he was lucky, he might even get to eavesdrop using the radio microphone built into her collar.

  Special Agent J. J. Speed was congratulating himself that stealthy Wilhelmina had not even noticed that she was being followed when all of a sudden the woman in front of him turned around and sang-song some nonsense at him: “If the universe bangs big and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” He scowled at her for this disruption, and more so when he saw the freakish tattoo on her forehead, and still more so when she touched the side of her nose and pointed flirty at him, and unbearably more so when she said, “Walk away.”

  But he relaxed considerably when he found the contours of her chest.

  87 IN FACT, Special Agent J. J. Speed had good reason to be anxious. That morning, he had yawned awake in the king-size bed in his hotel room, his tongue coated with the usual bouquet of brackish cotton, the fetid afterglow of his daily tequila bender. Groggily puzzled as to how he had forgotten to close the patio door the previous night (no matter how shitfaced he was, he knew he always closed it at night so that his deionizer could do its work unencumbered by fresh air), he let out a cry of alarm when he suddenly realized that there was someone else in bed with him. It wasn’t until after he scrambled out of the bed and took a second look over the barrel of his bedside Luger that he realized that there was in fact no one else in bed with him. Rather, and defying any explanation whatsoever, there was a grandfather clock lying there as if it were taking a grandfatherly nap.

  “What the hell is that?” Special Agent J. J. Speed yelled, still aiming his pistol at the clockworks. His pounding adrenaline inhibited any efficiently rational evaluation of the situation. “What the hell is that?” he repeated, helplessly lost in a paranoid perplexity. Heart still racing, he lowered his weapon as the definition of the object in his bed finally settled over him. There’s a goddamn grandfather clock in my bed, he reasoned. Looks to be made from cherry. Probably expensive. Claims the time is 9:00.

  The red LED demon eyes of the digital clock on his nightstand corrected the grandfather’s chronograph with their glowering display of 7:22, the last digit flicking into a three just as Special Agent J. J. Speed glanced at it. That grandfather clock isn’t working, he concluded without satisfaction. The categories were there, definitions and such (grandfather clock, cherry, probably expensive, maybe broken), but Special Agent J. J. Speed could fathom no possible meaning for any of it. Carelessly scratching his head with the barrel of his gun, he turned and slid the patio door mostly shut as Wilhelmina came trotting in from outside to begin begging for her breakfast. He always left the door open a few inches during the day so that she could leave after breakfast, as was her custom and their arrangement, but he never left it wide open at night. It was at least gratifying that she had not run off.

  “Hey girl, did you put that there?” he asked Wilhelmina in his pussycat falsetto, pointing to the grandfather clock. “Why would you do that?” Wilhelmina jumped up on the bed and meowed over his chatter. “Did you see anyone?” he asked as he opened the nightstand cabinet and retrieved a scoop of kibble for her.

  Sitting down across from Wilhelmina, he idly crunched a few pieces of kibble himself as he considered the situation. Maybe this
was some kind of a prank? he thought. Didn’t frat boys put donkeys in dean’s offices or something? Is this something similar? But why me? And who? And how the fuck did they get a goddamn grandfather clock in here without waking me up?

  Unpleasantly troubled as he hefted the grandfather clock off the bed and into a standing position, he found some distraction from the larger puzzle by focusing on the smaller puzzle of how to wind up the pulley system and set the pendulum ticking. Once he achieved this, he set the correct time and stepped back to regard the curiosity, though he still failed to find any meaning in it. Shaking his head in mystification for the duration of his shower, he noted afterward that Wilhelmina had split for the day, out the patio and down the banyan tree as she usually did. Today, however, Special Agent J. J. Speed closed and locked the patio door—something he never did since he wanted Wilhelmina to be able to come and go as she pleased. But since somebody had apparently snuck a grandfather clock into his room last night, it seemed a sensible precaution. Wilhelmina always found him anyway, even when he was out and about.

  Then he remembered that he had put a collar with a homing device on Wilhelmina late last night. Not only was there absolutely no risk of losing her, but suddenly he had a mission as well. He was going to track Wilhelmina and see if she opened any new leads, or failing that, discover just where the hell she got to every day. Excited that he got to use his new toy, Special Agent J. J. Speed sucked a long nip from his tequila flask, checked the batteries in the receiver to the homing device, grabbed a few dozen toothpicks, and headed out for the day, hot on the trail of Wilhelmina.

  88 ELSEWHERE AT that moment, Diana was pleasuring herself to climax after ending a good-morning phone call from her long-distance boyfriend, Tony, who had encouraged her in her desire to quit stripping and become a clown instead. Their morning chat had concluded with some phone foreplay, in which he described his cunnilingual technique in ravishing detail, and she was finishing in her imagination what he had started over the phone.