When dusk arrived, Tug found himself at the edge of the sprawling park adjacent to the University of Carrollboro in the city’s centre, one hundred acres of path-laced greenery, wild as Nature intended in spots.
Slumped against a foliage-rich oak tree atop a dry carpet of last year’s leaves (trees stayed seasonally green longer these days), Tug polished off a can of Coke. Dispirited and enervated, he mused on this latest failure.
Why hadn’t he gotten Pete to nail down the location of the Tom Pudding? If the place was unknown, he should have discarded the option, despite its romantic allure. But having chosen to search, why couldn’t he accomplish this simple task? It was as if the world always turned a cold shoulder to him. Why couldn’t he ingratiate himself with anyone? Was he too prickly, too proud? Would he die a bitter, lonely, unrequited fellow?
Tug’s thoughts turned to a wordless pall along with the descent of darkness. He stewed for several hours.
Then lilting ocarina music infiltrated his blue funk.
Tug had heard ocarina music intermittently for the past three days: from street musicians, lunchtime amateurs, kids in playgrounds, commercial loudspeakers. Fipple flute music provided the background buzz of Ocarina City, and he mostly paid little attention to it.
But he had never heard an ocarina sound like this. The music conjured up vivid pictures of foreign locales, an almost sensory buzz.
From out the bushes of the park emerged a dim figure, source of the strangely gorgeous sounds. Tug strained his eyes—
He saw Pete’s Nubian Princess.
The black woman was bundled up against the cold in a crazyquilt assortment of shawls and scarves. Tug suspected the patterned garments would be gaudy and colourful by day. Lithe, tall, thin, she moved like a swaying giraffe. Her indistinctly perceived facial features seemed more Arabic or Semitic than Negroid. Her hair was a dandelion explosion.
She stopped a few yards away from Tug and continued to play, a haunting melody unfamiliar to the man.
Tug got to his feet. What were the odds he’d encounter such an exotic creature, given that the whole of North America hosted perhaps only ten thousand Africans at any given moment, and those mostly diplomats and businessmen? Could she be a foreign student attending Carrollboro’s University? Unlikely, given the prestige of schools in Songhai, Kanen-Bornu and the Oyo Empire. Nor was it likely she’d be a shorebird, given that Africa’s displaced coastal citizens had all been taken care of at home.
Tug took a step toward the outré apparition. The woman ceased playing, smiled (teeth very white against dark skin), turned, then resumed playing and began to walk into the undergrowth.
Tug could do nothing but follow. Had not an ounce of will left otherwise.
Deeper into the park she led him. Tug could smell water. But not the semi-stagnant Canal water. Fresh, running water. He realized that they must be approaching the Cunhestiyuh River as it cut through the park and city.
Sure enough, they were soon at its banks, and could not cross. The woman led the way leftward along the shore until they reached a line of thick growth perpendicular to the river. Employing a non-obvious gap amidst the trees and bushes, she stepped through, Tug just steps behind.
No more ocarina music, and the woman had vanished.
Tug became more aware of his surroundings, as if awaking from a dream.
He stood on the edge of an artificial embankment. He suddenly realized the nature of the spot.
The Attawandaron Canal had been connected to the Cunhestiyuh River at intervals by short feeder canals, to refresh its flow. This was one such. A leaky yet still mostly functioning feedgate on the riverside was still in place, barring ingress of the River and making for a low water level in the feeder chute. Entering the Canal on the opposite side from the towpath, this feeder inlet, perhaps overgrown on its far end too, had been totally overlooked by Tug in his quest.
Tug looked down.
Nearly filling the narrow channel, the Tom Pudding floated below, lit up like an Oktoberfest beer garden with coloured fairy lights, its deck busy with people. A ladder ran from the top of the feeder canal on down to the barge’s broad roof.
A fair-haired man looked up then and spotted Tug. The man said, “Pellenera’s brought us another one. Hey, pal, c’mon down!”
8. VASTERLING’S MAD AND MARVELLOUS MENAGERIE
The planning and rehearsing for the quantum physics chautauqua were complete. A vote among the barge’s citizens had affixed the title of “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” onto the production, passing over such contenders as “The Heterotic Revue;” “Branes! Branes! Escape from the Zombie Universe;” “I’ve Got the Worlds on a String;” and “Witten It Be Nice? Some Good Sub-Planckian Vibrations.”
The one and only performance of the educational saturnalia was scheduled for this very night, at the Carrollboro venue that generally hosted visiting chautauquas, the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium. Franchot Galliard had paid for the rental of the space, reluctantly tapping into his deep family fortunes, despite an inherent miserliness that had caused him, about four years previously, to purchase the Tom Pudding at scrapyard prices and take up residence aboard, whilst leasing out his Ellwanger Barry-district mansion at exorbitant rates to rich shorebirds.
Oswaldo Vasterling was just that persuasive.
The young visionary self-appointed captain of the permanently-moored barge full of oddballs could have herded cats into a swimming pool, Tug believed. Short and roly-poly, his complexion a diluted Mediterranean olive hue, the stone-faced twenty-one-year-old struck most first-time interlocutors as unprepossessing in the extreme. (Tug suspected a bit of Asperger’s, affected or otherwise, in Vasterling’s character.)
Gorm Vasterling, Oswaldo’s dad, had been an unmarried Dikelander resident in Fourierist Russia, an agriculture specialist. When the Omniarch of the Kiev Phalanx ordered Gorm to transplant his talents to Cuba, to aid the Fourierist brethren there, Gorm instantly obeyed.
Upon relocation to Cuba, Gorm’s Dikelander genes almost immediately combined with the Latina genes of Ximena Alcaron, a Fourier Passionologist specializing in Animic Rehabilitation. The result was a stubby, incipiently mustachioed child who had received the least appealing somatic traits of each parent.
But in brainpower, little Oswaldo was not scanted.
Some three years ago, in 2007, at age eighteen, educationally accelerated Oswaldo was already doing post-doc work in M-theory with Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a semi-independent think-tank headquartered on the campus of Carrollboro U. But Smolin and his star student had clashed violently over some abstruse quantum heresy, and Oswaldo Vasterling had been cast out from the sanctum.
He hadn’t gone far, though, ending up just a mile or so away from the campus, serendipitously stumbling upon Franchot Galliard’s welcoming barge. There, he commandeered several rooms as his lab-cum-sleeping quarters and set up a rococo experimental apparatus resembling the mutant offspring of a Portajohn and a digital harmonium, attached to a small-scale radio-telescope, a gravity-wave interferometer, and a bank of networked ordinateurs, the whole intended to replicate what he had left behind at the PITP.
Forever short of money for his unperfected equipment, he perpetually harrassed the stingy Galliard for dough, generally with little success, and inveigled everyone else onboard to participate in money-raising schemes, of which the chautauqua was the latest. (The city had been plastered with advertisements, both wheat-pasted and CERN-spaced, and if Oswaldo’s show filled half of Vawter’s seats with paying customers, he’d net a hefty sum—especially since all the performers were volunteers.)
But the mixed-media performance also stood as Oswaldo’s intended refutation of his ex-comrades at the PITP. He had invited them all to witness his theories rendered in music and dance, light and sound, hoping they would repent and acknowledge the Vasterling genius. And his quondam colleagues had accepted en masse, in the spirit of those anticipating a good intellectual brawl.
>
Tug’s part in this affair? He had been placed in charge of stage lighting, on the crack-brained logic that he had worked before with machines that projected light. Luckily, the boards at the Vawter were old-fashioned, non-o consoles, and Tug had mastered them easily in a few rehearsals, leaving him confident he could do his part to bring off “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” successfully.
So in the hours remaining before showtime, Tug had little to do save hang out with Sukey Damariscotta. He looked for her now.
The vast open cargo interior of the old decommissioned barge had been transformed over the past four years into a jerry-built, multi-level warren of sleeping, dining, working and recreational spaces by the resident amateur carpenters (and by one former professional, the surly alcoholic Don Rippey, who managed just barely to ensure that every load-bearing structure met minimal standards for non-collapse, that the stolen electricity was not fed directly into, say, the entire hull, and that the equally purloined plumbing did not mix inflow with outflow). Consequently, there were no straight paths among the quarters, and finding anyone involved something just short of solving the Travelling Voyageur problem.
If the layout of the Tom Pudding remained still obscure to Tug even after a month’s habitation, he felt he finally had a pretty good fix on most of the recomplicated interpersonal topography of the barge. But initially, that feature too had presented an opaque façade.
Hailed from the barge that night of discovery, Tug had descended the ladder into a clamourous reception from a few dozen curious strangers. Supplied, sans questioning, with a meal, several stiff drinks and a bunk, he had fallen straight asleep.
In the morning, Tug stumbled upon the same fellow who had first spotted him. Brewing coffee, the ruggedly handsome guy introduced himself as Harmon Frawley. Younger than Tug by a decade or more, boyish beyond his years, Frawley had been an ad copywriter in Toronto until a painful divorce, after which he had gone footloose and impoverishedly free. He still favoured his old wardrobe of Brooks Brothers shirts and trousers, but they were getting mighty beat.
Sipping coffee and running a big hand through his blond bangs, Harmon explained the origin, ethos and crew of the Tom Pudding to Tug.
“So Galliard owns this floating commune, but Vasterling is the boss?”
“Right. Insofar as anyone is. Call Ozzie the ‘Prime Mover’ if you need a more accurate title. Frankie just wants to be left alone with his collection.”
When Tug eventually met Franchot Galliard, he was instantly reminded of Adolphe Menjou in his starring role in Where the Blue Begins, lugubrious canine makeup and all. Galliard’s penchant for antique eight-millimetre stag films, especially those starring the young Nancy Davis, struck Tug as somewhat unhealthy, and he was glad the rich collector knew how to operate his own projector. Still, who was he to criticize any man’s passion?
“And he doesn’t care who crashes here?”
“Not at all! So long as it doesn’t cost him anything. But you know, not many people find us here. And even the ones who do don’t always stay. The hardcores are special. Particularly since Pellenera showed up.”
Mention of the enigmatic Nubian Pied Piper sent mystical frissons down Tug’s spine. The story of her origin lacked no complementary mystery or romance.
“It was a dark and stormy night. Really. About six months ago, sometime in May. Ozzie announced that he was gonna power up his brane-buster for the first time. Bunch of us gathered down in his lab around midnight. Boat was rocking like JFK trying to solve the Cuban Seafloor Colony Crisis. So Ozzie straps himself in and starts playing the keys of that electronic harmonium thingy that’s at the core of the device. Weirdest music you’ve ever heard. Flashing lights, burning smells, the sound of about a dozen popping components self-destructing simultaneously— Then the inside of the booth part of the gizmo goes all smoky-hazy-like, and out pops this naked African chick! She looks around for a few seconds, not scared, just amazed, says a few words no one understands, then runs off into the night!”
Tug’s erotic imagination supplied all too vividly the image of the naked ebony charms of Pellenera—conjured up a picture so distracting that he missed the next few words from Harmon Frawley.
“—Janey Vogelsang. She was the first one Pellenera led back here, a week later. Marcello named her that, by the way. Just means ‘black hide.’ And you’re, oh, about the tenth.”
“And she never speaks?”
“Not since that first night. She just plays that demon ocarina. You ever heard the like?”
“Never.”
Harmon scratched his manly chin. “Why she’s leading people here, how she chooses ’em—that’s anybody’s guess.”
“Does she live onboard?”
“Nope. Roams the city, so far as anyone can tell.”
And so Tug entered the society of the Tom Pudding as one cryptically anointed.
He came now to a darkened TV room, whose walls, floor and ceiling had been carpeted with heterogeneous scavenged remnants. An old console set dominated a couch on which were crowded Iona Draggerman, Jura Burris and Turk Vanson.
“Hey, Tug, join us! We’re watching Vajayjay and Badonkadonk!”
“It’s that episode where Vajayjay’s relatives visit from India and have to go on a possum hunt!”
The antics of Kaz’s animated Hindi cat and Appalachian mule, while generally amusing, held no immediate allure for Tug.
“Aren’t you guys playing the part of quarks tonight? Shouldn’t you be getting your costumes ready?”
“We’ve got hours yet!”
“We don’t dance every time Ozzie pulls our strings!”
Tug moved on, past various uncanny or domestic tableaux, including the always spooky incense-fueled devotional practice of Tatang, the mono-named shorebird from the sunken Kiribati Islands.
At last he found Sukey Damariscotta, sitting all bundled up and cross-legged in a director’s chair on deck, sketching trees upon the shoreline.
Only twenty-four, Sukey possessed a preternatural confidence derived from her autodidactic artistic prowess. Tug had never met anyone so capable of both meticulous fine art and fluent cartooning.
Sukey’s heritage included more Amerind blood than most other Americans possessed. In her, the old diffuse and diluted aboriginal strains absorbed by generations of colonists had recombined to birth a classic pre-Columbian beauty, all cheekbones, bronze skin and coal-black hair, styled somewhat incongruously in a Dead Rabbits tough-girl cut repopularized recently by pennywhistlers the Pogues.
Tug was more than a little in love with the talented and personable young woman, but had dared say nothing to her of his feelings so far.
Dropping down to the December-cold deck, Tug admired the drawing. “Sweet. I like the lines of that beech tree.”
Sukey accepted the praise without false humility or ego. “Thanks. Hey, remember those caricatures I was working on?”
Sukey’s cartoon captures of the cast of the ongoing Tom Pudding farcical drama managed to nail their personalities in a minimum of brisk, economical lines. Tug had been a little taken aback when she showed him his own depiction. Did he really look like such a craggy, aged misanthrope? But in the end, he had to confess the likeness.
“Sure. You added any new ones?”
Sukey tucked her charcoal stick behind one ear and flipped the pages of her sketchbook.
Tug confronted an image of Pellenera in the guise of the enormous demi-barebreasted Statue of Marianne on her island home in New York Harbor. The statue’s fixed pose of torch held aloft had been modified to feature Pellenera cradling all the infantilized Tom Pudding crew to her bosom.
When Tug had finished laughing, he said, “Hey, you ever gotten interested in bande dessinée? With an image like that, you’re halfway there.”
“Oh, I can’t tell a story to save my life.”
“Well, what if we collaborate? Here, give me that pad and a pencil, and I’ll rough something out.”
“What’s
the story going to be about?”
“It’ll be about—about life in Carrollboro.”
Tug scrawled a three-by-three matrix of panels and, suddenly inspired, began populating them with stick figures and word balloons.
Sukey leaned in close, and Tug could smell intoxicating scents of raw woodsmoke and wild weather tangled in her hair.
9. “MORE OCARINA!”
Tug had never been subjected to a one-on-one confrontation with Oswaldo Vasterling before. The circumstances of their first dialogue added a certain surreal quality to what would, in the best of conditions, have been a bit of an unnerving trial.
The two men stood in a semi-secluded corner backstage at the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium, illuminated only by the dimmest of caged worklights that seemed to throw more shadows than photons. All around them was a chaos one could only hope would exhibit emergent properties soon.
Don Rippey was bellowing at people assembling a set: “Have any of you guys ever even seen a hammer before?”
Janey Vogelsang was trying to make adjustments to two costumes at once: “No, no, your arrow sash has to go counterclockwise if you’re a gluon!”
Turk Vanson was coaching a chorus of ocarina players. “Why the hell did I bother writing out the tablatures if you never even studied them?”
Crowds of other actors and dancers and musicians and crew-bosses and directors and makeup artists and stagehands and techies surged around these knots of haranguers and haranguees in the usual pre-chautauqua madness.
But Ozzie remained focused and indifferent to the tumult, in a most unnatural fashion. His lack of affect disturbed Tug. Despite Ozzie’s youth and a certain immaturity, he could appear ageless and deep as a well. Now, with Sphinxlike expression undermined only slightly by the juvenile wispy moustache, he had Tug pinned down with machine-gun questions.
“You’re sure you know all your cues? Did you replace those torn gels? What about that multiple spotlight effect I specified during the Boson Ballet?”
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