I guess, I said.
Well. He shrugged and sipped at a little plastic cup of orange juice on the tray beside his bed. All’s well that ends well, I guess.
And I probably should have disagreed, should have given him the you’re-fucking-up-your-life route, but I just said, Yeah, and then I sat and watched TV with him until he fell asleep, mouth open, about halfway through an episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel.
8
At work, people had somehow become aware of my new role, whatever that was, and I found myself suddenly copied on a new volume of internal emails. They were mostly disputes between the Solve Teams and IT, or between finance and purchasing, and I couldn’t figure out why my name kept appearing on the cc lists until I mentioned it to Mark, who’d returned from wherever he’d been traveling and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out at my desk and taking me to lunch. They perceive your power, he told me. They see you as an avatar of the higher powers around here. When Joe Blow emails Jane Doe to tell her that his motherfucking network printer still won’t scan to email, he includes your name to let her know that Others Are Being Informed.
Jesus, really? I said.
You never copied the mothership to let some dick know you mean business? Christ, Pete, what are you, like, moral or something? Self-possessed? I think I’ve found a gem in you. I think you understand the power of discretion.
Thanks, but I really don’t feel especially powerful, I said.
Shit, son, Mark said, you’re locked and loaded. What you really ought to do is start randomly responding. One-sentence emails. Has this been resolved? and that sort of thing. It will scare the shit out of everyone, and enhance your reputation as a stone-cold fucker. Huh, I said.
Set phasers on You’re Fired, he said.
I’ve never fired anyone.
We all gotta lose our cherry sometime, Mark told me. By the way, what are you doing on Friday? Helen and I are having a little dinner thing. Bring that cute hippie of yours. What’s her name?
Lauren Sara.
She’s probably a vegan or some shit.
Sometimes, I said. She’s currently pescatarian.
Dairy?
Yes. Usually.
Let me give you some advice. Never date a woman with dietary restrictions. Eating disorders are negotiable, especially if she’s got dental. Oh, on an unrelated note, there’s going to be a series of emails going around that say don’t talk to the press about the merger. I’ve had them phrased in the most blandly unthreatening language possible, all very in the interest of easing the transition period and in order to speak in one consistent voice we ask that you refrain, etc. So of course everyone will freak the fuck out. Anyway, my point is, you should feel free to ignore this. If you should feel like anonymousing around.
I don’t really talk to the press, I said. I don’t think I know any press. I don’t think the press is very interested in me.
He shook his head in wonder. Pete, he said.
Yes?
Never mind. You hungry? Let’s go grab some lunch. How do you feel about titty bars?
Really? I said.
Christ, don’t tell me you’re that sophisticated. Blush has a midget. And a decent Reuben, if you can believe it. Similarly priced, too.
9
When he was sufficiently recovered from his hospital stay—surprised to find that more than a week had passed, so maybe there was something to this time travel thing after all—Johnny took the bus over to East Liberty to visit Mustafah Elijah, the One True Prophet and sole proprietor of the Universal Synagogue of the Antinomian Demiurge as well as Elijah’s Afrikan Shop for the Body, Mind, and Spirit. There were a few women browsing dresses and beads in the front, and the usual dreadlocked clerk reading a High Times behind the jewelry case. The cover read, Federal Government Dope: the FDA’s Secret Stash. The store always smelled like incense and something slightly fetid: not rotten, but a little overripe. Hey, Scooty, Johnny said. Is the rabbi around?
Scooty pointed toward the back.
Johnny went through the doorway and down the two steps into the back room, which was overflowing with tables and bookshelves full of conspiracy tracts and trade sci-fi and old VHS documentaries and newspapers and magazines and cassette tapes on every shelf and every available surface. A young white woman with tangled hair and feather earrings and a full-sleeve tattoo of tigers and birds was crouching at a low shelf paging through a glossy exposé on chemtrails. Is this shit for real? she asked Elijah. Girl, he barked, you want to live in a dream world forever?
Uncle! Johnny said.
Nephew! Elijah answered. They bumped fists. What’s happening? You look skinny. For you.
I died and was reborn.
No shit? Well, that’ll take it out of a man. I been going to spinning. You ought to see those Shadyside bitches when I roll up. Ahahaha. You died, huh? How’d you do that?
Powerful drugs.
Hoo, Nephew. You got to watch that shit. I keep telling you. You know what Isaiah had to say about it: Woe to those who get up early to pursue intoxicating liquor; who stay up late at night, until wine inflames them. Sounds like you got a little taste of Sheol. Your ass will end up among the Rephaim.
Aren’t the Rephaim giants?
They’re giants and they’re dead motherfuckers. Anyway, you ain’t so small yourself, Nephew.
Yeah, but I’m surprisingly graceful.
Shit, underwater maybe.
The white girl said, Excuse, how much is this book?
Elijah glowered at her. What’s it say on the price tag?
There’s no tag.
It’s six dollars. With the white person discount, it’s ten dollars.
Um, sorry, how much?
Ten. Dollars.
Oh, okay, that’s cool. Do you take debit cards?
Elijah looked at Johnny, like, can you believe this shit? He turned back to the girl. Do I take debit cards? he said. Do I take Confederate currency? Do I invite the FBI to my house to watch me take a shit? Hey, Scooty! he called out to the front room. Do we take debit cards?
Does a nigger tan? Scooty said.
Jesus, the girl said. Sorry.
Get the fuck out of here, Elijah said. This ain’t a goddamn sideshow. I’m not here to entertain your ass.
Sorry, she said again.
Take the book, Elijah said. Go on. Take it. For free. Maybe your ass will learn something.
Oh, said the girl. Are you sure?
Fuck, no, I’m not sure. Leave the book. Use the door, he said, which she did.
Jesus, Uncle, said Johnny, you’re a real fucking salesman. Your customer service is top notch.
Fuck you, Nephew. I’m a model of fucking customer service. This is a customer-centric business. Your ass is always right. He glared. Johnny started laughing. Elijah held on to his frown for another second and started laughing as well. He reshelved the book. So, Nephew, what can I do you for?
Well, you know Winston Pringle?
Pittsburgh Project. Writer dude. Yeah. Why?
I need a connect.
Nephew, didn’t I just tell you to lay off the goddam needle? You’ve got to purify your body, son.
What are you talking about? Johnny said.
What are you talking about?
Well, do you, like, know how I can get in touch with him? Like through his publisher or something?
Why the fuck would you go through his publisher? I told you I know the man.
Like, know him know him? said Johnny.
Yeah, said Elijah. Like know him know him. What the fuck, you think I mean I’m familiar with his oeuvre? You know that motherfucker’s crazy, right?
Holy shit, really? Oh man. That’s awesome. How do you know him?
His fat ass lives out in Wilmerding. He comes into the store sometimes. Don’t like to pay for nothing neither. I’m surprised you never met him. He’s a goddamn substitute teacher. You know, his real name is Wilhelm Zollen. I mean, supposedly his real name. Docto
r Wilhelm Zollen. He teaches chemistry, if you know what I mean.
No. Wait, what do you mean?
What the fuck do you think I mean? The fat pervert sells drugs, my man. He’s the goddamn Timothy Leary of the Mon Valley, except he’s fat, insane, and a fag.
I’m a fag, said Johnny.
There’s fags and there’s fags, Nephew.
True enough, said Johnny.
10
After a week of waiting for the good doctor to stroll through the doors of Elijah’s store, which he did, according to Elijah, no more than once or twice a year anyway, Johnny decided that he could do no worse than spend a fruitless day in the Monongahela Valley, so he bused downtown and transferred to the 69 and took the long ride through the East End and the bombed-out remains of Wilkinsburg and the fleeting prosperity on the border of Forest Hills and through Turtle Creek and over the same actual and eponymous creek into the borough of Wilmerding, population two thousand one hundred and some odd thing. According to Wikipedia, there were just over a thousand households in exactly one square kilometer. Someone, Johnny figured, must know the man.
And, mirabile dictu, as soon as Johnny stepped off the bus on Commerce Street beside the small park and next to the Allegheny Housing Authority office and below the bluff on which sat the Romanesque pile of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company headquarters, wherein, according to Winston Pringle, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla had performed a series of Gnostic-Cathar sex magic rituals to divert the fire energies of the hollow earth through the subterranean ley lines of Allegheny County, thereby inculcating the fire element that birthed the Satanic Industries, whose sheer Vulcanic force weakened the liminal boundaries between this world and the next, thus setting the stage for the Deep Government’s Pittsburgh Project, through which psychically sensitive children, including Pringle himself, were broken down via the processes of ritual satanic-sexual abuse into subservient subpersonality psychic operators who might, one day, at the culmination of years of research and effort, complete this greatest magical working that the world had ever known by actually dissipating the barrier energies that held one reality apart from the next and the next and the next, collapsing the Quantum Matrix and enabling the Secret Powers of the World to pick and choose among the infinitude of potential realities and in doing so achieve ultimate, inexorable, and godlike power—just there, at the bus stop, because, I imagine, Johnny must have looked a little confused, unsure, precisely, of where to go, an old guy smoking a cigarette in a wheelchair decorated with American flag decals, who looked for the remaining life of him as if he had no intention of ever leaving that spot on the sidewalk, took one look at Johnny, spat on the pavement, and said, Well, I guess you’re here lookin for the witchy-poo.
What? Johnny said.
Yinz are always comin around looking for all that witchy-poo. Dressed in black and all that shit.
I’m not dressed in black, said Johnny, who was wearing his usual collection of browns.
You might as well be, the man said. Well, go on and ask me.
What am I supposed to ask you?
Ask me how to find the witchy-poo.
Hey, Johnny said, can you tell me how to find the witchy-poo?
Yeah. He lives up the end of Wood Street.
Winston Pringle?
I don’t know his witchy-ass name. I just know he’s up there at all hours, doin who knows what with all the whatchacall.
Right, said Johnny. Well, thanks.
Don’t thank me, boy. I ain’t do you no favors.
Thanks anyway, said Johnny.
11
He walked away from the Housing Authority and the squat forms of sixties-era Section 8 apartment blocks made of skinny glazed bricks past the Westinghouse mansion and up the hill into a neighborhood of brick and frame houses that recalled the great, gaudy, fifty-year illusion that there ever was a middle class in America, their trim having seen better days, their roofs having seen newer shingles, and as he went on, past the stained church whose front-yard marquee read GUNS, GUILT & GIFTS—the subject, perhaps, of a sermon?—as he went on, the street got steeper and greener, overhung with black walnut and weedy mulberry trees; then he was on Wood Street; it was as if he’d passed through a portal that skipped the fifty intervening miles and deposited him in the first, forested swells of the real Appalachia; the few houses winked in and out of the trees; their foundations were half dug into the steep hillsides and they looked like nothing so much as dogs swimming against a brown river.
At the end of the street, a dead end, there was a gated driveway leading into the woods. The gate looked to have been constructed of the final sales from a dozen different gone-out-of-business hardware stores. There was an old PED XING sign with a single bullet-hole on one of the posts; it had been altered with black paint so that the heads of the adult and child figure were almond-eyed aliens.
12
The gate wasn’t latched. Johnny pushed it open and walked down the driveway. After a few yards, a very large dog and a very small woman of indeterminate age, somewhere between twenty and sixty, wiry and weatherworn in a pair of sensible jeans, emerged from the trees. The dog loped up to Johnny, who regarded it warily; it stuck its nose in his crotch. Stinky, the woman said; come here, you stinky-stink. The dog obeyed. Hey, Johnny said. I’m looking for Winston Pringle.
Dr. Wilhlem? she said. He’s up at the house. She pointed down the drive.
Can I just go up?
It used to be a free country, she said.
Is that a yes?
It’s not a no. Anyway, it’s not my place. My and stinky-stinky-stinkers here were just stopping in to say hello.
That’s some dog.
He’s a werewolf.
Oh, really?
Not really. He’s just big and stinky. Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yes, you are. Yes yes you are.
Well, Johnny said. I guess I’ll go up.
I guess you will, she said, and she and the dog went on down the road.
13
The house was ramshackle, a mess of asphalt shingles and rotten gutters, but still less so than Johnny had expected, given the aesthetic condition of the gate. It reminded him in an odd way of his grandparents’ house; it had the same dimensions, the same roofline, a similar dormer window, and on the far edge of the property there was a large shed. There were some wrecked and useless autos and a derelict school bus without wheels in the clearing.
Pringle answered the door in an apron that read FIST THE COOK. He couldn’t have weighed less than four hundred pounds, but his head and hands were delicate, suggesting a naturally small man grown huge through a dedicated program of excess. He had a rooster’s jowls; he was flushed from the exertion of walking to the door, and the flush contributed to the impression that he was part poultry. Under the apron he wore jeans with an elastic waist, and he was wearing a sweatshirt despite the heat billowing out on a strong draft from inside the house.
I’ve been expecting you, he said. Like his head and hands, his voice was unexpectedly dainty, nasal and a little swallowed, like a birdcall run through a kazoo.
Me? said Johnny.
Pringle squinted and leaned closer. His breath smelled like peanut butter.
Oh, he said. No, not you.
Oh, said Johnny.
I thought you were someone else, said Pringle.
And Johnny, recalling unintentionally a story I’d told him, said, I am someone else.
Which must be some sort of magic phrase that unlocks the universe, because Pringle smiled—an unsettling redeployment of his lips into a sort of deflated parabola—and chuckled and made a sound like a duck that was his version of Well or Uh or Hm or Alors, and he said, Yes, I see that you are. Well, why don’t you come inside and we’ll talk about it?
Awesome, said Johnny. I’m your biggest fan.
Well then, said Pringle, maybe you can help me figure out this Internet thing.
What Internet thing? Johnny asked.
Oh, you know, said Pringle. Jus
t the Internet. In general.
14
Then Johnny was gone, but I didn’t much notice; Mark kept hauling me to meetings I didn’t really understand or have any business participating in, as well as hauling me to lunchtime strip joints, which I tried to appreciate ironically, but did not. Neither did he, really; he seemed to be trying to convey something to me, some message in a language I couldn’t translate; although I don’t know, maybe he did like it: one afternoon he paid Sassy Cassy, who was the dwarf who worked the early weekday shift, a hundred bucks to slap him across the face. She obliged, and when he righted his head, I saw that she’d split his lip. His tongue touched the blood, and he smiled as if he liked the taste of it.
Then one night Lauren Sara and I were meeting Mark and Helen for dinner. Hey, have you heard from Johnny lately? she asked. She was in the shower, and I was shaving. It was nearly the end of July somehow; the year had only gotten hotter; it had been ninety degrees for a week and felt like Florida.
No, I said. Why do you ask?
It’s like he disappeared, Lauren Sara said.
And it had been longer and deeper than his past benders. Since getting hooked up with Pringle, he’d rapidly effaced most of his online presence. We don’t want our psychotronics mapped onto the Google worldmind, which is, you know, running an algorithm to simulate human consciousness, predicting to the individual level the actions of every human on earth, literally eradicating free will through the power of prediction, he told me. I thought you said he wanted you to teach him how to use the Internet, I said. How to use it, Johnny snapped; not how to be used by it. It was the last time we’d really talked, although I did receive the occasional cryptic text message. His cell phone, at least, still worked. Meeting Pringle was all he could talk about. It’s all true, he told me. The Project, everything. You have to see his research facility. We’re close to a breakthrough, once we get access to the Project’s files in the Westinghouse building. His research facility? I said doubtfully, and Johnny whipped out his phone and showed me some pictures he’d taken. Is that a bathtub? I said. It looks like someone’s basement. It looks like a meth lab. You know, Morrison, fuck off. Whatever happened to you anyway? You see a goddamn UFO; you’re a straight-up witness to the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy; you see it with your own two eyes, and you become more normal. It’s fucking disappointing. Oh, that’s disappointing? I said. I disappoint you? You put yourself in the fucking hospital and maybe almost in jail on a weeklong bender, and then, as soon as you’re back on your feet, you start in with this? I’m fucking worried about you, Johnny. But as soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have, because his voice lost all of its hoarseness and anger and his tone went flat. I’m fine, he said. You’re not fine, I said. You’re far from fine. Morrison, he said, calmly and with a disconcerting lack of affect, I’ve seen things that would melt your mind and freeze-dry your eyes. You’d be on your knees begging for mercy. You. Don’t. Even. Know.
The Bend of the World: A Novel Page 13