Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “You’re not hot no more.” The Mick felt head-blown: his parents in Bangladesh, Bari a defector to the City of Lights, Tim Bowman in Salonika’s catacombs, and Uncle Xave not only a gunshot victim but a walking radioactive cloud. A picture bloomed in his head: an orphan standing in a bombed-out ruin as a wind hurled snow across the muddy hills surrounding the collapsed building. The Mick knew that he was that orphan.

  “I know how you feel,” Uncle Xave said.

  “‘The check’s in the mail.’ ‘I’ve never been with anybody but you.’ ‘Why, of course I’ll finish the job if you pay me now.’ ”

  Uncle Xave fended off The Mick’s attempt to stiff-arm him and wrapped him in a fast, upright hug. “No. I really do. I know how you feel. Exactly. I can remp you.”

  “Remp?”

  “Read you empathetically.”

  “Like pud you can.”

  “Listen,” Uncle Xave said: “Desolate. Abandoned. Emptied. Forsaken.”

  For The Mick, each adjective had an unwordlike depth that allowed it to echo inwardly. Each had unwordlike resonances. Uncle Xave did know how he felt. In fact, he knew exactly. The Mick sobbed. Uncle Xave held him. The shielded radioactivity of his body warmed and calmed The Mick even as the boy let himself cry.

  Catharsis. Release. Healing.

  “I’m going to visit T. B.,” he said. “You can’t stop me.”

  “I don’t want to. We’ll both go.”

  The Mick broke away. He felt like a beaker of acid into which someone has poured a neutralizing liquid—but all the acid wasn’t gone yet. Shoulders bent, The Mick slouched to his room. Its blackness was once a shrine to his punk nihilism, but now it was a grim objectification of his mood. He lay down in the middle of his bed. For once, Uncle Xave had the grace, and the good sense, not to follow him. After a while, The Mick remembered the bottles of airplane-model dope in his headboard. He rummaged out these tiny bottles, selected one from the multicolored brigade, and began to paint his fingernails black. In cones of light raying down from the bedroom’s recessed spots, his fingernails shone like ebony buttons, bleak digital bruises.

  Forsaken, he thought.

  And then, thinking further: Almost forsaken.

  38

  Night Thoughts

  That was good, Xavier thought. Mikhail’s heartsick. Angry, befuddled, grief-stricken. But we touched. . . . In the kitchen, Xavier tested a hypothesis. From a wooden knife-holder, he took a small knife with a black handle. He scratched the back of his hand with its blade tip. Pain and blood, but not much. In fact, the act gave him a rush—like swatting a roach. He set the knife down, touched the seeping blood, and watched as it stopped flowing and the scratches healed, leaving fresh skin where just seconds ago there’d been evidence of a minor violation. Incredible, Xavier thought. Incredible . . .

  A rapidly healed scratch was nothing compared to three gunshot wounds, which he had survived without an E.R. visit. Well, try something more drastic. With the knife, Xavier sliced off the tip of his index finger. Pain and blood again, but, again, nothing unbearable. He picked up the finger cap and held it against the wound. I should be faint. I should be sweating. When he eased the pressure on his finger, the tip stayed in place. Like the scratches, this small wound had already begun to heal. He examined his hand. The line between the finger and its cap vanished as they fused. . . .

  In the living room, Xavier sat down to think about what was happening to him. It grew dark outside. The Mick turned off the light in his room, and Xavier realized that like a superhero created by freak exposure to “atomic energy,” he was acquiring “stalwartly powers.” He could not yet (1) outrun the shot pattern of a 12-gauge shotgun, (2) take the place of an Oconee Southern diesel engine, or (3) leap any tower in Salonika Plaza. And he knew that he couldn’t fly. Even so, he was no longer—a pulpish phrase occurred to him—“an ordinary mortal.” Consider his recovery from Bowman’s attempt to kill him. Or, flexing his finger, his demonstrations with the knife. Or the high degree of empathy he had shown, and felt, striving to comfort Mikhail. He had actually remped the kid.

  Did he need further proof?

  Xavier could now hold his breath almost indefinitely without gasping for air. If he pushed himself much past a half hour, though, objects in his vision began to go out-of-focus on him. Blindfolded, Xavier opened his refrigerator and identified the leftovers in plastic buttertubs by touching the tubs and smelling his greasy fingertips. Without using a tea glass as an amplifier, he put his ear to an adjacent wall and heard (1) the scurrying of a solitary silver-fish, (2) the whine of an ice maker, and (3) the burbling of a neighbor’s unsettled gut. Xavier removed his blindfold and turned off every lamp in the apartment. Still, he could see into every cranny by Salonika’s late-night glow. In fact, he easily negotiated an obstacle course of chairs, pole lamps, objets d’art, coffee tables, stools, and plaster flamingoes.

  I’m augmented, thought Xavier, looking out his picture window into Le Grande Park. Even at this height and hour, he could see lovers trysting, pokeweed lords conferring, cops on stakeout, a dog in heat leading a panting mixed-breed army. He could smell sweat and salad gas, thermos-bottle coffee and raw doggy lust. The whole park was in his eyes and nostrils. Go to bed, Xavier advised himself. Forget the day’s upsetting events. Sleep. He realized that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but that he wasn’t hungry. This lack of hunger resulted not from distraction or emotional upset, but from a comfortable satiety. A slice of melon and a bowl of unsweetened cereal had helped him through an entire day, and he felt he could go another week without eating. Similarly, he needed sleep no more than he needed food. Sleep might have offered a brief escape from his dawning awareness of his specialness, but why escape that discovery? It was exciting. He wondered if the changes in him had an erotic dimension, if he could shift at will into spectacular Casanovan overdrive?

  Slow down, Xavier thought. Slow down. Walking into those radionuclides from Plant VanMeter almost two summers ago triggered your Philistine Syndrome. But what unleashed the powers you seem to have now? Bowman’s assassination attempt? No. Not that. That was just a disclosure event. The cause lay somewhere between the relief-valve accident at Plant VanMeter and this morning’s shooting. My trip up to the Hazeltons’ farm in December, Xavier thought. The key to the somatic metamorphosis unfolding in him tonight had something to do with the contaminated stream on Hazelton’s farm. Cockroach’s dam had drunk from that water. That three-eyed catfish had grown from a fingerling there. Xavier thought of the lead cylinders lying at the rock pool’s bottom. What were they? For the first time ever, he suspected that the warm bubbles from the pool bottom were proof of Con-Tri’s deliberate subterfuge. . . .

  The ebb and flow of these thoughts buffeted Xavier, breaking and receding with tidal force. A thought that kept returning, that broke ever further up the shell litter of his worry, was the fear that he was becoming, in the flesh, that which he had always hated, a comic-book trope: an invincible stalwart, namely Count Geiger. Nietzsche, even with his exalted championing of the Übermensch, would have gazed at him and murmured, “That is not it, at all. That is not what I meant at all.”

  39

  Smokehouse

  The cops who’d come to Philippi from Salonika interviewed Elrod Juitt around ten on the morning following Juitt and Larry Glenn’s all-night spray-painting party. Juitt got the feeling that one of them wanted to stroll from wreck to wreck in his junkyard looking for the stolen truck, but the size of the yard and the threat of rattlesnakes waking early to perforate his ankles had kept the cop from acting on this whim. He and his partner left with a reminder to Juitt to “keep your eyes open.”

  Of course, the object of the plainclothesmen’s search was three miles away. The truck stayed hidden behind the sorry-shingled smokehouse for more than a week after their return to Salonika, when Juitt drove over from the Auto Parts Reservation to reclaim it. Larry Glenn offered Juitt a half interest in his and Missy’s doublewide and a release from the t
hird part in cash that Juitt had promised to give him for spray-painting the truck. He also offered to throw in a free week’s work every month for six months, to sweeten the deal. “C’mon, Elrod. I want that truck.”

  “It still ain’t got no doors. Missy won’t like that.”

  “I’ll hang some. Reservation’s got a pair on it some’eres.”

  Juitt pointed out that Missy wouldn’t want any part of Juitt’s buying a share of their home. Anyway, the doublewide was useless to him unless he wholly owned it and sold it to somebody else.

  “Damn you,” Larry Glenn said. “How ’bout one week a month free for two years? Missy ain’t ever gonna let me carry her and Carrie-Lisbeth on any Harley.” He nodded at the bike leaning against the white-pine deck he had built behind the doublewide, all by himself, on the third day after his daddy’s funeral.

  *

  Juitt finally agreed, claiming outright Larry Glenn’s totaled ’68 Camaro, refusing to talk about the doublewide at all, and extending the one-week-a-month-free clause to cover an extra six months. “You’re picking my pocket,” he told Larry Glenn, who felt a little that way too. Anyway, the day after Juitt and Larry Glenn concluded their deal, Larry Glenn got two teenage boys from Silvanus County High to help him take the Therac 4-J out of the truck and carry it through a gap in the rear wall of the old smokehouse.

  Juitt had forgotten about the medical machine. Now it was Larry Glenn’s. He planned to keep it out of the rain, more or less, until he could peddle its prettiest components to a scrap dealer.

  The days warmed. Larry Glenn borrowed a welding torch from Cherokee Auto Parts and brought it home to cut the Therac 4-J into recyclable pieces. The loveliest thingamajig in the whole mysterious device was a stainless-steel cylinder, about the size of a gallon can of Sears Weatherbeater paint. This cylinder, which Larry Glenn worked free without using the welding torch, was good to look at and to run your finger along. With some effort, he put it in a wheelbarrow, next to the smokehouse.

  “I’m taking that pretty doohickey inside,” Missy said.

  “That’s what will most likely bring us a get-back. ’Sides, you can’t even lift it.”

  “I can push it in the wheelbarrow.” Missy pushed the thing, which weighed a lot more than an empty paint can, toward the trailer. Like a wind-up doll, Carrie-Lisbeth toddled along behind her through the biting wild onions.

  Larry Glenn lowered his welding hood and aimed his torch’s thin blue flame at the Therac 4-J. Almost immediately, he ignited a plank hanging in the back wall’s ragged gap. This brand set the smokehouse on fire. Larry Glenn was barely able to rescue Juitt’s welding equipment before flames were scouring the walls, leaping like Roman candles. Skin-blistering heat drove him toward the trailer’s white-pine deck.

  Unable to budge the cylinder in the wheelbarrow, Missy grabbed Carrie-Lisbeth and hurried up the deck’s steps. No need to call the Philippi Volunteer Fire Department. It was too late. Missy stood on the deck gazing at the fire. Even at mid-morning, the fire streaked her body with clambering shadows. Carrie-Lisbeth pointed a finger past her daddy, stumbling toward them through the weeds, at the raging source of those shadows.

  “Smokehouse,” she said, as if she had figured out the building’s name for the first time. “Smokehouse.”

  40

  Through the Gerbil Tube

  Bari returned in triumph from showing her UC couture collection in Paris. Her models, as Xavier had seen in a video sent to him by Marilyn Olvera, had strutted the catwalk at the Espace Cardin in a gaudy pageant of acetate, dyed leather, and mirrorlike foil. The inspiration for every outfit was the comic-book costume of a female stalwart: Ladysilk, Saint Torque, Warwoman, or Gator Maid.

  The models made catwalk sorties to a synthesized techno-rock beat, or wove about one another to drum-dominated Smite Them Hip & Thigh arabesques. Sometimes they moved so vigorously that they looked like cagers fast-breaking. Even the video showed Xavier the pop-eyed awe of the world fashion press and the hip covetousness of the Shiny Set women primed to buy.

  Xavier was reminded of an old joke: “‘I hate women, and I want the entire world to know it.’ ‘All right, then. You must become a fashion designer.’ ” But Bari didn’t hate women, and these clothes, despite their origin in the pages of Uncommon Comics, were not sartorial digs at the women who wore them. The fashions in Bari’s collection were well made, with flattering drapings and accessories. No woman would flaunt them at a backyard barbecue, but not one outfit would have seemed gauche at a ball or a theater opening: daring, even avant-garde, but hardly vulgar or silly.

  Still, it was hard not to think that by coopting certain points from the gear of pulpy superheroines, Bari had sold a piece of her soul for UC’s financial sponsorship and the market security of a pop-culture logo. Like teenage fanboys stateside, the French intelligentsia worshiped all things UC-connected. And Shiny Set women of a dozen nationalities (the wives and daughters of Arab oil sheiks and Arab import-export merchants being the major exceptions) leapt at these immodestly déclassé clothes, to lay claim to their auras of hipness and heroism. Both Bari’s of Salonika and Uncommon Comics had made a killing overseas. The money would pile up faster once Bari’s ready-to-wear variations on her couture collection premiered in New York and began filtering into boutiques and department stores from Maine to California.

  *

  One evening soon after her return, Bari was discussing these and various other matters with Xavier and Mikhail in the Oaxacan Zapotec Restaurant in the revolving sapphire disk atop the Bridgeboro Tower near the Salonika Hemisphere.

  “Hey, Bari, I get off on your UC Look,” The Mick said. “But it irks me that the dude who invented it, even if you and Howie Whoever modified it and all, has been canned by Finesse. T. B.’s sitting in jail for trying to kill my uncle.”

  “Of course that bothers you,” Bari said.

  The waiters in the Zapotec—waitpersons, rather—wore vinyl loincloths, white war paint, Aztec headdresses, and ocher bodysuits. Despite the tacky overliteralness of these “uniforms,” Xavier sympathized with the men. Their pre-Columbian costumes had to be as plaguesome as his own Count Geiger BVDs, with the humiliating disadvantage that their outfits were visible.

  “What in fuck’s ‘pollo de Cortés en una manta frita de maiz’?” The Mick held up a menu the size of a round card at a prizefight.

  “A fried chicken burrito,” Xavier said. “I think.”

  “‘Quince dolares,’ ” The Mick read. “Sheesh. We could’ve all gone to Ricardo’s for the price of one fancy cluck-roll here.”

  “Consider the view,” Xavier said. Tonight, the Zapotec’s disk was not revolving, but their perimeter table offered a view of the Hemisphere, the glinting surface of the Chattahoochee River, and a picturesque enclave of Satan’s Cellar, now a-ripple with lights and carved into irregular geometries by a salmon-tinted sky sinking toward full darkness. Their waiter—waitperson—took their orders and padded away in his ersatz-deerskin moccasins.

  “We thought you’d be home sooner,” Xavier said, using the first-person plural to cover his nag. (In some ways, it was a drag having Mikhail along; in others, a godsend. Despite his conviction that Finesse had rudely buggered Tim Bowman, The Mick loved Bari.) “I mean, it’s the end of March.”

  “We had dozens of orders. Buyers had to have individual fittings. One customer had seventeen. Couture fanatics, unlike ready-to-wear customers, regard it as their right to customize each ensemble. They also think the designer whose brand they’re buying should handle all the alterations. It’s a hassle, but I do it to keep the ladies happy. Also, frankly, to make my couture work in the real world. I would’ve betrayed my customers and my vision if I’d left early.”

  “How does one make the make-believe ‘work in the real world’?”

  “That’s the basic imperative of any art, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m one of those who believe that all clothes are costumes.”

  “Amen.” The Mick wore a silk-screened S
mite Them Hip & Thigh T-shirt with a Persian Gulf camouflage jacket and a string tie with a bucking-bronc clasp. The jacket and the tie had put The Mick in technical compliance with the place’s dress code, even if his galley-slave anklets and black fingernails were wake-up calls to throw him out.

  “It’s just that some costumes are more low-key, conventional, or unimaginative than others,” Bari said.

  “Like mine?” Xavier self-consciously pinched a lapel.

  “No. Uh, yes. Your suit would be wholly in place, and totally nondescript, almost anywhere.”

  “Dull?”

  “Soporific.”

  Bari meant this, Xavier could tell, not simply humorously, but judgmentally. It was a put-down and a dare, from a recess of her personality that she had barricaded from him ever since their chance meeting at the Upshaw. She had loved him once, Xavier decided, in spite of his stodginess in dress, because he had forcefully attacked orthodoxy and mediocrity on other fronts, but, with the advent of the craven Howie Littleton, via the UC connection, her opinion of him had declined toward tolerant affection. That was the emotion she broadcast now, amped up a degree or two by the good vibes attendant upon their reunion.

  “Boring. BOF City.” The Mick crunched a corn chip to punctuate this verdict.

  “All right. Presto, change-o.” Xavier stood up. He took off his jacket, unknotted his tie, removed his shirt, heeled off his polished but outdated oxfords, undid his belt, and stepped out of his pants. While he was aligning their creases and folding the pants over his chair back, their waitperson hurried up to remind him of the Zapotec’s dress code. He noted that Xavier was tempting arrest for “forgive me, sir, public indecency.”