Tooth and Claw

by T. C. Boyle

  Her eyes changed. She looked down and then away. “Oh, no,” she breathed finally. “No, I didn’t come for any of that. Don’t you realize what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t. A wave of exhaustion crashed inside of me and pulled back from the naked shingle with a long slow suck and moan.

  “I came for you. I’m here for you. For as long as it takes.” She lifted her eyes and gave me a searching look. “I’m your angel,” she said, and then she backed away and vanished into the night.

  I MADE IT THROUGH the first week without closing my eyes once, not even in the privacy of the Soul Shack’s unisex restroom, resorting to the Freon horn and the safety pin whenever I felt myself giving way. My body temperature dropped to 94.2 degrees at one point, but Dr. Laurie wrapped me in one of those thermal survival blankets and brought it back up to normal. Like the rats, I ate. Over-ate, actually, and by the second day I couldn’t have cared if Mother Teresa and all the starving bald-headed waifs of Calcutta were camped outside the glass cube, I was eating and there were no two ways about it. Whereas before I’d made do like any other bachelor fending for himself, skipping breakfast most days and going to the deli for a meatball wedge in the afternoon and one fast-food venue or another in the evening, now I found myself gorging almost constantly. Tony and Dr. Laurie were bringing me pizza, sushi, tandoori chicken and super-sizer burritos around the clock. I was thirsty too. Couldn’t get enough of the power drinks, of Red Bull, Jolt and Starbucks. The caffeine made me sizzle and it hollowed out its own place in the lining of my stomach, a low gastrointestinal burning that made me know I was alive. For the first few nights I felt a bit shaky during the down hours, from one to maybe five or so, but I never faltered, and there was always somebody there to monitor me, whether it was Dr. Laurie or one of our interns at the station. As the hours fell away, I felt stronger, more alive and awake, though the integument was back, draped over the world like a transparent screen, and everything—the way Hezza’s mouth moved when she spoke, Tony’s animated thrusts and jabs as he sat emoting beside me from six to nine each morning, even the way people and cars moved along the street—seemed to be happening at the bottom of the sea.

  Cuttler made himself scarce the first week, chary of associating himself with failure, I suppose, but on the eighth day, when I was a mere seventy-three hours from the record, he showed up just after Tony and I had signed off and the blitzkrieg of ads leading into Annie’s slot had begun cannonading over the airwaves. I was experiencing a little difficulty in recognizing people at this juncture—my eyes couldn’t seem to focus and the pages of the thrillers were just an indecipherable blur—and I guess I didn’t place him at first. He was standing there at the open door of the booth, a vaguely familiar figure in a canary-yellow long-sleeved shirt and trailing cerulean scarf, threads of graying blond hair hanging in his eyes—his small, pig-like eyes—and two mugs of piping hot coffee in his hands. Or maybe he was wearing a pullover that day, done up in psychedelic blots of color, or nothing at all. Maybe he was standing there naked, pale as a dead fish, loose and puffy and without definition beyond the compact swell of his gut and the shriveled little British package of his male equipment. Who was I to say? I was hallucinating at this point, experiencing as reality what Dr. Laurie called “hypnogogic reveries,” the sort of images you summon up just before nodding off to Dreamland.

  “Boomer, you astonish me, you really do,” Cuttler might have said, and I think, in reconstructing events, he did. His figure loomed there in the doorway, the two coffee mugs emblazoned with the KFUN logo outstretched to Tony and me. “We all took bets, and I tell you, really, I’ve been on the losing end all week. Not that I didn’t have faith, but knowing you, knowing your performance, that is, and the level of your attachment to, uh, procedure down at KFUN, I just didn’t think—well, as I say, you do astonish me. Bravo. And keep it up, old chip.”

  My focus was wavering. I couldn’t really feel the cup in my hands, couldn’t tell if it was cold or hot, ceramic or Styrofoam (I was suffering from astereognosis, the inability to identify objects through the sense of touch, the very same condition that had afflicted Randy Gardner from the second day on). I felt irritated suddenly. Hot. Outraged. The feeling came up in me like a brush fire, and I couldn’t have put the two proper nouns “Cuttler” and “Ames” together if they were the key to taking home the million-dollar prize on a quiz show. “Who the fuck are you?” I snarled, and the coffee seemed to snake out of the cup of its own accord.

  Cuttler’s canary-yellow shirt was canary no longer, if, in fact, that was what he was wearing that day. He snarled something back at me, something offensive and threatening, something about my status at the station, but then Tony, glad-faced, big-headed, cliché-spouting moron that he was, stepped in on my side. “Lay off him, Cutt,” he might have said. “Can’t you see the strain he’s under here? Give us a break, will you?”

  And now I felt warm to the bottom of my heart. Tony, good old reliable witty Tony, my partner and my fortress, was coming to my aid. “Tony,” I said. “Tony.” And left it at that.

  Then somehow it was night and my mood shifted to the valedictory because I knew I was going to die just like the rats. My quarter-hour spots lacked vitality, or that was my sense of them (“Helloooo, you ladies and baboons out there in K-whatever land, do you know what the time is? Do you care? Because the Boomer doesn’t”). The street outside the booth wasn’t a street anymore but a portal to the underworld and the bums weren’t bums either, but dark agents of death and decay. I saw my wife and her second husband rise up out of the fog, sprout fangs and wings and flap off into the night. My dead mother appeared briefly, rattling the ice cubes in her cocktail glass till the sound exploded around me like a train derailment. I shoved a gyro into my face, fascinated by the pooling orange grease on the console that seemed to have risen up out of the floor beneath me just to receive it. When Dr. Laurie, who might have been dressed that night like a streetwalker or maybe a nun, came in to monitor me, I may have grabbed for her breasts and hung on like a pair of human calipers until she slapped me back to my senses. And Hezza. My angel in earflaps. Hezza was there, always there, as sleepless as I, sometimes crouched in the bushes, sometimes manifesting herself in the booth with me, rubbing my shoulders and the small of my back with her medium-sized mittened hands and talking nonstop of bands, swag and the undying glamour of FM radio. Christ was in the desert. I was in the booth. My fingers couldn’t feel and my eyes couldn’t see.

  ON THE TENTH DAY, I achieved clarity. Suddenly the ever-thickening skin of irreality was gone. I saw the street transformed, the fog dissipating that seemed to have been there all week pushing up against the glass walls like the halitosis of defeat, each wisp and tendril burnished by the sun till it glowed. I went live to the studio for my quarter-hour update and let my voice ooze out over the airwaves with such plasticity and oleaginous joy you would have thought I was applying for the job. When I got up to visit the facilities at the Soul Shack, a whole crowd of starry-eyed fans thumped and patted me and held out their hands in supplication even as the chant Boomer, Boomer, Boomer rose up like a careening wave to engulf us all in triumph and ecstasy. One more day to set the record, and then we’d see about the day beyond that—the twelfth day, the magic one, the day no other DJ or high school science nerd or speed freak would ever see or match, not as long as the Guinness Brewing Company kept its records into the burgeoning and glorious future.

  I was running both taps, trying to make out the graffiti over the toilet and staring into my cratered eyes as if I might tumble into them and never emerge again, when there came a soft insistent rapping at the door. Clear-headed though I was, I felt a surge of irritation. Who in hell could this be? Didn’t everybody in town, from the people in their aluminum rockers at the nursing home to the Soul Shack’s ham-fisted bouncers, know that I had to have my five minutes of privacy here? Five minutes. Was that too much to ask? Sixty stinking minutes a day? Did they have to see me squatting over the toilet? Unzip
ping my fly? What did they want, blood? “Who is it?” I boomed.

  The smallest voice: “It’s me, Hezza.”

  I opened the door. Hezza’s face was drawn and white, pale as a gutter leaf bleached by the winter rains. Beyond her I could see Rudy, our prissiest intern, studying the stopwatch that kept me strictly to my five minutes and not a second more. “Nazi!” I shouted at him, then pulled Hezza into the bathroom with me and shut the door.

  She was shivering. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the irises faded till you couldn’t tell what color they were anymore. She’d been keeping vigil. She was as tranced as I was. “Take your clothes off,” I told her.

  How much hesitation was there—half a second?

  “Hurry!” I barked.

  She was wearing blue jeans, a blouse under the long coat, nothing under that. The coat fell to the floor, the blouse parted, the jeans grabbed at her thighs, and her panties—yellow and gold butterflies and hovering bees, the panties of a child—slid to her knees. Hypnogogic reverie indeed. I tore the buttons off my third-favorite Hawaiian shirt, yanked at my belt, but it was too late, too far gone and lost, because Rudy was pounding on the door like the Gestapo with instructions from Cuttler to knock it off its hinges and snap an amyl nitrate cap under my nostrils if I lingered even a heartbeat too long.

  I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I don’t think I even touched her.

  DAY ELEVEN WAS a circus. A zoo. I was in the cage, hallucinating, suffering from dissociated thinking, ataxia, blurred vision and homicidal rage, and the KFUN fans—a hundred of them at least, maybe two hundred—blocked the street, pressed up against the glass walls, gyrated and danced and shouted. Tony was with me full-time now, counting down to the moment of Randy Gardner’s annihilation, the KFUN sound truck blasting up-to-the-minute KFUN hits to the masses, the police, the city council and the mayor getting in on the act—taking credit, even, though at a safe distance. The stores up and down the block were doing a brisk business in everything from T-shirts to birdcages to engagement rings, and the fast-food outlets were putting on extra shifts.

  Hezza was in the booth with us, the booth that had grown crowded now because Dr. Laurie and Nguyen were hovering over the console like groupies, milking every moment for all it was worth, and nobody wanted Hezza there but me. I insisted. Got angry. Maybe even violent. So, though Cuttler and Rudy the intern bit their lips and looked as sour as spoiled milk, Hezza was right there in a plastic chair between me and Tony, her medium-sized mittened hand clutched in my own. And why not? I was the star here, I was the anchorite, I was the one nailed to the cross and hung out to dry for the public’s amusement and edification and maybe even redemption. I was feeling grandiose. Above everybody and everything. Transcendent, I guess you’d call it. I wanted Hezza in the booth. Hezza was in the booth.

  Tony and I stumbled our way through the show, the Boomer anything but, my wit dried up, my voice a freeze-dried rasp, a whisper. We played more music than usual, cueing up one insomnia tune after another, the Talking Heads’ “Stay Up Late,” the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a Cuttler Ames’ blast from the past “Wake Me, Shake Me.” The ads came fast and furious. Tony counted down the minutes in a voice that got increasingly hysterical. The record was in sight. I was going to make it—and what’s more I was ready to shoot for the whole banana, the twelfth day, the immortal day, and I’d already told Cuttler as much. “It’s in the bag,” I told him, waving my arms over my head like an exercise guru. “No fears.”

  And then the final countdown, live on the air, 5-4-3-2-1, and a shout went up from the crowd, all those delirious bobbing heads, Hezza grinning up at me out of her parchment face and squeezing my hand as if she were milking it, Dr. Laurie beaming, Cuttler, Tony and the mayor jostling for position with Nick Nixon from the local TV station and a smattering of crews from as far away as Fresno and Bakersfield. “Speech!” somebody shouted, and they all took it up: “Speech, speech, speech!”

  I rose from the chair, bits of pea stone gravel stuck to the backside of my sweaty trousers, Hezza rising with me. Tony was chanting along with the crowd now—or no, he was leading the chant, his voice booming out through the big speakers of the sound truck. It was my moment of glory. My first in a whole long dry spell that stretched all the way back to high school and a lead role in the Thespian Club’s production of The Music Man. I lifted the mike to my lips, took a deep breath. “I just want to say”—my voice was thunderous, godlike—“I just want to say, Goodbye, Randy Gardner, R.I.P.!”

  THEN I WAS ALONE again and it was dark. The morning had bled into afternoon and afternoon into evening, the world battened on the fading light, and with every sleepless minute a new record was being forged. Dr. Laurie begged me to quit at noon, three hours into the new record (actually six, if you consider that I’d been awake and alive for the show that first day before sequestering myself in the glass box). She reminded me of the rats—“They had hemorrhages in their brain tissue, Boomer; enough is enough”—but I ignored her. Cuttler wanted me to go twelve full days, and though I knew on some level he didn’t care if I lived or died, I had to show him—show everybody—what I was made of. It was only sleep. I could sleep for a week when I was done. A month. But to stay awake just one more minute was to make history, and the next minute would make history all over again, and the next after that.

  Hezza had melted away with the crowd. Dr. Laurie had gone home to sleep. Tony had a date. Cuttler was cuddled up at home with his snaggle-toothed British wife, listening to Deep Purple or some such crap. Even the bums had deserted me, taking their movable feast down the avenue to a less strenuous venue. The funny thing was, I felt fine. I didn’t think sleep, not for a minute. What I saw and what I thought I saw were one and the same and I no longer cared to differentiate. I was living inside a dream and the dream was real life, and what was wrong with that?

  I watched the KFUN fans line up outside the Soul Shack, watched the line swell and shrink, and fixated on the taillights of the cars moving silently down the boulevard. I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch the portable TV Tony had set up for me, couldn’t even listen to the chatter of it. Everything seemed so inconsequential. I would say that my mind wandered, but the phrase doesn’t begin to do justice to the state I was in—I no longer inhabited my body, no longer had a mind or a being. I felt a great peace descend on me, and I just sat there in silence, studying the red LED display on the console as it chopped and diced the hours, moving only to lift a listless hand to acknowledge the thumbs-up from one or another of the baggy-pantsed teens drifting by on the sidewalk. The club emptied, the streets went silent. I didn’t even bother to take my restroom breaks.

  In the morning, the light climbed down from the tops of the buildings, a light full of pigeons and hope, and Tony appeared, as usual, at quarter of six, with two cups of coffee. There was something wrong with him, I could see that right away. His face lacked dimension. It wasn’t a face at all, but a flat screen painted with Tony-features. He looked worried. “Listen, Boom,” he said, “you’ve got to give this up. No offense, but it’s like having a dead man here doing the show with me. You know what you said yesterday, on the air, when I asked you how it felt to set the record? You remember that?”

  I didn’t. I gave him a numb look.

  “You said, ‘Fuck you, Dog Face.’ ”

  “I said ‘fuck’? On the air?”

  Tony didn’t respond. He handed me a coffee, sat down and put his headphones on. A moment fluttered by. I couldn’t feel the paper cup in my hand. I studied Tony in profile, hoping to see how he was Tony, if he was Tony. “Just keep out of my way today, will you?” he said, turning on me abruptly. “And when the show’s over, when you’ve got your twelve days in, you go home to bed. You hear me? Rudy’s going to take over for you the next two days, so you get a little vacation here to get your head straight.” And then, as if he felt he’d been too harsh, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned into me. “You deserve it, man.”

  I don’
t remember anything of the show that day, except that Tony—Gooner, as the KFUN audience knew him—kept ringing down the curtain on my record, reminding everybody in KFUN land that the Boomer would be going on home to bed at the conclusion of the show, and what would the Boomer like? A foot massage? A naked blonde? A teddy bear? Couple of brewskies? Ha-ha, ha-ha. One more day, one more show, one more routine. But what Tony didn’t know, or Cuttler Ames or Dr. Laurie either, was that I had no intention of giving up the microphone: I was shooting for thirteen days now, and after that it would be fourteen, maybe fifteen. Who could say?

  A handful of people were milling around outside the glass booth as we closed out the show, but there was none of the ceremony of the preceding day. The record had been broken, the ratings boosted, and the stunt was over as far as anybody was concerned. The mayor certainly didn’t show. Nor did Dr. Laurie. Tony let out a long trailing sigh after we signed off (“This is the Gooner—and the Boomer—saying adiós, amigos, and keep the faith, baby—at least till tomorrow morning, same time, same place”) and made as if to help me out of the chair, but I shoved him away. He was standing, I was sitting. I was trembling all over, trembling as if I’d just been hosed down on an ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Don’t touch me, I muttered to myself. Don’t even think about it. He dropped his face to mine, his big bloated moronic moon face that I wanted to smash till it shattered. “Come on, man,” he said, “it’s over. Beddy-bye. Time to crash.”

  I didn’t move. Wouldn’t look at him.

  “Don’t get psychotic on me now,” he said, and he took hold of my left arm, but I shrugged him off. The people on the street stopped what they were doing. Heads turned, eyes zeroed in. He gave them a lame smile, as if it was all part of the act. “You’re tired,” he said, “that’s all,” but there was no conviction in his voice. “Boomer?” he said, as if I were floating away from him. “Boomer?” A minute later I heard the glass door at the back of the booth swing open and then shut.