by John Sladek
‘Tribe, tribe. All of the Seneca put together.’
Sir Somebody looked at him in the way only a man of his class is able to look at someone. ‘Good Lord! Is there more than one great Seneca? Seneca, whose moving death…’
In the next room, just beyond the doorway, Senator Vuje looked around to see who was calling him. No one was, so he turned back to listen to an astrologer, who was giving the horoscope for anyone born on December 25th:
‘He will work and toil, and others may reap the benefit of his labor unless marriage alters the destiny. He is usually well-disciplined and cautious, and tends to overlook his own faults while quick to recognize the faults of others.’
The party rumbled on like a Hay Wain (as someone in the middle of it pointed out), carrying its cargo of fools toward the hour of their release. A lady lawyer spoke long sentences about international law as regards defacing the moon, and to each the cryogenics man nodded and smiled. The girl in the snood claimed that Thomas M. Disch was the author of a novel called Concentration Camp. Other girls, in leather bikinis, glass crinolines, wooden mail, foil tartans and plastic pinafores behaved as slightly animated decorations, receiving each conversation item with the same graceful indifference with which chair cushions receive buttocks of all shapes. News, gossip, compliments, pedantry, wit and philosophy, all were rested upon them briefly and then removed, leaving no impression.
One pretty blonde wore a dress of pale creamy silk that seemed to be on upside down. It flared outward and upward from her knees, ending at the neck in a fountain of ruffled lace. Someone remarked that she looked like a peach sundae, and later everyone thought they had originated the idea.
Ank danced with her, danced with them all, doing the jung, the freeb, the buckle-o, the rap. After a short intermission (to puke up a gallon of cheap wine) he returned to dance the rap, the nood and the fox-trot.
‘Seneca’s death,’ remarked the knight, ‘reminds one of the death of Quixote. Or, as you Americans say it, Key-oty.’
‘Kiote?’ Hackendorf frowned. ‘He’s not a Seneca god. I think you mean one of the plains tribes…’
But Sir Somebody wasn’t listening. He had given up trying to understand the peculiar American versions of the classics, and turned instead to scrutinize Bates, the young man in the wicker suit, who spoke now of English cooking.
‘It’s quite underrated,’ he said. ‘You have to get down in the country and try the really authentic English dishes: Curate’s Egg, for instance. And Parson’s Nose.’
‘Good Lord! Is the man serious? Parson’s Nose? Parson’s Nose? What the deuce is he on about?’
In the living room someone comforted Miss Columbine, who lay full-length on the sunken sofa, heaving with sobs.
‘What happened, dear?’
‘That dirty young man in the paper suit…’ indicating Ank. ‘He called me a—a lesbian!’
Ank grinned. ‘All I did was ask her why her arms are so muscular,’ he said. ‘Well it’s true!’
Someone looked down at the 250-pound writhing figure. ‘Like a trapped elephant,’ he murmured. ‘Poor thing.’
The publisher in the hot-dog costume plodded through the den, asking if anyone had seen his wife. The lady with the jeweled face regarded him. ‘How quaint!’ she exclaimed. ‘A kapok coat! How poply quaint!’
She turned to smile on the patrician profile of General Weimarauner. ‘They wore things like that when I was young—practically—I thought they were out of fashion forever. I’ll bet he doesn’t dare take it off. He’s afraid someone might see his truss.’
A drink sloshed over her. The face so covered with jewels that it might have been any age looked up. An unsteady man in a wrinkled dinner jacket pulled his forelock in apology. ‘’S all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m from Innerpol.’
‘A jaw section?’ Ank lurched forward to look at Myra’s face. ‘So that’s why you’re drinking through a straw. How long before the wires come out?’
Before she could answer he began on the details of his own accident, resulting, as he mentioned several times, in concussion.
‘Ye den’t lek tee well, Enk.’
‘Ank looks terrible,’ Glen said to a girl wearing only blue jeans.
Even across the room he could see the edges of Ank’s paper jacket were frayed and greasy, and the seams had started to let go.
‘But he’s a great dancer,’ replied the girl.
Glen made a mental note to take some dance lessons.
Mr Bradd and a crewcut young giant finished their competition, a chinning contest on the bedroom door-frame. Crewcut won. Bradd suggested a little kendo, broom against mop.
‘You’re crazy to go up against him,’ someone whispered to Bradd. ‘He’s a Yale younger poet, for God’s sake.’
Glen asked Hackendorf if he were the Indian expert.
‘Well, I guess you might say that. I’m advising General Weimarauner for his book on the Indian wars.’
‘I wanted to ask you something about this tribe, the Utopis.’
‘The Utopi, yes, a minor Southwestern tribe. Not really important—most of their ritual and so on is copied from others. Gosh, there can’t be many Utopi left.’
‘There must be some,’ Glen said. ‘I just ordered a hat from them, a real Utopi headdress. I thought you might be able to tell me what it would look like.’
The anthropologist looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not certain, really. Didn’t know they had any crafts. Utopi hat? That’s a new one on me.
‘Now, if you’ll excuse us, the general and I will duck out early. I have something to discuss with him privately.’
‘Daisy James,’ said a blonde. ‘You know, by Henry Miller?’
‘Isn’t Feinwelt here?’ someone else asked.
The lady lawyer’s shrill voice carried over the other conversations. ‘The question remains, does the moon really constitute…’
A man on crutches came in. Someone persuaded someone else not to rush over and ask him where he got his one-legged outfit. Someone else tried to throw up into the swimming pool, but it was covered. The man from Interpol crawled around on all fours, peering up dresses. He was the only one to make the discovery:
The girl wearing only blue jeans really wasn’t. The blue jeans, pockets, rivets and all, were painted on.
Glen noticed the girl in the peach-sundae dress was alone. He moved over to talk to her, pausing on the way to put his pipe in his mouth.
Jerry shifted a crutch. ‘A jaw section? Myra, that’s nothing. I lost a leg in that accident—clear up to the knee!’ He held out the stump for her inspection.
‘E see. Thet’s trrble, Jrry. Whet’ll ye de?’
‘Do? Who cares?’ He drank off a cocktail and held the glass in a way that indicated he expected her to fetch him another. ‘Oh, I guess I can keep on working for the Crusade. I’m still a good systems man, and their computer—but I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who did this to me, Myra. Some stupid fuckhead in a slow truck, hogging the intersection.’
She took his glass and went to the bar. Ank wandered past a moment later, waggling an unlit cigarette. No one seemed to have a light.
‘How about you?’ he asked Jerry. The one-legged man made a great show of clapping his crutches together and digging out his lighter. He was (his manner indicated) a cripple being put upon by a man with all limbs intact.
Without even thanking him, Ank shuffled away, trailing a torn strip of paper suit and raining live coals on his own lapels.
‘…and another thing,’ someone asserted. ‘All the penitents aren’t in the penitentiary.’
‘Film critic?’ said the tall man, slipping a cigarette out of his sweater sleeve. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. He still thinks The AfricanQueen is a retitled version of Strange Fruit.’
Sir Somebody entered the living room, promenading with the lady with the jeweled face. ‘Incredible!’ he was saying. ‘The fellow claims we English are fond of eating hen’s arse!’
‘Are you the jan
itor?’ someone asked the old Negro by the door, who declined to answer. ‘There’s a lot of water coming out from under the bathroom door. Somebody must have passed out in there.’
The old man smiled to himself, took out a sack of tobacco and papers, and deliberately rolled a cigarette.
‘Isn’t that just like a colored?’ shouted the hot-dog man. ‘Look at that! Doped to the teeth, or drunk maybe, or just plain idiotic. Has anybody seen my wife, by the way?’
‘I think,’ said Ank, stumbling into him, ‘I think she left with a mustard pot…’
The two zoot suits were rolling on the floor. The man on top had seized the other’s hand-painted tie and was trying to strangle him with it. ‘1948, you son of a bitch!’
The six persons in the bathroom were taking a shower with their robes on. The water was up to their ankles and leaking out under both doors, the locked door to the hall and the door to the bedroom, where the polite cryogenics man was helping Bradd to his feet. The gloomy producer stood by, still talking shop.
‘I’m tired of doing spade westerns,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of doing’—with a malicious look at Bradd, who was groping for his glasses—‘a queer western. The fairy lawman who has to keep proving he’s a man. Takes incredible risks, rides in a rodeo and so on. So “straight” he wears low-heeled boots. Only what to call it? Andy Oakley?
Ank stood in the corner by the fireplace, mumbling to himself. He seemed oblivious of everything, even the great charred hole in the front of his paper jacket. Suddenly he pulled himself up and charged across the living room towards the patio door. He collided with the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ank. ‘You’re from Interpol, remember?’
‘Hey, how did you know? Hey, come back here!’
But Ank lurched on, crookedly but with purpose, across the fiberglass swimming pool cover and on, towards the parapet.
Out in the hall, the Yale younger poet had wedged the elevator doors open by jamming a mop across the opening at knee level. Now he started chinning himself on the mop, letting his body hang down inside the shaft. The two Shriners and a few others looked on.
Grunting, he explained. ‘Have to purify myself…after combat…too much I and thou…need some experience of the Infinite…I and It, see?’
‘That’s not infinite,’ said one watcher, ‘it’s only forty floors, man.’
In the living room, someone asked where that TV exec had got to.
‘A transvestite executive? Wild!’
Ank, unconscious, was carried in from the patio by Myra and Drew, the art dealer.
‘What happened to him?’
‘We found him passed out with one leg over the parapet.’
‘Does the moon,’ said the lady lawyer, ‘in legal terms, belong to everyone?
General Weimarauner and his anthropologist sat in a lunch counter drinking coffee, or anyway stirring at it.
‘What is it, Hack? It better not be about your damned Indians.’
Hackendorf coughed. ‘In a way, General, in a way. But it’s also about X Forces.’
X Forces was the as yet unnamed cadre being assembled in Florida under General Rockstone. It was the Pentagon’s hope that X Forces could regain some of the reputation for toughness lost by the old Green Berets in Vietnam, and become a model and a morale booster for the other services.
‘Go on, then.’
‘The Cheyenne had a peculiar military corps called the Contraries. These were the finest, fittest braves in the tribe, and more. They were so tough, they did everything backwards.’
The general looked at him, then turned his Roman profile. ‘Come on, Hack. I’m tired. Either spit it out, or let’s get back to the hotel. I’ve got to fly to Washington in the morning.’
‘They really did, sir. They rode to battle mounted backwards, and they never carried weapons. There was much more merit in it, if when a man had the chance to kill an enemy he just touched him instead. Just slapped him with the open hand, or hit him with a small stick, the coup stick.
‘Another thing is, the Contraries never touched women. They were like monks, or knights under a vow…were supposed to be. They fasted and prayed and tortured themselves all night before a battle, and then they just clowned around on the battlefield, taking incredible risks. All for honor.’
Weimarauner sighed. ‘Yes, yes, but Hackendorf, we already have enough honor.’
The Yale younger poet and his followers came in from the hall, leaving the elevator doors jammed open, and went straight to the bar. The poet turned his back on Mr Bradd, who was too busy talking to the cryogenics man to notice. Glen and the peach-sundae girl went into the bedroom and locked the door.
‘They call me the I B M wish, baby,’ sand the World et al., ‘They call me the Icy B M fish.’
A lighted sign went on over the bedroom door: UNE FEMME EST AVEC MOI.
‘I envy that bastard Glen Dale,’ said a Shriner. ‘He must of gone through more ass than I have socks.’
The cryogenics man, sensing a customer in Mr Bradd, began to sober up fast. ‘Freezing isn’t just a science, you know. It’s an art. Look at it this way: If you’d frozen yourself twenty years ago, today you’d be—what, sixteen years old?’ He judged Bradd to be forty-five, actually.
‘Twenty-four,’ Bradd said, ‘but I wouldn’t have any money.’
‘No? If you had bought this sheaf of stocks,’ the list brought out and held so that Bradd had to turn and move closer to have a look at it, ‘you’d have nearly a hundred dollars for every dollar you invested then. Even if you put your money in the bank, it would nearly have tripled! And youth, don’t forget, youth—is—money!’ From another pocket he produced a full color brochure of freezer designs.
‘What I was thinking,’ Bradd said, looking them over, ‘was something for a friend—really a business associate of mine. A woman thirty years old. The thing is, her job effectiveness—her RBI—depends on her age. In maybe five years, she’ll be useless. Meanwhile, she works maybe an hour a week, maybe two. The rest of the time, she just mopes around the house. Do you think we could do something to shape up her career?’
Mrs Grebe peeled off her jeweled face and put it away. She was about to go with Sir Somebody to his hotel room, to look at his pictures of Welsh Corgis. The art dealer in the feather cape and Myra shouldered Ank and headed for the door. With a look of irony, Jerry stood out of their way.
A businessman in a fur wig rushed in from the hall. ‘Hey, somebody fell down the elevator shaft! I heard him scream!’
‘Christ! Somebody get the janitor!’
‘Where the hell is he?’ demanded the walking hot dog. ‘He was right here a minute ago. As soon as there’s any work to be done…’
Two pork-pie hats swiveled to look at him. ‘Forget it,’ said one of the musicologists. ‘No hurry now.’ They went back to their amiable discussion of the recording date of Deef John Holler’s Decatur Freight Blues,
One floor below, Deef John Holler lay on the roof of the elevator. He had few cues to his whereabouts, being not only deaf but nearly blind, but he found this place more congenial than Glen’s penthouse. Here there were no irritating, jerky vibrations from amplified clumsy playing, no smells of stale smoke and spilled whiskey, only a gentle descending motion. He was not interested in getting anywhere, in being anyone, or in living at all. So Deef John sat up, dusted off his new overalls, and began to sing.
All the rest of the evening, riders of the elevator declared they had never heard Melodiak sounding so good.
‘I see what must’ve happened,’ said the Knight of Columbus. ‘Some prick left this mop stuck across the door like this, and guess some drunk tripped over it.’ He unstuck the mop and let the doors close.
‘Forty floors. Some trip.’
Miss Columbine, plumping her enormous breasts into shape, came out of the flat. The stiff blonde wig was askew, and one trickle of mascara ran down to her white—faintly bluish-white—jowl. Drawing her red velvet
cloak about her, she turned her back on the others to wait for the elevator.
When she was gone, they chuckled. ‘I think Ank was right about her, she is a lesbian,’ said one. ‘I mean, did you see that five-o’clock shadow?’
‘Sure upset her, though. She spent the whole evening sprawled out on the couch, bawling.’
They went back inside.
Someone lurched up to the bedroom door and peered at the lighted sign over it, spelling it out. ‘Fums?’ he said. ‘I wonder where in hell the other one is. What do they call it? Ohms.’
The water in the bathroom was thigh-deep, but the six pseudo-Egyptians hadn’t noticed. They were all piled up against the door to the bedroom, listening to Glen’s taped music.
Ank awoke to see Myra and a man in a feather cape looking over his two completed paintings. He was at home, on the bed. One of his paper sleeves had fallen off; it lay in the middle of the floor, like an abandoned snakeskin.
‘Never mind those,’ he roused himself to say. ‘They’re not…not what I wanted.’
‘They’re what I want, thougih,’ said the man. He introduced himself as Drew Moody of the Moody Gallery. ‘Those paintings live. All right, it’s corny, but I’ve been looking at other stuff all week. Cold mechanical stuff, the kind those computer jerks crank out.’
‘Computer…?’ Ank tried to clear his head.
‘Half the kids in the country think if they can only get a random number generator they automatically become a painter. But this—this is by God human art, untouched by mechanical hands. Can you do a few more? I’d like to give you a one-man show.’
‘But…do you think the critics…?’
‘The critics! The critics are a bunch of dehorns who wouldn’t know paint from diarrhea. The real world will eat this up, if I present it right.’
‘Et’s e wenderfel eppertenety, Enk.’
‘He’s tired and foggy,’ said the dealer. ‘Tell you what, Ank. I’ll give you a jingle in the morning. And here’s my card. Now Myra and I will sneak off and let you get some sleep.’
On the way out, the art dealer noticed the tarpaulin-draped painting machine. ‘What’s this? Sculpture?’