Elvissey

by Jack Womack

  FLVISSFY

  Also by Jack Womack

  Ambient

  Terraplane

  IIeathern

  Random Acts of Senseless Violence

  Gets Put the Future Behind Us

  FLVISSEY

  ,TACK WOMACK

  All my love For Carrie

  FLVISSEY

  1

  "Elvis died several years before he saved me from drowning. My late husband's chihuahua, Betty, fell off the pier and I dove in after her, forgetting I couldn't swim. As I sank beneath the waves a strong hand pulled me out. Though the glow of His suit blinded me I saw His face, bathed in beatific light. Averting my eyes before His glory burned me I realized that without my having to ask He'd washed me in His love and I'd walk with Him ever after. As I dropped to my knees He ascended into the clouds, shining like the evening star. I didn't understand why He didn't save Betty but I know there must be a reason, there has to be."

  -hom "Postludinal Testimonies,"

  The Book of E (Vegassene)

  Ascension, I craved; my husband dreamed of descent. At our meet that set our seal.

  "Zen," Conrad repeated. "Zen, not zinc. Zen, zen, zen."

  "Think philosophy, not metal, to correctly phrase," said Weber.

  Aware that present is bearable only when future makes it past, my husband and I often found ourselves creating images of what we believed our marriage had been, or of the people we once thought we were. But I was unable any longer to take comfort from holograms of the spirit, for when I tried clasping their shimmers against me, they dissolved under touch as reflections in water.

  "Cruisin'-" I replayed, following my teachers' lead.

  "Zen," Weber said.

  We'd tried timeover to regood ourselves; perceived, we thought, that we never would. Then our company gifted us, heaving an assignment our way, rippling our stasis; we believed it our last chance to recover what we'd had as we plunged in, heedless of depth.

  "Cruisin'-" I repeated; they nodded. Conrad and Weber were forensic philologists, adept in resuscitating dead languages so that, once alive again, the words might be appropriately vivisected. For my husband and myself, in preparation for our assignment, they ran their class, Slang Lab-Slab, I rephrased. Slab underwayed on Philosophy Hall's fifth, at Columbia, on Morningside Heights, under Dryco aegis. We all worked for Dryco, for whom there were no betters to work; no others, in truth, whether regooded or not. "Cruisin' for a bruisin'."

  Words skidded smooth off my tongue, however their friction, at intervals, burned my tutors' ears. This time, having mimed proper, I'd delighted them. "AO," said Conrad, offering what John called a switchblade smile. "Demetaform."

  Metaphor meaning, they meant; I considered all likely interpretations, deciding upon one that personally pleased. "One finds trouble when and where it's sought," I said. But why seek trouble when it finds you so easily?

  "Apt," said Weber. "Next," he requested of his monitor; its blue eye refused to wink. "Phrase me."

  "Moderate tone to effect interface-" Conrad began to say.

  "Phrase, " Weber commanded, his voice and color deepening. "Please," he added; at last received response. Hieroglyphs emerged from the blue as Venus rose from the sea. Staring doorways as Weber deciphered, longlost argot ringing twixt my ears, I glimpsed a woman hallwayed, downbound, carrying a veiled container; one of the artists, I reckoned. A workperson, too, strolled amid students, bloodying her orange coverall with reddened hands. During the month my husband and I trained oncampus, razored vines were loosed from all college walls that ivy might again shoot unslashed veins along clot-colored brick, revealing regooded structures fit to house regooded souls. Regooding proposed to make all that was long-wrong rainright once more.

  "Ah," Weber murmured, studying the text at last revealed. "Comprehended."

  By regooding, Dryco proclaimed to all that security was assured. In my mind it unimagined that security could ever be secure. "Bonney," Weber continued, addressing me. "Hear and replay."

  Isabel, my mind rephrased; my name is Isabel, that name is my own. Isabel Bonney overran my boundaries; admitted my husband, my other who sat so near, too dangerously deep into my being. I loved him; there were none I loved as I loved my husband, but his is not my name. Call me Isabel.

  "I be boppin'-" Weber began.

  "I be boppin'-" I replayed. My husband John, his name-said I knacked lingo; he didn't, and sat lipstill in Slab, eating apricot slices from his bag of dried fruit, which almost exclusively made up his daylight diet. One of us had to master background; it essentialled plain that we understand what the natives were saying when we confronted.

  "-at the high school hoop," Weber concluded.

  "I be boppin' at the high school hoop-"

  "Hold," Conrad interrupted, extending a hand the shade and texture of undyed surimi. "Errored."

  Weber's face so reddened that stroke seemed readied to cut him free. "Sourced here, sourced there," he said, fingertapping the screen.

  "Don't," his monitor voiced in woman's gentle tones.

  "Excuse. Sourced all the same, Conrad," Weber went on. "Midfifties term, present in all media. In High School Confidential, plus-"

  Conrad shook his head. "1958 cinescript jumbled into low vernacular black English, urb class." He paused, as if only now noting my own urb class; eyed my lightening darkness, the yet-evident kink of my hair. Convincing himself he'd not offended, he proceeded sans exegesis or after-word. "Inapplicable for situation. Next."

  "Demonstrable proof available," Weber insisted. "Stand corrected."

  "Ignore, Bonney," said Conrad. "Proceed, Weber."

  That linguists so incomprehensibled as they did didn't surprise; their degreed specialty ,/as the Elizabethan period, not America's nineteen-fifties. But if we were to return to our world with anyone-as Dryco intended-it wouldn't be Shakespeare; at Dryco's demand, they adapted for the duration of our prep.

  "Proof postsession," Weber said. "Waste time, want time. Next, then. Phrase me, please."

  John's hands trembled as if palsied; his rising fear evidenced pure. I watched as he attempted meditation, appearing, after a moment, not to breathe.

  "Complexities," Weber warned, examining the screen. "Replay tripartite with ongoing phrasing. Set?" I nodded. "My baby. Iterate, Bonney."

  "My name's so unpronounceable?" I asked; wasn't answered. They so deafened to my words that I felt no greater than a lesser preposition.

  "My baby," Conrad said. "Iterate."

  "My baby-"

  "Not be-be," he corrected. "Bay-bee. Replay."

  "Bay-bee," I replayed. "My bay-bee-"

  "Rocks me."

  "Rocks me-"

  John so stilled that others might have marveled that he be alive. A fly settled on his nose; stroked its legs against themselves as if to self-immolate, then wandered across his closed eyes; buzzed, and flew away. When John lapped his hands his knuckles whitened more than I'd ever seen them pale.

  "-with a steady roll," concluded Weber.

  "With a steady roll."

  "Replay in toto," said Conrad.

  "My bay-bee rocks me with a steady roll."

  "She's got, she's got," said Weber.

  "Demetaform," said Conrad.

  If Dryco could regood itself-regood, therefore, our world-there was naught to believe that my husband and I would not eventually regood ourselves as well, in like manner, to like effect. This we told ourselves, timeover time, until we almost believed it.

  "Ears open, Bonney," said Conrad, jarring me. "Demeta- form phrase given as requested."

  "Love bites when it strikes," I suggested. Again, they nodded. John's eyelids peeled open; he shuddered, seeming beaten by his dreams out of a restless sleep. He unpocketed a bottle of small blue pills; Dryco's standard e
yedots and smile were imprinted upon each tablet. Three hours sole could pass between closings, no more, no less. Swallowing dry, he fixed a doorways stare; shook, and resettled. There was so much he could have seen if he hadn't looked so hard. Meditation, medication; both essentialled, neither changed. Regooded or not, his unscratchables still itched.

  "Which is the universe? Fortean or Joycean? Who tells?" asked Professor Mora, who taught Historical Inference; Guess and Grab, I rephrased. "The shadow world is, by its nature, shadowed." His room was on Schermerhorn Hall's ninth. The building was once a science center; in its womb the Manhattan Project conceived. "Notions of two spatial structures at once independent and interrelated were intolerable concepts until reality demonstrated other, fifteen years past."

  We surely inhaled so much radiation, interiored, as exteri- ored. John and I transversed the campus topside, strolling along ramps inset for the physically challenged. Our fellow students formicated through tunnels underneath, battening their stores for winter. That afternoon, John and I stared into Jersey sunset, as if seeking literal, rather than metaphorical, blindness; sighted instead a herald, an unforecast spark, appearing as a match Godness struck against heaven.

  Wish I may, John whispered as the spark faded. Wish I might.

  We wished; in lieu of the doable that was all to be done. Fate, chance, kismet, term it as willed: to have seen, as we had, an old missile erasing itself against the atmosphere as its orbit knew inevitable decay was a vision as rare as that of a robin in springtime; most often they lowered over desert or taiga or sea, sprinkling the clouds with isotopes to later baptize us in soft burning rain. I fancied, at its sight; imagined Venus, rising on her own accord, the morning star slipped free of her perpetual transit's unbreakable noose.

  "Science explains rotational balance essentialed to superimposed earths," Mora continued. "Accounts for observable non-Keplerian orbital dynamics. Explanations for similarity divergence between worlds and nonconcurrent progression of their respective human timelines are the concern of art, mayhap, rather than science. Certainly nothing in our history explains."

  Nothing in history explains why something goes wrong. John and I stared into the curtain before which Mora paced, seeing in its nub's sparkling texture a moonshadowed beach's color. Scrawling its dune with tracings of light, he inscribed dates; they washed away as he wrote them.

  "What occurs there seems not always what happened here. Less so, as time passes. In the other world it is presently late April, 1954. Peopled expeditions previous-yeared yielded inconsistent data owing to mortality of all responsive participants save three. From the two Russians, little forthcame and less was told. From the third, Biggerstaff, we gained such awareness as we've possessed of that world's existence, one summer weekend in 1939. Their 1939."

  In our fifteen-year transit through cosmic haphazards John and I slid across surfaces seeming smooth from afar, suffering irreparable scars in the flames our contact raised. Our similarity divergence developed as unexpectedly as it had for the two worlds, for like reasons undoubted: multitudinous though unguessable, foreseen yet Cassandraed, known because ignored.

  "Mayhap inference and induction gained us not enough, it was thought. There inhered challenge, thus. How to answer unanswerables?"

  Where did love for John end, and hate begin? How deep did each lie buried beneath anger's eversettling mud? Did love essential a coeval hate? Must those emotions deepen from acute into chronic so synchronically? Must only enough love linger to so pain its inevitable decay?

  "Last month, in correlation with the E project, we at last broke off a new shard of their glass," Mora said. "An icicle fallen from a plane overhead."

  Did we want our love to end? Did we need it to end? Did it matter?

  "A minireceiver was guided through the Flushing Window, across the zone, for sixteen minutes, seizing and relaying the other world's radio transmissions in immediate range."

  Chance attracted us, experience repelled; what bound us was as enigmaed as the true nature of that only-imaginable world.

  "Reception peripheralled. Static and fade were unavoidable, enhancement notwithstanding. Keep minded of this, giving ear," said Mora.

  As John's medication, taken the hour earlier, soaked into its hold, he first expressed nothing but inexpressible rage; then his look became no look at all. I turned from him, feeling my own anger flower; I couldn't save him from himself, by myself, and the assistance of others only hurt all the more. Underdesk I took my husband's hand, in my grasp feeling a fish snatched from water. Pressing my fingers into his numbness I fought to draw his blood through his veins anew, warming his graying skin if but for a shard of history, a shiver of time.

  "Insert your present into theirs," said Mora, petting his machine as if hoping he could bring it to climax. "Hear the unseeable. Quilt the patchwork assembled. This is what awaits." Disarticulate voices spurted from the speakers, near yet afar, shouts across canyons lowed into ears. We heard silence; then, a song.

  "Sh-boom, sh-boom-!"

  Lessons memorized in Antecedental Ur-Beat class awared me that these voices, white as bones, were Crew-Cut notes, and not those of the Chords. Their song faded; medleyed vocalese drifted across the range.

  "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot"

  "-every day at this time by Listerine-"

  =that doggie in the window-"

  John's eyes refocused as he drew further inward, stealing from Mora, from me, from another world's words. He unjacketed a worn black book; studied its pages as if seeking answers to questions never guessed applicable.

  `--and the prices go down, down, down-"

  "-dozens reported seeing the saucers in the skies over Washington last night, and on radar screens-"

  Jake oversaw Security during John's initiation, seventeen years past; upon graduation, following the blooding, John and all acceptables were gifted with Jake's hymnal Knifelife. In its pages Jake provided for his charges' inspiration enabling enough that they might ignore the day presently entrapping and look ahead to the one that, likely, would follow: one perhaps better, perhaps worse; a fresh day regardless, its evanescent security as yet unaborted by event.

  11 -as we join Reg Berman and the gang at the Marine barracks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard-"

  Days after meeting John, at once knowing the love I'd never lose, however hard I tried, I met Jake, who avoided the look of others' eyes. Overhanging him I fancied a cloud so black as his suit was white; I realized only afterward that I was taller than Jake. He said little, and that gnomic; John told me that in justifiable mood Jake killed with a wink, and though I prodded, he left that remark to be taken as metaphor to be demetaformed as I chose. Jake vanished soon after, coming back from the place where we'd be going: in his class Mora had earlier recounted how Jake accompanied Biggerstaff on that initial transgression into that other world; how, returning, he'd been somehow lost, somewhere inbetween. Whether he lingered there, no one could say.

  "-that the Spirit of Light should overwhelm the Sons of Darkness-"

  `-nine out of ten doctors recommend Camels-"

  John had been Dryco's Security Head for three years. He oversaw what had been, implemented that which was becoming; forever provided security to all save himself. Mora frowned, seeing John ignore the lesson; yet attempted no punishment, surely recalling responses of other guards, seen at other times. In the classroom dim Mora's face appeared so livid as John's, as if for his chieftain's funeral he'd painted it with ash.

  "-travel the Interstate, you'll be glad you did-"

  "In Berlin, Chancellor Speer-"

  Regooding of Dryco Security's five hundred departmental units necessitated that they begin a program of medication to assist in curbing their long-conditioned reactions. One hundred and seventy-four had suicided in the six months since.

  "Now's the time for Jell-O-"

  Indirectly and overtly, my husband smothered me beneath more emotions than I could bear, killing me so surely, if not so slowly, as they killed him: s
till I stayed with him; couldn't abandon, felt compelled to accompany, wherever he went.

  "Why, then-"

  Whenever he went.

  "Why, then, with all this strength," the voice said: Eisenhower's voice. President there too, we induced, and sounding enough like ours as to chill; again I remembered what was first told, that their world was no less real, nor more unreal, than ours. "Why should we be worrying at times about what the world is doing to us?"

  Worry, rather, about what we'd allowed it to do. John continued to regard Jakeisms; I vizzed the page he studied, saw its single printed line: Sharpest knives leave sweetest wounds.

  "-this increase of power from the mere musket and the little cannon," their Ike went on, "to the hydrogen bomb in a single lifetime is indicative of the things that have happened to us."

  What wounds had we inflicted upon ourselves that we didn't even feel? Which had we asked for? Which, wanted? Which, needed? Which, deserved?

  "They indicate, rather, how far the advances of science have outraced our social conscience."

  Many moments lately passed when I dreamed of conclusion so immediate, and so thorough, as John desired. His pain destroyed us-my pain destroyed us-and all I could do in response was love: but love didn't limit darkness, wouldn't shape shadow. Our world shrifted love, ran screaming from its presence, at night turned from its light to fasten gaze upon the dark, lonely bed. We favored a notion so free of science as a history class: that the other world held the answer we needed, if not the one we wanted; that, smashing through our looking-glass, we might on the other side see ourselves true, neither as we wished nor as we feared we were, and so be able to decide, at last, whether we should disunite.