By the time I found it, I had left our living quarters completely and wandered out into Mary’s Place proper.
Living in back of a tavern has been a lifelong dream of mine, and the reality has turned out to be even better than I imagined. There, for instance, ranked in rows behind the bar, were a plethora of acceptable receptacles. (Say that three times fast with marbles in your mouth and you’ll never need a dentist again.) Before selecting one, I punched a combination into The Machine and set a mug upright on its conveyor belt, which hummed into life and whisked the mug away into the interior. Less than a minute later it emerged from the far side of The Machine, filled now with fresh hot Tanzanian Peaberry coffee adulterated to my taste. I took it and the specimen container I had chosen back into the bedroom.
There are few things a very pregnant woman will wake up for, but peeing is definitely one of them. Getting Zoey to a sitting position on the side of the bed (without tipping over the chamber pot) was probably less difficult than portaging a piano. The smell of coffee must have helped. She took a long sip of it, then came fully awake when she recognized the receptacle I was offering her.
“Jake, I am not peeing into a stein.”
“Oh hell, Zoey, what’s its religion got to do with anything? It’s wide enough, it’s been sterilized, it’s got a lid I can tape shut after, we’re out of specimen jars, just go ahead and get it over with, okay? Whoever it is today will be here any minute.”
My best friends in the world—AKA: my regular clientele—had organized what they insisted on calling a Pee Pool: each morning one of them took a turn at coming by Mary’s Place to pick up the day’s specimen and ferry it to the hospital for analysis. I had no idea whose turn it was today, and was too groggy to figure it out, but the way things were going I suspected it would be one of the rare prompt ones.
Zoey thought it over, and relaxed to the inevitable. She set the coffee down where I couldn’t reach it without stepping over her, deployed the stein above the thundermug, and cut loose.
Sure enough, just as she finished, there was a thunderous knocking. A distant thunderous knocking—at the bar’s front door.
That irritated me. Whoever it was could have just as easily come around to this side of the building and knocked on the much-closer back door. As a gesture of my irritation, I tossed aside the underpants I had just managed to locate, snatched the filled stein out of Zoey’s hand, and set off to answer the knock stark naked. “Jake—” Zoey called after me, and I snarled, “Whoever it is has it coming,” over my shoulder. For the second time that day I padded out of the living area and into the bar, went through the swinging doors into the foyer, and flung open the outside door with a flourish.
And was vouchsafed a vision.
It had to be a vision. Reality, even the rather plastic kind I’ve learned to live with over the years, simply could not—I felt—produce a sight like that. Nor was it a mere hallucination: I had not had a drink in many hours, or a toke in several days. The thing was so weird that it took me a full second or two to learn to see it: at first my brain rejected what it was given and searched for plausible alternatives.
This object is a fireplug—no, a fireplug’s older brother—over which someone has draped a very used painter’s drop cloth, and onto the top of which someone has placed the severed head of a pit bull. No, wait, pit bulls don’t have mustaches. Perhaps this is the secret midget son of Buddy Hackett, wearing a paint-spattered toga as part of his fraternity initiation. No, I have it now: this is R2-D2 dressed for Halloween. Or maybe—
We gaped at each other for a good five seconds of silence, the vision and I, before I tentatively—and correctly—identified it as the ugliest woman I had ever seen. The moment I did so, I screamed and jumped back a foot—and at the exact same instant, she did the exact same thing.
The difference was, I was holding a nearly full stein.
The lid flew open when I started, and a glog of the contents sailed out into the air: an elongated fluid projectile, like a golden version of the second, liquid-metal-model Terminator. It caught her amidships and splattered, the splat sound overpowered by the clop! of the stein lid slamming shut again.
There was a short pause, and then she barked.
I mean barked, like a dog. In fact, yapped is closer to the sound she made—but doesn’t begin to convey the impact. Even “barked” isn’t strong enough. Maybe “bayed.” Imagine a two-hundred-pound Pekingese with a bullhorn, and you’ve only started to imagine that sound. It was something like all the fingernails in the world being drawn across all the blackboards in Hell and then amplified through the Madison Square Garden sound system at maximum gain.
I shivered rather like a dog myself, blinked rapidly without effect, and felt my testicles retreating into my trunk.
The vision barked again, louder—a sound which you can duplicate for yourself if you wish by simply inserting a power drill into each ear simultaneously. As its echo faded, I heard the distant sounds of Zoey approaching to investigate. She pushed the swinging doors open and joined me in the foyer—stopped short and gaped.
The…I was finally beginning to believe it was a human woman, or something like one…gaped back at the two of us, staring from the naked hairy man to the extremely pregnant woman in the ratty bathrobe. She opened her mouth to bark again, paused, blinked, looked down at the damp stain on her chest, sniffed sharply—the sight of her hirsute nostrils flaring will go with me to my grave—glared up at me, then at the stein in my hand, then back at me, then down at the stain on her chest again, then one more time at Zoey, and finally she threw back her head and howled.
A couple of glasses burst behind the bar.
I heard them just before my hearing cut out completely, as though God had accidentally overloaded the automatic level control on my tape deck. I know I tried to scream myself, but don’t know whether I succeeded. I also tried to jam my fingers into my ears, to stop the pain that continued long after actual hearing had fled. Not only didn’t it help a bit, the stein I had abandoned to do so landed squarely on my bare right foot, with a crunch that I did hear, by bone conduction, and sprayed the last of its contents onto the creature’s behaired shins, pilled socks, and orthopedic shoes.
A pity, for it caused her to sustain her howl longer than she might have otherwise, and to shake at me a fist like a small wrinkled ham.
Horrible as that shriek was—and it was, even without being audible—the end of it was worse, for now she had to draw in breath for the next one, and so I saw her teeth. I can see them now. My eyes sent my brain an urgent message asking how come they had to stay on duty when my ears had already bugged out.
With that, my Guardian Idiot snapped out of his stupor, and reminded me that I did not have to endure this trial any longer than I chose to. I closed the door quietly but firmly in her face.
Then I stood on one leg and cradled my mashed foot in both hands and hopped in pain. Then I lost my balance and fell down, for the third time that morning, on my bare ass, banging my head again too. (For those of you who are connoisseurs of anguish, a hardwood floor is perceptibly harder than either tub or tile.)
Zoey, bless her, did the only thing she could: she burst out laughing.
I did not join her. Not right away. I tried a withering glare—but if age cannot wither nor custom stale my Zoey, no glare of mine is going to do the trick. Then I thought about kicking her, somewhere that wouldn’t endanger Nameless—but now was not a good time to get beat up. Next I opened my mouth to say something—deeming it safe because I assumed she was still as deafened as me by the vision’s banshee cry.
But before I could, I realized that the deafness must have worn off: I could hear Zoey’s hoots of helpless hysteria, now, and the distant and fading sound of that monstrous barking outside. So I closed my mouth, prepared a slightly less offensive speech, opened my mouth again…and clearly heard the sound of knocking.
Distant knocking. Not here—but at the back door, back in the bedroom…where one of my fri
ends must be waiting to receive the daily beaker of piss.
Now I joined Zoey in laughing.
I just had to. It was that or go mad. The louder and more urgent the distant knocking became, the harder we laughed. Finally I got up, collected the empty stein, and went, still laughing, to answer the knock.
“What the hell was that?” Zoey asked as we walked back toward our quarters, wiping away tears of laughter.
“I think it was a person,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it was a lifeform of some kind, anyway.”
“If you say so. I wonder what in God’s name she wanted. What language was that she was speaking?”
“I’m not sure she was evolved that far. Come on, hurry up, or—”
Needless to say, by the time we got to the back door to answer the knock, the knocker—Noah Gonzalez—had given up and gone round to the front door. I left Zoey there and retraced my steps through the entire building—for the third time, before coffee—and got to the front door moments after Noah had given up and gone round to the back door again.
That’s it, I thought, I quit. I went as far as the bar, made a second cup of coffee, and vowed not to move another step until I had finished drinking this one. Zoey and Noah must have connected, and worked out for themselves the awkward business of him waiting in the bedroom while she waddled into the bathroom and refilled the stein for him. (No problem for a pregnant lady.) By the time she came out to find me, carrying my bathrobe, I was putting the finishing touches on the lyrics of a new song.
It goes like this:
God has a sense of humor, but it’s often rather crude
What He thinks is a howler, you or I would say is rude
But cursing Him is not a real productive attitude
Just laugh—you might as well, my friend,
’cause either way you’re screwed
I know: it sounds so simple, and it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
God loved Mort Sahl, Belushi, Lenny Bruce—He likes it sick
Fields, Chaplin, Keaton…anyone in pain will do the trick
’Cause God’s idea of slapstick is to slap you with a stick:
You might as well resign yourself to stepping on your dick
It always sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
You can laugh at a total stranger
When it isn’t your ass in danger
And your lover can be a riot
—if you learn how to giggle quiet
But if you want the right to giggle, that is what you gotta do
when the person steppin on that old banana peel is you
A chump and a banana peel: the core of every joke
But when it’s you that steps on one, your laughter tends to choke
Try not to take it personal, just have another toke
as long as you ain’t broken, what’s the difference if you’re broke?
I know: it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
It can be hard to force a smile, as you get along in years
It isn’t easy laughin at your deepest secret fears
But try to find your funny bone, and have a couple beers:
If it don’t come out in laughter, man, it’s comin out in tears
I said it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
The barking vision did not return. Within ten minutes, Zoey and I had crawled back into bed, where we would enjoy a sound and undisturbed sleep, and nothing else awful or astonishing was to happen after that until well after sundown.
But—had we but known it—the ending of Mary’s Place had already begun.
2
TOO FAR, EDNA:
WE WANDER AFOOT
That evening started out to be a fairly typical night. At least, by the standards of the patrons of Mary’s Place—and its proprietor and chief bartender: myself.
Not that the evening had been uneventful. By ten o’clock, just under thirty of us had put away about thirteen gallons of booze…though admittedly something over eleven gallons of that had gone directly from their various bottles and kegs to the throat of Naggeneen, our resident Irish cluricaune, without ever occupying the intervening space. (Like their cousins the leprechauns, and indeed like all the Daoine Sidh, cluricaunes have paranormal psi powers—in their case, the ability to teleport and absorb alcohol—and Naggeneen feels that pouring, lifting and sipping are shameful wastes of good drinking time.) On the bright side, he paid for every drop he drank, cash on the bar, in gold coin so pure it would take a toothmark. And, of course, he tended to be a very agreeable drunk, neither pugnacious nor pathetic, neither morose nor maniac, both merry and mannerly. I guess a few hundred years of practice must count for something.
Thanks to our other resident Irish myth, Ernie Shea, the Lucky Duck—a half-breed pooka, around whom the iron laws of probability tend to turn into extremely silly putty—we had even had a brief spell of weather indoors: at about nine o’clock one of the very few tornadoes in Long Island’s history had suddenly sprung up of nowhere and lifted the roof clear off the place, neat as you please, and scaled it away into the night like a Frisbee. The noise and suddenness of the roof’s departure startled us a bit, naturally (Doc Webster, though, rising to the occasion as he so often does, glanced up nonchalantly and said, raising his voice over the howling wind, “A Gable roof, I see—gone with the wind.”), and there can’t be many sights sillier than a roomful of people gaping up at rain falling on their faces…but fortunately it is not possible for any of us at Mary’s Place to get wet when it rains (thanks to an alien cyborg friend of ours—I’ll get to that later), and besides, by now we had all acquired a certain sense of just how the Duck’s luck tends to run; we simply covered our drinks with our hands to prevent their dilution and waited it out. Sure enough, another roof came along in a few minutes. It was a good enough fit, and apparently it arrived with all its nails bristling because it installed itself with a solidity that we could hear and feel was reliable. Indeed, it turned out to be slightly better than the roof I’d traded for it, in one respect: like its predecessor, it had a built-in hatch for rooftop access—but this hatch was better positioned, further away from the bar, so that I would now be able to get a stairway up to it and allow my customers the option of doing their drinking under the stars. (I’d have to put a fence around the roof, too, of course.)
After that, well, let’s see…once the floor had dried sufficiently, Ralph Von Wau Wau the talking dog got out his latest short story and read it aloud to us, turning the pages expertly with his muzzle and paws, and dropping, for the duration of the reading, that silly fake accent he usually puts on. (Well, okay, I have to admit a German shepherd speaking in a German accent is kind of amusing.)
And after he was done and we finished applauding and commenting and petting him and so forth, we all spent a while chatting with the Internet. Not chatting on the Internet. Chatting with the Internet…with its self-generated Artificially Intelligent avatar, whom my true love Zoey had named Solace, and who had for several months now been manifesting herself, at infrequent intervals, through the house’s souped-up Mac II (augmented with camera and microphone). The chat was of a fairly standard type: we tried to think of Turing Tests that Solace couldn’t pass—and she tried out a few Turing Tests of her own on us.
Like I say, a pretty routine night, for us at Mary’s Place. It was nearly ten o’clock before anything I’d classify as weird happened.
Solace had just aced our latest homebrewed Turing Test, a speech recognition homonym-discriminator devised by Doc Webster. This consisted of correctly displaying onscreen—as the Doc dictated it, without perceptible pause for thought—the following nonsense sentence:
“I was musing on the Muse under some yews outside S.M.U.’s museum, as I’m used to doing, when a kitten’s musical mews drew me into the museum’s
mews, which some use—damn youse—to sniff mucilage for amusement.”
This is, of course, just an extended variation on Heinlein’s classic construct, “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through,” that is, a sentence designed to confound just about any imaginable speech-recognition system short of a human brain or functional equivalent. As far as I’m concerned, software capable of grokking that all six of Heinlein’s different sounds are spelled identically, or that the single repeating sound in the Doc’s sentence can and must be semantically interpreted thirteen different ways, is software that meets my criteria for sentience, whether its neurons are wet or dry. (What matter if said sentience consists of “nothing more than” a large sheaf of complex algorithms? I don’t know about you, but a good half the human beings I run into on the street are, or seem to be, on automatic pilot: navigating by a series of prestored algorithms, clumsy primitive rules of thumb. Can’t see that it makes any difference whether the algorithms are expressed by meat, machine, or Martian.) As the last words of the Doc’s test sentence appeared onscreen, correctly spelled, a mild cheer went up from those ten or fifteen patrons who were paying attention.
I’d like to pause there for just a second and preen, if I may. I think I have a right to be a little proud: at age forty-five, I ran the kind of bar where a live, realtime chat with the Net come alive was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the room. Over at the opposite end of the house from the sparkling fireplace, for example, Ev and Don were playing tic-tac-toe with smoke-rings for an appreciative crowd of onlookers—don’t ask me how Don can blow an X; all I can tell you is they seem very happy with each other—and in another corner of the house, the Darts Championship of the Universe (a weekly ritual) was in progress; the Lucky Duck had agreed to accept as handicaps both a blindfold and the tying of both hands behind his back, and nonetheless was clearly going to seize the crown from Tommy Janssen, the reigning champion; it was just a matter of time. His luck was with him, you see.
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