Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

  I had never understood parties. Overheated or freezing, earsplitting or deadly silent, boring or overstimulating, crowded or sparsely attended, too much food or too little, liquor-saturated or temperance-bound, they always inhabited one extreme or another. Never had I been to a party that was just plain enjoyable, in a moderate way. It was possible none such existed. Certainly, Ann Marie’s end-of-the-century bash was not one.

  “Just think,” said Ann Marie herself, as she steered me around a recumbent body wrapped like a fashionable mummy in the curtains I had earlier heard being misappropriated, “there must be a zillion parties just like this one going on around the world tonight!”

  “What an appalling notion.”

  “Poop! Gee willikers, where is that Greek guy?”

  We entered the kitchen just in time to be nearly dually decapitated by a colorful flying plate, which crashed and shattered against the wall alongside the door.

  “You bitch!”

  “Bastard!”

  Ann Marie intervened. “Jules and Melissa, I’m so hurt! That was a piece of original Fiestaware!”

  “Sorry, Ann Marie. But he deserved it. I caught him with that slut Oona in the bathroom!”

  “I told you, she only asked me to help her zip her dress.…”

  “And what was it doing unzipped in the first place, may I ask?”

  “Now, now,” said Ann Marie, “why don’t you two kiss and make up? You don’t want to start the next thousand years off with a silly ol’ spat, do you?”

  Convinced that she had done all she could to effect a reconciliation, Ann Marie turned away from the glowering couple. Spotting a jug of Smirnoff’s on the counter, she snatched it up. Setting her own drink down next to an unclaimed lipstick-smeared glass, she splashed a few inches of vodka for herself and me.

  “Here you go! Now, if only—oh, there he is!”

  She dragged me over to a man sitting alone on a countertop.

  If you took a composite of Keith Richards at the nadir of his heroin addiction and Charles Bukowski on a six-month bender and started to morph his body into that of Miles Davis just before he died, but stopped with the transformation half complete, you might end up with someone who looked like this guy. He was dressed in sandals and an outfit that resembled blue satin pajamas, and he was eating from a bunch of grapes with languid disdain. “Dissipated” was the most charitable word whose dictionary entry he might illustrate.

  Ann Marie accosted him with, “Hell-low! I’d like you to meet someone. This is Loren. Loren, meet—oh, I’ve forgotten your name!”

  Chewing a grape with enervated precision, the man said, “Bacchus.”

  I could almost hear the wind the allusion made, passing over Ann Marie’s head. “Well, Mister Backus, you and Loren have a nice talk. I’ve got to go mingle.”

  Ann Marie left. A pool of silence seemed to surround “Bacchus” and me, strangely isolating us. I tried to think of something to say, and some reason to say it. The habits of sociability die hard. Finally, I opted for easy sarcasm.

  “What happened to the figure, man? Aren’t you supposed to be carrying a few more pounds? And what about the ivy wreath? Couldn’t get to the florist’s tonight? Wait a minute, let me guess. Alanon, World Gym, Ralph Lauren, and you’re a new man.”

  I knocked back my drink, watching him out of the bottom of my eyes, waiting for his reaction to the needling.

  Bacchus finished chewing, regarding me with neither overt hostility nor friendliness. When he had extracted the last atom of taste from the fruit, he spoke.

  “You from fucking Disney, or what?”

  It took me a few seconds to get it. Then I burst out laughing.

  “Yeah,” continued Bacchus, “I came that close to slapping them with a lawsuit when that fucking cartoon came out. Made me look like a real asshole. The cute donkey, the pratfalls, scared of lightning, for Hera’s sake, as if Zeus and I weren’t tight as your mama’s twat. But then I figured an out-of-court settlement would be best. I still get thirty percent on every tape sale.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, taking one of his grapes and flicking it across the room. “Keeps you in produce.” The vodka had gone through my empty stomach and straight to my head. Suddenly, it seemed good to be drunk, for what I still intended to do. I made a move toward the Smirnoff’s for a refill, but Bacchus stopped me.

  “Here, let me.”

  I stuck my glass out, not knowing what to expect, and he held his right palm over it. Wine gurgled out, as if from a vinous stigmata.

  I pretended not to be astonished. “Hose up the sleeve?”

  Bacchus shrugged. “If you wish.”

  I tasted the wine.

  Cool breezes on a green hillside, ocean spray and hot sunlight, a shaded stream under ancient oaks. That was the vintage.

  My head was light as a Wordsworthian cloud. Bacchus’s voice seemed to come from a neighboring solar system.

  “You know, you can call them anything you want. Parties, revels, carnivals, orgies, saturnalia, mardi gras— Hades! Call ’em Bacchanalia, if I can toot my own horn. But all festivities have a certain logic. I could write a fucking book on the dynamics of fun. And one chapter would be all about cases like you.”

  I sipped more of the incredible wine. “And what exactly am I?”

  “The specter at the feast. The suicide. Hanged man and fool.”

  I tried not to shiver. “What if I am? You gonna try to talk me out of my plans?”

  Bacchus held both hands up, palms out. I couldn’t see any tubes—or holes, for that matter.

  “By no means. I just offer my Olympian perceptions, for what they’re worth.”

  I was suddenly sick of talking. Sick of living. Midnight was fifteen minutes away, and I just wanted everything over with.

  “Don’t you have someplace else to go?” I said.

  Bacchus laughed. “I am everywhere already.”

  I was turning away, but that stopped me. “Huh?”

  Leaning forward as if to confide a secret, the strange man said, “Every party that ever was or is or will be is connected. Same with every war or every fuck. Or so Mars and Venus tell me. You just have to know how to get from one to another.”

  “And how would you do such a thing?”

  “In my case, I am simply called, manifesting simultaneously, everyplace at once. Gods are like that. You see, I am the original party vibe, a permanent, omnipresent wavefront that collapses into physicality wherever conditions are right. But if you wanted to try it, you’d need some props.”

  “Props?”

  Bacchus skinned back the sleeve on his right arm. The veins in his wrist were not blue, but royal purple, and there was definitely no tube down his clothing. He held up his empty hand in an affected magician’s pose.

  I never looked away, but somehow, with a mere twitch, he summoned up an object.

  It was a paper and plastic party horn, with trailing cellophane streamers around the bell.

  “One blast on this, and you’re instantly elsewhere, dispersed randomly along the party matrix.”

  “Randomly?”

  Another shrug. “Nature of the beast. Some drunken scientist named Heisenberg tried explaining it to me once, but I didn’t dig it. Stochastic, probalistic, chaotic—made less sense than Socrates. Oh, I should mention something else. Wherever you find yourself, you’re limited to the psychophysical boundaries of the party. Whatever gathering you pop up in, you can’t just step out of it into, say, Armistice Day New York.”

  “How come?”

  “Outside the special party environment, you’d be a temporal-spatial intruder. Your unnatural presence would cause the instant conversion of your whole mass to energy. Make Hiroshima look like a firecracker.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Not interested.”

  Bacchus tucked the horn in my jacket pocket. “You never know.”

  Despite myself, I found myself saying, “You mentioned ‘props,’ plural.…”

  Bacchus grinne
d, and twitched his hand again. A polka-dotted conical party hat appeared. Before I could stop him, he had placed it on my head, snapping the rubber string maliciously under my chin.

  “Lets you speak and understand all languages. And then there’s this.” He materialized a Ziploc bag full of multicolored confetti. “Sprinkle a little of this on someone, and they’ll accompany you when you blow the horn.” He dropped the confetti into my other pocket. “Now, you’d better get going. It’s almost midnight.”

  So saying, Bacchus spun me around and booted me in the rump.

  I went down to my knees.

  And when I picked myself up, he was gone, as if he had never been.

  But I was still wearing the party hat, and my hands found the other “props” in my pockets.

  Screw all his bullshit! Nothing in my pitiful life had changed.

  I made for the patio door.

  None of Ann Marie’s jabbering or insensate guests tried to stop me, and Ann Marie herself was nowhere to be seen.

  As was only natural, considering the chill and darkness, the small balcony was empty.

  I shut the glass door behind me, a barrier to all warmth and human noise.

  The narrow flat railing was bitter cold beneath my hands as I clambered atop it.

  Below me the city spread out like a Tiffany show window. Wind plucked at my sleeves, beckoning. My eyes began to tear.

  I leaned forward, then hesitated. Was this really my only out—?

  Hands in my back shoved me over.

  “See you later!” I heard Bacchus yell.

  I fell about twelve stories before I got the horn out and up to my lips.

  I closed my eyes and blew like Gabriel, releasing a long sour BLAT!

  The tremendous passage of the icy wind past my plummeting body stopped. All sense of falling ceased.

  I seemed to be sitting in a large comfortable padded armchair. The noise of rattling crockery dancing on a wooden tabletop came to my ears. Someone was huffing and puffing. Another someone was grunting. A third someone was squeaking. Then the grunting someone spoke. Shouted, rather, in a high-pitched unhuman voice.

  “Put some butter ’round his ears!”

  I opened my eyes.

  A large tree overspread the tea-party-bedizened table, casting an emerald umbrage. I could smell growing grass and warm scones. The Mad Hatter held the Dormouse by his ankles, while the March Hare was pushing on the pitiful rodent’s shoulders, trying to cram him into a teapot. Alice, of course, had just left.

  Abandoning his efforts, the Mad Hatter lowered the Dormouse’s legs to the table, and the Dormouse lay there with his head in the pot, his squeaks gradually subsiding, to be replaced by snores.

  The Mad Hatter removed his topper and scratched his sparsely-haired scalp. I could see the dark line of sweat around his hatband. “‘Put some butter ’round his ears’? Why, whatever for? We’re not going to eat him, are we?”

  The March Hare wrinkled his nose in disgust, quivering his whiskers. “Dolt! Naturally not. You can only eat Dormice in months that end with an ‘O,’ and this is May!”

  Restoring his hat to his head, the Mad Hatter said, “As I recall, you were the one who formerly advised me to add some butter to the works of my watch, and we all know how that turned out. Why should this time be any different?”

  “You must admit, the time your watch keeps with butter in the works is much different than the time it kept before.”

  The Mad Hatter removed his watch from his pocket and gazed dolefully at it, before soaking it in his teacup. “True, quite true. Although it’s still right twice a day, the days seem so much longer!”

  “I only suggested the butter this time,” stipulated the March Hare, “with an eye toward slipperiness.”

  “You said, ‘ears,’ not ‘eye.’ It was the Dormouse’s ears that needed buttering, you claimed. I recall it quite distinctly, for it gave me such a disturbing pause as I never experienced before, nor ever hope to again.”

  The March Hare grew huffy. “I said no such thing! I merely claimed that our somnambulent friend had gotten some butter in his eye, and it needed wiping.”

  “What a fib!”

  “God’s truth!”

  “Fib!”

  “Truth!”

  From inside the teapot came a muffled voice. “Why not ask the gentleman wearing the dunce cap to settle the matter?”

  The March Hare and the Mad Hatter both turned toward me.

  I tried to shrink into the chair, but there was no DRINK ME bottle handy.

  What in sweet Jesus’s name had I gotten myself into? Goddamn that Bacchus!

  “What a capital idea!” exclaimed the Mad Hatter. “There’s no one more impartial than someone who has no idea of what’s going on!

  Squinting one eye at me, the March Hare said, “I question his qualifications. He looks as if he’s searching for something. How can a man with a mission possibly help us?”

  “We already tried a miss with a mansion, and she was utterly useless.”

  The March Hare clapped his paws together. “That’s it! He’s looking for Alice!”

  The Dormouse, with one paw on the pottery spout and one on the handle, succeeded in removing the teapot from his head. “I think not. He’s merely looking for a lass.…”

  “Oh, well, in that case, there’s always the Queen.”

  “Or the Duchess,” added the March Hare. “Neither one is married.”

  “What of the King?”

  “The King has nothing to do with the Duchess. That’s merely a nasty rumor started by the Knave.”

  “The King wouldn’t object, then, if this fellow wished to marry the Queen?”

  “Why should he? A husband has to do whatever his wife wants, especially if he’s as powerful as the King.”

  “Then it’s agreed? Our friend with the sugarloaf cap is to marry the Queen today?”

  “By all means.”

  “Excelsior!”

  Joining hands, the Hare and Hatter began to dance and sing.

  “We’re going to a wedding!

  “It shall be very gay!

  “We’ll save the groom’s beheading

  “For another summer day!”

  Meanwhile, the Dormouse had walked across the table and stepped down into my lap. Involuntarily, I flinched away from his furry weight. But, restraining myself, I allowed him to curl up and go to sleep.

  I didn’t dare do anything in this hallucination. There was no telling how I might make it worse. In any case, I fully expected to impact the pavement below Ann Marie’s apartment any second now, once this Ambrose-Bierce moment of frenzied delusional brain activity was over.

  Finishing their capers, the two strange creatures arranged themselves on either side of me.

  “Have some wine?” asked the March Hare.

  “Thanks, but I’ve had enough. Would you answer a question for me though?”

  “Only if you ask one.”

  “Assuming that what Bacchus told me was true, how is it that I’ve ended up in a fictional party instead of a real one?”

  “Fictional? Who says we’re fictional? That’s a tall story someone’s shortchanged you with! Here, does this feel fictional?”

  The March Hare inclined his head and made me stroke one long plush ear.

  “No,” I was forced to admit, “it doesn’t.…”

  “And what of poor Dormouse? If you were fictional, as you fictitiously maintain, would it be possible for him to eat that confetti in your pocket, as he is now so raptly doing?”

  I looked down, alarmed. Although his eyes were still closed, the Dormouse had somehow burrowed into my pocket, gnawed a hole in the Ziploc of transport-confetti, and was now chewing a mouthful.

  “Hey!” I shot to my feet, dumping the Dormouse onto the ground. He lay on his back, still somnolently chewing.

  Suddenly, my arms were pinioned with surprising strength by the Mad Hatter.

  “That’s no way to treat someone you’ve just po
isoned!”

  “Off with his head!”

  The Queen and all her court had arrived. I was somehow gratified to see that their playing-card bodies had a narrow third dimension to them. It made the whole thing so much more plausible.

  The masked executioner advanced on me. He held not an axe, but a butter knife he had appropriated from the table.

  “I’m so sorry we shan’t be getting married now,” said the Queen. “But I can’t possibly marry a murderer unless he’s paid for his crimes by dying.”

  I felt the blade of the knife laid against my throat.

  Jerking violently forward, I tossed the Mad Hatter over my shoulders. He flew among the playing-card figures, flattening a swath through their ranks.

  I found Bacchus’s horn and brought it to my lips.

  I heard the March Hare exclaim, “How splendid! A fanfare for his own throat-slitting—”

  And then I was gone.

  By the light of two flaring cressets that cast back the night, I saw that there was a sign over the door of the marble mansion that read:

  ANY SLAVE LEAVING THE HOUSE WITHOUT HIS MASTER’S PERMISSION WILL RECEIVE ONE HUNDRED LASHES

  “Ah, Latin,” said a drowsy voice from the vicinity of my knees. “How I wish I could read that marvelous language! Unfortunately, during my school days I developed the habit of dropping off to sleep whenever the Master began to declaim Caesar. Even now, the simplest ‘weenie-weenie-winkie’ sends me to the Land of Nod straight away.”

  I looked down. Standing on his hind legs, the Dormouse began to lick a paw and drag it over one rounded, unbuttered ear.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  “Why, grooming myself. I’m positively slathered with soggy tea leaves! I’m terribly sorry if I’ve offended you. Is it considered ill-mannered to groom oneself in public where you come from?”

  Obviously, Bacchus’s transport-confetti worked as advertised. I had been hoping to leave all traces of the Mad Tea Party far behind me. Plainly, however, the Dormouse and I were now permanently linked.

  “Where’s the Latin?” I asked.