by T E. D Klein
The photograph showed what appeared to be a mass of rotting gar-bage, the sort that Nadelman had seen washed up by the tide, glistening with grease and reeking of dead fish, when, as a boy, he'd walked the Long Beach shoreline in winter. It lay piled in a roughly manlike shape, arms outspread, like those false aircraft images that New Guineans built out of underbrush to attract passing planes. The figure was lying on the tarry black surface of an apartment rooftop; in the distance Nadelman could see the flat top of a similar building and the peaked roofs of neighboring houses. Jagged things that looked like shards of glass, perhaps from broken windows, gleamed amid its body, especially at the hands. A used toilet-paper roll and gobs of crumpled Kleenex, he former sticking upright like a phallus, showed where Huntoon had dumped the contents of a bathroom wastebasket onto the roof.
It was strange to see a creature from the back room of his imagination-something he'd conjured up in a few scribbled lines con-ceived in the loneliness of his dorm-take hideous concrete form in the photograph. Seeing it embodied there on the roof made him feel vaguely godlike-but an imperfect, irresponsible god who let others do his dirty work, and who had no real hint of what he had created until he saw it face to face. It was a little like the shock he'd felt the previous year, working on the campaign for a new vitamin-enriched peanut-butterlike spread Qiffle, when one of his illustrators had first unveiled the strange peanut-shaped creature he'd drawn to go with Nadelman's tag line ("What in the world is a Qiffle?!"); or iike the feeling he'd had, the uncertain pride and disbelief, when a beaming nurse had first shown him his son. Only this thing was something he'd prefer to disown.
He wondered, briefly, who the Bravermans were, and why it was important they be scared.
At the top of the photo was the thing's head, presumably a melon, though the fruit was concealed beneath a grotesque-looking full-face rubber mask turned inside out. Instead of a bird, it looked like some travesty of a sea creature, an immense, smooth, pink skinned shrimp, dragged from the depths with mouth sealed over and eye sockets vacant.
Crouched at the head, cradling it like a trophy, was a grinning hatchet-faced man with a black moustache, sideburns, and a long, wolfish-looking jaw. He was dressed as if for winter-it was cold near rhe water, Nadelman knew-in heavy gloves and a shapeless green overcoat with a pair of brownish stains down the front. He was holding the thing's head up to the camera like some exultant lawman posed beside the corpse of John Dillinger, or like the soldiers propp-ing up the head of Che Guevera. The man was easily in his thirties and looked rough, broad-shouldered, and beefy, the sort who wouldn't go out of his way to avoid a brawl. And something malicious in his smile reminded Nadelman of the witch he'd met that night in the bar down in Chelsea. The letter continued:
Thats me there on the roof with it. No cracks please about my ugly mug! Im raring to go & there are certain people wholl be sorry they ever chose to cross me. Now all I have to do is invoke the god & get it moving.
A.F.A. (A Friend Always) Arlen
P.S. Would you mind if I called you up some time? Theres a lot you & me should discuss. I know your a busy man & promise I will not abuse the privilege.
Nadelman's heart beat faster. So this was his supposed teenaged fan, the one he'd felt so sorry for. (Or rather, the one Rhoda had felt so sorry for; another mark against her.) His instincts had been right: he should never have written back to the fellow. He should have sensed that wolfish face even in Huntoon's first letter, peering at him just behind the paper's ragged edges, whispering to him from the smeared black ink.
And to think that the dumb bastard took Jizzmo's song seriously; he actually believed that the words Nadelman had cribbed from a rhyming dictionary and a bunch of college library books were a magical spell, and was now waiting patiently for the Holy Ghost to come and animate his garbage pile. Nadelman remembered something Rhoda's analyst had told her: "Reality is never enough for some peo-ple."
He resolved that tomorrow, immediately upon getting up, he would attend to something he'd been meaning to do for years, what with clients who felt free to bother him at any hour here at home. He would get himself an unlisted phone number, and keep the creeps at bay.
The night was chillier than any so far that fall, a preview of November just ten days away, while December, the real thing, lurked just beyond the horizon. Three floors down, among the dim shapes of cars parked on Seventy-sixth Street, an automobile alarm went off with an insis-tent animal yowl, no doubt from the mere touch of another car's bumper. Nadelman lay unmoving with his head on the pillow, sens-ing the other hundreds of people in the neighborhood waiting, as he was, for the siren to stop. An hour after midnight he heard dis-tant thunder, strange on so cold a night, and probably the last he'd hear till spring. Whipped by the wind, rain slapped against the win-dows like something solid and alive. He thought of the same rain soaking the thing that lay out there on the roof in Long Beach. Was it no more now than a sodden mass of garbage? Or did it lie there like a corpse?
Rolling out of bed so as not to waken Rhoda, who, over years of their marriage, had become more and more unmovable in sleep, even as his own became increasingly uncertain, he tiptoed out to the hall in his underwear, closing the bedroom door behind him. In the kit-chen he poured a finger of cognac into the "World's Greatest Dad" mug Michael had given him last Father's Day, but after taking a sip he decided it would give him heartburn. Anyway, this stuff didn't do his body any good, he had to stay in shape for his weekly session downtown tomorrow with Cele. Carefully he poured the dark liquid back into the bottle. From the living room came the sound of rain beating urgently against the windows. He rose and went toward them. From the end-table beside the couch, where remnants of the day's mail were still gathered, he withdrew the snapshot from Huntoon's most recent letter. Studying the blind, smooth-faced thing that lay on the roof, he smiled, remembering a comic-book character from his childhood: "Heap," it had been called, a slithering mass of liv-ing garbage, complete with flies and wavy odor-lines. And suddenly he remembered how he'd arrived at the name of his poem. The creature mentioned in its closing stanzas, the servant of the nameless god, had been a monster he'd made up of equal parts Heap; the Golem, and a third figure, one that had given him his unlikely title, "Advent of the Prometheans." He had takenit from "The Modern Prometheus," the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Like a child frightened of a face staring from the cover of a comic book, and who, even in a darkened room, must turn the picture over before he dares give himself to sleep, Nadelman felt an urge to hide the letter and photo in the same place he'd filed the previous one. Opening the closet in the hall, he dragged out the old suitcase again. But once he'd gotten the catch unfastened, instead of slipping the envelope inside, he reached in and drew forth the Unicorn, which he opened back to his poem.
Maybe it wasn't quite so bad after all. Maybe he'd had some talent then. The second section, severely truncated in Jizzmo's version, was entitled "A Vision of Decay." It advanced an explanation of the Lord's apparent callousness and neglect. Perhaps, it said, He had simply grown old, senile, weak:
A dull grey god of fizzle, fail, and blunder, Who speaks to us in drizzle, not in thunder.
In the third section, "Recognition," the poem's narrator decided that the sheer sadism of the god he'd been observing was far too energetic, and too fiendishly ingenious, to be the work of an old, sick, burnt-out god. All the evidence bespoke a new god, a bloodthirsty young upstart, "not mild,/but savage, wild"-"A hyperactive god, too viciously inventive to be sane." Nadelman's intention, at the time, had been to compare the position of the human race to that of beleaguered medieval peasants, hapless pawns in an incomprehensi-ble war between two uncaring lords. As the battle raged this way and that, they suffered the agonies of both sides.
Part IV, "Retribution," had been cut altogether by the band-perhaps properly so, since it amounted to something of a false lead. In it the narrator tried to imagine where this upstart god had come from. Perhaps the old God h
ad created him ("Til create Me a Creator,' He would say") in order to punish mankind for its polluted civilization and warlike ways, which spelled ruin for all life on earth. (Nadelman shook his head as he scanned the ringing phrases, remembering the certainties of the early sixties.)
The next section, "Hymn to Corruption," half Swinburne, half Pete Seeger, had been left intact. It wondered if there might be "pollu-tion in heaven, just as here on earth," and if this new god might be some sort of mutation -m short, a true adversary. Such a hypothesis struck the narrator as correct, for the new god appeared to be, in terms of pure hellishness, as powerful as the old: "A rival god who sides with the bullies, the landlords and the bees."
"Honey, come to bed." It was Rhoda, passing through the hall on her way to the bathroom. He rubbed his eyes and stood, just as glad to put away the poem; but before he closed the suitcase, he took the magazine out and hid it in the end-table drawer.
As he lay in bed, waiting for sleep more resignedly now, he wondered whether he should answer Huntoon's new letter; perhaps it would be wiser to ignore it. He forced the thought away, listening instead to the more soothing voice of the rain. At last, as the rain stopped, he slept, but dreamed that something hovered at his win-dow, a great angelic thing with the face of a bumble-bee.
His concern over what to do about Huntoon's letter proved academic, because Friday of the following week brought a postcard from him. The picture on the front showed the deserted dining room of the Sea Glades Manor. "On the Boardwalk at Long Beach, Long Island. Providing wurld-iamous cuisine and unparalleled servicc for over forty years."
I tried calling you but they said its not a working number. You never wrote back how I could reach you or maybe your letter was lost in the mail but thats OK because by following your Instruc-tions I am now in communication with your god & Hes everything you said. Thanks again for your courage & guidance. Dont worry no ones going to get punished except the ones who deserve it.
Nadelman felt himself sliding further down the feathery slope to the land of unreason. First the creep believed the Rival God was actually real; now he claimed he'd talked to him. Earlier that week one of the ad industry trade magazines had recounted the story-with unalloyed approval-of an Englishman who, writing a history of UFOs, had playfully invented a supposed sighting over Oxford, and of how annoyed he'd been when, for years afterward, the incident was cited as authenticated fact by dozens of other saucer books. The lie had become real. And a certain Welsh writer named Machen, the article went on to say, had written a story during World War I about the so-called "Angels of Mons," ghostly Saxon bowmen who'd come to the aid of embattled British troops. The story had become a full-fledged legend, with war veterans claiming in later years that they'd actually seen these spirits. "All of us in the communications industry can learn something useful from this," the article had concluded.
Nadelman spent that weekend preparing for a presentation on the Holiday Farm account, and on Sunday he took Rhoda and Michael for a drive to a clamhouse on the Jersey shore. The next day at the agency, while in the middle of a meeting with one of the creative directors, he was buzzed by the secretary who worked in the corridor outside his office and whose services he shared with his neighbor. "Mr. Huntoon for you," she said.
Nadelman, his hands full of sketches from the art department, froze. "He's here?"
"Uh-uh," she said, "call for you. Shall I put him through?" "No!" His voice was loud enough to bring conversation in his office to a temporary halt. Dropping a sheaf of cartoons of the boy George Washington wolfing down frozen desserts, he hurried out to the secretary's desk. "Listen," he whispered, "just take a message. I'm not in and you don't know when I'm coming in. I'm never in for that guy, understand?"
The girl nodded as if chastened. Nadelman waited by her desk as she told Huntoon he was out, cursing himself for having blown his cover by writing to the guy on company stationery. He watched her begin to jot down the message on a pink slip, then stop when it became clear she'd be able to remember it all.
"Uh-huh, okay, I'll tell him," she said. "Yes, I will. Yes, yes, J promise." She hung up and looked at Nadelman. "What a weird guy," she said. "It was hard to hear him. He sounded like he was calling from a bar."
"What was the message?"
She gave a half shrug. "He says to tell you, 'I've got it up and dan-cing'."
The meeting did not end until long after five, when the city outside his window had already begun to grow dark. Emboldened by the trap-pings of his ofTice-the bright fluorescent lights, the serene curve of his steel IBM, the plush burgundy carpet, and the view of the East Side of Manhattan, a world so much higher, and consequently safer, than that of his apartment-with the spires of Pan Am and Chrysler looming beside him like guardians, Nadelman wrote back:
Dear Mr.Huntoon:
You may indeed, as you say, be "in communication" with a god, but I have to inform you that it's not my god. Mine does not exist! It was merely something I made up years ago for a college poem, long before the members of Jizzmo and the rest of those groups were even out of kindergarten. Please understand that I don't mean to disparage your religious beliefs; I'm a great respecter, in fact, of all people's rights to worship whatever gods they choose in whatever manner they choose. That's one of the things that makes this country great. But the particular god you claim you've con-tacted is just a work of fiction, and it disturbs me to see you tak-ing it so literally.
Also, I must ask you to please refrain from trying to call me here in the office. As you noted, I'm terribly busy and cannot allow myself the luxury of personal conversations. My home phone number is unlisted because of the medical problems of someone in my family, and, as I'm sure you understand, I cannot give it out. Whatever you want to do with the scarecrow or whatever it is you've constructed is fine with me, but I have no interest in the matter and really don't care to be involved. I wish you the very best of luck and suggest that you do not try to contact me again.
He prayed that this would do the trick. Later that evening, as he walked home from the office, he felt dimly oppressed by some menace the streets held tonight, and was sure he'd glimpsed a cloaked, dwar-fish creature scurry into a building half a block ahead. He attributed it to his state of mind, until, entering his apartment, he was greeted by the tiny shrieking figure of his son, pirouetting before him in one of Rhoda's old black raincoats, with blood-red makeup on his face and deep black rings beneath his eyes. Behind the boy, smiling, stood his wife, a damp washcloth in her hand. Nadelman realized with relief, that he had missed another Halloween.
His letter must have crossed Huntoon's in the mail, because on Wednesday of the same week-another stormy evening with echoes of unseasonable thunder, just as if they'd never passed through summer-there was a third envelope waiting for him, weighing slightly more than the earlier ones. It contained a packet of snapshots.
Dear Mr. Nadelman,
Tried you yesterday at work but they said you were out. Thats like the dispatcher at Val-R-Rite who has no time for me now that 1m laid off but Im not saying your in the same boat he is. Did they give you my message?
These are for you, I think you the one who really deserves them. Im sure youll recognize Whos in these pictures. I took them on the roof last night but I wasnt sure how to use the flash attachment & it didnt work on all of them. It should be better when the moonlight gets stronger.
There were six photos in all, and they were ludicrous. They looked like the sort of crazy unframed shots people brought back from frater-nity initiations, hunting trips, or Halloween parties, despite the fact that they showed only a single figure-clearly that of Huntoon himself, the over-the-head pink mask concealing his face, dancing on the roof-top in the darkness. His arms were thrust grotesquely in the air, like a broken doll's, and in one shot his right arm was bent behind him in an angle that looked almost painful. In several of the pictures one of his legs was raised like that of a dog about to urinate, revealing a dull brown military boot, the laces loose. He was w
earing thick grey gloves that made his hands look comically oversized, except in one shot where they were raised to the sky as if in supplication. Nadelman recognized Huntoon's baggy pants and stained green over-coat from the earlier photo. Despite the man's assertion in the letter, the photos had presumably been taken by his mother-though an old lady (perhaps the mother's friend?) appeared in the background of one of them, solid and kerchiefed like an East European peasant, the flashbulb's glare making her stand out against the blackness behind her as she gazed solemnly at the proceedings. Her face was lined and glowing, her eyes and the eyes of the masked dancing thing flashing weirdly in the light.
Nadelman was momentarily unnerved to discover that across the back of the last photo, Huntoon had written: Mama.
Well then, some friend had taken the photos. Even people like Huntoon had friends. Didn't they?
Nadelman kept returning surreptitiously to the pictures all evening-after dinner, between Taxi and the news, just before bedtime-as if to a cache of pornographic photos. And his thoughts kept returning to the letter he had sent Huntoon earlier that week. He wondered if the man had received it yet, and if so, whether he'd been hurt by it; and, if he were, what that hurt might mean for himself.
Meanwhile, Nadelman peered out the window of his bedroom, as the rain pelted the few remaining pedestrians making their way down Seventy-sixth Street and the crash of far-off thunder echoed up and down the block. Somewhere great wheels were rolling through the ocean, plunging down some secret track, making their way ever closer to the mainland; he could almost hear them. He got up, stared once move at the face of the thing in the photos on the living room table, and slid the poem from the drawer.
"With lidless eyes and lipless mouth"-that phrase, so annoyingly apt, came from "The Lineaments of Despair," the sixth section of the poem, in which the narrator attempted to imagine what the savage new god must look like. This part Nadelman remembered well. Judg-ing by its handiwork, the god was not a thing of beauty, but must indeed be "a leprous thing." The narrator described it as monstrous, a travesty of other deities, and referred to it throughout the section as "Spider Eyes," "the Mosquito God," and "the Bee." In further defiance of logic, but perhaps in misplaced homage to William Golding, the god was also referred to as "Lord of the Roaches."