by Evan Dara
Dark music harped from overhead. A dirge, a threnody. Low brass. Chiming, harping from overhead …
The others proceeded as slowly, shifting forward, toe-ing forward, dark suits spied through shifts in fabric, in falling fabric. The men, the women, all in dark suits, simple suits, unembellished suits, slowly fabricked forward …
Then, a shift. An acoustic drift. The dirge – suddenly! – slalomed into shine, into music, house music. Loud, lively house music …
A space, a void, canyoned before him. Birgit, tensed, hunched up against him, warm on his arm, seeing the spreading void. High ceilings, distant walls, the huge opened-out space floor-fitted with cars, antique cars. And a dark along one wall, a dark dotted with prickling lights … The bar …
A smile appeared, a light-gathering smile …
Hostess …
KGB …
A reception. A big reception, the KGB bash. Put together by Auran’s group, The Academy of St. Paul …
Great music. Great people. Great, great food.
—But, I—
—And – I—
—And what that music—
—I mean, Tracy Littleton was there.
—And Bobby Kiehl, leafing Vanity Fair—
—And Eckstein Scott was there and Wylie Reese was and Zina Seminevsky—
—And who had the brilliant idea to hold it in a car gallery?
—Classic cars. Collectors’ cars. A whole huge showroom full of—
—Amazing Austin Healeys and Maseratis and—
—And where were the Trabants—?
—Wow! I mean, the Academy really—!
—Big and dark and wow and music and—
—And Lincoln, I mean—
—Yeah: Lin—
—Magnificent. He—
—Shaking hands with Perry Colmswoode and hugging Marky Villanova – and that slit-grin on Rita Wunschbild when he—
—What, no Red Square rocket launchers—?
—And he, I mean, just granding and riffing, just everywhere, solid and real, the best, both above it all and absolutely dead center—
—And did you see Auran? Did … ? Great new hair, a permanent – lovely mid-back long and wavy—
—And now long nails, all dark blue with silver-light edges—
—You think Birgit showed her that—?
—So like how do they dance in Urtusk?
—She looked great. I mean, Auran was shining, just shining, when she introduced Lincoln to Didi—
—She found Didi talking to Stan Sterlinger and brought her over to where Lincoln was standing, over by an Aston Martin, and—
—And she just walked Didi Metzger into the group, there must have been six—
—And introduced her, presented her—
—Right in front of—
—And they shook hands, you know, they started chatting—
—Smiling, swerving—
—I mean, Lincoln and Didi were—!
—With Birgit right there looking and—!
—Tall glasses and big-lamped Lamborghini’s and—
—And when Didi left, she—
—She—!
—Her number—
—In Cape Town—!
— … And the number of her travel agent—
—I think … —
—While Birgit, I think, Birgit had gone to—
—And hey—
—You know Didi—
—The only one not in Soviet clothes—
—Can you imagine Didi wearing—?
—My sweetie, when he like saw me, he called it Gorby-garby—
—Fruit of the GUM—!
—Not much Cartier in Stalingrad—
—And like laser lights—
—All like shoot-streaking above the dance area—
—Searching for Allied bombers—!
—That Moscow mix—!
—And Lincoln—
—Sarrusophones and glockenspiels and baritone horns—
—He, magnif—
—And big boots: calf boots whomping an October beat—
—Then giving way to house, to four-on-the-floor house—
—Four-four time for a five-year plan—!
—Great DJ—!
—LeRoy Freek calling the tunes, spinning us ’round—
—And great munchies! Like these little pancakes—
—Like mini-blini with black caviar, heaped, really good—
—And Ralph Padgug, he like says to the waiter Go back to the gulag and get us some more—
—And – but—
—And—
—And Ron Boggs jumping into the Willys Jeepster—
—And looking, smiling—
—At Lin—
—Signaling Yeah, they’re gonna get outta there, they’re just gonna run everybody over and get away!
—And here, there’s Parsons Enzopolis getting sloppy on vod—
—And did you see Caroline Keene in that boxy, that frumpy—?
—Fighting off Siberian winter—!
—And like Lincoln talking, or remembering, about Ted Turner—
—About, you know, what were they called—?
—What was … – the Goodwill Games—
—How Ted Turner—
—Such a great theme—
—Such a great concept for a reception.
—The like Cyrillic-like letters on the invitation—
—The reception-summoner—
—And it was like You are summoned to the secret service—
—Of a Friday night—
—Stiff paper and texture—
—Really official—!
—And, because it’s—
—Wasn’t—?
—It was like the tenth, the—
—Of—
—The end, the fall—
—Nostalgia for the KGB—
—Good ole KG—!
—The Academy was marking—
—It was some anniversary.
—And what. That would pay for all this … ? This—
—Just an amazing—
—On the contrary, the Academy was looking forward—
—I mean the bosses, at the Academy, even Mr. Number One RJ at the top, they were so giddy, this was such a big one for them that they couldn’t wait. They didn’t want to wait, even to next week.
—Like this is the payoff. The announcement is coming next week. We’re ahead of the curve here. The White House is going to be announcing—
—It was an inside thing – a gag! A little one – something for snickering—
—It was like people in the Academy began to hear they’d won, they’d coordinated regional lobbying efforts and then got the word they’d won, and they wanted to celebrate and like give a big reception to celebrate because it brought in like tons in fees, and when they were planning after a few days they started calling it KGB, you know KGB, the KGB event, people just shortened it from Kyoto Goo Bye!, which is what Michael Mandel said when he told the managers, when he learned they’d performed and called them in. And it was all over the office. It took like ten seconds. It was adorable—!
—And—
—And Lin—
—Magnif—
—Great. That’s just great. Thank you. Thank you …
It was Vidaky again. The fact-checker. Fact-checking the reception …
The Sun-Times …
Lincoln stayed on the line …
And just a few more. So. And was there an ice pavilion? With sorbet fountains? And did Morty Landsmann sculpt the raspberry sorbet to look like Don Knotts … ?
Ah. Yeah, Ken DeLay told me that. Oh man … Hey, that’s why I run ’em by you … !
And just a few few more. And did the bridegroom faint instead of saying I … ?
And there were a few more, and a few more after that. And then, Vidaky: Thank you!
—Hey – and guess what?, Vidaky continued. Check this out. I got the bounce! Upstairs! Yeah!
To the city desk. They asked me to be a rewrite man. Unbelievable. Now I’m gonna be polishing the reporters! Make ’em look good! But hey: the editors’ll know it’s really me … !
So yeah, it’s a nice step up. But now we may not be speaking so much. The one downside on this move, I gotta say. And let me tell you: one fact I am sure of, all this – well, lots – is because of you. Yeah. Your being so available and all. So generous with your time. I mean, you’re the hottest thing to hit here since ’95, and the way you’re so open, and helped me out, all the quotes you give me, the details … I mean, that really adds color. Bill, my editor, he just eats it up! So, yeah. Really appreciate it, man …
Man, I should be checking my own facts. Can’t believe ’em! For years, you know, I like ran deliveries for a Thai restaurant. On a bike. In the heat and all the cold. And I don’t even like Kung Song Kruang. Then I met a guy. And now a rewriter. For the Sun-Times! Unbelieva …
So tomorrow night, I’m taking myself out to eat. Hey: why not. And you know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’ll take myself to a Thai place. Why not? Maybe it’ll taste better now I can afford it!
—Armand Capstan was a very nice man. He wore nice, nicely pressed suits and parted his brown hair well. He held the door for others, and was trim. He went to a very good school, the University of Missouri, Rolla Rolla, and got his degree, a doc-torate, with honors. He belonged to the Chicago Symphony. He visited his father at the retirement village every third Sunday. He spoke highly of people and things. He was a very good psychologist and treated many important and famous people.
—Capstan leaned upon the table. Look at that thing, he said. Look at the size of it! Now that’s corned beef …
Forget 2nd Avenue, he continued. Forget them forever. Here, right here, Kashtan’s, that’s the best c-b sandwich in creation. I’m not even one of the chosen people and I can tell you that. Kashtan’s does its own curing, OK? If only the medical profession could make such a claim …
Capstan lifted the humped pink hillock with one hand, a cloth napkin curled around and falling from his little finger. He introduced a sandwich-corner into his mouth with open-eyed ardor, chewed elastically, looked into the distance, wiped his still-working chin by twisting his hand to access the attached napkin. Then he rubbed …
But to return to … , Capstan then said, and sipped soda. Yeah, I know Zinkofsky’s. Damn thing’s making a name for itself. It’s becoming fashionable – like autism, or Asperger’s. It’s becoming one of those automatic diagnoses that tell you exactly nothing, beyond the fact that the damn diagnostician is too lazy to look further than the day’s cliché …
He wrenched another calf from his sandwich. If you ask me, he continued, chewing, it’s better to consider the whole range of skonk-related disorders before making any snap judgments. I prefer a more, mm, nuanced approach. Gotta. So what I propose is we do a series of tests, nothing too you know, just the normal series of skonk-sensitivity examinations—
—They cruised through ice-slipped Chicago streets in the back of a gypsy cab …
Ah, Capstan said. Well, the way we look at it now, skonk is kinda a subspecies of interpersonal abuse, but one we traffic in so constantly it’s become all but invisible. Like water for the fish. It’s a kind of – and thank you again for lunch, by the way – it’s all the quotidian deceptiveness we swim in, the whole range of messy concessions we make to social passage and survival, and which we’ve come to accept as necessary to function …
You know what I’m saying?, he continued. Skonk is not classical bullshit. It encompasses a hell of a lot more than that. It’s – how do I put? – it’s kind of the slipperiness inherent in human relations, the nonstop individual grifting that’s so inbred and ever-present that we take it as a given – the shiftiness that’s so common that it doesn’t even register as horseshit any more, weighing in at maybe 2.7, 2.9 on the ethical Richter scale. Essentially, it’s become automatic. We don’t question it and we can’t imagine we could survive without it. So we rationalize it, we conclude it’s inevitable, or inescapable, even imperative, the price of doing business, the incidental little whiffs of the social machine. And so, from experience, sometimes pained experience, we just shut it out of awareness and go about the two-step …
One guy, a psychologist out of Seattle, he tried to compile a list of what he called skonk’s avatars, the ten-thousand faces of the buncombic beast. But he gave up, he did, because the guy couldn’t get to skonky bottom. Wanna hear a few? Some of the ones I remember, ones beyond the most obvious, include misrepresentation, omission, silence, non-corrective silence, suggestion, ellipsis, distortion, evasion, partiality, imprecision, ambiguity, hyperbole, specious questioning, prevarication, dissimulation, non-neutrality of utterance, Jesuitism, equivocation, Flatov’s famous PSTS – puff, spin, twist, spiel – softening, Bondelian overtoning, nonfull-disclosure, non-objectivity, non-non-dissimulation, heightening, enhancing, posturing, packaging, posing, shading, slanting, loaded ordering, framing, guff, sprezzatura, esotericism, decontextualizing, recontextualizing, foregrounding, bafflegab, association-manipulation, softening, hiding, disguising, double-messaging, paralipsis, intimidation, salience, acting, suppression, obfuscation, romanticizing, mythologizing, deifying, sentimentalization, shamming, auxesis, feinting, cloaking, concealing, papifying, putting on airs, etc., etc. And – may I add – etc …
Oh yeah, forgot one: bobwilsonization: justifying entirely puerile and egregious nonsense as the access route to some higher, dare-I-say-it more poetic truth. Still see that every now and then.
—Capstan opened the door to his office, turned on overhead lights, gestured for Lincoln to come in …
So you see the thing’s prevalence, Capstan said, sitting in a leather chair and waving for Lincoln to do the same. Again, skonk isn’t some kind of by-product of a universal indeterminability – it’s a willful, if often unconscious, process of distortion. And there are both active and passive versions – skonk that’s used to affect, infect, someone else’s thoughts or behavior versus skonk you aim inter-psychically, for inner purposes. Put them together and a recent study, I think it was at Tufts, found normal individuals looking at some 420 skonkings per. Per hour. Again, this is not ordinary bullshit. Even now, that’s up only eight, ten percent from late-Edwardian times, according to the mucky-mucks at the Veridical Institute – and much of that, they maintain, comes from globalization, as we push our moral manufactories offshore. No, skonk is broader, and thinner. It’s the social world’s background radiation, the dark matter of consciousness – the endless scamming that makes it all happen. It’s the performance lubricant of social life, the goddam ether of the interpersonal …
So, let’s just go inside – thanks for the cab, by the way – and we can … , Capstan said, as he rose and opened an inner door; his other hand curling like a crustacean from the tip of his tweed sleeve.
—So, where to begin, the doctor said. Well, one must start by noting that the brain is profoundly skonkotropic – we’ve known at least since Charcot that consciousness lists toward the lie. The reasons are purely conservational: Skonk requires far less cerebral energy to process, as it gives rise to markedly fewer synaptic events. PET scans show that, when normal brains are introduced to verifiable skonk, flows of neurotransmitters, notably aspartate and glycine, are some 67% less than when the brain is treating equivalent quantities of nonskonk. The view is stunning: skonked, the whole synaptic heaven is largely left in darkness – unlit, unstarred, unsparkling. Entire azimuths of cortical activity are as if eclipsed, with the midcingulate cortex firing at way below Hanson thresholds. The brain receives and processes skonk in ways that evidence it was born to do so …
It’s easy to understand why, Dr. Mellon continued, perched on his lab room’s lone stool. Nonskonk, to be determined as such, needs one hell of a lot of handling. It has to be recognized, established, tested, verified, defended, sometimes even justified. It’s got to register in a huge assortment of cerebral systems, with al
l their redundancies – a vast wash of psychic activity. But skonk needs no such vetting. It can simply pass on through, meeting essentially no system friction, and so is incomparably easier to work with. That’s why Crostino, writing just last month in the Journal of Veridical Mechanics, says skonk makes the mind a superconductor – of thoughts, of feelings, of intuitions, enabling ideational flows of unimaginable efficiency. Of course, Chodiswarmi, a great guy at Georgia Tech, has called skonk mind’s olestra. Tastes good, gets the job done, then just slides on out. And if it soils your britches – so be it, Chodiswarmi says. A remarkable thinker …
Somatically, too, Dr. Mellon said, one must recognize the innate affinities. Repeatedly, tests have shown that, in the presence of persuasive skonk, heart rates slow, breathing eases, eyes dilate, attention slackens, circulation lessens to distal zones – the whole panoply of responses that Borst calls Happy ’n Hearty. Nitric oxide in the blood shoots way up, all but neutralizing the CRH-ACTH-epinephrine-cortisol complex of stressors. There’s also an immediate surge in opioid production – several endorphins, yes, but also dynorphin, as well as an uptick in B-lipotropin. It’s feel-good stuff, an outing to the soul’s own ice-cream parlor. The Rizzani indicator is perhaps at its highest. In fact, some researchers are now connecting skonk to the placebo, and are beginning to produce pretty cogent evidence that the finagling involved in this procedure, always somehow sensed, is directly linked to the miracle healing …
But one must admit to finding this pattern all over the place, Mellon continued. Think of the story of Ahikar, and its parable of the archer and the gouty man. The first gives shooting lessons when he has no competence to do so, and the latter, though he catches no game, gets up and walks. Or remember the progress of the Hwandis, living for centuries along both banks of the Changane River in Mozambique. The political storm comes, the east-shore Hwandis fall under the rule of the M’lumbo and are doused, for decades, with pro-M’lumbo propaganda. The result? Even though their genotype-range, physical circumstances, food supplies and traditions of healthcare remain nearly identical, life expectancy for the east-bankers rises by some twenty-seven percent over that of the Hwandis to the west. Other examples are numerous. In short, evidence shows that skonk – noble, necessary skonk – is a powerfully beneficent force for the human organism …