Against the Day (120 page)

   
“I’m
what?”

   
“I
thought Americans knew that word.”

   
“Believe
the word you’re groping for is ‘poor.
’ ”

   
“Your
arrangements with the Vibe people are canceled?”

   
“Null
and void.”

   
“And you
owe them nothing.”

   
“Well,
they might not agree.”

   
“But
if another offer were presented . . .”

   
“You
mean from your T.W.I.T. people?”

   
She
shrugged prettily, more with her hair than her shoulders. “I could ask.”

   
“I’ll
bet.”

   
“Shall
I, then?”

   
“It
would depend on the pay, I guess.”

She laughed, and he thought of the
carefree girl so long ago sashaying in through the smoke of that
Bierstube.
“Oh,
you’ll see how they pay!”

Kit looked
, looked away, looked again. Except
for the absence of a mustache, there, right in the middle of Göttingen, was the
spit of Foley Walker. Hat and all. Kit felt like somebody had just taken a shot
at him. Life in Göttingen appeared to proceed on its bladetwinkling way,
wheelfolks on brandnew bikes crashing into each other or careering out of
control and scattering pedestrians, beerdrinkers quarreling and bowing,
preoccupied Zetamaniacs forever on the verge of walking off the edge of the
Promenade being rescued by companions, a town he had never loved all at once
become a place, now he was obliged, it seemed, to leave it, whose most
quotidian detail shone with a clarity almost painful, already a place of
exile’s memory and no returning, and here just to make that official was the
angel, if not of death at least of deep shit, and nobody else seemed to notice,
despite Foley’s telltale fatality for the garish, exhibited here in an outfit
no description of whose tastelessness can be comfortably set upon one’s page
. . . .
Well, actually, it was a threepiece
sporting ensemble popular some years back, woven so as to present different
colors depending on the angle it was viewed from, these including but not
limited to brownish pink, saturated grape, and a certain necrotic yellow.

   
Next
time Kit looked back, of course there was no Foley now, if that’s what

the apparition had been. The fourth dimension, no doubt.
Despite Yashmeen’s helpful citation of the Pythagorean
akousmaton
that
goes, “When away from home, never look back, because the Furies are in pursuit”
(Iamblichus 14), Kit soon found himself paying close attention to the street
and what went on in it, not to mention doublechecking doors and windows before
he tried to get even an hour or two of sleep, which was becoming a
problematical chore. Why hadn’t Foley stepped around, he wondered, just to say
hello? Did he think Kit hadn’t seen him?

But
Foley, as if possessed of the master
Hausknochen
for all Göttingen, was
keeping his acts of visitation for the night, and so it came about that with no
transition at all, soles and palms aching and pulse thudding, Kit was sitting
up staring into the dark at this eidolon, inelegantly turned out contrary to a
whole raft of publicdecency statutes, which had come monitory and breathing in
to violate Kit’s insomnia. “Let me tell you about the minié ball in my head,”
Foley began. “And how over the long comfortless years it has changed, I guess a
chemical person would say transmuted, not to gold, that would be too much to
expect, but to one of these rare metals that are said to be sensitive to
electromagnetic waves of one sort and another. Zirconium, silverbearing galena,
one of them. Vibe Corp. digs it out of veins all over the world, including your
own native Colorado. That’s how it happened I could hear those
voices—through that precisely warped little sphere of metal, because they
were all out there, where hardly any of us ever hear them, those waves from far
away, traveling forever, through the Æther, the cold and dark. Without enough
of the right mineral concentrated there in your brain, you can live your whole
life and never hear them
. . . .
”

   
 
“Don’t mean to interrupt, but how’d you
get in here?”

   
“You
haven’t been listening, Kit—please—now—this is for your own
good.”

   
“Like
stopping my money was.”

   
“ ‘
Your’ money? Since when?”

   
“We
had a deal. Don’t you people honor deals?”

“Don’t
know nothing about honor, I’ll spare you that lecture, but I can tell you about
being bought, and sold, and the obligations that come with that.”

   
“You’d
know.”

“See,
it’s what we thought
you
knew. Figuring you for a smart kid. We assumed
too much.”

   
“If
Vibe went back on his word, then something changed. What was it, Foley?”

   
“You
weren’t honest. You knew things, but you didn’t tell us.”

“
I
wasn’t honest?” This was getting close to the edge, and Kit felt less than
surefooted. He reached for a cigarette and lit up. “What do you want to know?
Ask me anything.”

   
“Too
late. Trouble you for one of them?”

Kit pushed the pack over. “You come
all the way here just to threaten me, Foley?”

   
“Mr.
Vibe is currently on a tour of Europe, and wanted me to look in.”

“What
for? He cut me out of his life, that would sort of limit any further
socializing.”

“It’s
the boss’s scientific curiosity, see, how a subject might react to philanthropy
in reverse, where the charity gets taken away, instead of handed out? Would he
get angry? sad? desperate? give in to suicidal thoughts?”

   
“Tell
him I’m happier’n a fly on shit.”

   
“Ain’t
sure he’ll want to hear that.”

   
“Make
something up, then. Anything else?”

   
“Yeah.
What’s a man do for entertainment in this town?”

   
When
he was sure Foley had gone, Kit found a bottle of beer, opened it, and raised
it to his tenebrous face reflected in the window glass.
“ ‘
Away from Göttingen, there is no life,
’ ”
he quoted the motto on the Rathskeller wall, and a few minutes
later his family’s own.
“ ‘
Well.
Reckon
yo tengo que
get
el
fuck out of
aquí.
’ ”

It didn’t seem
like the weekend had arrived, it
didn’t seem like there was much of a calendar in force at all anymore.
Nonetheless, as dusk gathered over the town, Kit was rushed upon and seized by
a small group of classmates.

“
Zum Mickifest! Komm, komm!
”

Among students of mathematics here,
chloral hydrate was the preferred drug. Sooner or later, whatever the problem
being struggled with, having obsessed themselves into nightly insomnia, they
would start taking knockout drops to get to sleep—Geheimrat Klein himself
was a great advocate of the stuff—and next thing they knew, they were
habitués, recognizing one another by the sideeffects, notably eruptions of red
pimples, known as “the dueling scars of chloralomania.” On Saturday nights in
Göttingen, there was always sure to be at least one chloral party, or
Mickifest.

It was a peculiar gathering, only
intermittently, as you’d say, brisk. People were either talking wildly, often
to themselves and without seeming to pause for breath, or lounging draped in
pleasurable paralysis across the furniture or, as the evening went along, flat
on the floor in deep narcosis.

   
“You
have the
K.O.Tropfen
in the U.S.?” inquired a sweet young thing

name of Lottchen.

   
“Sure,”
said Kit, “they show up in drinks a lot, usually with criminal intent.”

   
“And
keep in mind,” Gottlob announced, with lengthy pauses between words, “that the
English word ‘pun,’ upside down, is. . . ‘und.
’
”

Kit squinted, waiting for him to
pursue the thought. Finally, “I’m
. . .
not
real sure I actually . . .”

“Grouptheoretical implications,”
Gottlob slowly explained, “to begin with—”

Somebody started screaming. Very
slowly everyone looked around, and then began making their way into the kitchen
to see what had happened.

“He’s dead.”

“What do you mean, dead?”

“Dead. Look at him.”

“No no no,” Günther shaking his head
in annoyance, “he does this all the time. Humfried!” screaming in the
horizontal mathematician’s ear. “You have poisoned yourself again!” Humfried
emitted an alarming rhonchus. “First we shall have to wake him up.” Günther
looked around for their host.
“
Gottlob!
Wo ist deine Spritze?
”
While Gottlob went looking for the
syringe which seemed to be a standard accessory at these gatherings, Günther
went in the kitchen and found a pot of coffee left to cool against just such a
contingency. Humfried had begun to mutter, though not in German—in fact
in no language anybody in the room recognized.

Gottlob brought over a gigantic
syringe of some dented and tarnished gray alloy, stamped “Property of the
Berlin Zoo” and
“
Streng reserviert
für den Elefanten!
” and
attached to it a long ebony nozzle.

“Ah, thank you, Gottlob, now somebody
help me roll him over—”

“This is the part where I leave,”
said Lottchen.

Humfried, his eyes fluttering open
wide enough to register the syringe, screamed and attempted to crawl away.

“Now now, sleepyhead,” chided Günther
playfully, “what you need is some nice black coffee to perk you up, but we don’t
want you trying to
drink
it do we, dribbling it all over your shirt, no,
so just to make sure it all gets where it’s going—”

Those who were still awake began to
gather around to watch, which Kit knew was also a regular part of these
Mickifesten.
The intensity of Humfried’s monologue picked up, as if he were aware of his
audience and his obligations as an entertainer. By now Gottlob and Günther had
pulled his trousers down and were attempting to insert the huge nozzle into his
rectum, bickering over points of technique. Someone else was in the kitchen
concocting an emetic from mustard and raw eggs.

Anyone expecting a chance to look
into the mysteries of death and return would be disappointed tonight.

   
“Only
the vomiting? You will not administer strychnine?”

“Strychnine is for French
schoolchildren, not as good an antidote for chloral as chloral is for
strychnine.”

   
“Noncommutative,
so?”

   
“Asymmetric,
at any rate.”

Günther gave Humfried a professional
onceover. “I am afraid he will have to go to the hospital.”

“Let me do that,” Kit said, feeling
less obliging than anxious for no reason he could think of, until about a block
from the hospital, there, huge and in no one’s control, least of all his own,
came Foley, running at him with something in his hand. “Traverse! Come here,
goddamn you.” He might have been drunk, but Kit did not delude himself that it
gave him any kind of an edge on Foley.

“A friend of yours,” said Gottlob,
who was holding Humfried up from the other side.

“I owe him money. Any way we could lose
him?”

“This part of town is my second
home,” Gottlob began, when there was the sound, dishearteningly distinct, of a
gunshot.
“
Verfluchte cowboy!
”
screamed Gottlob, and ran off.

The chloraladdled Humfried, by now
able to walk, grabbed Kit by the arm and steered him quickly into the nearest
hospital entrance. “Trust me,” he mumbled.
“
Achtung, Schwester!
Here
another dopefiend is!”

Next thing Kit knew he was surrounded
by orderlies and being bustled down a corridor.

“Wait a minute, folks, where’s that
fellow I brought in?” But Humfried had vanished completely.

   
“Imaginarycompanion
syndrome, quite typical,” murmured an interne.

   
“But
I’m the sober one here.”

“Of course you are, and here is a
special
souvenir
we
give to
all visitors as a reward for being so sober,” dexterously jabbing him with a
hypodermic. Kit dropped like a stone. And so it was off to the
Klapsmühle.