Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (22 page)

“Man,” from Heffalump finally, putting his beer on the sink. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”

“What is it?” asked Gnossos, suddenly uncomfortable.

They all turned their heads from the commode and gazed at him, lips still parted. “Ech,” said Fitzgore.

Gnossos nudged his way between them, peering down. When he glanced up, they were all waiting for his reaction. Then he looked again.

Floating in the water was the largest turd he had ever seen in his life.

Ever.

“Mine?” he asked, a finger at his heart.

They all nodded in sympathy.

“Bullshit,” he protested, “I refuse it. It’s somebody else’s.”

“Nobody’s been here, man.”

“You just came in to piss, Heff, it was you.”

“No,” said Agneau softly. “He saw it and screamed. When you were outside.”

“But I flushed it.”

“It’s too big. Won’t go through.”

“Hell it won’t,” said Gnossos, reaching for the handle.

“No no,” protested Youngblood and Rosenbloom together. “Save it.”

“We can have it cast, man,” said Heff.

Gnossos reached again, but they stopped him. “Hey, let go, goddammit, that thing’s been trying to creep into the ground for months. You can’t
leave
it there. Have the gods down on you in the night. Monsoons.”

“Casting,” said Youngblood respectfully. “The perfect solution, really. Just look at it.”

Gnossos stared down again. As he did, a small eddying current in the water lolled it over on its side. It was astonishingly well formed, here and there a minuscule design. Cuneiform of the bowels. Secret cellular knowledge etched by the insides, trying to tell us something.

“It is sort of splendid,” he admitted slyly, and lunged for the handle. But they stopped him again, Rosenbloom blocking the front of the pot.

“What is this, anyway? If it’s mine I can do what I want with it.”

“It belongs to the people,” said Heff solemnly, gazing down.

“Like any other work of art,” added Youngblood, agreeing. “You no longer have the right to destroy it. I’m sorry.”

“How do we lift it out?” asked Heff.

“Ech,” said Fitzgore.

“Nobody else gets it!” yelled Gnossos at the ceiling.

“One of those shirtbags,” suggested Agneau, “those plastic things.”

“Anybody got some rubber gloves?” asked Youngblood.

Fitzgore went out reluctantly and returned with a plastic shirtbag, Heff coming up with an ebony salad fork and spoon.

“Hey,” said Fitzgore, protesting, “my mother sent me those.”

“For art,” said Rosenbloom, rubbing his tiny, hairy hands together. Heff handed him the salad set and he knelt next to the bowel, implements poised.

“I want it left alone! Do I have to bust heads?”

“Shh,” said Heffalump gently. “A little Satyagraha, please.” He also knelt, spreading the top of the bag. “This is a very delicate operation.” Then, to Rosenbloom. “Maybe we should put a little water in first, keep it fresh and all.”

“Ugh,” said Fitzgore, but he was grinning, fascinated.

Rosenbloom lifted six spoonfuls of water from the commode into the plastic bag. Heffalump tested for watertightness and signaled to proceed. Gnossos gazed spectatorially, like an anaesthetized catatonic. Rosenbloom tested different methods of execution, settling finally on a chopstick-pincer arrangement, spoon below, fork on top.

“Won’t it break?” asked Agneau.

“Scotch tapes,” said Rosenbloom, “hold the worl’ together. She look pretty, how you call him, stolid.”

“Solid,” corrected Fitzgore, hands over his eyes, peeking between the fingers.

“Thas the one,” said Rosenbloom, making contact, lifting the gargantuan object free, raising it perilously high, one end dangling over the spoon, straining, but showing no signs of fracture.

“Man,” said Heffalump. “Just look at it.”

“Oh, the bloody indignity! Tidal waves, earthquakes, solar eclipses!”

Delicately Rosenbloom lifted the flexible object over the plastic bag as Heff arranged the opening. It fell with a wet plop and shoved out the sides of the bag.

Gnossos stared, unbelieving. “I disown it. It’s not mine. Must have floated up from downtown. It belongs to Fat Fred or somebody.”

They filed out of the bathroom one at a time, Gnossos glancing at each static face, Judases all, failing to know me, making off with their cargo. “Wait,” he called. “A boon. Grant me a boon, you guys.”

“A what?” asked Heff, wheeling. “What the hell did you call me?”

“No, man, a
boon
, a favor.”

“Certainly,” from Agneau.

“When you’re finished, you have to bury it, okay?”

“With full honors,” said Youngblood.

“Militaring funerals,” said Rosenbloom, still holding the ebony fork and spoon. “Let’s do it.”

They all marched through the living room in step, and out the front door. Fitzgore did an about-face on the porch and returned wearily, still looking exhausted, to his bed. Gnossos heard the cars start and drive off but he refused to go to the window. Fitzgore avoided his menacing eyes.

“Butchers,” he hissed. “Maniacs.” And returned to the bathroom, where he looked at the empty toilet bowl. It seemed there was nothing more to do. Remembering Kristin, he turned the hot water on in the tub and compulsively emptied every bottle of oil and salt into the billowing steam. The fumes impregnated each nook of the apartment with the sugary odor of nectar and honeydew. Sweet perfumes for the flesh, drive away the demons.

Provided they’re ready to go.

Two nautical hours in the oceangoing tub, half emptying then refilling the water, turning the tap when the temperature fell below a critical level; the periscoping tool a thermometer. He watched it absently, foreshortened as it was by the plane of soapy liquid, some new genus of lily pad, a blind, muscular fish, single hollow eye socket hidden under catholicized skin. On the final filling he added the blue cosmetic crystals of Prince Matchabelli bubble bath, aerating the multiplied froth with his knees, using the periscope to lift a weightless clump of sixty or seventy spheres. He slipped on Fitzgore’s skin-diving goggles and descended, looking for treasure, a tiny Poseidon or Aphrodite clip-clopping along in the microcosm. All gods and muses tiny, the length of a thumbnail or smaller; primitives wrong to make them monumental. Find them in peanut butter jars, under bottlecap cork slices.

He caught sight of an unlikely movement and plunged forward to examine a cluster of partially dissolved crystals. He had to wipe the fog from the goggles in order to see. But instead of Hermes he found the reflection of Fitzgore, immaculately dressed, distorted like a fat man in a sideshow looking glass. “
God
, Paps, you’re not still in the goddamned tub?”

“No, as it happens I’m not.”

“What are you doing, anyway?”

“Man, how come you guys have such a talent for slipping worms in the image?”

“Worms?”

“Later, Gore, I’m busy.”

Fitzgore nodded, straightening his tie in the mirror. “That girl’s coming over, isn’t she, that one in the knee-socks, what’s her name?”

“Why don’t you flee, man, before you get some bath oil on your nice John Lewton suit?”

“Brooks Brothers, Paps, please. Only wanted to know ’cause I can hang around D.U. or someplace after house meeting.”

“That
would
be kind of you, yes. Unless of course you plan to fall by and watch, take seconds.”

“Speaking of which, you don’t know anything about Pamela and Mojo, do you?”

“Will you get
out
of here?”

Fitzgore shrugging, looking as if he might have something more to say, then dabbing after-shave lotion under his ears and leaving with a diabolical, “Have fun.” Gnossos slid into the froth to be alone, submerged his head, and looked up at the glittering underside of the surface. He talked out loud into the bubbly liquid, his mouth flooding with perfume:
How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

By five-thirty he was out of the tub and she had not come. His stomach was warm with the discomforting incalescence of anxiety. He sang nonsense lyrics to himself and jumped around the apartment with an oil rag, dabbing at already spotless ashtrays, mantels, hunting horns, record jackets, rucksack buckles, window sills, door handles, pots and pans, and the ominous Blacknesse painting. The dolma lay simmering in an exotic sauce on the stove, wine chilled in the baby refrigerator, olives waiting on one of Fitzgore’s Wedgwood plates. Chunks of seasoned lamb were impaled on coathanger skewers, marinating, ready for the flame.

He tried Mose Allison but lost patience and turned him off in favor of the Hohner F, which wouldn’t work. The C note had been blown out during his morning walk. Man, still the same day. Cycles of the sun the wrong way to measure time. Crusting of the cells was how, little vessels aging, collapsing at the temples, inching you along without your say.

At six she still was not there. Why? She couldn’t have forgotten, surely. The whole thing just a tumble for the evening, chitchat with a maniac Greek, quaint little animal tales to share with the dorm?

Six-thirty.

He curled into a ball on Fitzgore’s clean bed and peeled back the cover in order to feel the algid pillow. Sleep seemed unlikely while he counted minutes, but he found it all the same, a gloomy, humid breed of semiconsciousness. The well-lubricated lid of his mind’s additional eye lifted on a winter clearing, where the silently driving wind made powder of the snow, cosmetic talcum storms dusting the pines. A disemboweled wolf offered a Cheshire grin at the gates of perception, its presence only partially sensed, never explicit. Then a faint odor of animal ammonia, the landscape changing form and dimension, the wind abating, the talcum receding, spiraling backward into a panoramic vista. The scene was viewed from a high-altitude plateau, a mesa perhaps, but with the mouth of a cave gaping on the surface. An unimaginable creature stirred within the cave, prepared to reveal itself, scuttle lewdly out. The vista beyond was Oriental. But why? A sound of quarter tones, a muted tambourine, the chanting of an Amane: . . . 
Ela ke si ke klapse. Ke par to ema mou, ke ta mallia sou vapse.

“Gnossos.”

“Unh?”

“Are you awake?”

“Un.”

“You were dreaming.”

“What?”

“You were talking something. It sounded foreign.”

“Unh. Hello. How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. Hello yourself.”

“Man,” stirring, rubbing his eyes with a fist.

“The door was open. I knocked for a while.”

“Ummm. C’mon in, sit down.”

“I’ve been watching that whatever it is on the stove. It was nearly burned.”

The dolma. Forgot about the sauce. Sit up. Oomph. Green knee-socks still. “I’d better go look—”

“It’s okay, I turned it down. And I put that shish kebab business in the oven. I hope you don’t mind, but you looked comfortable.”

“Sure thing.” Could have been Pamela. Leave the door unlocked, find an icepick in your temple. “I’ve got a rug for a tongue, man.”

“Drinking?”

“Talking is all. I looked comfortable, did I?”

“Was the dream bad?”

“Neurotic, baby, full of warning. You hungry? How about a Salonika pepper?”

“When you wake up, you have to talk them out. Right away, otherwise you forget.”

“Yeah, well it’s not really worth it. No overt sex, just a lot of symbols, loose ends. You want an hors d’oeuvre, little something to chew on?”

She shoved back the sleeves of her denim blouse, shook her hair loose, and called after him as he padded into the kitchen: “Listen, I’m sorry I’m late. I had that seminar I mentioned last night and Judy was supposed to take me down to the infirmary.”

“Don’t sweat it, baby.”

“She’s off somewhere with that one-eyed creature.”

“Heap?”

“Whatever it’s called. The bald one that snaps its fingers.”

Gnossos patting his pockets for cigarettes, Kristin giving him one from what looked like a silver case with a bear on the hallmark. Quick puff, stain the lungs. “Anything wrong? The infirmary, I mean?”

“Only a friend with mono, an old roommate. I tried calling you but the number’s unlisted or something.”

“Under Pamela’s name, nobody can get it. Have an endive?”

Her eyebrow going up as she munched. “Pamela?”

“Watson-May. Girl who used to have the pad. English.”

“Oh.”

“Alone, baby, not with me. You want some resin wine? Vitamin D, good for metabolism.”

She kicked away her loafers as she crossed the room and had one knee-sock off when she returned with the bottle. She eased the other down with her toe as she stood on a single foot and poured. Her grace was astonishing. Gnossos put a finger to his lips instead of taking the offered glass, indicating that she should be silent a moment, as if some sound required their attention and in order to hear it they had to remain motionless. The neck of the bottle was poised, tilted in one hand, and his waiting drink in the other. She glanced from side to side, still on one leg, and looked at him. But it was a trick. All he wanted was time. The last of the sun’s spectral color was refracted from the far side of the valley. It filtered through the bamboo slats that served as shades, lining her face in orange, ocher, blue, and brown, teasing the nap of her skin, polarizing the otherwise invisible down on her forearms, cheeks, and legs, pollenating the soft hairs into erotic dimension. The sleeves on her denim blouse were rolled high, her suede skirt was luxurious with texture, a knee was cocked, poking below the hem.

Blood pulsed into his groin and she probably knew. She took the brass ring that bound her hair and tossed it across the room, where it landed on the couch. “You haven’t had any wine yet,” she said.

He slaked the urge to touch her then and there. Talk food. “You dig stuffed vine leaves, all like that?”

“I guess. Try me.”

Half a foot of Greek sausage, just the thing. “Why don’t you turn on the machine? There’s some Miles, a little J.J. You said you were hungry, right?” He pogo-sticked into the kitchen in bare feet and whisked out the new Kresge’s tablecloth. Powder-blue linen trimmed with white, little touch of nationalism. Must send a silver dollar to Makarios, buys two kilos of goat cheese. He reduced the flame under the egg-and-lemon sauce, squeezed a lime on the sizzling kebab, moved the plate of olives and feta nearer the stove, and took the chilled Pouilly-Fuissé from the refrigerator. Nod to a foreign culture, liberal touch for the second course. Back in the living room he spread the linen cloth over the plywood table and arranged the knives and forks. He’d scrubbed them in Bon Ami and dried with cheesecloth. Kristin sat watching, bare leg tucked under her bottom, free foot tracing a pattern on the floor. Again in the kitchen he turned up the oven, extra lick of crust to the old sheep, and brought in more hors d’oeuvres, chilled, on a pewter platter. “You want a cushion for the floor?” Kristin smiled at the mussel fantasy, sliding a foam rubber pumpkin beneath her, and asked, “What’s in them?”