Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (7 page)

“What?”

“Too much shit in me, you’d never fertilize.”

“Oh, what an ugly word that is. What will I do? I feel it inside of me.”

“Here,” handing her the enema bag. “Emergency douche for your peace of mind.”

“You pig.”

She snatched it away from him and ran to the bathroom. Gnossos sitting there with his pants collapsed around his shoes, shirt and tie still on, erection wilting slowly. He drained the glass of Scotch and poured another. Through the wall, the sound of anguished moans and squirting water. Talk to her.

“Do you need any help?”

“Oh, go away.”

Gratitude. So to speak.

He scuttled over to the record machine and flipped through her collection, finding little of value, settling finally on a Brubeck. Footsteps coming. “Did it work?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I feel sick.”

“Original sin.”

“You’re some help, you are. And why are you sitting there with your pants down? Oh, couldn’t you go away? For a little while, please?”

Standing up, pants all wet. From her? No, the Cutty Sark. Jesus, forgot about dinner. Poor Fitzgore. “Can I move in tonight?”

“No! Oh, I feel awful. Poor Simon.”

Got to piss. Better wait until I get someplace else. “Okay, baby, dig you later.”

“Take this thing with you,” holding out the damp, deflated bag.

He slung it over his shoulder, shrugged, looked at her sadly for a brief moment as she stood shivering by the fire, her arms crossed in front of her belly, then turned and wandered out the door and up the street.

He hesitated once as a peculiar figure danced out of the shadows, limp wrists dangling, eyes leering in the moonless, overcast night, then vanished. He blinked at where it had been. Bald skull? He hunched his shoulders against the cold and continued walking through the snow. What the hell.

Semper virgini.

Without commission the membrane was still intact. Soon, he told himself again, soon: there must come love.

A black and swollen depression closed down around him and spilled heavily through the blood and marrow of his night.

A tarantula.

Eyeless and hairy, squatting thickly in his mouth, a brown prickly leg twitching between closed lips.

How did it get there? He turned his head to one side and tried spitting, but it squirmed and remained. What if it bites? Smoldering greasesticks impaled in my neck.

He rolled over with extreme caution, feeling for the pillow, but there was only the dusty rug on the floor. He had been breathing lint throughout the night and the tarantula was not a tarantula but his tongue.

“Water?” came the feeble try.

A brief stirring in the adjoining room, sounds of someone dressing, then silence. The effort expended uttering the weak request had driven a sliver of caustic, nauseating pain from temple to temple and he lay as still as a closed book until it went away. Move very slowly.

His chin was on the rug and he opened one eye to find stray hairs, nail parings, spent staples, little dustballs, cat fur, dried flower petals, onion peel, and a dehydrated wasp. He closed the eye. Attacked in the spine by some species of burrowing, parasitic worm. Easy now.

“Heff?” Again the sickly throb.

The door to the connecting room opened and Heffalump walked over barefoot, in jeans, a towel around his neck. He carried a glass of fizzing Bromo Seltzer in one hand and two fingers of umber horror in the other.

“Drink it,” came the unsympathetic order.

“Gggggg,” from Gnossos, gulping down the chilly effervescence.

“Never mix shit and booze,” came the reprimand.

“Oh crap, a mother.”

“Here,” handing him the whiskey, which went swirling spasmodically through his blood, jarring the terrified will of nerves and blood cells. Then a warm calm. “Better?”

“A little. You wouldn’t believe my tongue.”

“You look very near death.”

Remembering. “He passed me last night. On Academae Avenue.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Kind of a bald cat, looked like a teenager, though.”

“You should have asked him in for a nightcap, save him the trouble of looking you up in a year or two, when you overdose on horse or something.”

“Will you
stop
being a mother! Jesus, man, there’s a growth in my frontal lobe. Oooo.”

“Have it cut out.”

Not a bad idea. Be a vegetable, no emotional response. “Why am I on the floor?”

“You wanted to be. You were worried about low-flying planes. You even called Monsignor Putti, he’ll be here any minute. You need something to eat?”

“Jesus, no. You wouldn’t have a strawberry frosted? What’s Putti coming for?”

“You wanted Extreme Unction. Come on, try getting up, we’ll find something in the Plato Pit.”

“Ooooohhh—”

“It’s not that far, man—”

“Those Red Caps, that’s where it started.”

“How’d it go at the fraternity?”

“Ohhhhhhh.”

“We figured. They might bid you just the same, make you the house maniac,” swilling a can of Donald Duck orange juice. “Let’s go, don’t you have to register?”

“Hey, how about a little orange juice? That British chic said I’d be fined, registration takes bread, I’m nearly clean.”

“No citric acid on a twisted stomach.”

“Mother Heffalump.”

“Your rucksack is full of silver, anyway.”

“From what, man, green stamps?”

“The wheel, Jesus, you don’t remember?”

A smoky recollection. “What wheel?”

“You won over a hundred bucks. Proctor Slug’s probably got a warrant out.”

“You’re not serious? Roulette? From who?”

“What does it matter who? Some spic in a cowboy suit and a guy from the Mentor
Daily Sun
. Now try getting up, man, you look like spoonfuls of warmed-over death.”

“Hundred bucks? Ohhhh.”

“Now what?”

“That woman at the checkout.”

“Hey, all this expiation is a drag,” Heff pulling on a pair of stiffened socks from his laundry bag. “Why don’t you go to Confession or something.”

“Penance the wrong sacrament, baby, only add to the pain. Need myrrh for the injured cells. You’re putting me on about Monsignor Putti, right? I mean, what would I do that for?”

“You even left an instruction note. You want to see it?”

“Prayer is all. Fasting, Satyagraha. Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord—”

“Look man, would you please get up, I want to find out if I’m still in school.”

“De Profundis, semper hangovum—”

“Oh shit,” Heff dropping into a rocking chair, socks collapsing on his ankles. Long bone of a quadroon body gangling with the remnants of Watusi blood, almost close enough to pass, not quite. But blue eyes, unlikely, gets the girls.

“You’re beautiful, Heffalump, I ought to marry you.”

“Ugh.”

“Ohhhh, my neck. Always worst in the neck, have you noticed? And the left eye.”

Heff flipping idly through the
Anatomy of Melancholy
, whistling some Randy Weston, asking casually:

“You going to make Cuba with me over spring vacation?”

“Please no mother-organizing. You should have grown out of that adventure syndrome, anyway. This is ’58, not 1922.”

“At least things are happening down there; talk about a revolution, getting rid of this Batista maniac.”

“You couldn’t grow a beard, where’s the percentage? Ohh, this is all too much for the head. Will you play a little Miles? You got any Miles? Something to mollify my bruised cortex? Oof.” He scrambled to a sitting position and found his swollen reflection in a cracked mirror on the other side
of the smelly room. Don’t look. Mortality. Mornings always hardest. Heff was dutifully settling a record on the spindle of his borrowed turntable, fondling the Heathkit preamp knobs with a free hand. Next to the lamp which had been used to dry the previous night’s joints were a half-empty vial of paregoric and the eye dropper.

Gnossos stood unsteadily and aired his tongue. He removed the slovenly remains of the lint-coated suit he’d slept in, then shuffled naked across the room to the sink, scratching his scrotum. He flicked some cold water from his fingernails to his eyes, blinked painfully, and set about replacing everything criminal in the rucksack. Got to cool Mother Church, too much irony in getting busted by a priest. As he turned toward the speaker, snapping his fingers, he found the image of a wrinkled penis looking back at him. Only after it moved did he recognize the reflection as his own.

“Jesus, put some clothes on,” from Heff, who also saw, tossing him a black terrycloth robe. “Your body is obscene after a debauch.”

“Meaningless word, man.”

“Lewd, then. How the hell you ever get women to make love to is way past me.” Traffic noise from the street, a world functioning on.

“I don’t. I bang them is all. I’m still a virgin. Have yet to make love, right?”

A polite rapping at the door.

“Jesus, the Man.”

Heff leaping up from his rocker, “Lie down somewhere, quick. And for Christ’s sake, keep that robe closed!”

Pappadopoulis pulled the terrycloth around him and jumped onto the pathetic leather couch, its skin peeling in jagged strips. Heffalump threw an army blanket over his knees, tucked him in, and waited until hands were locked in reverence before going to the door. Monsignor Putti was waiting nervously, carrying a black pigskin satchel in stubby fingers. He entered and stood to be helped with his heavy coat.

“Is this the patient?” he asked with a twitching smile. Wound around his splendid frock was a scarlet sash. Swollen belly, balding scalp, hair combed back to front in a foppish attempt to conceal. Eek, a concave sternum.

“He finds it difficult to speak,” explained Heff cautiously.

“God help us. Has the doctor been here already?”

“He refuses all medical assistance.”

“Dear me, is that wise?”

“He has faith only in, well, you know.”

From the couch a hand groping weakly into space: “Father. Father, is that you?”

The monsignor bending curiously toward Heff, “Perhaps you’d better ring the infirmary, after all—”

“And movements, you see, sudden movements give him great pain.”

“Yes, yes . . . ” shakily opening the pigskin bag and removing the delicate cruets of holy oil. Plump pink fingers. Jesus, that Miles.

“Father?”

“Yes, my son?”

In a whisper: “More treble, we’re losing the highs.”

“What’s that? What’s he saying?”

“He wanders now and again, Father. It happens every half hour or so,” Heff going over to the amplifier and adjusting the controls.

“Better,” from the figure on the couch.

“My son, I’m, well, I’m moved that you sought the blessing of the Church first in your infirmity; but perhaps a doctor—”

“BUTCHERS,” called Gnossos violently, thrashing under the army blanket, “ATHEISTS!”

“Oh dear.”

“You see, Father, that’s how he becomes.”

Then, in a lower tone, inviting them closer to hear, clutching the monsignor’s retreating sleeve and staring at him with one eye closed, breathing Bromo Seltzer, whiskey fumes, and hangover in his face: “I know what they do, Father. These doctors, these men of learning, I know what they do, all right. They cut open your belly and look inside for a soul, that’s what. They look inside for a soul and when they don’t find any they say, ‘HA! No soul! Pancreas maybe, but no soul!’” Releasing the sleeve, falling back against the couch with a gasp, “I’ve got one though, haven’t I; I’ve got a soul, tell them I have a soul.”

“Yes, my son, yes,” brushing his sleeve unconsciously, glancing for support at Heff, who just in time suppressed a choking giggle.

“Fix me, Father, I’m a sinner. I’ve done wrong. My mortal soul is in danger.”

“Yes, yes, of course, try and calm yourself, I’ll be only a moment.” With shaky gestures and an odd glance around the mildewed room for security in some familiar object, the priest annointed the senses with holy oil. He squinted as he prayed hurriedly for the sins each perceptive organ had under its jurisdiction.

There was a pause, then a startling, erotic sensation on the soles of his feet. Looking down, he was astonished to find them being annointed and prayed over.

“What are you doing
that
for, man?”

The priest was silent until he had finished, then answered with a weak smile, “The sins of the feet.”

“Of the feet?” Big toe right in there. Blakean fetish.

“They carry one to sin.”

“Ah.” He stared down at his great paddles, the ankles jutting out absurdly, Mr. Right and Mrs. Left, the hermaphrodites. Introduce them again, annointed sinners. Hello there, you handsome thing. Hello there yourself; wanna tickle?

“Well then.” The priest stood and replaced the cruet in his bag. “We’ll certainly remember you in our prayers. It’s so seldom we’re called out to administer this lovely sacrament. So many think it’s reserved for the dying, you see.”

“Ohhhhh,” pressing both forefingers to his temples.

“What is it, my son?”

“The dregs of the pain, ohhhh.”

“My, my. You really must not negate the value of secular medicine,” looking to Heff for corroboration.

“Symptomatic claptrap, Father; they fail to treat the disease. But here . . . ” he motioned for his rucksack, fishing out two of the silver dollars, “here; for the poor.”

“Oh. Well, thank you. My. But what are they?” Turning them over cautiously in pink fingers.

“Silver, Father. Sow and ye shall reap.”

“Yes, well. Well then, I’ll just be going. When you’re healthy again you must come along to the Newman Club. There are so few members.”

“I certainly will, man. And may I bring this fallen angel as well?” Heffalump twitching at the reference.

“Of course, you might even be interested in the little choir we’re getting up. Well then, I’ll just be on my way. Lovely sacrament, this. Pleasing to give.” He squirmed into his heavy coat and turned to the door as Heff rose, “No no, I’ll let myself out. Thank you.” And was gone.

“Weeee,” squealed Gnossos when the footfalls had faded, “Dig me. Dig where I’m at. Annointed, cleansed, purified.”

“Your feet are all greasy.”