Count Geiger's Blues (6 page)
10
Critical Mass
One morning, Xavier took Bari and The Mick to mass
at Christ’s Episcopal Church in downtown Salonika, a lovely white edifice in the classic Greek style. Mikhail hadn’t wanted to go—he’d never gone with Xavier to church before—but when he learned that Bari was also going, he reconsidered.
On the walk from Franklin Court to Jackson Square, he slouched along behind Xavier and Bari in his blue jeans, sneakers, and a clean white T-shirt with his Ephebus Academy tie. Xavier had been about to forbid him to come, if he dressed with so little respect, but Bari, a vision in mockingbird-grey and eggshell-white, had urged Xavier to relax his standards—not to demean high communion, but to make it easier for Mikhail to go with them. “What’s more important, Xave, that he look like a little earl or that he take part in the Eucharist?”
Even Xavier knew the answer to that question; and in the wide, cool sanctuary of Christ’s Episcopal, as the choir on the balcony sang to guitar and flute accompaniment, the issue of the kid’s dress ceased to matter. Xavier felt uplifted by his presence in the church and exalted by the music. Nietzsche would puke, but Xavier was religious not just by childhood upbringing but on tested philosophical-aesthetic grounds. Preparing for high communion, he felt exactly as he did when strolling past a superb exhibition in the Upshaw or seeing Aeschylus well performed at the state theater.
So what if The Mick had schlepped into God’s house clad like a retropunk whirled through a men’s shop? So what if Xavier’s head still throbbed from too much wine at Lesegne’s? So what if Bari had come along more to keep him company than to take the elements? And so what if his nephew was paging the Book of Common Prayer as if it were an out-of-date volume of
Comic Buyer’s Guide
? What mattered now was this sublime striving toward Godhead. A sublime striving—as scandalous as the notion struck most priests—spiritually
akin
to the Nietzschean urge to obtain to the
Übermensch
.
“Are you all right?” Bari asked Xavier.
“Fine,” he said, surprised they were still in a building in latter-day Salonika.
The robed priest had finished his homily. He was calling parishioners to the altar to take the wafer and drink from a silver goblet. Ushers were gesturing pew occupants to their feet and nodding them into a shuffling double queue. The huge painting of Christ behind the altar, a fresco in which Jesus looked like either a Dante Gabriel Rossetti longhair or a superannuated hippie used-car salesman, seemed to lend the Savior’s own blessing to this steady procession. Xavier grabbed a pew back to get to his feet.
whoosh! his sinuses roared open. He pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, dabbed his upper lip and chin. But Xavier was the victim of an untimely allergy. Not only did his nose run, but his eyes gushed, his lips discharged a colorless sebum, and his ears drained a waxy amber goo.
“Fucking gross,” yucked The Mick.
Xavier was disoriented, as if a very large person—Lee Stamz, say—had seized his head and plunged it into a zinc bucket of acidic vanilla extract and melted crayons.
“Xavier, you’re ill,” Bari said, taking his arm.
“I’m all right!”
“You can’t go up, Uncle Xave,” The Mick whispered. “They’re using a fucking common cup.”
An usher—a watery ghost in a three-piece suit—said, “He’s right. Things being what they are nowadays, we can’t let you take with everybody else.”
Had Xavier insisted on that privilege, there might well have been a scene in Christ’s Episcopal. But Xavier didn’t insist. Balloon-headed, he offered no protest when the usher led him and his companions to the vestibule.
Asked the usher, “Should I see if there’s a doctor in church today, Mr. Thaxton?”
“No, thank you.”
Xavier, Bari, and The Mick walked home. Or, as it seemed to him, swam home, dog-paddling through the bizarre mists generated by his own inner weathers. Yuck. (The only word adequate to the situation.)
Later, laid out on the sofa in his living room, a towel protecting the pillow under his head, Xavier tried to compute the chances of drowning while unsubmerged.
“We should call a doctor or visit the ER at Salonika General,” Bari said.
“Unh-uh. I’ll be all right.”
Squatting, The Mick opened the louvered doors hiding the TV.
“Not now, Mikhail,” Bari pled.
“Uncle Xave didn’t get decently churched. Watch this.”
Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s
Great Gospel Giveaway
flickered into view. Wide-angle pans of the Televangelism Temple in Rehoboth, Louisiana, revealed several thousand jubilant worshipers. McElroy was dunning them and his video audience for money, now with a performance by twelve poodles dressed in robes: McElroy’s Dixie Dog Disciples. The poodles danced about the stage as a two-hundred-member choir sang:
“Giving your all, / O yes, your all, / Yes, giving your all / For JEEEEEE-suhss.”
“What a fucking trip,” said The Mick.
“Spare me,” Xavier said, squinting at the spectacle between his stockinged feet. “Mikhail, spare me.”
“Come on, Mick,” Bari said.
“Just want Uncle Xave to get his minimum weekly fix of religion, Bari-Bari.”
“That’s not religion, Mikhail, but an abominable mix of sideshow hucksterism and pious razzmatazz.” Xavier sat up and pointed at the screen. “
Great Gospel Giveaway
has about as much to do with cultivating faith as astrology has with acquiring knowledge about the heavens. A hypocritical sham. It makes me sick. Sick to my soul.”
“That may be. But,” Bari said, “you seem to be doing a little better physically.”
Xavier recoiled to find this true. Strange fluids had ceased flowing from his eyes, ears, and nose. His mucous membranes had dried out, he was witnessing McElroy’s vaudevillian tom-foolery with mist-free eyes.
Gospel Giveaway
offended him spiritually, but he couldn’t deny that he was otherwise in the pink of health.
How thoroughly he’d recovered from his untoward allergy attack during high communion!
“Turn that off, Mikhail. Now.”
The Mick, picking up something implacable in his uncle’s tone, obeyed.
11
Chad, Di Pasqua, and the Therac 4-J
Teri-Jo Roving’s two-year-old son, Chad,
stood on the carpeted speaker’s platform in an auditorium of the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic. Dr. Witcover, a visiting oncologist, had just given a lecture on new advances in detection-and-diagnostic procedures, and Chad, podium mike in hand, was doing a dead-on baby-talk impersonation of the departed lecturer. Dr. Di Pasqua heard the noise and returned from the corridor. He had been so busy dispensing hospitality and local color to Dr. Witcover that Teri-Jo hadn’t yet had a chance to talk with him. Well, that chance seemed imminent. . . . “I’m sure you all have things to do,” Dr. Di Pasqua told Teri-Jo and the others watching Chad.
“Yessir,” everybody said, beginning to leave. Chad stayed on stage, beside the podium, swaying in knock-kneed spasms and talking to a mike that returned nothing but amplified popping. “Your grandson?” Dr. Di Pasqua asked Teri-Jo, now trying to halt the toddler’s performance.
“No, Dr. Di Pasqua, my firstborn.”
“Sorry,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “Of course.”
Teri-Jo carried Chad down to Dr. Di Pasqua. During her pregnancy, he had been on a research sabbatical. As a result, he had forgotten, or had never learned, that her labor had been hard and her recovery slow.
“Chaddie’s here because my husband’s sick. Our regular day-care providers are remodeling their building.”
“Never mind. So long as he isn’t burlesquing a distinguished guest, I don’t object to his being here.”
“Mamma,” Chad murmured lowly. He placed both hands on her face and pushed his button nose into her hair.
“Come, Nurse Roving,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “I’ve something to show you.”
They left the hall. When Dr. Di Pasqua thought better of Chad’s accompanying them, Teri-Jo took him to Bonnie Gainsboro, a secretary, who seemed even less thrilled by this arrangement than did Chaddie. His heartbroken wails were audible all the way to the service elevator to the basement.
*
Downstairs, Dr. Di Pasqua led her into the tunnel connecting the cancer clinic with Salonika General. “A custodian found this yesterday, but Dr. Witcover’s visit kept me from facing the problem until now.” They stopped short of the tunnel’s midway point, in a bleak tributary corridor that Teri-Jo had never really noticed before. Kept
me
from facing the problem, she amended her boss’s words. That’s what you really meant.
“This is an auxiliary storage area.” Dr. Di Pasqua opened the door with a tarnished key. “The custodian came in yesterday to inventory cleaning equipment, but ended up”—he escorted Teri-Jo past a tall rack of disinfectants and paper products—“finding something alarming.”
Briefly, Teri-Jo imagined the janitor stumbling upon a corpse, maybe even Dr. Wayman Huguley’s. Which was absurd. She’d gone to that old man’s funeral.
“There.” Dr. Di Pasqua pulled a frayed light string to reveal the inanimate cause of his alarm: “
That
.”
Teri-Jo gaped. It was a cancer-therapy device, an antiquated machine whose type the clinic no longer used and a working example of which she hadn’t seen in over fifteen years. Radiation therapy was yet a fairly young science, but before this obsolete treatment machine, Teri-Jo felt as a contemporary sports-car enthusiast might in the presence of a Stanley Steamer.
“What I’d like to know,” Dr. Di Pasqua said, “is if this thing has been radiation-decommissioned.”
“Desourced?”
“Yes. This was one of Dr. Huguley’s purchases. There’s no telling how long it’s been moldering in here.”
Despite the Scrooge-like slur on Dr. Huguley, her boss might be right. If he were right, he’d shown bad judgment letting them walk in here as if the therapy machine were as benign as any old Wurlitzer. They should have worn vest shields and carried a dose-rate meter. If any of the janitors had been cleaning with radioactive disinfectants, the clinic’s weekly checks would have told them so long ago.
Teri-Jo knelt by the machine. Its markings—and her own memory, now kicking in—identified it as a Therac 4-J, a device once manufactured by the EarthRay-Schenck Corporation of Danby, Ohio. Teri-Jo examined it carefully.
“It looks like its source is intact, Dr. Di Pasqua. The cylinder holding the cesium cake is here, just where it would be if the device worked. But there may be no cesium in the can.” She wrote down the machine’s serial number and date of manufacture.
“How likely is that?”
“Not very. If somebody’s going to decommission a source—empty out its heat—why would they shove the empty cylinder back into the machine? We’d probably be smart to regard the Therac 4-J as alive.”
“All right. We will. So we may have another disposal problem on our hands. If so, I’m charging you to get rid of this machine without a drawn-out search for a disposal site. We don’t have the room, and I don’t have the patience.” Dr. Di Pasqua directed Teri-Jo back out into the main tunnel.
Tell me something new, Teri-Jo thought. Aloud, she said, “At least I’ve got a telephone number this time. If they haven’t changed it. If they’re still in business.”
Dr. Di Pasqua locked the door, and he and Teri-Jo returned to the clinic, where she rescued Bonnie Gainsboro from Chad (and vice versa) and carried him into her own office to scan the computer files for the radiation-disposal invoice and to flip past all her dog-eared Rolodex entries looking for the number of . . . Environomics Unlimited. Ah, there.
“We’re in business, Chaddie.”
On the floor with a box of facial tissues, Chad pulled them out and tossed them away like a magician releasing doves with clipped wings.
*
That afternoon, Milton Copperud, the NCR physicist assigned to the cancer clinic, dropped by to tell Teri-Jo that, as she had surmised, the Therac 4-J was still
loaded
. It had not only its source cylinder, but, within it, a hefty complement of the radioactive stuff that had once made it a moderately effective therapy instrument.
Moderately effective
because this model of the machine had always had some design problems.
“Its last resupply from EarthRay-Schenck was two years before Dr. Huguley hired me,” she told Copperud, consulting a folder no one had ever logged onto a computer disk. “Cesium 137’s half-life is thirty years. That means there’s still a goodly mess of curies clicking away in there.”
“Well, Teri-Jo, they’re safely pent—the emission level’s not even measurable yet. But the sooner the Therac’s gone the better.”
“You talking public health, Milt, or my job security?”
Copperud laughed, winked, and took off for another part of the clinic. Chad slept in a nest of carpet shag, snoring in an eerie high-pitched impersonation of his daddy’s sleep sounds. Smiling, Teri-Jo punched out the old number for Environomics Unlimited.
Blessedly, it rang.
12
Variations on an Unknown Malady
In the next month, nothing similar to, or quite similar to,
the episode at Christ’s Episcopal befell Xavier. He told himself that an allergy had been to blame. When this theory failed to quell his doubts, he posited such causes as diet, stress, a rampant virus, or an extreme reaction to exhaust fumes or other pollutants. Damn it all, his body had begun to betray him in strange ways. Nothing like the sinus problems—“head leakage,” Mikhail had dubbed that complex of symptoms—suffered at communion, but stuff equally hard to account for and deal with. In fact, Xavier accounted for and dealt with it all by refusing to think about it.
If he thought about it, he’d have to take steps—write out a list of his episodes, visit a doctor. And visiting a doctor was out of the question. He didn’t want to know what the doctor might find. Cancer. Muscular dystrophy. AIDS. Alzheimer’s. Nothing but a clean bill of health would relieve his anxiety, and maybe he couldn’t get one. So he never thought about his illness except recurrently through the day and continuously through the night. In “The Night-Song” from
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, the prophet says,
“But I live in my own light, I drink again into myself the flames that break forth from me.”
Xavier was living in his own darkness and drinking again into himself every potentially enlightening tongue of flame. Maybe those flames would flicker out if he ignored them. . . .
The Mick just survived his classes at Ephebus, bringing home a D- in English for refusing to let Melville, Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner “bore” him. This attitude enraged Xavier, who saw it as an excuse for avoiding the unfamiliar and dismissing big chunks of humanity’s past as unworthy of study.
During Ephebus’s Christmas break, The Mick hunted different means of getting through his days while Xavier worked. He read (comic books), eyed the tube (soaps and game shows), fiddled with his computer (video games), and listened to his tapes and CDs (especially those of Cold Grease on Cary and Smite Them Hip & Thigh). What he didn’t do, Xavier noted, was throw the football in Le Grande Park, lift weights at the Y, take walks, or join a youth basketball league. “You’ve got to get some exercise,” Xavier told him. “You can’t just sit up here and vegetate.”
So The Mick rummaged up his skateboard, bought knee and elbow pads, high-topped athletic shoes, and a helmet, and spent his days “thrashing” the sloped concrete walls at Skateboard City on Battery Place. He did this morning and the afternoon. He did it wearing court gear and a pair of loose dove-grey sweats—so that when he got home in the evening, he had the parboiled look of a lobster and the reek of a well-worked dray horse. His shins, forearms, and palms bore the bruises and hamburgery scrapes that he got playing “war” against other skateboard jockeys, and at dinner Xavier felt lucky if Mikhail didn’t nod off while eating.
“Go easy,” Xavier said. “Don’t wear your skateboard out before the New Year.”
So The Mick stayed home the next day, and that evening Xavier asked him to play chess. It took a while to persuade Mikhail, his own preferred sports being televised women’s roller derby and the all-out sort of concrete surfing favored at Skateboard City, but at last he fetched the chessmen and the board. This, thought Xavier, is what Mikhail needs. Skateboarding was on a par with declassé amusements like pro wrestling, jai alai, and drag racing, but chess was a hallowed variety of intellectual combat.
The game began. The two traded pawns and erected defenses even as they plotted wily lines of attack. Xavier was into it, and likewise The Mick. Abruptly, Xavier’s nose began to bleed. He’d never had a nosebleed in his life, and the sight of so much crimson splashing the chess pieces—“
The Red Sea!
”, to quote Cyrano—unnerved him. Maybe the hemorrhage implied a fatal cancer. Both hands over his nose, he recoiled from the board as if from blazing coals.
“
Caramba!
” The Mick cried. “Looky, unc—you’ve done a
Friday the Thirteenth
sequel on your whole damned army!”
Nearly every piece on Xavier’s side of the board resembled the victims in a slasher film. Seeing the bloody carven knights, bishops, and other pieces, well, it made him recall every rotten horror film he’d stumbled into accidentally or whose plot he’d heard numbingly detailed by the
Urbanite
’s Popular Culture staff. Abruptly—as abruptly as it had begun—his nosebleed was staunched. Mysteriously staunched.
“You okay?” The Mick asked.
“I think so.” Xavier wiped his face and hands with a tissue.
“Here.” The Mick picked up the board. “I’ll clean the bloody fuckers up.”
“Okay, but I’ll never touch one of those chessmen again. Never.”
The Mick considered the crimson flood an interlude in their play, not an emphatic period, but Xavier would not continue. He retreated to the bathroom for a washcloth and peered at himself in the mirror with haunted eyes.
*
That same December, some actors set to act in the next George Bernard Shaw Drama Festival in Placer Creek came to Salonika’s Oconee State Theater to do a staged reading of “Don Juan in Hell” from
Man and Superman
. This reading was a preview of the festival and a sop to city officials who felt that Phosphor Fog Community College was too small an institution, in too remote a spot, to host such a prestigious event.
Xavier, now recognizing Ivie Nakai’s passion for all things Shavian, took her with him. Because she would attend the GBS Drama Festival & Country Crafts Fair as the
Urbanite
’s Fine Arts reporter, he wanted her to have a head start on the out-of-state competition. He had outperformed the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, and
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reporters who’d come to Oconee last July. Ivie would too.
The first reading was a private affair for the mayor and a few media people. The actors dressed casually and moved about the bare stage as if their playbooks were superfluous. Their preparation and the ease with which the actors playing Don Juan and the Devil spieled Shaw’s witty speeches impressed Xavier.
Suddenly, he found himself resisting an urgent pressure in his lower colon. Ivie Nakai, enraptured by the performance, was unaware of his problem. How to dam this intestinal tide? Should he run to the john to prevent public embarrassment? Near the end of the piece, as the Devil advised,
“Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human,”
Xavier had no choice. Standing, he said, “Forgive me, Ivie. This is . . . urgent.”
It was, too, and in the john, he tried to recall if he’d eaten or drunk anything that would have affected him this way. Out of disgust for its radio ads, he avoided Ricardo’s, and he’d never been big on martinis or kraut dogs. But even as empty as an unused wineskin, his stomach continued to knot and unknot. Xavier crept back into the theater and eased down in his seat just as the actors were taking their final bows.
“God,” Ivie said. “You’re as white as a slug, sir.”
*
Xavier left the theater and caught a taxi back to the Ralph McGill Building. He had work to do, and his continuing cramps were no immediate threat to his sanity. They’d surely stop soon. (Wouldn’t they?)
In the lobby, Donel Lassiter saw Xavier and waved a tabloid called the
Instigator
at him. “See this rag. A classic, a bona fide classic.”
“Garbage, Donel. Garbage pure and simple.”
“How can you say that, sir? This story”—slapping the front page—“is Pulitzer Prize material.” He thrust the
Instigator
into Xavier’s hands. “See for yourself.”
“Wait a sec—!”
But Donel exited hurriedly onto the street. Xavier, gut aching, carried the paper to his office and read “84-year-old woman gives birth to frog!” —the headline of the story that Donel had cited as Pulitzer Prize material.
Other headlines?
TEENAGE SEX SLAVE’S FAVORITE SNICKERDOODLE RECIPE
JESUS’S UFO TWIN VISITS ISRAELI KNESSET WITH JOHN LENNON’S GHOST
DANNY DEVITO AND JACKIE O. REVEAL THEIR FORBIDDEN LOVE
Xavier, incredulously agog, perused the accompanying stories. In a while, his wrenching intestinal spasms ceased, and he felt himself again.
An evening later, Xavier attended a performance of the Salonika Symphony Orchestra. The airier his spirit, though, the heavier his body. As the tenor horn sounded soulfully in a late movement of Mahler’s
Seventh Symphony
, his knees began to tremble, his eyes to tear, his arms to depend like dead-weight salamis. Not again, he thought.
He had to stay alert. If he fainted, he’d halt the winter concert, embarrass himself, and miss the piece’s stirring
Kapellmeistermusik
parody, a rondo that never failed to tickle and revive him. How terrible, to succumb again to the perverse ailment that had plagued him off and on ever since . . . his fateful camping trip in the Phosphor Fogs.
What barbarous times, he thought, still trying to focus on the fourth movement’s lovely
Nachtmusik
. A barbarism that includes various nuclear threats, random terrorism, the galloping debasement of popular tastes—and the soul-destroying physical and emotional fallout from these horrors. Xavier envied the
civilized
romantic angst of Mahler, who had written this movement in 1904 at Maiernigg in the Tyrolean Alps. Even in those transitional times, one could fall into existential nausea. But in 1904, at least, one could still shape, without embarrassment or apology, sublime works of art, passionate expressions of the human soul that could change one’s life and redeem the age.
The harp and the tenor horn lifted Xavier’s spirit ever higher, but his body had filled with sludge. “Xavier,” said the beauty beside him in the
Urbanite
’s reserved box. “Xavier, what’s wrong?” Bari Carlisle, a world-famed couturière. The woman he planned to marry. He could not answer her. He pulled himself up by the balcony rail and stared down on the audience. Closing his watery eyes, he reached toward the musicians brilliantly rendering the
Seventh
. Gravity seized him, and he began to topple.
“
Xavier!
” Bari cried.
Later, people conferred above him.
“An honest-to-God swoon,” a male voice said. “You rarely see that anymore.”
“Better to call it a ‘swoon dive,’ ” a woman said.
“If Ms. Carlisle hadn’t grabbed him by the cumberbund.”
“Otherwise,” the woman replied, “he’d’ve taken out three or four concertgoers.”
“Who is he, Tess?”
“Fine Arts editor of the
Urbanite
. Or he favors that highbrow idiot’s picture.”
“Idiot or no, he brought this Mahler marathon to an end. I’m forever in his debt.”
Bari knelt beside Xavier. “Then why not give the ‘highbrow idiot’ a little air?”
“Why?” a woman said. “I mean, he’s always giving himself airs, isn’t he?”
Holding a moist towel to Xavier’s forehead, Bari glared at the bitch, and she and her escort slunk off via the stairs.
Belatedly, the orchestra launched the bravura fifth movement of
Song of the Night
. “Thanks,” Xavier managed, opening his eyes and reaching for Bari’s hand. He still felt weak, but getting out of their balcony seats had restored a modicum of his vitality. Unfortunately, the wonderful music swelling anew in the concert hall had begun to erode it again.
“We’re leaving,” Bari said.
“I
can’t
leave. Concert’s not over. I’ve got a review to do.”
“Haven’t you liked what you’ve heard so far?”
“Of course. This is a definitive Seventh, Bari.”
“Then the fifth movement won’t be a letdown, either.” Bari helped Xavier stand. “Write what you’ve told me and your review’s as good as in the system.”
“That’d be cheating, Bari. That’d be—”
“—surviving, lover, and that’s all we’re going to say about the matter. Come on.” She helped him down the stairs and out of the concert hall.