Tooth and Claw (11 page)

I
FOUGHT SLEEP
through the morning and into the early afternoon, so wired on caffeine my knees were sore from knocking together under the table. There are two low points in our circadian cycle, one to four in the morning, which seems self-evident, and, more surprisingly, the same hours in the afternoon. Or maybe it’s not so surprising when you take into account the number of cultures that indulge the post-prandial nap or afternoon siesta. At any rate, on a normal day at this hour I’d be doing voice-overs on ads or dozing off in one of the endless meetings Cuttler and Nguyen seemed to call every
other day to remind us of the cost of postage, long-distance phone calls and the paper towels in the restroom. The afternoon lull hit me. My head lolled on my shoulders like a bowling ball. I thought if I ate something it would help, so when Tony stopped in to glad-hand the bums and the half-dozen lingerers and gawkers gathered round the booth, I asked him to get me some Chinese takeout. I did the one forty-five spot (“Hey, out there in KFUN land, this is the Boomer, and yes, I’m still awake after three hours and forty-five minutes, and when you hear the tone it will be exactly—”), then bent to the still-warm cartons of kung pao chicken, scallops in black bean sauce and mu shu pork.

I couldn’t eat. I lifted the first dripping forkful to my mouth and a dozen pairs of eyes locked on mine. The bums had been stretched out in comfort all morning, passing a short dog of Gallo white port, cadging change and hawking gobs of mucus onto the pavement, making merry at my expense, and now they just turned their heads to stare as if they somehow expected me to provide for them too. A trio of middle-aged women with Macy’s bags looped over their wrists took one look at me and pulled up short as if they’d forgotten something (lunch, most likely). And one of the old men from the morning reappeared suddenly, licking his lips. I tried to smile and chew at the same time, but it wasn’t working. I toyed with the food awhile, even picked up one of the thrillers and tried to block them out, but finally I set down the fork and pushed the cartons away. That was when the girl in the earflaps popped up out of nowhere—she must have been lurking in the bushes along the median or watching from the window of the Soul Shack—to painstakingly indite a second message. She pressed it to the glass. EAT, it read, YOU’RE GOING TO NEED YOUR STRENGTH.

T
HE GIRL
’
S NAME WAS
Hezza Moore. She was of medium height, medium weight, medium coloring and medium attractiveness. We met formally just after the sun went down the evening of that first day. I’d got my second wind around seven or so (the second period of alertness in our circadian cycle, by the way, corresponding to the
one we experience in the morning), and by the time the sun went down I felt as energized as Nosferatu climbing out of his coffin. I paced round the glass box, spanked off my quarter-hour spots with the rumbling monitory gusto that had won me my on-air moniker ten years back when I was an apprentice jock at KSOT in San Luis Obispo, did a few sets of jumping jacks, flossed my teeth and unlatched the glass door at the rear of the booth to embrace the night air.

I was thinking this is a lark, this is nothing, thinking I could go a month, a year, and who needed sleep anyway, when she materialized at the open door. She was still in the knit cap, but she seemed to be wearing mittens now too, and an old Salvation Army overcoat that dropped to the toes of her Doc Martens. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“You remember that Dishwalla promo you guys did six years ago?”

I gave her a blank look. The temperature reading on the display over the Bank of America down the street was 71°.

She’d edged partway into the booth, one foot on the plywood floor, her shoulders bridging the Plexiglas doorframe. “You know, the new CD and dinner for two at the Star of India? I was the fourteenth caller.”

“Really?”

She beamed at me now, two dimples sucked down into her smile. The knit hat cut a slash just above her eyes, and her eyes jumped and settled, then jumped again. “Yeah,” she went on, “but I was only fifteen and I didn’t have anybody to go with. I wound up going with my mom, and that was a drag. You should have been the prize, though. I mean, it was you telling us all that the fourteenth caller would win the free chapatis and the lime pickle and all the rest of it, and if it’d been you going to dinner with the fourteenth caller I would’ve died. Really, I would have. You know, I’ve never missed your show, not even once, ever since you went on the air? I even used to listen in school, in homeroom and first period, with headphones.”

I held out my hand. “It’s a real pleasure,” I said, just to say it, and that was when she gave me her name. “You want an autograph? Or some of this swag?” I gestured to the heap of KFUN T-shirts, beanies,
CDs and concert tickets we were giving away as part of the Wake-A-Thon, teen treasure mounded in the corner of the glass booth just above the spot on the pavement outside where one of the bums—the one with the empty pantleg where his left foot should have been—was stretched out in bum nirvana, snoring lustily.

Her eyes changed. She looked down and then away. “Oh, no,” she breathed finally. “No, I didn’t come for any of that. Don’t you realize what I’m saying?”

I didn’t. A wave of exhaustion crashed inside of me and pulled back from the naked shingle with a long slow suck and moan.

“I came for you. I’m here for you. For as long as it takes.” She lifted her eyes and gave me a searching look. “I’m your
angel
,” she said, and then she backed away and vanished into the night.

I
MADE IT THROUGH
the first week without closing my eyes once, not even in the privacy of the Soul Shack’s unisex restroom, resorting to the Freon horn and the safety pin whenever I felt myself giving way. My body temperature dropped to 94.2 degrees at one point, but Dr. Laurie wrapped me in one of those thermal survival blankets and brought it back up to normal. Like the rats, I ate. Over-ate, actually, and by the second day I couldn’t have cared if Mother Teresa and all the starving bald-headed waifs of Calcutta were camped outside the glass cube, I was eating and there were no two ways about it. Whereas before I’d made do like any other bachelor fending for himself, skipping breakfast most days and going to the deli for a meatball wedge in the afternoon and one fast-food venue or another in the evening, now I found myself gorging almost constantly. Tony and Dr. Laurie were bringing me pizza, sushi, tandoori chicken and super-sizer burritos around the clock. I was thirsty too. Couldn’t get enough of the power drinks, of Red Bull, Jolt and Starbucks. The caffeine made me sizzle and it hollowed out its own place in the lining of my stomach, a low gastrointestinal burning that made me know I was alive. For the first few nights I felt a bit shaky during the down hours, from one to maybe five or so, but I never faltered, and there was always somebody there to monitor me, whether it was Dr. Laurie or one of our interns at the station. As the hours fell away, I felt
stronger, more alive and awake, though the integument was back, draped over the world like a transparent screen, and everything—the way Hezza’s mouth moved when she spoke, Tony’s animated thrusts and jabs as he sat emoting beside me from six to nine each morning, even the way people and cars moved along the street—seemed to be happening at the bottom of the sea.

Cuttler made himself scarce the first week, chary of associating himself with failure, I suppose, but on the eighth day, when I was a mere seventy-three hours from the record, he showed up just after Tony and I had signed off and the blitzkrieg of ads leading into Annie’s slot had begun cannonading over the airwaves. I was experiencing a little difficulty in recognizing people at this juncture—my eyes couldn’t seem to focus and the pages of the thrillers were just an indecipherable blur—and I guess I didn’t place him at first. He was standing there at the open door of the booth, a vaguely familiar figure in a canary-yellow long-sleeved shirt and trailing cerulean scarf, threads of graying blond hair hanging in his eyes—his small, pig-like eyes—and two mugs of piping hot coffee in his hands. Or maybe he was wearing a pullover that day, done up in psychedelic blots of color, or nothing at all. Maybe he was standing there naked, pale as a dead fish, loose and puffy and without definition beyond the compact swell of his gut and the shriveled little British package of his male equipment. Who was I to say? I was hallucinating at this point, experiencing as reality what Dr. Laurie called “hypnogogic reveries,” the sort of images you summon up just before nodding off to Dreamland.

“Boomer, you astonish me, you really do,” Cuttler might have said, and I think, in reconstructing events, he did. His figure loomed there in the doorway, the two coffee mugs emblazoned with the KFUN logo outstretched to Tony and me. “We all took bets, and I tell you, really, I’ve been on the losing end all week. Not that I didn’t have faith, but knowing you, knowing your performance, that is, and the level of your attachment to, uh,
procedure
down at KFUN, I just didn’t think—well, as I say, you do astonish me. Bravo. And keep it up, old chip.”

My focus was wavering. I couldn’t really feel the cup in my hands, couldn’t tell if it was cold or hot, ceramic or Styrofoam (I was
suffering from astereognosis, the inability to identify objects through the sense of touch, the very same condition that had afflicted Randy Gardner from the second day on). I felt irritated suddenly. Hot. Outraged. The feeling came up in me like a brush fire, and I couldn’t have put the two proper nouns “Cuttler” and “Ames” together if they were the key to taking home the million-dollar prize on a quiz show. “Who the fuck are
you
?” I snarled, and the coffee seemed to snake out of the cup of its own accord.

Cuttler’s canary-yellow shirt was canary no longer, if, in fact, that was what he was wearing that day. He snarled something back at me, something offensive and threatening, something about my status at the station, but then Tony, glad-faced, big-headed, cliché-spouting moron that he was, stepped in on my side. “Lay off him, Cutt,” he might have said. “Can’t you see the strain he’s under here? Give us a break, will you?”

And now I felt warm to the bottom of my heart. Tony, good old reliable witty Tony, my partner and my fortress, was coming to my aid. “Tony,” I said. “Tony.” And left it at that.

Then somehow it was night and my mood shifted to the valedictory because I knew I was going to die just like the rats. My quarter-hour spots lacked vitality, or that was my sense of them (“Helloooo, you ladies and baboons out there in K-whatever land, do you know what the time is? Do you care? Because the Boomer doesn’t”). The street outside the booth wasn’t a street anymore but a portal to the underworld and the bums weren’t bums either, but dark agents of death and decay. I saw my wife and her second husband rise up out of the fog, sprout fangs and wings and flap off into the night. My dead mother appeared briefly, rattling the ice cubes in her cocktail glass till the sound exploded around me like a train derailment. I shoved a gyro into my face, fascinated by the pooling orange grease on the console that seemed to have risen up out of the floor beneath me just to receive it. When Dr. Laurie, who might have been dressed that night like a streetwalker or maybe a nun, came in to monitor me, I may have grabbed for her breasts and hung on like a pair of human calipers until she slapped me back to my senses. And Hezza. My angel
in earflaps. Hezza was there, always there, as sleepless as I, sometimes crouched in the bushes, sometimes manifesting herself in the booth with me, rubbing my shoulders and the small of my back with her medium-sized mittened hands and talking nonstop of bands, swag and the undying glamour of FM radio. Christ was in the desert. I was in the booth. My fingers couldn’t feel and my eyes couldn’t see.

O
N THE TENTH DAY
, I achieved clarity. Suddenly the ever-thickening skin of irreality was gone. I saw the street transformed, the fog dissipating that seemed to have been there all week pushing up against the glass walls like the halitosis of defeat, each wisp and tendril burnished by the sun till it glowed. I went live to the studio for my quarter-hour update and let my voice ooze out over the airwaves with such plasticity and oleaginous joy you would have thought I was applying for the job. When I got up to visit the facilities at the Soul Shack, a whole crowd of starry-eyed fans thumped and patted me and held out their hands in supplication even as the chant
Boomer, Boomer, Boomer
rose up like a careening wave to engulf us all in triumph and ecstasy. One more day to set the record, and then we’d see about the day beyond that—the twelfth day, the magic one, the day no other DJ or high school science nerd or speed freak would ever see or match, not as long as the Guinness Brewing Company kept its records into the burgeoning and glorious future.

I was running both taps, trying to make out the graffiti over the toilet and staring into my cratered eyes as if I might tumble into them and never emerge again, when there came a soft insistent rapping at the door. Clear-headed though I was, I felt a surge of irritation. Who in hell could this be? Didn’t everybody in town, from the people in their aluminum rockers at the nursing home to the Soul Shack’s ham-fisted bouncers, know that I had to have my five minutes of privacy here? Five minutes. Was that too much to ask? Sixty stinking minutes a day? Did they have to see me squatting over the toilet? Unzipping my fly? What did they want, blood? “Who is it?” I boomed.

The smallest voice: “It’s me, Hezza.”

I opened the door. Hezza’s face was drawn and white, pale as a
gutter leaf bleached by the winter rains. Beyond her I could see Rudy, our prissiest intern, studying the stopwatch that kept me strictly to my five minutes and not a second more. “Nazi!” I shouted at him, then pulled Hezza into the bathroom with me and shut the door.

She was shivering. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the irises faded till you couldn’t tell what color they were anymore. She’d been keeping vigil. She was as tranced as I was. “Take your clothes off,” I told her.

How much hesitation was there—half a second?