Tooth and Claw (12 page)

“Hurry!” I barked.

She was wearing blue jeans, a blouse under the long coat, nothing under that. The coat fell to the floor, the blouse parted, the jeans grabbed at her thighs, and her panties—yellow and gold butterflies and hovering bees, the panties of a child—slid to her knees. Hypnogogic reverie indeed. I tore the buttons off my third-favorite Hawaiian shirt, yanked at my belt, but it was too late, too far gone and lost, because Rudy was pounding on the door like the Gestapo with instructions from Cuttler to knock it off its hinges and snap an amyl nitrate cap under my nostrils if I lingered even a heartbeat too long.

I don’t know. I can’t remember. But I don’t think I even touched her.

D
AY ELEVEN WAS
a circus. A zoo. I was in the cage, hallucinating, suffering from dissociated thinking, ataxia, blurred vision and homicidal rage, and the KFUN fans—a hundred of them at least, maybe two hundred—blocked the street, pressed up against the glass walls, gyrated and danced and shouted. Tony was with me full-time now, counting down to the moment of Randy Gardner’s annihilation, the KFUN sound truck blasting up-to-the-minute KFUN hits to the masses, the police, the city council and the mayor getting in on the act—taking credit, even, though at a safe distance. The stores up and down the block were doing a brisk business in everything from T-shirts to birdcages to engagement rings, and the fast-food outlets were putting on extra shifts.

Hezza was in the booth with us, the booth that had grown crowded now because Dr. Laurie and Nguyen were hovering over the console like groupies, milking every moment for all it was worth,
and nobody wanted Hezza there but me. I insisted. Got angry. Maybe even violent. So, though Cuttler and Rudy the intern bit their lips and looked as sour as spoiled milk, Hezza was right there in a plastic chair between me and Tony, her medium-sized mittened hand clutched in my own. And why not? I was the star here, I was the anchorite, I was the one nailed to the cross and hung out to dry for the public’s amusement and edification and maybe even redemption. I was feeling grandiose. Above everybody and everything. Transcendent, I guess you’d call it. I wanted Hezza in the booth. Hezza was in the booth.

Tony and I stumbled our way through the show, the Boomer anything but, my wit dried up, my voice a freeze-dried rasp, a whisper. We played more music than usual, cueing up one insomnia tune after another, the Talking Heads’ “Stay Up Late,” the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a Cuttler Ames’ blast from the past “Wake Me, Shake Me.” The ads came fast and furious. Tony counted down the minutes in a voice that got increasingly hysterical. The record was in sight. I was going to make it—and what’s more I was ready to shoot for the whole banana, the twelfth day, the immortal day, and I’d already told Cuttler as much. “It’s in the bag,” I told him, waving my arms over my head like an exercise guru. “No fears.”

And then the final countdown, live on the air, 5-4-3-2-1, and a shout went up from the crowd, all those delirious bobbing heads, Hezza grinning up at me out of her parchment face and squeezing my hand as if she were milking it, Dr. Laurie beaming, Cuttler, Tony and the mayor jostling for position with Nick Nixon from the local TV station and a smattering of crews from as far away as Fresno and Bakersfield. “Speech!” somebody shouted, and they all took it up: “Speech, speech, speech!”

I rose from the chair, bits of pea stone gravel stuck to the backside of my sweaty trousers, Hezza rising with me. Tony was chanting along with the crowd now—or no, he was leading the chant, his voice booming out through the big speakers of the sound truck. It was my moment of glory. My first in a whole long dry spell that stretched all the way back to high school and a lead role in the Thespian Club’s
production of
The Music Man
. I lifted the mike to my lips, took a deep breath. “I just want to say”—my voice was thunderous, godlike—“I just want to say, Goodbye, Randy Gardner, R.I.P.!”

T
HEN
I
WAS ALONE
again and it was dark. The morning had bled into afternoon and afternoon into evening, the world battened on the fading light, and with every sleepless minute a new record was being forged. Dr. Laurie begged me to quit at noon, three hours into the new record (actually six, if you consider that I’d been awake and alive for the show that first day before sequestering myself in the glass box). She reminded me of the rats—“They had hemorrhages in their brain tissue, Boomer; enough is enough”—but I ignored her. Cuttler wanted me to go twelve full days, and though I knew on some level he didn’t care if I lived or died, I had to show him—show everybody—what I was made of. It was only sleep. I could sleep for a week when I was done. A month. But to stay awake just one more minute was to make history, and the next minute would make history all over again, and the next after that.

Hezza had melted away with the crowd. Dr. Laurie had gone home to sleep. Tony had a date. Cuttler was cuddled up at home with his snaggle-toothed British wife, listening to Deep Purple or some such crap. Even the bums had deserted me, taking their movable feast down the avenue to a less strenuous venue. The funny thing was, I felt fine. I didn’t think sleep, not for a minute. What I saw and what I thought I saw were one and the same and I no longer cared to differentiate. I was living inside a dream and the dream was real life, and what was wrong with that?

I watched the KFUN fans line up outside the Soul Shack, watched the line swell and shrink, and fixated on the taillights of the cars moving silently down the boulevard. I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch the portable TV Tony had set up for me, couldn’t even listen to the chatter of it. Everything seemed so inconsequential. I would say that my mind wandered, but the phrase doesn’t begin to do justice to the state I was in—I no longer inhabited my body, no longer had a mind or a being. I felt a great peace descend on me, and I just
sat there in silence, studying the red LED display on the console as it chopped and diced the hours, moving only to lift a listless hand to acknowledge the thumbs-up from one or another of the baggy-pantsed teens drifting by on the sidewalk. The club emptied, the streets went silent. I didn’t even bother to take my restroom breaks.

In the morning, the light climbed down from the tops of the buildings, a light full of pigeons and hope, and Tony appeared, as usual, at quarter of six, with two cups of coffee. There was something wrong with him, I could see that right away. His face lacked dimension. It wasn’t a face at all, but a flat screen painted with Tony-features. He looked worried. “Listen, Boom,” he said, “you’ve got to give this up. No offense, but it’s like having a dead man here doing the show with me. You know what you said yesterday, on the air, when I asked you how it felt to set the record? You remember that?”

I didn’t. I gave him a numb look.

“You said, ‘Fuck you, Dog Face.’ ”

“I said ‘fuck’? On the air?”

Tony didn’t respond. He handed me a coffee, sat down and put his headphones on. A moment fluttered by. I couldn’t feel the paper cup in my hand. I studied Tony in profile, hoping to see how he was Tony,
if
he was Tony. “Just keep out of my way today, will you?” he said, turning on me abruptly. “And when the show’s over, when you’ve got your twelve days in, you go home to bed. You hear me? Rudy’s going to take over for you the next two days, so you get a little vacation here to get your head straight.” And then, as if he felt he’d been too harsh, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned into me. “You deserve it, man.”

I don’t remember anything of the show that day, except that Tony—Gooner, as the KFUN audience knew him—kept ringing down the curtain on my record, reminding everybody in KFUN land that the Boomer would be going on home to bed at the conclusion of the show, and what would the Boomer like? A foot massage? A naked blonde? A teddy bear? Couple of brewskies? Ha-ha, ha-ha. One more day, one more show, one more routine. But what Tony didn’t know, or Cuttler Ames or Dr. Laurie either, was that I had no
intention of giving up the microphone: I was shooting for thirteen days now, and after that it would be fourteen, maybe fifteen. Who could say?

A handful of people were milling around outside the glass booth as we closed out the show, but there was none of the ceremony of the preceding day. The record had been broken, the ratings boosted, and the stunt was over as far as anybody was concerned. The mayor certainly didn’t show. Nor did Dr. Laurie. Tony let out a long trailing sigh after we signed off (“This is the Gooner—and the Boomer—saying
adiós, amigos
, and keep the faith, baby—at least till tomorrow morning, same time, same place”) and made as if to help me out of the chair, but I shoved him away. He was standing, I was sitting. I was trembling all over, trembling as if I’d just been hosed down on an ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
Don’t touch me
, I muttered to myself.
Don’t even think about it
. He dropped his face to mine, his big bloated moronic moon face that I wanted to smash till it shattered. “Come on, man,” he said, “it’s over. Beddy-bye. Time to crash.”

I didn’t move. Wouldn’t look at him.

“Don’t get psychotic on me now,” he said, and he took hold of my left arm, but I shrugged him off. The people on the street stopped what they were doing. Heads turned, eyes zeroed in. He gave them a lame smile, as if it was all part of the act. “You’re tired,” he said, “that’s all,” but there was no conviction in his voice. “Boomer?” he said, as if I were floating away from him. “Boomer?” A minute later I heard the glass door at the back of the booth swing open and then shut.

At quarter past nine I went to do my update, but the mike was dead: they’d cut the power on me. I flicked the on/off button a couple of times, then shifted in my seat to glare at the engineer in the sound truck, but the engineer wasn’t there—nobody was. So that was it. They were going to isolate me, the sons of bitches. Cut me off. Use me and discard me. I got up from my seat, and who was watching? Nobody. Or no, there was a six-year-old kid standing there gawking at me while his mother jawed with some other mother in front of the Burger King outlet across the street, and I locked eyes with him for an instant before I jerked the mike out of the socket. What came next I don’t remember too clearly, or maybe I’ve repressed it, but it seems I
began to pound the mike against the Plexiglas walls, whipping it like a lariat, and when that was in fragments, I went for the console.

When they finally got me out of there, I’m told, it was past noon and I was well into my thirteenth day—a record that has yet to be surpassed, incidentally, though I’m told there’s a fakir in India who claims he hasn’t slept in three months, but of course that’s unofficial. Not to mention impossible. At any rate, Dr. Laurie had to come down and reason with me in a rigorous way, a squad car began circling the block, and Cuttler ordered Rudy and the sound engineer to cover up the glass walls with black plastic sheeting from the Home Depot up the street. We were getting publicity now, all right, but it wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely sort of publicity our august program director had in mind. I’d latched the door from the inside and forced the remains of the console up against it as a makeshift barricade. Rudy was on the roof of the glass cage, unscrolling sheets of black plastic as if it were bunting. I watched Dr. Laurie’s face on the other side of the transparent door, watched her mouth work professionally, noted and discarded each of her patent phrases, her false pleas and admonitions. Anything could have happened, because I wasn’t going anywhere. And if it wasn’t for Hezza I might still be in that glass box—or in the Violent Ward down at the County Hospital. It was that close.

I wasn’t aware of how or when it occurred, but at some point I realized that Hezza’s face had been transposed over Dr. Laurie’s, and that Hezza was smiling at me out of the screwholes of her dimples. I don’t know what it was—psychosis, terminal exhaustion or the simple joy of being alive—but I’d never seen anything more beautiful than the earflaps of her knit hat and the way they tucked into her cheeks and made her face into the face of a cut-out doll in a children’s book. I smiled back. Then she bent her head, scribbled a moment, and pressed a sheet of paper to the glass. I LOVE YOU, it read.

O
F COURSE
, this is the sort of resolution we all hope for, even the sleep-deprived, but it wasn’t as easy as all that. When we got to my place, when we got to the bed I hadn’t seen in thirteen days, the skin of irreality was so thick I couldn’t be sure who it was at my side—Hezza, Dr. Laurie, my ex-wife, one of the lean shopping machines
I’d watched striding down the avenue from the confines of my glass cage. There was a stripe of sun on the carpet. I pulled the curtains. It vanished. “Who are you?” I said, though the earflaps were a dead giveaway. Something began buzzing from the depths of the house. Outside in the alley the neighbor’s dog barked sharply, once, twice, three times. She looked puzzled, looked hurt. “Hezza,” she said. “I’m Hezza, don’t you remember?”

This time I didn’t have to shout, didn’t have to do anything really except fall into her where she lay naked on the bed, the blissful bed, the place of sex and sleep. I made love to her through the sheath of exhaustion and afterward watched her eyes slip toward closure and listened to her breathing deepen into sleep. I was tired. Had never been so tired in my life. No one on this earth—no one, ever, not even Randy Gardner—had been so tired. I closed my eyes. Nothing happened. My eyes blinked open as if they’d been trip-wired. For a moment I lay there staring at the ceiling, then I closed them again and by force of will kept them closed. Still nothing. Hezza stirred in her sleep, kicked out at an imaginary something. And then a figure stepped out of the mist and I didn’t see him. He had a gun, and I didn’t see that either. Swiftly, a shadow moving over open ground, he came up behind me and fired, hitting the gap between the parietal plates.

Boom: I was gone.

S
HE WAS TRYING
to tell him something about eels, how it had rained eels one night on a town in South America—in Colombia, she thought it was—but he was only half-listening. He was willing himself to focus on the road, the weather getting worse by the minute, and he had to keep one hand on the tuner because the radio was fading in and out as they looped higher into the mountains. “It was a water spout,” she said, her face a soft pale shell floating on the undersea glow of the dash lights, “or that’s what they think, anyway. I mean, that’s the rational explanation—the eels congregating to feed or mate and then this eruption that flings them into the air. But imagine the people. Imagine them.”