Slow Learner, page 7
By this time it was late and everybody was loaded. Bolingbroke yawned. “Good night, man,” he said. “I got to be up bright and early. You hear any strange noises don’t sweat it. That’s a strong bolt.”
“Wha,” Pig said. “Who’s gonna get in?” Flange began to feel uneasy.
“Nobody,” Bolingbroke said, “only them. They try to get in every once in a while. But they ain’t yet. And there’s a hunk of pipe you can use if they do.” He put out the lamp and stumbled over to his bed.
“Yeah,” Pig said, “but who?”
“The gypsies,” Bolingbroke yawned. His voice was drowsing off into sleep. “They live here. Here in the dump. Only come out at night.” He fell silent and after a while began to snore.
Flange shrugged. What the hell. All right, there were gypsies around. He remembered back in his childhood that they used to camp out on the deserted areas of beach along the north shore. He thought by now they had all gone; somehow he was glad they had not. It suited some half-felt sense of fitness; it was right that there should be gypsies living in the dump, just as he had been able to believe in the rightness of Bolingbroke’s sea, its ability to encompass and be the sustaining plasma or medium for horse-drawn taxis and Porcaccios. Not to mention that young, rogue male Flange, from whom he occasionally felt the Flange of today had suffered a sea change into something not so rare or strange. He drifted into a light, uneasy sleep, flanked by the contrapuntal snorings of Bolingbroke and Pig Bodine.
How long he slept was uncertain; he awoke in that total darkness with only the visceral time sense of its being two or three in the morning, or at least a desolate hour somehow not intended for human perception, but rather belonging to cats, owls and peepers and whatever else make noises in the night. Outside the wind was still blowing; he searched it for the sound he knew had awakened him. For a full minute there was nothing, then at last it came. A girl’s voice, riding on the wind.
“Anglo,” it said, “Anglo with the gold hair. Come out. Come out by the secret path and find me.”
“Wha,” Flange said. He shook Pig. “Hey buddy,” he said, “there’s a broad out there.”
Pig opened one unfocused eye. “Great,” he mumbled. “Bring her in and let me have seconds.”
“No,” said Flange, “what I mean is, this must be one of the gypsies Bolingbroke was talking about.”
Pig snored. Flange groped his way over to Bolingbroke. “Hey man,” he said, “she’s out there.” Bolingbroke did not respond. Flange shook harder. “She’s out there,” he repeated, starting to feel panicked. Bolingbroke rolled over and said something unintelligible. Flange threw up his hands. “Wha,” he said.
“Anglo,” the girl called insistently, “come to me. Come find me or I shall go away forever. Come out, tall Anglo with the gold hair and the shining teeth.”
“Hey,” Flange said to nobody in particular. “That’s me, ain’t it.” Not quite, it occurred to him immediately. Closer to his Doppelgänger, that sea-dog of the lusty, dark Pacific days. He kicked Pig. “She wants me to come out,” he said. “What do I do, hey.”
Pig opened both eyes. “Sir,” he said, “I recommend that you go out and obtain a sitrep. And if she’s any good, like I say, bring her back in and let the enlisted men have a go at it.”
“Aye, aye,” Flange said vaguely. He made his way to the door, slid back the bolt and stepped outside. “O Anglo,” he heard the voice, “you have come. Follow me.”
“All right,” Flange said. He began weaving his way out through the stacks of tires, praying that he wouldn’t set off one of Bolingbroke’s booby traps. Miraculously, he made it almost to open ground before anything went wrong. He was not exactly sure that he had misstepped but realized, suddenly, that he had goofed somehow, and looked up just in time to see a huge stack of snow tires sway and lurch, hanging for a moment against the stars before they toppled over on him, and this was the last thing he remembered for a while.
He awoke to cool fingers on his forehead and a coaxing voice: “Wake up, Anglo. Open your eyes. You’re all right.” He opened his eyes and saw her, the girl, her face, floating wide-eyed and anxious over him, and the stars caught in her hair. He was lying at the entrance to the ravine. “Come,” she smiled. “Get up.”
“Sure,” Flange said. He had a headache. He was throbbing all over. He finally managed to get to his feet, and it was only then that he had a good look at her. In the starlight she was exquisite: she wore a dark dress, her legs and arms were bare, slim, the neck arching and delicate, her figure so slender it was almost a shadow. Dark hair floated around her face and down her back like a black nebula; eyes enormous, nose retroussé, short upper lip, good teeth, nice chin. She was a dream, this girl, an angel. She was also roughly three and a half feet tall. Flange scratched his head. “How do you do,” he said. “My name is Dennis Flange. Thank you for rescuing me.”
“I am Nerissa,” she said, gazing up at him.
He had no idea what to say to her next. The conversational possibilities were suddenly limited. Though they might, it occurred to him insanely, discuss the Midget Problem or something.
She took his hand. “Come,” she said. She pulled him after her into the ravine. “Where we going,” Flange said. “To my home,” she answered. “It will be dawn soon.” Flange thought about this. “Well wait a minute hey,” he said. “What about my buddies back there. I’m abusing Bolingbroke’s hospitality.” She did not answer; he shrugged. What the hell. She led him through the ravine and up the slope. On top of the pinnacle of bank run stood a human figure, watching them. Other shapes hovered and flitted in the darkness; from somewhere came the sound of guitar music, and singing, and a fight in progress. They entered the junk pile he had passed before on the way to get a mattress, and they began picking their path through a cast-off chaos of starlit metal and porcelain. Finally she stopped at a General Electric refrigerator which lay on its back, and opened the door. “I hope you’ll be able to fit,” she said, climbed in and disappeared. Oh Christ, Flange thought, I’ve been putting on weight, haven’t I. He climbed in; the back of the refrigerator was missing. “Shut the door after you,” she called from somewhere below, and he obeyed trance-like. A beam of light shot up, probably from a flashlight she was holding, to show him the way. He had not realized that the junk pile ran to such a depth. There were some tight squeezes, but he managed to worm his way between, around and down through various loosely stacked household appliances for about thirty feet until he reached the opening of a forty-eight-inch concrete pipe. She was there waiting for him. “From here on it is easier,” she said. He crawled, she walked down a gentle incline which must have run for a quarter of a mile. In the wavering beam of the flashlight, between flickering shadows, he could see that there were other tunnels which led off from this one. She noticed his curiosity. “It took them a long time,” she said and told him how the entire dump had been laced with a network of tunnels and rooms back in the ’30’s by a terrorist group called the Sons of the Red Apocalypse, by way of making ready for the revolution. Only the Feds had rounded them all up, and a year or so later the gypsies had moved in.
They reached a dead end finally, with a small door set in the gravelly soil. She opened it and they entered. She lit candles, whose flames revealed a room hung with arrases and paintings, an immense double bed with silk sheets, an armoire, a table, a refrigerator. Flange had all kinds of questions. She told him about the air supply, and the drainage and the plumbing and the power line that had been run in without Long Island Lighting’s ever suspecting; about the truck which Bolingbroke used in the daytime and which they drove out at night to steal food and supplies; about Bolingbroke’s half-superstitious fear of them and his reluctance to inform anyone in authority about all this lest he be accused of alcoholism or worse and lose his job.
It occurred to Flange that there had been a gray furry rat sitting on the bed for some time, peering at them inquisitively. “Hey,” he said, “there is a rat over there on the bed.”
“Her name is Hyacinth,” Nerissa said. “Before you came she was my only friend.” Hyacinth blinked non-committally. “That’s nice,” Flange said, reaching over to pet the rat. She squealed and backed away. “She is shy,” Nerissa said. “She will make friends with you. Give her time.”
“Ha,” Flange said, “that reminds me. How long do you expect me to stay here? Why did you bring me?”
“The old woman with the eye patch who is called Violetta read my fortune many years ago,” Nerissa said. “She told me a tall Anglo would be my husband and he would have bright hair and strong arms and—”
“Of course,” Flange said, “yes. But us Anglos all look like that. There are all kinds of Anglos roaming around who are tall and blond.”
She pouted; tears began. “You do not want me for your wife.”
“Well,” Flange said, embarrassed, “what it is is, I already have a wife, I’m married, is what I mean.”
She looked for a moment as if she had been stabbed, then began to bawl violently.
“All I said was I was married,” Flange protested. “I didn’t say I enjoy it particularly.”
“Please do not be angry with me, Dennis,” she wailed. “Do not leave me. Say you will stay.”
Flange thought about this for a while. His silence was suddenly broken by the rat Hyacinth who did a backward somersault on the bed and began to thrash around violently. With a sharp pitying gasp the girl picked up the rat, held it against her breast and began to stroke it, croon to it. She looks like a child, Flange thought. And the rat like her own child.
And then: I wonder why Cindy and I never had a child.
And: a child makes it all right. Let the world shrink to a boccie ball.
So of course he knew.
“Sure,” he said. “All right. I’ll stay.” For a while, at least, he thought. She looked up gravely. Whitecaps danced across her eyes; sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the submarine green of her heart.
Entropy
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. . . . We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
— Tropic of Cancer
DOWNSTAIRS, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev. They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambú and had to their credit one 10” LP entitled Songs of Outer Space. From time to time one of them would flick the ashes from his cigarette into the speaker cone to watch them dance around. Meatball himself was sleeping over by the window, holding an empty magnum to his chest as if it were a teddy bear. Several government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and NSA, had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink.
This was in early February of ’57 and back then there were a lot of American expatriates around Washington, D.C., who would talk, every time they met you, about how someday they were going to go over to Europe for real but right now it seemed they were working for the government. Everyone saw a fine irony in this. They would stage, for instance, polyglot parties where the newcomer was sort of ignored if he couldn’t carry on simultaneous conversations in three or four languages. They would haunt Armenian delicatessens for weeks at a stretch and invite you over for bulghour and lamb in tiny kitchens whose walls were covered with bullfight posters. They would have affairs with sultry girls from Andalucía or the Midi who studied economics at Georgetown. Their Dôme was a collegiate Rathskeller out on Wisconsin Avenue called the Old Heidelberg and they had to settle for cherry blossoms instead of lime trees when spring came, but in its lethargic way their life provided, as they said, kicks.
At the moment, Meatball’s party seemed to be gathering its second wind. Outside there was rain. Rain splatted against the tar paper on the roof and was fractured into a fine spray off the noses, eyebrows and lips of wooden gargoyles under the eaves, and ran like drool down the windowpanes. The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been winds of gale force and before that the sun had made the city glitter bright as April, though the calendar read early February. It is a curious season in Washington, this false spring. Somewhere in it are Lincoln’s Birthday and the Chinese New Year, and a forlornness in the streets because cherry blossoms are weeks away still and, as Sarah Vaughan has put it, spring will be a little late this year. Generally crowds like the one which would gather in the Old Heidelberg on weekday afternoons to drink Würtzburger and to sing Lili Marlene (not to mention The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi) are inevitably and incorrigibly Romantic. And as every good Romantic knows, the soul (spiritus, ruach, pneuma) is nothing, substantially, but air; it is only natural that warpings in the atmosphere should be recapitulated in those who breathe it. So that over and above the public components—holidays, tourist attractions—there are private meanderings, linked to the climate as if this spell were a stretto passage in the year’s fugue: haphazard weather, aimless loves, unpredicted commitments: months one can easily spend in fugue, because oddly enough, later on, winds, rains, passions of February and March are never remembered in that city, it is as if they had never been.
The last bass notes of The Heroes’ Gate boomed up through the floor and woke Callisto from an uneasy sleep. The first thing he became aware of was a small bird he had been holding gently between his hands, against his body. He turned his head sidewise on the pillow to smile down at it, at its blue hunched-down head and sick, lidded eyes, wondering how many more nights he would have to give it warmth before it was well again. He had been holding the bird like that for three days: it was the only way he knew to restore its health. Next to him the girl stirred and whimpered, her arm thrown across her face. Mingled with the sounds of the rain came the first tentative, querulous morning voices of the other birds, hidden in philodendrons and small fan palms: patches of scarlet, yellow and blue laced through this Rousseau-like fantasy, this hothouse jungle it had taken him seven years to weave together. Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder. Through trial-and-error Callisto had perfected its ecological balance, with the help of the girl its artistic harmony, so that the swayings of its plant life, the stirrings of its birds and human inhabitants were all as integral as the rhythms of a perfectly-executed mobile. He and the girl could no longer, of course, be omitted from that sanctuary; they had become necessary to its unity. What they needed from outside was delivered. They did not go out.
“Is he all right,” she whispered. She lay like a tawny question mark facing him, her eyes suddenly huge and dark and blinking slowly. Callisto ran a finger beneath the feathers at the base of the bird’s neck; caressed it gently. “He’s going to be well, I think. See: he hears his friends beginning to wake up.” The girl had heard the rain and the birds even before she was fully awake. Her name was Aubade: she was part French and part Annamese, and she lived on her own curious and lonely planet, where the clouds and the odor of poincianas, the bitterness of wine and the accidental fingers at the small of her back or feathery against her breasts came to her reduced inevitably to the terms of sound: of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy. “Aubade,” he said, “go see.” Obedient, she arose; padded to the window, pulled aside the drapes and after a moment said: “It is 37. Still 37.” Callisto frowned. “Since Tuesday, then,” he said. “No change.” Henry Adams, three generations before his own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stand as much for love as for power; that the two are indeed identical; and that love therefore not only makes the world go round but also makes the boccie ball spin, the nebula precess. It was this latter or sidereal element which disturbed him. The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identical at every point in it); the meteorologists, day-to-day, staved it off by contradicting with a reassuring array of varied temperatures.
But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of apocalypse, Callisto shifted beneath the covers. His fingers pressed the bird more firmly, as if needing some pulsing or suffering assurance of an early break in the temperature.
It was that last cymbal crash that did it. Meatball was hurled wincing into consciousness as the synchronized wagging of heads over the wastebasket stopped. The final hiss remained for an instant in the room, then melted into the whisper of rain outside. “Aarrgghh,” announced Meatball in the silence, looking at the empty magnum. Krinkles, in slow motion, turned, smiled and held out a cigarette. “Tea time, man,” he said. “No, no,” said Meatball. “How many times I got to tell you guys. Not at my place. You ought to know, Washington is lousy with Feds.” Krinkles looked wistful. “Jeez, Meatball,” he said, “you don’t want to do nothing no more.” “Hair of dog,” said Meatball. “Only hope. Any juice left?” He began to crawl toward the kitchen. “No champagne, I don’t think,” Duke said. “Case of tequila behind the icebox.” They put on an Earl Bostic side. Meatball paused at the kitchen door, glowering at Sandor Rojas. “Lemons,” he said after some thought. He crawled to the refrigerator and got out three lemons and some cubes, found the tequila and set about restoring order to his nervous system. He drew blood once cutting the lemons and had to use two hands squeezing them and his foot to crack the ice tray but after about ten minutes he found himself, through some miracle, beaming down into a monster tequila sour. “That looks yummy,” Sandor Rojas said. “How about you make me one.” Meatball blinked at him. “Kitchi lofass a shegitbe,” he replied automatically, and wandered away into the bathroom. “I say,” he called out a moment later to no one in particular. “I say, there seems to be a girl or something sleeping in the sink.” He took her by the shoulders and shook. “Wha,” she said. “You don’t look too comfortable,” Meatball said. “Well,” she agreed. She stumbled to the shower, turned on the cold water and sat down crosslegged in the spray. “That’s better,” she smiled.
