Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (16 page)

Heff ducking as a surprised crow flew directly at them and veered away. He nodded silently, hands going into pockets. “Zombis.”

“They’ve got it all down, Aquavitus man; even the cat with the opal in his forehead, from Havana, whatever they call him.”

“Buddha,” came the snappy reply, then a frown as he began walking faster. “C’mon, you think I got all night?”

“Stay loose, man.”

“Loose, that’s right. Ha,” spitting. Something wrong?

“Little meprobamate, just the thing for your head.”

“Take gas.”

“What’s up, man?”

His head shaking, foot kicking at the road.

“Heff?”

“What?”

“Something bugging you?”

“Nope.”

“It’s only that I thought something might be bugging you.”

Heff stopping suddenly at the sarcasm, turning to face Gnossos in the dark. “Look, Paps, you’re my ace buddy and all that but I’ve already told you about Jack, so cool it, okay?”

“What?”

“I dig the chic, I’m in love with her.”

“Hey, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Jack, I’m talking about Jack.”

“So?”

“So it’s bad enough she fools around with other chics without you talking about her and me and positions, that’s what.”

Gnossos catching on, booming out a surge of laughter, poking Heffalump forcefully in the stomach, making him double over and cough. “Oh, splendid Heffalump, decadent old boogie.”

Heff uncoiled at the word, hissed, and took off after Gnossos, who was bounding away, yelling back, “Help help, a heffable horralump; horr horr—”

Two cars came speeding around the turn at their backs, horns blasting, one passing the other, tires on the shoulder of the road. They had to leap out of the way, arms flying, both of them landing in a plowed but virgin snowdrift. They lay panting until the sound of the cars had vanished, Gnossos giggling to himself, chin tucked against his chest.

“Oh, you’re bad-ass shit, all right,” said Heff, raising himself momentarily out of the drift, not wanting to be there, then sinking back resignedly
as his elbow slipped. Gnossos rose, still giggling, and strolled back the ten yards between them, flopping down again.

“Okay, baby, where’s the insight?”

Silence. Then, in an annoyed voice: “Don’t provoke me.”

“I’m straight, I want to know whatever you meant at Grün’s.”

Heff checking for facial expression, inflection. “You’re provoking me.”

“No, man, I’m the soul of nonviolence. Dig me lying here in the wet, at peace.”

“You said you’d be around next fall, that’s all.”

Gnossos giggling again, making a wet snowball, tossing it out on the road. “Oeuf does it, no reason why I can’t.”

“No, I guess not.”

“C’mon, wise-ass.”

“And what about all these maniac hangups you’ve got—secretly, mind you, but got all the same—with Morality and Conduct, and like that?”

“Hangups?”

“This whole neurotic
syn
drome about love. What’s going to happen is you’ll get dosed, as if I’m telling you something you don’t already know. And you can’t just say you’re making this party tonight because of some clinical interest in Mojo and his weirdo helper. That’s a lot of crap too. You’ll fall by just on the off-chance you’ll meet the absolutely A-number-one apocalyptic love of your life, and walk off into a field of cherry blossoms or some shit. Man, you
know
you’re pulling for the big one and don’t tell me different.”

“Oh come on, Heff.”

“Or maybe not cherry blossoms, maybe Oriental poppies with that corpuscular fruit.”

“Capsular.”

“All the same junk. So why couldn’t you get hung up on this Pamela chic and save yourself a lot of dosing? Least you can do, a little expiation for the blood on your hands, Seymour, Simon, whatever the cat’s name was—which you can’t pretend you’re not a little paranoiac about. Fitzgore’ll grab her while you’re waiting.”

“Hey look—”

“Probably you’re not able to, excuse the expression, love her any, ’cause you’re worried that your
approach
was too crude to begin with— stomping in on her the way you did. And what the hell are you going to do for a living when you get out of here? You don’t have a dime, sweetheart, and you never did, outside of those scholarships you somehow conned—”

“Won, baby,” corrected Gnossos, “in competitive exams—”

“—and nobody,” continued Heff, barreling right over him, “nobody’s going to give you squat, and you know it.”

“Stipend. Grants. The Ford Fruit, the Guggenheim Vine.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What for, man, where’s the percentage?” Gnossos falling silent momentarily as another set of headlights glowed dully on the horizon, grew brighter, then poked away into the night. “You’re out to bring me down. You have any grass with you, by the way?”

“And that’s another thing, that escapism syndrome. You watch and see, you’ll be mainlining, man, in a year and a half you’re gonna have trackmarks right down into your fingertips. Lying around on old newspapers in a Detroit hotel, with a neon sign blinking in the window on your collapsed veins, with a poppy pipe in your mouth.”

“Stimulates the soul.”

“Don’t talk to me about soul, Paps. You go out and roll it around so it gets all dirty on U.S. Forty and then flee back to Athené to get purified. That poor monsignor didn’t know what he was getting into.”

“My senses, man, he cleaned out my senses, not my soul. Greek senses need reawakening every so often. And anyway, he was accomplishing his function.”

“So what?”

“So he at least knows what his function is, and that puts him one up on you and me.”

“Jargon.”

“Vision, baby, that’s all I’m after. Having a night light on all the time so’s I can see.”

“Be satisfied with the sun.”

“I want to
be
the sun, schmuck. Particles, wave, and source.”

“Yeah, and where do you fit it all in, Pythagoras?”

“You bet your ass where. Tight in the old womb-bag, if I could get one big enough to creep into.” Gnossos reaching into his rucksack and pulling out a piece of strongly smelling goat cheese from Greece, old rabbit hairs and pieces of lint stuck to the mold. “Right here, baby, look at what comes out, examine the texture. You smell it? Not very idyllic, true? A piece of old cheese with Saltine crumbs, that’s about the best I can do.”

“So split for Athens, Mykonos, someplace groovy.”

“With what? About as much heart as you’d have getting on the British steamer for Nairobi? No thanks. Exemption, baby. Walk among the diseased with Immunity. A little knowledge-in-the-abstract is all. With any luck, a vision every seventh day or so. Keep your senses hanging out, dig a little.”

Heff nodding, but without much assurance.

“Of course there’s a rule of thumb that goes along with that.”

“Yeah?”

“Skip the Small Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“You know what I mean?”

“I heard you.”

“You ever dig Washington crossing the Delaware?”

“All’s I want to do is get to Havana, man, I don’t want to know anything about George Washington. I mean really, who is that, George Washington?”

Gnossos popping the goat cheese into his mouth, shrugging. “Enough said. Let’s go to this party.”

They lifted themselves, wet and shining from the drizzle, stomping their boots, just as a truck lumbered by and fixed their forms in the conical glare of its lights. They watched their shadows roll along the falling mist behind them. Then Heffalump, after a moment’s hesitation, gave Gnossos a perfectly dry, solidly packed paregoric Pall Mall from his wallet. “Pax,” he said. “Before I have to punch you in the mouth.”

“Thanks, man, you’re so sweet.”

They shared the joint while walking, speaking not another word.

Oobop shebam.

The rain fell in sudden, torrential sheets, barreling out of the low-flying clouds. Gnossos and Heffalump breaking into a run to escape it, sprinting the last few yards from the road to the protection of the barn, glancing around through the lashing wind to make certain the place was right.

They stood shivering in an arched doorway, stamping their feet, wiping their faces free of the wet. The windows of the loft glowed above them, a soft orange color through the burlap squares strung across the panes. Lamps burning on the floor, no doubt, pointed at the walls, indirect hipster decor, always the same. The barn was next to the Dairy Queen, as Mojo had said, wispy thread of irony there, proximity to frozen-custard machines. A squat, angular building with a mammoth vanilla cone balanced on its sloping roof, entrances all boarded up, looking inert and functionless. A deformed glass egg abandoned the instant after laying, dropped
unceremoniously to the earth by some huge, clattering aluminum bird.

“Ground zero,” said Heff, shaking out his soaking jacket.

Gnossos nodded, looking for something to dry his hair with. He indicated the large number of cars parked by the road: no care for their placement, look of a party to them. The microbus had been moved to a patch of dry ground under a dense grove of sycamores, secure position, half hidden from sight, snow shoveled away, ready to flee. Exercise caution, old sport, the furies are never asleep. Who to be? Green Arrow, Billy Batson? Plastic Man still best, do the metamorphosis, be a Mingus side, feel the crystal vibration in my grooves, spindle poking through the brain, reincarnation of a lovebird, three-four time, funk in a rocking chair.

They climbed the worn, surprisingly well scrubbed wooden stairs to the loft and paused before a heavy oak door. Everything too clean-looking for a barn, smell of disinfectant, no farmy odor, no snatches of old hay. Murmurs from the party within, sudden surges of laughter, glasses tinkling through the hubbub. A faint, then increasingly stronger, scent of smoldering pot. Heff made a sniffing sound. “Hey, man.”

“Yeah,” said Gnossos, “I just got the breeze myself.” A comforting nutlike aroma, smoky, autumn leaves.

“Lot of cars down there, where’d he get all the people?”

“Who knows, Celebrity Service maybe.”

The oak door was built to slide sideways on heavy-duty casters and it took both of them to roll it back. On the other side was a small vestibule, built for protection against winter, and another door, more conventional, opening into the party. Gnossos put his ear against it, waited for another surge of laughter, shrugged, and went in.

For a moment he could barely see through the smoky, polarized haze. Heff stepped in behind him, colliding, blinking, fanning his hand in front of his face. “Wow,” he said.

The place was full of zombis.

One wall of the loft had been cleared of plaster, wire-brushed, and taken down to the ancient brick. Gnossos paid brief attention to what might have been a piece of frontal sculpture, a lumpy frieze, then shifted his cautious gaze. Above him was a skylight, its glass panels surfaced with different-colored sheets of translucent plastic to make it appear stained. Beams across the ceiling, antique, but too antique, blowtorch no doubt, knots and burls chiseled in, clever atmosphere. A hairy little man squatted on a silk pillow in the middle of the floor, wearing a V-necked teeshirt, holding a guitar limply in his hands. A bubbling narghile rested on a brass platform at his side, one of its many mouthpieces pursed in the man’s lips.

Pallets on the floor, covered with Indian prints and burnt-sienna burlap, zombis on the pallets. Japanese bamboo mats, here and there a foam rubber cushion stained with spilled liquids, crushed fruit, spent love. Zombis on the cushions, each of them from the back of the Mojo microbus; leaning on the brick wall; lounging against a masonite collage; hovering by the narghile. Twin vampires with Egyptian eye makeup knelt by an icebox-size polyphonic speaker, digging sounds too muted to distinguish. Couples dancing on the bare floor, but not exactly dancing, more like shifting their weight around the common focus of their welded navels, rubbing.

“Very domestic little scene, wouldn’t you say?”

“Lovely,” said Heff.

But something out of key, in abeyance. Jaded energy only potential in the smoke-filled air. Too many students, straight as arrows, smoking legit cigarettes. Surely they know? That one with the boobs, dancing with what’s his name, the editor. Lumpers, Judy Lumpers. And that South American ring-ding with his sequined rodeo shirt, they couldn’t be heads. The orgy?

“Where’s it all at?” asked Heff, picking up the thought.

“I don’t know, wrong party maybe.” But then he knew. Mojo, dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the previous morning, still carrying the bullwhip-fastened briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, was leading a girl through the haze, into a doorway at the far end of the loft. The girl had already stepped over the threshold when he noticed them, too late for Gnossos to recognize her. At that precise moment the record changed and the zombis paused with a collective hush, their voices falling silent in the absence of diversionary sound. Mojo failed to realize the quiet in time, retained the volume of his inflection, and offered a delicate joint from his tweed jacket to the girl on the other side of the small metal door. Her phthisic hand reached back across the threshold, and his faltering, anxious voice became clearly audible in the hush: “Like a kiss is how, dear girl; wanton lips against the flesh, then suck.”

There were snickers and a quick, interrupted laugh. Mojo grinned nervously, showed his missing tooth, and stepped inside with a quick, weasel-like shifting off of weight. The door closed as the next record began, and conversation resumed its earlier level. Nonetheless Gnossos was able to distinguish a particular sound, unmistakable in intent: the clacking of a bolt jumping securely into place.

He turned to speak to Heff but Heff was staring at the brick wall in horror. Gnossos looked as well, and a scalding chill swam through the viscous
fluids of his bowels like an evil fish. The frieze on the wall was not a frieze.

It was a spider monkey.

“Proust,” said Heap, who had materialized at their side.

They both jumped at the name. “What?”

“That’s his name, guys. The monkey.”