Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (24 page)

“It’s not her fault. I’m sorry, really I am.”

“Then stay out with me. It’s not your fault either.”

“It
is
my fault for getting you started and then having to come back. You know what would happen if I stayed.”

“Fuck it. So you get booted. We’d flee.”

“Listen, Pooh Bear. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“And stop giving the finger to that girl, she’s getting all upset. Are you listening?”

“Right.”

“Do you know why I said okay tonight? I mean, before those people came in.”

“Those were not people. Those were Oriental maniacs and I’m going to kill them in their sleep.”

“You’re not listening to what I mean.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you know why I said okay?”

“What okay?”

“Gnossos, honest to God, would you put that finger in your pocket or something. We only have another minute.”

“Another minute, that’s right.”

“People are watching you.”

“Do you know what I’m going to do to those wogs? Do you have any idea what terror I’m going to bring down on their nodding, alcoholic heads?”

“Gnossos, listen to me!”

“I’m listening. What the hell makes you think I’m not listening? Just because those idiots stayed there and got smashed and grinned at us for two and a half hours.”

“I said okay because I want you, does that make any sense?”

“They’re going to fear the sound of my footsteps, man.”

“And because of everything you said tonight.”

“Torture, mutilation, the death of a Thousand Cuts. And who the hell are you kidding, baby? Whenever I talk, I talk to the old wall, right? Twenty times, maybe, I told them to clear out, you were there, you heard me. All’s we got was that inscrutable crap they come on with.”

“I have to get inside, Gnossos.”

“I’ll bet they practice it. I’ll bet they stay up in front of little mirrors from Poona or someplace and rehearse Detachment.”

“I’m talking about what you said to
me
, not them, or the wall. Oh Christ, the light is out. Hurry and kiss me.” Her arms flew around his neck and held on for nearly a minute. The girl from the sign-in desk came to the door with a huge key and said officially: “Miss McCleod.”

Gnossos wiggled his finger back and forth. His baseball cap was on the back of his head, his boy scout shirt was buttoned at the throat, tied with a red bandana, his tennis shoes were full of holes, and his corduroy trousers were too short.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered, and was gone through the door. He could see her pronouncing the word goodnight as she paused in the vestibule, and his heart sank. He gave the Greek horns to the sign-in girl, who was pale with hatred, then turned back to the empty courtyard.

In his shirt pocket was a rolled-up piece of paper. Irma Rajamuttu had inserted it mysteriously when Kristin was in the bathroom, fixing the brass ring on her hair. In an alarming moment of sober exemption from betel, gin,
and grenadine, and with the professional air of a secret lover at a cocktail party, she’d said to him, “Much caution.”

Now the paper was in his hand, and he kept it there until he reached the street. The first warm wind of spring was still blowing strongly, and all the fraternity automobiles were gone. There was no moon, so he shuffled under a lamppost to read, easing the baseball cap forward on his eyes. Indian pinheads, all into their own little thing. Much caution of what? Spooky, those red teeth, like a nutria, younger than I thought.

The message was written in indelible purple ink. It said:

the statement on the other side is false

He turned it over cautiously. The paper had a faint odor of incense and rosewater.

the statement on the other side is true

He thought about it only as long as he had to, then looked up, across the campus, at nothing in particular.

Tell me all about it.

BOOK
THE SECOND

G. Alonso Oeuf, also a paradox.

But not without a plan. Old corpulent jelly foxing the outside world for ten years, playing the game in enemy territory. Impossible to elude, like Muzak in Las Vegas. A subliminal breed of animate slogan, owl features and horn rims grinning at you everywhere. Textbook illustrations, Oeuf doing titration; billboards, Oeuf drinking Red Cap; campus calendars, Oeuf talking to summery coeds under sycamores. The Kodak blowup in Grand Central Station, his technicolor form expanded eighty times, gazing past a row of binocular microscopes,
YOUNG
AMERICA
AT
WORK
. A
Daily Sun
supplement on faculty achievement, in sweatclothes with a medicine ball, endorsing Dean Magnolia’s calcium remedy for athlete’s foot. Testimonial posters in the student union, wearing his black knit tie and olive shirt, shaking hands with candidates, bright-eyed androids who never lose. Wire photos, standing just behind President Carbon at groundbreaking ceremonies. Newsreels, always prominent in the spectator footage; parades, football games, state funerals. People remember but don’t know why. Who was that young man with the umbrella, Miss Pankhurst, don’t we know him from somewhere?

Gnossos finally clomped down the hill to check Oeuf’s condition. The belated visit was coaxed by Youngblood’s early-morning call, a smell of unrest in the thermal air, and a taste of ferment and revolt. Heffalump had once returned with a description of the private infirmary room. Odors of antiseptic and Old Spice toilet water, he’d said, the university’s only Hollywood sack, topped with the inflatable mattress they kept for inflamed-prostate cases, sons of South American dictators. Something about an office atmosphere, file cabinets on casters, swingaway bookshelves with political science texts, electric typewriters plugged in and humming, an abacus, an adding machine, a dictaphone, mimeograph stencils, chrome-plated photostat devices, empty peanut jars of sharpened pencils, shorthand pads, small combination safe, addressograph machine, three telephones. One with a red panic-bulb, padlocked.

He wandered through the antiseptic Victorian building, opening ward doors, peeking into out-patient waiting rooms, stumbling upon blood tests and urine analyses, feeling his way. Too much of a drag to check with the desk, forms to fill out, questions to answer, maybe get a no at the end: Sorry,
young man, Mr. Oeuf is not allowed visitors, will you just sign this loyalty oath and try again in the fall?

But he was approached mysteriously by a red-haired nurse in orange spike heels. She looked him up and down and said, “Room one-o-one. Follow me, please.”

“Who’re you?”

“Nurse Fang. This way, please, last door on the left, Alonso has been expecting you.”

She walked ahead of him, ass swinging, nearly six feet tall. At the door she used a four-inch key, nodded, and waited for him to enter.

Oeuf lay propped up in the huge bed, wearing baby-blue pajamas. There was white piping on the lapels. He was shorter and fatter than Gnossos remembered him, chubby little-boy fingers, trimmed cuticles, new goatee. His attention was momentarily fixed on a pack of playing cards. Systematically he was cutting kings and aces. Not realizing who had entered, he motioned for a moment’s silence before making a final part in the deck. The pause gave Gnossos an opportunity to locate the padlocked telephone on a bedside table. Around Oeuf’s neck were a platinum chain and key.

Cough. Two owl eyes blinked up.

“Pappadopoulis, well!” They blinked again. “I was beginning to despair. You find me
in extremis
and somewhat
en deshabillé
.” The whites of his eyes were cloudy yellow, not white. His expression changed from preoccupied intensity to pleasurable interest.

“Hello, Oeuf. Long time no see, buddy.”

“
Chacun à son goût
. Did you get my message?”

“Youngblood called at seven in the morning, man. Said you wanted to see me before you died, or something.”

“Splendid fellow, Youngblood. The perfect
particeps criminis
, I should say.” His horn rims slipped down on the tip of his tiny nose, fingers continuing to cut money cards. “Little poker, five-card draw?”

Gnossos shaking his head, patting the rucksack where the few remaining silver dollars clinked weakly. “Heff said you thought I was frozen, man, how’d you find out?”

“Oh, an
obiter dictum
here and there. How was she, anyway?”

“Who?”

“Your Radcliffe muse?”

He paused a moment. “
Obiter dictum
, my ass.”

“
Sotto voce
, Gnossos,
sotto voce
. There’s a nurse’s aid or two suspicious of my presence here.”

“Can’t blame them,” turning over a card, getting the queen of spades, sliding it back into the deck. “How’s your frame doing?”

“Bedsores, Gnossos. You wouldn’t believe them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it. And look at my eyes.”

“Jaundice?”

“Convincing, isn’t it? That’s what they thought
ab initio
.”

“What’ve you got, anyway?”

“It’s all unlikely. The whole thing is extremely unlikely. Speaking of which, I hear you’re in love.”

“Jesus Christ, Oeuf.”

“Venus is really more worthy of the invocation. Aphrodite, in your case. Cloud is her name? Christmas Cloud?”

“Kristin McCleod. And what do you mean ‘convincing’? Isn’t it still jaundice?”

“Never was, old boy. Not even mono. Didn’t have a thing, actually, till I caught the clap from Ian.”

“Clap? Who’s Ian?”

“I didn’t really catch it from Ian, but I said I did. He was their prostate surgeon here. Not a bad fellow at all, Canadian, I think. We shared a bathroom before they gave me these private accommodations, you see.”

“You don’t have the clap?”

“Oh, but I do. I caught it from Nurse Fang on this very same inflatable mattress. God knows where she got it. Perhaps from you. A great deal of
noblesse oblige
, Nurse Fang. Very
au fait
. Runs my addressograph machine, all kinds of special skills. You didn’t give her the clap, did you, Gnossos?”

“What the hell is this all about, you scheming maniac? And why are your eyes yellow?”

“You know Rosenbloom, certainly? Splendid fellow.
Agent provocateur
type. A chemical engineer, extremely useful, he prepares the inert ocher compound I’m obliged to use.”

Gnossos watched him carefully with a measured sideways glance. Then moved around the room slowly, cautiously, touching all the office machines to establish their presence, picking up pads to test for weight, listening to dial tones on the two unpadlocked telephones, trying the space bar on the electric typewriter. Oeuf watched with a considerate smile on his pale lips, continuing to shuffle cards on the pink silk quilt, cutting aces and kings. Gnossos finally stopped, after checking half a dozen names on the addressograph plates.

“All right, man, what’s up?”

“Whatever do you mean, Paps?”

“You know what I mean. All this organization crap, this private room, your not being sick and the whole goddamned campus thinking you were ready to die with hepatitis or something.”

“You do me an injustice, Paps. Like I said, I’m
in extremis
. I’ve got the clap. It’s very uncomfortable. Drip-drip-drip.”

“So get some penicillin. I want to know what’s up.”

“Penicillin no longer kills the Athené clap bug. Got to use one of the mycins.”

“Use one, then. What’re all the phones for?”

“They suggested aureomycin, but it might have cured me, and we cannot afford to let that happen. Too much harm would come of it. I’m safe here, Gnossos. We’re all safe here. Would you care for a drink? Metaxa perhaps, ice, twist of lemon, dash of angostura?” Oeuf cut the ace of diamonds as he leaned over toward the intercom and snapped a switch:

“Double Metaxa,
à la grecque;
the usual for me. And hurry, please.” He smiled again at Gnossos, then flicked the entire deck, a card at a time, from one palm to the other over a distance of nine inches. “Would you be surprised to learn, Paps, that with a minimum of risk and the vaguest cooperation on your part, you could earn precisely enough Exemption Status to keep you Immune, Secure, and Non-ionized, say, for the next generation?”

Gnossos watched the cards shuffle in the opposite direction like the folds in a collapsing concertina. He had not answered by the time Nurse Fang pranced into the room with a glass of Metaxa, a half pint of
piña colada
, and a small silver pail of icecubes. Her orange spike heels sank luxuriously in the wall-to-wall weave of the Kerman rug. Her pinstriped uniform was skintight.

“This is Mr. Pappadopoulis, Nurse Fang,” continued Oeuf, carefully watching both of them for signs of recognition. “He is not the man who gave you the clap you gave me, is he? The truth, now.”

Nurse Fang examined Gnossos with a clinical once-over from baseball cap to borrowed combat boots. “No sir,” she said.

“Very well. See that we’re not disturbed by anyone except the Junta.”

“Junta?” asked Gnossos. The nurse had walked across the rug and was closing the door behind her. She wore fishnet stockings.

“Sit down,” said Oeuf. “Let’s talk
en famille
.”

Gnossos eased into the empty leather chair by the side of the bed. Play it through, go along, who knows? There were no windows in the room, just the single door. His stomach rolled, but it could have been an intestinal hangover from the trauma of the previous afternoon’s bowel evacuation. He sipped at the Metaxa and forced a clever, “Try me, man.”

“The
ancien régime
is about to fall, Gnossos.”

“Oh yeah?”

“The
beau monde
is ready to topple.”

He nodded.

“There is going to be a
coup d’état
. The
bête noire
is doomed.”

“The
bête noire?
”

“President Carbon.”

“Oh.”

“Why just ‘oh’?”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Youngblood?”

“And I’m not interested,” standing up, looking for an uncluttered surface on which to set down his drink. “I’m a-political, dig?”