Going For a Beer

by Robert Coover

  He’s not far, he realizes, from the stairwell down to the rooms below, and it occurs to him, splashing over on his hands and knees (perhaps he’s thinking of the bomb shelters in war movies or the motherly belly of the whale), that he might be able to hide out down there for a while. Think things out. But at the head of the stairs he feels a cold draft: he leans over and sweeps the space with his hand: The stairs are gone, he would have plummeted directly into the unchartered regions below! It’s not completely dark down there, for he seems to see a dim roiling mass of ballroom dancers, drill sergeants, cartoon cats, and restless natives, like projections on smoke, vanishing even as they billow silently up toward him. Is that the ingenue among them? The one in the grass skirt, her eyes starting from their sockets? Too late. Gone, as though sucked away into the impossible chasms below.

  He blinks and backs away. The room has come to a stop, a hush has descended. The water fountains are silent. The floor is dry, his pants, his shoes. Is it over? Is she gone? He finds a twist of licorice in his pocket and, without thinking, slips it between his chattering teeth. Whereupon, with a creaking noise like the opening of a closet door, a plaster statue leans out of its niche and, as he throws himself back against the wall, smashes at his feet. The licorice has disappeared. Perhaps he swallowed it whole. Perhaps it was never there. He’s reminded of a film he once saw about an alien conspiracy which held its nefarious meetings in an old carnival fun house, long disused and rigged now (“now” in the film) for much nastier surprises than rolling floors and booing ghosts. The hero, trying simply to save the world, enters the fun house, only to be subjected to everything from death rays and falling masonry to iron maidens, time traps, and diabolical life-restoring machines, as though to problematize his very identity through what the chortling fun-house operators call in their otherworldly tongue “the stylistics of absence.” In such a maze of probable improbability, the hero can be sure of nothing except his own inconsolable desires and his mad faith, as firm as it is burlesque, in the prevalence of secret passages. There is always, somewhere, another door. Thus, he is not surprised when, hip-deep in killer lizards and blue Mercurians, he spies dimly, far across the columned and chandeliered pit into which he’s been thrown, what appears to be a rustic wooden ladder, leaning radiantly against a shadowed wall. Only the vicious gnawing at his ankles surprises him as he struggles toward it, the Mercurians’ mildewed breath, the glimpse of water-spotted underwear on the ladder above him as he starts to climb. Or are those holes? He clambers upward, reaching for them, devoted as always to this passionate seizure of reality, only to have them vanish in his grasp, the ladder as well: he discovers he’s about thirty feet up the grand foyer wall, holding nothing but a torn ticket stub. It’s a long way back down, but he gets there right away.

  He lies there on the hard terrazzo floor, crumpled up like a lounge-lizard in a gilded cage (are his legs broken? his head? something hurts), listening to the whisperings and twitterings high above him in the coffered ceiling, the phantasmal tinkling of the chandelier crystals, knowing that to look up there is to be lost. It’s like the dockside detective put it in that misty old film about the notorious Iron Claw and the sentimental configurations of mass murder: “What’s frightening is not so much being able to see only what you want to see, see, but discovering that what you think you see only because you want to see it . . . sees you . . .” As he stands there on the damp shabby waterfront in the shadow of a silent boom, watching the night fog coil in around the tugboats and barges like erotic ribbons of dream, the detective seems to see or want to see tall ghostly galleons drift in, with one-eyed pirates hanging motionless from the yardarms like pale Christmas tree decorations, and he is stabbed by a longing for danger and adventure—another door, as it were, a different dome—even as he is overswept by a paralyzing fear of the unknown. “I am menaced,” he whispers, glancing up at the swaying streetlamp (but hasn’t he just warned himself?), “by a darkness beyond darkness . . .” The pirates, cutlasses in hand and knives between their teeth, drop from the rigging as though to startle the indifferent barges, but even as they fall they curl into wispy shapes of dead cops and skulking pickpockets, derelicts and streetwalkers. One of them looks familiar somehow, something about the way her cigarette dances between her spectral lips like a firefly (or perhaps that is a firefly, the lips his perverse dream of lips) or the way her nun’s habit is pasted wetly against her thighs as she fades away down a dark alley, so he follows her. She leads him, as he knew she would, into a smoky dive filled with slumming debutantes and sailors in striped shirts, where he’s stopped at the door by a scarred and brooding Moroccan. “The Claw . . . ?” he murmurs gruffly into his cupped hands, lighting up. The Moroccan nods him toward the bar, a gesture not unlike that of absolution, and he drifts over, feeling a bit airy as he floats through the weary revelers, as though he might have left part of himself lying back on the docks, curled up under the swaying lamp like a piece of unspooled trailer. When he sets his revolver on the bar, he notices he can see right through it. “If it’s the Claw you’re after,” mutters the bartender, wiping a glass nervously with a dirty rag, then falls across the bar, a knife in his back. He notices he can also see through the bartender. The barroom is empty. He’s dropped his smoke somewhere. Maybe the bartender fell on it. The lights are brightening. There’s a cold metallic hand in his pants. He screams. Then he realizes it’s his own.

  He’s lying, curled up still, under the chandelier. But not in the grand foyer of his movie palace as he might have hoped. It seems to be some sort of eighteenth-century French ballroom. People in gaiters, frocks, and periwigs are dancing minuets around him, as oblivious to his presence as to the distant thup and pop of musket fire in the street. He glances up past the chandelier at the mirrored ceiling and is surprised to see, not himself, but the ingenue smiling down at him with softly parted lips, an eery light glinting magically off her snow-white teeth and glowing in the corners of her eyes like small coals, smoldering there with the fire of strange yearnings. “She is the thoroughly modern type of girl,” he seems to hear someone say, “equally at home with tennis and tango, table talk and tea. Her pearly teeth, when she smiles, are marvelous. And she smiles often, for life to her seems a continuous film of enjoyment.” Her smile widens even as her eyes glaze over, the glow in them burning now like twin projectors. “Wait!” he cries, but the room tips and, to the clunk and tinkle of tumbling parts, all the people in the ballroom slide out into the public square, where the Terror nets them like flopping fish.

  Nor are aristocrats and mad projectionists their only catch. Other milieus slide by like dream cloths, dropping swashbucklers, cowboys, little tramps, singing families, train conductors and comedy teams, a paperboy on a bicycle, gypsies, mummies, leather-hatted pilots and wonder dogs, neglected wives, Roman soldiers in gleaming breastplates, bandits and gold diggers, and a talking jackass, all falling, together with soggy cigarette butts, publicity stills, and flattened popcorn tubs, into a soft plash of laughter and applause that he seems to have heard before. “Another fine mess!” the jackass can be heard to bray mournfully, as the mobs, jammed up behind police barricades in the dark but festive Opera House square, cry out for blood and brains. “The public is never wrong!” they scream. “Let the revels begin!”

  Arc lights sweep the sky and somewhere, distantly, and ancient bugles blows, a buzzer sounds. He is pulled to his feet and prodded into line between a drunken countess and an animated pig, marching along to the thunderous piping of an unseen organ. The aisle to the guillotine, thickly carpeted, is lined with red velvet ropes and leads to a marble staircase where, on a raised platform high as a marquee, a hooded executioner awaits like a patient usher beside his gigantic ticket chopper. A voice on the public address system is recounting, above the booming organ and electrical chimes, their crimes (hauteur is mentioned, glamour, dash and daring), describing them all as “creatures of the night, a collection of the world’s most astounding horrors, these abominable parvenus of i
conic transactions, the shame of a nation, three centuries in the making, brought to you now in the mightiest dramatic spectacle of all the ages!” He can hear the guillotine blade rising and dropping, rising and dropping, like a link-and-claw mechanism in slow motion, the screams and cheers of the spectators cresting with each closing of the gate. “There’s been some mistake!” he whimpers. If he could just reach the switchboard! Where’s the EXIT sign? Isn’t there always . . . ? “I don’t belong here!” “Ja, zo, it iss der vages off cinema,” mutters the drunken countess behind him, peeling off a garter to throw to the crowd. Spots appear on his clothing, then get left behind as he’s shoved along, as though the air itself might be threadbare and discolored, and there are blinding flashes at his feet like punctures where bright light is leaking through.

  “It’s all in your mind,” he seems to hear the usherette at the foot of the stairs whisper, as she points him up the stairs with her little flashlight, “so we’re cutting it off.”

  “What—?!” he cries, but she is gone, a bit player to the end. The animated pig has made his stuttering farewell and the executioner is holding his head aloft like a winning lottery ticket or a bingo ball. The projectionist climbs the high marble stairs, searching for his own closing lines, but he doesn’t seem to have a speaking part. “You’re leaving too soon,” remarks the hooded executioner without a trace of irony, as he kicks his legs out from under him. “You’re going to miss the main feature.” “I thought I was it,” he mumbles, but the executioner, pitilessly, chooses not to hear him. He leans forward, all hopes dashed, to grip the cold bolted foot of the guillotine, and as he does so, he notices the gum stuck under it, the dropped candy wrapper, the aroma of fresh pee in plush upholstery. Company at last! he remarks wryly to himself as the blade drops, surrendering himself finally (it’s a last-minute rescue of sorts) to that great stream of image-activity that characterizes the mortal condition, recalling for some reason a film he once saw (The Revenge of Something-or-Other, or The Return of, The Curse of . . .), in which—

  LAP DISSOLVES

  (1987)

  She clings to the edge of the cliff, her feet kicking in the wind, the earth breaking away beneath her fingertips. There is a faint roar, as of crashing waves, far below. He struggles against his bonds, chewing at the ropes, throwing himself against the cabin door. She screams as the cliff edge crumbles, a scream swept away by the rushing wind. At last the door splinters and he smashes through, tumbling forward in his bonds, rolling and pitching toward the edge of the cliff. Her hand disappears, then reappears, snatching desperately for a fresh purchase. He staggers to his knees, his feet, plunges ahead, the ropes slipping away like a discarded newspaper as he hails the approaching bus. She lets go, takes the empty seat. Their eyes meet. “Hey, ain’t I seen you somewhere before?” he says.

  She smiles up at him. “Perhaps.”

  “I got it.” He takes the cigar butt out of his mouth. “You’re a hoofer over at Mike’s joint.”

  “Hoofer?”

  “Yeah—the gams was familiar, but I couldn’t place the face.”

  She smiles again, a smile that seems to melt his knees. He grabs the leather strap overhead. “I help out over at Father Michael’s ‘joint,’ as you’d say, Lefty, but—”

  “Father—? Lefty! Wait a minute, don’t tell me! You ain’t that skinny little brat who useta—?” It’s her stop. She rises, smiling, to leave the bus. “Hey, where ya goin’? How’m I gonna see you again?”

  She pauses at the door. “I guess you’ll have to catch my act at Mike’s joint, Lefty.” She steps down, her skirts filling with the sudden breeze of the street, and, one hand at her knees, the other holding down her fluttering wide-brimmed hat, walks quickly toward the church, glancing up at him with a mischievous smile as the bus, starting up again, overtakes and passes her. Her body seems to slide backwards, past the bus windows, slipping from frame to frame as though out of his memory—or at least out of his grasp. “Wait!” The driver hesitates: he jams his gat to the mug’s ear—she’s like his last chance (he doesn’t know exactly what he means by that, but he’s thinking foggily of his mother, or else of his mother in the fog), and she’s gone! The feeling of inexpressible longing she has aroused gives way to something more like fear, or grief, frustration (why is it that some things in the world are so hard, while others just turn to jelly?), anger, a penetrating loathing—how could she do this to him? He squeezes, his eyes narrowing. Everything stops. Even, for a moment, time itself. Then, in the distance, a police whistle is heard. He takes his hands away from her throat, lets her drop, and, with a cold embittered snarl, slips away into the foggy night streets, his cape fluttering behind him with the illusory suggestion of glamour.

  There is a scream, the discovery of the body, the intent expression on the detective’s face as, kneeling over her, he peers out into the swirling fog: who could have done such a heinous thing? The deeper recesses of the human heart never fail to astound him. “Looks like the Strangler again, sir—a dreadful business.” “Yes . . .” “Never find the bastard on a night like this, he just dissolves right into it.” “We’ll find him, Sergeant. And don’t swear.” People speak of the heart as the seat of love, but in his profession he knows better. It is a most dark and mysterious labyrinth, where cruelty, suspicion, depravity, lewdness lurk like shadowy fiends, love being merely one of their more ruthless and morbid disguises. To prowl these sewers of the heart is to crawl through hell itself. At every turning, another dismaying surprise, another ghastly atrocity. One reaches out to help and finds one’s arms plunged, up to the elbows, in viscous unspeakable filth. One cries out—even a friendly “Hello!”—and is met with ghoulish laughter, the terrifying flutter of unseen wings. Yet, when all seems lost, there is always the faint glimmer of light in the distance, at first the merest pinprick, but soon a glow reflecting off the damp walls, an opening mouth, then out into sunshine and green fields, a song in his heart, indeed on his lips, and on hers, answering him across the hills, as they run toward each other, arms outspread, clothing flowing loosely in the summery breeze.

  They run through fields of clover, fields of sprouting wheat, fields of waist-high grasses that brush at their bodies, through reeds, thick rushes, hanging vines. He is running through a sequoia forest, a golden desert, glittering city streets, she down mountainsides, up subway stairs, across spotlit stages and six-lane highways. Faster and faster they run, their song welling as though racing, elsewhere, toward its own destination, the backgrounds meanwhile streaking by, becoming a blur of flickering images, as if he and she in their terrible outstretched urgency were running in place, and time were blowing past them like the wind, causing her long skirts to billow, his tie to lift and flutter past his shoulder, as they stare out on the vast rolling sea from the ship’s bow, arms around each other’s waists, lost for a moment in their thoughts, their dreams, the prospect of a new life in the New World, or a new world (where exactly are they going?). “We’re going home,” he says, as though in reply to her unspoken (or perhaps spoken) question. “We’ll never have to run again.”

  “It hardly seems possible,” she sighs, gazing wistfully at the deepening sunset toward which they seem to be sailing.

  Their reverie is rudely interrupted when pirates leap aboard, rape the woman, kill the man, and plunder and sink the ship—but not before the woman, resisting the violent advances of the peg-legged pirate captain, bites his nose off. “Whud have you dud?!” he screams, clutching the hole in his face and staggering about the sinking ship on his wooden peg. The woman, her fate sealed (already the cutlass that will decapitate her is whistling through the briny air), chews grimly, grinding the nose between her jaws like a cow chewing its cud, the sort of cow she might—in the New World and in a better, if perhaps less adventurous, life—have had, a fat old spotted cow with swollen udder and long white teats, teats to be milked much like a man is milked, though less abundantly. Of course, what does she know about all that, stuck out on this desolate windblown r
anch (listen to it whistle, it’s enough to take your head off) with her drunken old father and dimwit brothers, who slap her around for her milkmaid’s hands, saying they’d rather fuck a knothole in an unplaned board—what’s “fuck”? How will she ever know? How can she, cut off from all the higher things of life like finishing schools and sidewalks and floodlit movie palaces and world’s fairs with sky-rides and bubble dancers and futuramas? But just wait, one day . . . ! she promises herself, tugging tearfully on the teats. She leans against Old Bossy’s spotted flank and seems to see there before her nose a handsome young knight in shining armor, or anyway a clean suit, galloping across the shaggy prairie, dust popping at his horse’s hooves, coming to swoop her up and take her away from all this, off to dazzling cities and exotic islands and gay soirees. She sees herself suddenly, as a ripple courses like music through Bossy’s flank, aswirl in palatial ballrooms (the dance is in her honor!) or perhaps getting out of shining automobiles and going into restaurants with tuxedoed waiters who bend low and call her “Madame” (the milk squirting into the bucket between her legs echoes her excitement, or perhaps in some weird way is her excitement), or else she’s at gambling tables or lawn parties, at fashion shows and horse races, or, best of all, stretched out in vast canopied beds where servants, rushing in and out, bring her all her heart’s desires.

  But no, no, she sees nothing at all there, all that’s just wishful thinking—some things in this world are as hard and abiding as the land itself, and nothing more so than Bossy’s mangy old rump, even its stink is like some foul stubborn barrier locking her forever out here on this airless prairie, a kind of thick muddy wall with rubbery teats, a putrid dike holding back the real world (of light! she thinks, of music!), a barricade of bone, a vast immovable shithouse, doorless and forlorn, an unscalable rampart humped up into the louring sky, a briary hedgerow, farting citadel, trench and fleabitten earthworks all in one, a glutinous miasma (oh! what an aching heart!), a no-man’s-land, a loathsome impenetrable forest, an uncrossable torrent, a bottomless abyss, a swamp infested with the living dead, their hands clawing blindly at the hovering gloom, the air pungent with rot. He staggers through them, gasping, terrified, the quicksand sucking at his feet, toothless gums gnawing at his elbows, trying to remember how it is he ended up out here—some sort of fall, an airplane crash, an anthropological expedition gone sour, shipwreck, a wrong turn on the way to the bank? Certainly he is carrying a lot of money, a whole bucketful of it—he throws it at them and they snatch it up, stuffing it in their purulent jaws like salad, chewing raucously, the bills fluttering obscenely from their mouths and the holes in their flaking cheeks.