Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  Eeena eeena, eeena-eeena haj

  Beneath the floorboards of this room, schoolgirls operate a diamond mine. Every card on the table is the queen of diamonds. And the wallpaper howls at the moon.

  Revelations were starting to overlap. Ellen Cherry was just thinking about how no amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death; she was thinking something in that category when the sixth veil flew away from Salome’s likable, lickable breasts, and abruptly her mind was occupied with notions of time, history, and the afterlife. She saw that the past was a recent invention, that people sacrificed the present to a future that never really came, that those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an “after” of; saw that time was a meadow not a highway; that the psyche was an all-night restaurant, not a museum or a church; and that on every conceivable level, belief in a hereafter was hazardous to health. Moreover, the world would not be destroyed, at least not until the sun pooped out in about two billion years—and by then there would be other options.

  “But what about Judgment Day?” Ellen Cherry found herself whispering.

  Every day is Judgment Day. Always has been. Always will be.

  “Anything else?”

  Yes. Just this. The dead are laughing at us.

  “Wow,” said Ellen Cherry Charles.

  FOR HOURS, the Reverend Buddy Winkler had been pacing the floor of his office. Cracking his knuckles. Grinding his gold teeth. Scratching his face until the pustules broke and bled. He was just so blessed dad-blamed all-fired frustrated! He could hardly stand it! Lordy lordy lordy lordy law. All those many long lonely months, years even, that he’d been preparing himself, priming himself, honing himself for one monumental and glorious act: the bringing down of the Dome of the Rock so that the Third Temple might rise in its place. This very day, Sunday, January 23, was when the holy explosives were supposed to go off. Today! And here he was, hamstrung, impotent; stuck among the niggers and the dope fiends and the sodomites in New York City, not only deprived of the opportunity to personally fulfill his God-appointed mission but unable to be on hand in Jerusalem in case the rabbis and yeshivas went ahead and bombed the damned mosques without him (which probably would not happen, the CIA would see to that).

  Lordy lordy law, he was fit to be tied. He was about to explode his own self. He needed an outlet for the righteous energy, the redemptive fury, with which Jehovah had flooded him.

  It was going on five in the afternoon when Buddy hit upon the idea of venting a little spleen on Isaac & Ishmael’s. If ever an establishment needed a sharp whack with God’s flyswatter, the I & I was it. Those peacenik humanists! That dancing girl! That blabber-mouth Jezebel of Verlin Charles’s! Yep. Bud allowed as to how he might amble down there and wag a finger or two at their shame. He telephoned several of his Zionist friends, but they were all watching the Super Bowl. So were his contacts in the Little Matches of Jesus. Okey-dokey. Let the fools sully the Sabbath with their trivial games. Buddy would go it alone.

  Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

  Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

  Zinga dopla dop lop zinga

  Eh, eh-eh, eeena-eeena ai

  THIS IS THE ROOM, all right, but the candles have burned down, the lamps are dry, and the blue neon has blown a fuse. The wallpaper might as well be stone. In the blackness there can be heard a low, perpetual rattling and a click click click click. It is Jezebel’s bones. Or else the rolling of the dice.

  The teenager was completely naked then, except for the short purple veil that masked her face. Abu and Spike were beyond worrying over the illegality of the situation. Detective Shaftoe certainly wasn’t about to arrest her. He was himself in irons. Nobody moved, and above the whine, drone, and drumming of the orchestra, no sound was audible except for Salome’s labored breathing. She had been dancing for more than two hours and obviously was near exhaustion. The dance appeared to be winding down. The whirls were elongated, slow and dreamy now, although they’d lost little if any of their impact. She turned as if knee-deep in fruit pulp, and the hypnotized audience followed her as helplessly as if she were the cufflinks of Mandrake the Magician.

  Earlier, much earlier, in the afternoon, Ellen Cherry had considered applying the eye game to the dancer, but decided it would have been akin to painting a second smile on the Mona Lisa. Now, she was incapable of that kind of self-control, even if she had deemed it desirable. Her mind was calm, yet humming with activity, and Salome seemed to hold on to it with small sweaty fingers, the way that she held on to her tambourine.

  When the seventh veil flew away from Salome’s face, it was as if the girl had opened her mouth and burped out a bird-sized butterfly. Ellen Cherry’s first thought was, How beautiful she is! Her second thought was, Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves.

  Yes, that was it. The government wouldn’t take care of it for you, no matter how much you’d paid into Social Security, or how many votes your political action committee may have bought. You couldn’t learn it in college, colleges chose largely to ignore it. Churches, conversely, were falling all over themselves to save you the trouble of thinking about it; they would hand you an answer as neat and tidy and definitive as your horoscope in the daily paper—and, unfortunately, just about as useless because it was just about as generic and every bit as speculative. Great books, paintings, and music were helpful, in an inspirational way; nature, even more so. Valuable clues were constantly dropping from the lips of philosophers, spiritual masters, gurus, shamans, gypsy circus girls, and wild-talking tramps in the street. But they were clues, only. No self-proclaimed holy man could cut the mustard for you, and the ones who were truly holy would tell you so. Nor could you turn it over to some chatty, disembodied entity channeled from the other side. (The dead are laughing at us, remember.) You couldn’t even learn it at your mammy’s knee.

  The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn’t follow you home and park your car.

  Was there a more difficult lesson for a human being to learn, a paradox harder to accept? Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely—but it was the bottom line.

  It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah. He’d call you.

  Um, well, okay, thought Ellen Cherry, I guess I understand. But wait a minute. This isn’t all? Surely there’s more? There must be something else.

  The dance was ending. Salome executed one last passionate pirouette, slapped both feet resoundingly against the floor, then staggered to a stop. She stood facing, but not looking at, the audience; her eyes downcast, her mouth gasping, her entire respiratory system convulsing, her legs wobbling as if about to give way. Oddly, nobody, not even her chaperon, made a move to support her or to cover her nakedness. The room was silent, transfixed.

  Ellen Cherry’s condition was not measurably superior to the dancer’s. She was tremulous, flushed, in a kind of trance. She was in the room and not in the room. Her mind whirled endlessly upon a dance floor of ideas. Instinctively, she sensed that once the last of the veils had dropped, some greater, more all-inclusive secret should have been exposed; she should have been squinting at the contours of the Mystery. Thus, she squinted at poor Salome, who contin
ued to stand there, shaking, panting, dressed in angel chaps of sweat. And she thought, Come on, now. What’s the punch line? There’s got to be something else. Until, finally, a voice inside her said:

  “We’re making it up.”

  Who? What?

  “Us. All of us. It. All of it. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

  We’re making it up?

  “We make it up. We made it up. We shall make it up. We have been making it up. I make it up. You make it up. He, she, it makes it up.”

  Okay, I’m an artist, I can accept that. In theory. But how do I apply it to my daily life?

  “You’ll have to figure . . .”

  It out for myself. But hold on. Please don’t go away. Can’t you at least leave me with some advice?

  “You need more?” (The inner voice was incredulous.)

  Yes. Please. A little more. A speck more in the line of practical advice.

  “Very well. The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can’t see the ball.”

  You’re kidding, thought Ellen Cherry Charles.

  Ellen Cherry made for the door. She had to get out of there and get out fast. All that had transpired seemed perfectly natural to her, as natural as daydreaming or brainstorming or the eye game; she was overwhelmed, to be sure, but hardly frightened or bewildered; she was, in fact, in a state rather next to wahoo. But she needed to change spaces, to get some air.

  Others, perhaps as many as twenty, followed her out. And when she turned the corner and headed up East Forty-ninth they did likewise. It wasn’t as though they were interested in her, but, rather, that she was in the lead of a group that was being swept along by its own stupefied momentum.

  The group was far enough down the block that it failed to hear the commotion back at Isaac & Ishmael’s.

  At exactly the moment that they were turning the corner, Buddy Winkler had pushed his way into the restaurant. When he had spotted Salome, still standing there naked (her chaperon was in the act of draping a coat about her), he’d rushed the bandstand, nearly falling over Roland Abu Hadee, who, for some reason, was on his hands and knees, picking up the discarded veils. Some witnesses later testified that the Reverend Buddy Winkler had shouted, “Beast! Great Fornicator! Whore of Babylon!” Others would claim that he was merely sputtering and growling. In any case, he charged the girl and grabbed her by the throat.

  Detective Shaftoe shot him dead.

  The two security guards ran in, guns blazing, just as they had seen it done in the movies. Salome was shot accidentally, Shaftoe more or less on purpose.

  Both were critically wounded but, in time, recovered.

  Jackie Shaftoe, once he could walk again, retired from the police force and devoted his days to painting, with moderate success. His major influence, he was ever quick to point out, was Ellen Cherry Charles. He never attended another football game nor watched one on TV.

  Once she could breathe without the aid of a respirator, the Jewish/Arab girl who called herself “Salome” was whisked by her guardians out of the country, presumably to Lebanon—once known as Phoenicia, an extension of the land of Canaan.

  SCATTERED SNOWFLAKES as large as postage stamps were spinning in the dusk, but the temperature was rather mild, a benefit to Ellen Cherry, who had neglected to don her coat. She did shiver slightly as she passed the Mel Davis Dog Boutique, but it was not due to the weather. If we’re making everything up, she wondered, why are we making up doggy salons? Sushi bars, she could understand, which was nice, because she and the motley band of ecstatics who tagged along with her must have passed a dozen of them, closed for the Sabbath, the green furnaces of their wasabi banked against the night.

  As the group neared Lexington Avenue, it became aware that a great many automobiles were blowing their horns. That was unusual for a Sunday evening and had not the “pilgrims” been so blissed-out, some of them might have taken it personally. On Park Avenue, sedate Park, the automotive blare increased, and on Madison, people were yelling from the windows of hotels and cars. Approaching Fifth, Ellen Cherry paused to listen. The others paused behind her. In the distance, a great din could be detected, a singing and cheering and banging sort of din, as if, in a parking lot many blocks away, the Woodstock rock festival was being reenacted. At last, the “pilgrims” had a destination. They crossed Fifth, then Sixth, and turned southward toward the roar, their waitress, Ellen Cherry, leading their advance.

  Times Square was in turmoil. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, there. A huge noisy surge of humanity clogged every artery, like animated cholesterol, halting vehicular traffic for blocks in all directions. Drivers leaned on their horns, but less in anger or frustration than in joy. As for the multitudes on foot, they whooped like warriors on an ancient rampage, danced, jumped up and down, slapped one another’s palms repeatedly and ritualistically, and raised their index fingers in the air. Grinning boys of many races chugged beer from quart bottles, and intoxicated girls flashed their bare breasts at the mobs, just as they might in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras, in fact, was what it resembled, except for the occasional dancing snowflake and the absence of masks. It was a celebration, a mighty, riotous jubilee—and the dazed group from Isaac & Ishmael’s jumped to the conclusion that what was being celebrated was the end of illusion, the undraping of the Mystery, the genesis of a grand new age.

  Even Ellen Cherry, momentarily, thought that the spontaneous outpouring had been unleashed by the Dance of the Seven Veils. Gradually, however, it dawned on her that what was being celebrated, what had whipped the population into exultant frenzy, was New York’s victory in the Super Bowl game.

  Symbolically, perhaps, Ellen Cherry swam against the current, fighting her way out of Times Square even as hundreds fought their way in. At one point, her forward progress arrested by a knot of Jersey guys through which she could not slice, she used the delay to scan the front pages of newspapers at a kiosk. A prominently featured article bore a Jerusalem dateline. In its lead paragraph, it reported that a squad of Israeli soldiers had employed a bulldozer to bury alive a half dozen West Bank Arab youths (one as young as eleven) whom they suspected of stoning military vehicles. In the second paragraph, it described how a pair of Palestinians had stabbed to death four innocent Israeli civilians and an American tourist at a sidewalk café in Jerusalem. As the Arabs shoved their long knives into stomachs, hearts, lungs, they had shouted, “God is great! God is great!”

  Sickened, she turned, found a seam in the mob, and snaked through. She pushed, and was pushed, back to Fifth Avenue. There, she walked to the north, the crowds growing thinner, the din fainter with each step. By the time that she reached St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she was virtually alone on the sidewalk, although Times Square roared behind her like a distant waterfall of parrots and soup pots, and every other passing motorist had his palm on his horn.

  At St. Patrick’s she slackened her pace. Instantly, she saw, or thought she saw, a flash of purple fabric behind a shin-level grate. It so resembled one of Salome’s falling veils that she was convinced that she was hallucinating. I’ll probably be seeing them everywhere, she thought. I’m really in a state.

  Ellen Cherry walked a few yards further, stopping at the place where Turn Around Norman had performed. Deliberately, she planted her feet as precisely as possible on the spot where his feet always stood. She closed her eyes and even tried turning a fraction of an inch to her left, but her slow motion was far too fast.

  “Turn Around Norman,” she said aloud. “Where does magic and beauty go when it’s driven from the world?”

  At the grate, there was another flicker of purple, but she wasn’t inclined to investigate. She just stood there, a snow stamp pasted to her forehead as if she were about to be mailed to the Yukon, wondering about Turn Around Norman until there was nothing left to wonder. Then, recalling the newspapers that she had seen, she wondered, Why are we making up a mess like the Middle East?

  The dance was over
. The veils were all dropped. The cascade of epiphanies had ceased. The inner voice was mute, and that was fine, it had given her more than enough guidance, more than enough understanding, more than enough to figure out for herself. Nevertheless, she believed that she would try to summon it one more time. Standing in Turn Around Norman’s footprints, she squeezed her eyelids and began to hum an approximation of the music that had filled the I & I all afternoon.

  Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

  Eeena eeena, eh-eh, haj

  What about this Middle East business? Why is it making everybody crazy? Why is it so awful? Is it really totally hopeless? I need to know.

  For a long while she heard nothing except Super Bowl fallout. It didn’t surprise her. She brushed a snowflake from her nose (Antarctica, twenty-two cents). What could she expect? Ah, but then an answer began to build in her brain, slowly, organically, like bees excreting comb.

  Consider the anatomy of the Middle East, said the inner voice. Hasn’t it been called the Fertile Crescent, the primordial uterus from which the human race emerged? Well, look at it today, consider it now. Of all the places on the planet, it is the most feverish, hot, pain-racked, tense, dilated, bloody, traumatized, stretched to the point of ripping. Remind you of something? The “trouble” in the Middle East is nothing but natal contractions. The world is in labor, and the Middle East, quite obviously, is the vagina out of which, if it doesn’t abort, the new order of humanity must be born. The labor is difficult and long, and it may get worse before the vagitus is heard, but don’t despair over the Middle East: something great, something wondrous, something completely unimaginable is there aborning.