The Starbucks server suddenly jumped, literally jumped up off the ground. “Did you feel that?” she cried. Now everything on her counter was jumping too.
“A small earthquake,” said the sober man, trying to sound reassuring.
“That’s not an earthquake,” the drunk man said.
Sancho ran to the door and looked down the street. He saw that Mr. Jonésco had come out of the motel across the way and was staring in the same direction. Then around the corner thundered a large mastodon, a living specimen of M. americanum, last seen in North America perhaps ten thousand years ago. It rampaged down the road destroying parked cars and storefronts. Sancho stood still, rooted to the spot in horror.
“Oh my God!” shouted Mr. Jonésco. “Frankie, is that you?”
* * *
—
“NOTHING SO DIVISIVE HAS ever happened in Berenger since I came here from Romania to escape Communism,” Mr. Jonésco said. Quichotte and Sancho were sitting with him in the motel bar, and they all needed and were having stiff drinks, vodka for Mr. Jonésco, whiskey for Sancho and Quichotte. “I don’t know how it will end,” the motel proprietor went on. “Who will make the beds and vacuum the rooms? There is no logic to it. Perfectly okay people, people who were our neighbors and our staff and with whom our kids went to school, turning into mastodons overnight! Without warning! You don’t know who will be next. Now you understand why I wanted to inspect your ears and noses and teeth. For signs of mastodonitis, as I call it, though there is no evidence that it is a medical disease.”
“Was this a happy town before the mastodons?” Quichotte asked.
Jonésco shrugged. “Happy, who knows. People looked like they got along. But now we see that many were mastodons under the skin.”
“How many?” Sancho asked.
Jonésco spread his arms. “Hard to be certain,” he said. “Since they changed, they mostly bunch together near the river and we don’t go down there anymore, though once lovers walked there hand in hand, and you could buy a hot dog and a soda and watch the moon rise over the water. Sometimes one of them comes barreling through downtown, as Frankie did just now, looking for their old haunts, perhaps, wishing things were as they had been, or just hating the old haunts for refusing to accept them, and wanting to destroy whatever they can. Up here in the main part of town people are frozen by fear, and everyone watches everyone else for the first signs, the enlargements of the ears and noses, and the arrival of the tusks. Once one has turned into a mastodon he is utterly impervious to good sense. The mastodons refuse to believe that they have turned into horrible, surrealistic mutants, and they become hostile and aggressive, they take their children out of school, and have contempt for education. My belief is that many of them can still speak English, but they prefer to bellow like badly played flügelhorns. In the first days one or two of them insisted that they were the true Americans, and we were the dinosaurs and ought to be extinct. But after a short time they gave up on talking to us, and just yowled like flügelhorns instead.”
“I have heard a flügelhorn played,” Quichotte said mildly, “and I do not believe it sounds the way you think it sounds.”
Jonésco didn’t care. “To me the word flügelhorn and the word mastodon go together,” he said. “And that’s all that needs to be said about that.”
“When we arrived,” Sancho asked him, “you said something about barricades and then pretended you hadn’t.”
“It’s supposed to be a quarantine zone,” Jonésco said. “Because of the mastodonitis. To prevent the whole of the United States from becoming a land of mastodons. This is what we were assured, on local radio, from the megaphones mounted on the vans of the local authority, on the websites of power. But here you are, so plainly the barricades were not erected. Already, perhaps, the mastodons are in the Lincoln Tunnel and then all will be lost, perhaps all has already been lost.”
“Not all metamorphoses are capable of being reversed,” Quichotte reflected. “At a certain point, a tipping point, if you will, we may have to accept that these mastodons are citizens just like us, and we will have to find a way to bridge the gap between us, however hostile toward us, however ignorant and prejudiced, they may appear. But we have been traveling far and wide and have heard nothing of these creatures in other places, so the problem may still be contained here in this microcosm of Berenger, and if so, may be containable, and America can go on being what it always was.”
“But what is to be done?” Jonésco wailed. “My business, like so many others, is ruined.”
Quichotte rose swaying to his feet, whiskey glass in hand. “I see now that we are at the very end of the fourth valley,” he declared, “for here reality as we believed it to be has truly ceased to exist, and our eyes are opened to this new and dark revelation of how things may actually be. I understand that this has been shown to me because it is an essential part of the Way. I will go through this veil and as a result may come to the place where the path to the Beloved is revealed.”
“What is he talking about?” Jonésco asked Sancho. “What veil? Here we are confronted by a terrifying insanity, and he sits with us spouting a foolishness of his own.”
“He talks like this,” Sancho said good-naturedly. “Don’t mind him.”
“The veil is maya,” Quichotte said. “It is the veil of illusion which prevents our eyes from seeing clearly. That which we previously believed to be reality was an error of perception caused by being forced to see through that veil. Now the veil is ripped from our eyes and we perceive the truth.”
“And the truth is mastodons?” Jonésco asked.
“The truth is whatever is put before us to overcome,” Quichotte replied, “so that the Beloved may be attained.”
* * *
—
AN UNEASY NIGHT’S SLEEP FOLLOWED, for Sancho at least; Quichotte, calm and resolute, slept fairly soundly, although he did get up early and dressed with the care of a soldier going to war. Jonésco met them in the motel’s simple dining area. “My cook Alfie didn’t show today,” he said. “I’m afraid he may have joined forces with the tuskers. You’ll have to put up with the eggs I cooked personally.” Quichotte ate heartily; Sancho, less so.
“Is there a newspaper in Berenger?” Quichotte asked Mr. Jonésco. “The Berenger Eagle? The Berenger Star-Tribune? The Berenger Globe? The Berenger Mercury? The Berenger Plain Dealer? The Berenger Times-Picayune? And has it reported on the mastodons?”
“The print edition of The Berenger Gazetto died several years ago,” Jonésco told him, “and I don’t think the web page has been updated lately. Maybe the Editor is having the same staffing problems as myself. The office is right down the street.”
“Then,” cried Quichotte, leaping to his feet and stabbing at the air with an upraised index finger, “the Gazetto is where the resistance must begin.”
Outside the Gazetto office building, which was actually an ice cream parlor with a couple of rooms upstairs where the paper was located, a small crowd had gathered, licking ice creams while they protested and argued in the manner of old friends who have suddenly stopped trusting one another. “It’s an outrage!” cried a bow-tied gentleman with a briefcase. “These mastodons are riding roughshod over everything we hold sacred, and that includes your barista Frankie, Jonésco, and we’re holding you responsible for the damage he has caused.” A lady in a floral-print dress who might have been Frankie’s mother shouted back at him, “It’s because people like you behaved so patronizingly to my Frankie that he defected. You think you can go on being snooty at people for years without facing the consequences? Well, you have sown the wind. Now we are all reaping the whirlwind.” The hubbub increased, the crowd grew larger, and people took sides, anti-mastodon like Mr. Bow Tie, sympathetic to mastodons like Mrs. Floral Print, and even a few distinctly pro-mastodon voices. “The system is corrupt,” a young man on a bicycle shouted, “and if it can
not be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.”
“Has anybody seen the mastodons in the green suits?” asked a man in a brown suit. “It’s said they can walk on their hind legs, like human beings. I haven’t seen one myself but I’m reliably informed they exist. It’s my opinion that these are the moderate mastodons, the ones who want to make an accommodation with human beings, and we need to negotiate terms with them. Has anyone seen one?”
“Yes, from a distance,” shouted the town drunk, already well advanced in his drunkenness at breakfast time. “But I thought it was my mother-in-law and ignored it.” This comment was greeted with hisses, boos, cries of “shame,” etc., and the town drunk subsided to the sidewalk, propped up against a lamppost.
The Editor, a flustered young woman who had only recently taken over the position when her formidably competent aunt decided to retire, came downstairs to calm things down, but her presence only increased the level of excitement.
“Why is there nothing on your page about this crisis?” Mr. Bow Tie demanded. “It’s an outrage.”
The Editor looked at him sternly. “It is the practice of all responsible media outlets,” she said, “not to provide terrorists with the oxygen of publicity.”
The use of the word terrorists inflamed everyone, above all the young man on, or now, in fact, off his bicycle. “These are not terrorists, you fool,” he yelled. “These are American patriots.”
“Things are getting out of hand,” Quichotte said to Mr. Jonésco. “I must take charge and lead the people toward a solution. But what that solution might be, I confess, is a question that presently defeats me utterly.”
All this while Sancho had been deep in conversation with a studious-looking, young, bespectacled woman in a white lab coat. Now, to Quichotte’s surprise, it was not himself but Sancho who took the lead, raising a hand and silencing the crowd with an unexpected air of command, and getting up onto a bench with White Lab Coat Woman at his side.
“Mastodons are creatures from the faraway past,” he said, “and I don’t think many of us, especially the younger people, are interested in a return to the Stone Age. Back then the mastodons became extinct—this young woman in the lab coat tells me—because early humans hunted them down. So that’s one solution. Hunt them down.”
There were some nodding heads in the crowd and a chant of “Hunt—them—down!” began, then petered out for lack of widespread support.
“Or,” Sancho said, “we can be grateful for what my friend here has done, because she has found the cure.”
Here the White Lab Coat Woman removed from her pocket a small phial containing a colorless liquid and held it up for all to see.
“In some cases,” she shouted out in a strong voice, “the metamorphosis is partial, there are mastodons with some human features, such as these green-suited mastodons walking erect like us, and in other cases the metamorphosis may look complete but is still within the parameters of reversibility. A simple dart from a dart gun will achieve the cure.”
“Shoot—the—darts!” the crowd began to shout. “Shoot—the—darts!”
“However, I have to warn you that in cases in which the metamorphosis has gone too far, the cure will not reverse the process. In these cases the mastodon, the mutant, will die.”
“So it’s kill or cure?” the Editor asked.
“Kill—or—cure!” the crowd shouted. “Kill—or—cure!” The pro-mastodon faction had fallen silent, possibly denoting acquiescence, or simply the realization that they were outnumbered.
It was Mrs. Floral Print who made the kindly liberal objection. “Killing them seems harsh,” she cried. “They were our own community until the day before yesterday. And I don’t want my Frankie to die!” She began to sob. Others comforted her. But then the ground began to tremble, a loud trumpeting sound was heard, and the crowd scattered screaming. The mastodon that came thundering down the street was indeed one of the fabled green-suited creatures that could stand on their hind legs. Standing up like that, it looked even larger and more frightening than the ordinary kind, and it didn’t behave with anything like moderation, plowing into the ice cream parlor and destroying it, and the Gazetto offices above, before it ran off honking into the distance.
“So much for my moderate mastodon theory,” said Brown Suit Man. “I vote we go with the poison darts.”
“They aren’t poison,” White Lab Coat Woman protested, but to no avail. The crowds, coming back together, demanded “Poison darts now!”
“Very well,” Quichotte cried, taking the lead. “And I myself will fire the first dart.”
It turned out the laboratory where White Lab Coat Woman had found the cure was just around the corner. The crowd moved there quickly. She and Sancho went inside and brought out a quantity of dart guns, all loaded with the curative needles. When the arms had been distributed, the group moved down toward the water’s edge, where the mastodons had gathered in two distinct groups, the green-suited hind-leg-walkers to the left and the more traditional mastodons to the right. It’s almost as if they don’t care very much for each other, Sancho thought, but what unites them, I guess, is that they care for us even less.
On the way down to where the mastodons were gathered Sancho had another disquieting thought. What a strange town this was, he thought, where everything was so conveniently next door to everything else—the motel, the coffee place, the ice cream parlor, the newspaper offices, the laboratory—and where this group of recognizable character types rushed up and shouted and then rushed away screaming and then rushed back again to shout some more, almost as if they were doing it on cue, or according to some script which he and Quichotte had not read. Mrs. Floral Print, for example, didn’t seem to be in the state a mother might actually be in if her child had really turned into a mastodon, and nobody else seemed to be quite, so to speak, psychologically convincing. It was all too stylized, somehow, to be real.
But Quichotte had warned him that reality as they had understood the word would now cease to exist, so maybe this theatricality was an aspect of that transformation?
Then they were there, the human beings, on the higher ground above the water, looking down at the baleful mastodons, some in suits, others not, and their weapons were aimed, and Quichotte’s dart gun was raised along with the others, and Sancho suddenly understood that they were somehow being tested, who knew by whom or why, and he cried out to Quichotte, “Don’t shoot!” At which point all hell broke loose, the mastodons saw that they were under attack and charged, and the humans of Berenger began to fire their dart guns, panickily, some in the air, some in the direction of the mastodons, and in every other direction as well, and they were yelling and running, and the mastodons were charging, the ones in the green suits as well as the ones on all fours, and Quichotte and Sancho, rooted to the spot, found themselves in a kind of no-man’s-land between the charging tuskers and the screaming humans, and there somehow was Mr. Jonésco pointing at them and laughing an insane laugh, and this is it, Sancho thought, looks like it all ends right here, and then a sort of cloud or fog descended suddenly over the scene, and when it dispersed the battle of Berenger had vanished, as had Berenger itself, and they were back in the Cruze turning off the turnpike, and Quichotte was saying slash had just said that “we ought to be fresh and perky for our entrance into the great city where Destiny lies.” The fog dispersed quickly and there was a sign pointing to the town of Weehawken, New Jersey (pop. 12,554, reflecting a decline of seven percent from the 13,501 counted in the 2000 census), and the mastodon-benighted town of Berenger, New Jersey, was nowhere to be seen, not then, not later, never.
Quichotte somehow managed to guide the car down the exit ramp and then pulled over onto the hard shoulder, perspiring and panting. Sancho, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, shook in the seat beside him.
“What just happe
ned to us?” Sancho finally asked.
Quichotte shook his head. “Now that we have passed through the veil,” he said finally, in a weak voice, “I surmise that visions and other phantasmagoria are to be expected.”
Quichotte, driving the Cruze out of the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, felt like a snail coming out of its shell. Here was bustle and thrum, hustle and flow, everything he had run from, had spent the better part of his life recoiling from, concealing himself in the heart of the country, leading a small life among other small lives. And now he was back on the main stage, on which the headliner acts performed, he was at the high rollers’ table, betting the farm on love. “The fifth valley,” he said quietly, and Sancho looked at him for elucidation, but for the moment he said no more.
The city (pop. 8,623,000) greeted them with a sudden autumn storm: thunder that said I see you, and who do you think you are?, lightning that said I will fry the flesh off your bodies and your skeletons will dance to my tune, rain that said I will wash you away like the rats on the sidewalk and the bugs in the gutters, and like all the other fools who came here on quests in search of glory, salvation, or love.
They took shelter in the Blue Yorker hotel, which stood conveniently just a couple of blocks from the tunnel exit, $103 including parking, excellent value, no ID demanded, no questions asked, cash money required per night in advance, and only when they entered their Oriental Delights–themed room did they understand that they were in one of the city’s numerous no-tell motels, with six free porno stations on the TV. There was adjustable mood lighting. There were strategically placed mirrors. The bellhop, a sleazy old Korean gent wearing an ancient pillbox hat, said that for fifteen dollars they could upgrade to the Arabian Nights room with Jacuzzi and steam bath, and if there was anything else they wanted, maybe good massage, deep tissue massage, massage with happy ending, anything, you understand, he could arrange that too. There were twin double beds in the room, for double the action if you want it, the bellhop said, at which they shut the door in his face. That was no way to talk to a father and his son who had come to the city on a mission. “We will move tomorrow,” Quichotte said, “or as soon as the rain stops.” Sancho bounced down onto his bed and looked up at his reflection in the angled mirror above him. “No!” he objected. “This is cool.”
Quichotte Page 20
