“Listen, that machine is—”
“That machine is going to stretch your tape, and it’ll be a long cold summer before you find another like it.”
“What have you got, perfect pitch?”
“Yuh.” He went back to the refrigerator. “Can I take some coffee?”
I glanced up. He was already into my stash of plastic coffee packs, was not waiting for an answer. His whole approach was to scrounge penny-ante things in such a way as to make you a miser if you objected. “What are you going to do about that grave robber?”
“What grave robber?”
“Jomo what’s-his-name.” (As if everybody in the world didn’t know what his name was.) “The Scriabin.”
I hadn’t forgotten about it but I’d been trying. Everybody—well, the Bump—kept asking me what I was going to do. I kept asking me what I was going to do. So I got sore and said it was my business what I was going to do.
“Okay,” he said mildly, and picked up his ice and his coffee—eleven packs, would you believe?—and went to the door. “Do you know when Scriabin was born?” He asked, and left without waiting for an answer.
Did I know when Scriabin was born. Did I care when Scriabin was born. I went back to work on the Oberammergau, with a grumble-grumble going on in the back of my head. I should tell that guy off. I should throw him out. I should wait until he was out and burgle into his place and find out if he really did fry bacon on my bill. I got madder and madder at him for making me mad at me, and began to understand some of the Bump’s tirades about him.
It was all of an hour and a half later that I let myself realize that Scriabin and his date of birth were shoving themselves between me and what I was trying to do. In exasperation I dialed the Library computer and asked.
Christmas Day, 1871.
Big deal. I went back to work, accomplishing not very much except the clear realization that it was too late and I was too tired and that newsboy had cost me again. And eleven packs of coffee to boot. Cursing him, I shut up shop and went home.
It takes me forty minutes to get home, so it was eighty minutes before I got back to the office. I don’t think I have ever been so excited in all my life. I started writing do-it memos to stack on the Bump’s desk, placed orders, wrote queries, and kept the computer down at the Library humming.
“Well, you’re up early!”
I looked up. It was the Bump, and around her was a blue haze from my fatigue, and across her face were little moving speckles—the black spots swimming in front of my eyes. And I felt just wonderful. “No, I’m up late.”
“Oh my God.” I don’t know whether she said that because of the mountain of paper in her do-it stack or because the door opened and in walked Jomo Delahanty. “Well,” he said, “you’re up early.”
“I’m up late,” I said again. “Sit down and shut up, Jomo. I want to talk to you. Bump, take a memo. To—”
“Well!” said the newsboy from the door. “You’re up early!” He put down the paper and went out.
“No, I’m—Bump! Quit that giggling. And cancel our subscription to that damned paper!”
“We don’t have a subscription to that damn paper. He just brings it. He brings it whether I fight with him or not. I hate him a lot. He give you the money this month?”
“Yes, I told you! Jomo—”
“Massacree at Punxsutawney,” said Jomo, and began punching the air and snapping his fingers, punch, snap, punch, snap, which he always did when he was talking to you. He never looked at you either, just off into the middle distance, punch, snap, punch, snap. Pop stars. “We killed them dead by the hundreds of thousands.” He wore a kilt with a codpiece.
“I know what you did at Punxsutawney. You barely scored enough to cover the bribes, with enough left over to buy a peanut for the groundhog.”
“You always sweet talk me, Solly boy.” He closed his eyes, showed his teeth, and went punch, snap.
The Bump said, “What are you going to do about—”
“Shut up, Bump. I got to have words with this, uh, talent. You know where you are on the charts?”
“Four.” Punch, snap.
“And you know where you were last week? And the week before? And the week before that?”
“That’s show biz.” Punch, snap.
“I’ll tell you what’s showbiz. It’s great to be in the top ten but four is special. Up from four and you’re a winner. Down from four is out, man. You don’t slide, you fall right off. Well maybe number eight, nine for a week, but then goodbye.”
“I got a new cut that’ll—”
“You got ‘Metaphysical Mope’ that’ll keep you right where you’re at for maybe two more weeks. The other thing special about number four is that the longer you stay there the surer it is that you’ll fall right off. If you even get to three for a week you might have a chance, but every time you score that four after four, you’re closer to the final edge.”
“He’s right,” said the Bump, which is, I think, the first time she ever said such a thing in my hearing.
Punch, snap, punch, snap. “Well don’t you fret Solly boy. I got a trick up my sleeve, something new, something different. I got a whole new sound, whole new trend.” Punch, snap, and the closed eyes and the teeth, the bit that always made the split-tails scream. He opened his eyes and looked right at me for a change. “And I am not just jammin’ a loose riff. I hit that stride a while back and it paid off, and I never went on with it. Now I will. Okay?”
“You mean you’re going to stop stealing from Scriabin and go back to robbing Dvorak?”
No punch.
No snap.
From the corner of my eye I saw the Bump slowly, slowly sitting down. I think she had to. Jomo Delahanty sprawled where he was, speared and bleeding and glassy-eyed. Sometimes it’s a shame to catch a man so dead to rights. Sometimes it does a lot more harm than good. You got to leave the man a place to stand.
He said, “How did you know?”
“Did you take me for a musical ignoramus?”
“Yes.”
I heard suppressed laughter make a scratchy noise in the Bump’s sinuses. I hoped it hurt.
“What you want me to do?” asked Jomo. (Jomo!)
“Go on doing what you’re doing,” I said. “It’s great. The only thing wrong with the Scriabin you’ve been doing is Jomo Delahanty. Give us less of that and more of the real thing. Of course, double the beat and fuzz the sides, and fool around like that all you want, but keep the Scriabin clean.”
“They’ll … find out. They’ll know!”
“Sure they’ll know.… When was Scriabin born?”
“Long time back.”
“Christmas 1871,” said the Bump, looking at my notes.
“Christmas, 1871. Next year, two hundred even. Right?”
Behind me I heard the Bump, in an awed whisper, begin reverently to recite the names of the top deities from three religions. I said, “You are going to ram hot clean Scriabin clear up to the top of the charts for a whole year, and when the news leaks out it will be countered with a prepared campaign and the biggest woodstock ever seen, for the Scriabin Second Centenary, and the fans’ll be locked in, and the snobs’ll love you for the greatest rediscovery since Mendelssohn plugged J.S. Bach.”
“How did you know that story, Sol?” asked the Bump. “I took you for a musical ig—”
“Shut up, Bump. Now you listen, Jomo. Scriabin wrote—hand me that note, Bump—no, that one.… Scriabin wrote five symphonies, more or less, ten sonatas, and a whole bunch of orchestral poems and preludes. There ought to be enough there for you to keep your sticky fingers busy for that year. I want more Scriabin, less Delahanty, and lyrics.”
“Yuh, yuh, what?”
“Lyrics.”
“You mean words? Words, to neo-rock? Aw man, nobody writes words no more, except folk, and I don’t do folk. Nobody’s wrote words for forty years, man. I mean an antique dealer I may be, but camp I am not. They used to do that, but more and mo
re the music crowded in, and more and more the words fuzzed down, and everybody likes it the way it is, you listen and feel, man, and you don’t screw it up with ‘wha he say, wha he say?’ ”
“You trust this nose, and Jomo, and do like I said.”
Jomo stirred himself up from three-quarters horizontal to a forty-degree list, which was his code for standing up for his rights. “And if I don’t?”
“Think about it,” I said. I let him think about it for a minute. I let him think about the clause in his contract which called for original compositions, and I let him think about the public announcement that he’d stolen everything he ever wrote. I could see him thinking about “the biggest woodstock ever seen,” too. All this thinking got kind of heavy and he slowly slumped under the weight until he was backed to supine. And I had him.
“But I can’t write lyrics,” he moaned. (“Either,” I heard the Bump murmur.) And he had me.
There was a painful silence for a while and then Jomo stirred. He sat up and punched a couple of times, though he couldn’t cheer himself up enough to snap. “I guess you get words the same way you get music,” he said.
I shared a sick look with the Bump and then told Jomo to go round up the group. “I’ll release ‘Metaphysical Mope,’ ” I said, “and by this time tomorrow I want a call from you telling me you cut tracks on some new Scriabin—your choice—and a draft of some lyrics.”
“Ain’t going to like this,” said Jomo, getting up. “I ain’t, they ain’t, and them out there neither.” He left.
“It doesn’t scan and it doesn’t parse, but it do communicate,” the Bump observed, and “Sometimes you do genius things, Sol.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Statistical necessity,” said my valued employee. “You do so many things, so sooner or later—”
“Soon as you get to work.” I pointed at her do-it stack, wondering when I could get a compliment without a sting in its tail.
The Bump had a hell of a fight with the newsboy. I concede that I got the story from her, and you might think it is slanted her way, and it probably was—but not much. Though she has an ego the size of Mount Washington, the Bump has honesty like the Alps.
“I Love Maple Walnut”
Ejler Edgar Aylmer (nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer, not any more) once showed me a computerized butler he invented. I’d visited his basement workshop while he was having his lunch, and he said, “I want some mustard.” Before I could finish saying, “Sure, where …” the far wall made a noise like hawking in the antriums, and a great long pantograph sort of thing came whizzing across the room and smacked a jar of chilled Dijon into his open palm, retracting into the wall with a crisp ptui.
“What was that, Ejler Edgar?”
“Butler,” said the inventor. “Of course, that’s an understatement. I’m not about to tell you its real name. I told somebody else the other day, and the consequences were not—ah …”
“You can tell me.”
“Well then, just between you and me and the far wall, I call it Cupid.”
“An acronym.”
“Not an acronym. Cupid is Cupid because nobody really understands how he works. Also, Cupid always did have a way of giving people what they deserved when what they asked for was their heart’s desire. Also there was always something cold-blooded about Cupid with his blindfold and his random shots. Cupid—this one here—is after all a computer, recording all available data, sieving it through the command, and dropping the result out of the chute—in this case, fulfilling the demand.”
“It can give you anything? Anything?”
“Certainly. Doesn’t everybody believe that of Cupid? You get what you want, based on every scrap of data that Cupid can discover about you. No matter what.” And he made a peculiar laugh.
“Ejler Edgar, you better tell me why you made that peculiar laugh. I won’t tell as long as we both shall live.”
And I think all along he really wanted to tell me. “It was that other idiot” (I think that was how he phrased it) “who used to come barging in here at lunchtime. Dendium, his name was, Potiphar Ungwall Dendium, a lubricious type with a pornographic wink and a chuckle out of his right molars. Used to gobble his lunch at Greasy’s and get his dessert to go—gooey puddings and sloppy sundaes, leave the empty containers around the basement for me to clean up. Wormed the name Cupid out of me, found out Cupid could deliver anything—anything. Challenged me to prove it. So I said, ‘Go ahead, ask.’ So he said, ‘You know what I want, Cupid. and I want it at home in bed waiting for me.’ He launched one of those winks, and I swear the man’s eyelashes smelled of musk.
“Back he comes the next day, really, doesn’t begin to be lunchtime, screaming at me. Called me a dammit. ‘Dammit,’ he screams, ‘frigidity I can deal with, but this is ridiculous. You and your dammit dammit butler …’ ”
“Dammit?”
“You are very young,” said Ejler Edgar gently. “I am substituting. ‘Your dammit butler put me to bed with an ice cream cone!’ Then he called me a dammit and stormed out.”
“But why? I mean, why?”
“Because Cupid can only act on the data he gets. Maybe that’s what the blindfold means. And because the word love is so rich in meanings and so poor in distinctions between those meanings, Cupid gave him love as he himself defined it, one of the times he was here.”
“Defined it how?”
“I won’t tell you,” said Ejler Edgar. I guess I looked pretty stricken because he said, “but I’ll write it.”
“Write it where?”
“Why, up there at the top of your story,” said Ejler Edgar Aylmer, may he rest easy wherever he may be.
Blue Butter
Not having heard anything in so long, I went over to his lab and banged: bip-bip. bam bam. “Hey, come in,” came Stromberg’s voice, and it called my name.
Thirty-eight years I’ve known Stromberg, and that instant recognition of my knock, that immediate Hey, come in! are things I am very, very proud of. I never knew how I earned them. I learned from a third party one time that he liked having me around because he could talk with me about anything, anything at all, all the things that kept that great big brain of his seething along the way it did: physics, chemistry, art, music, electronics, poetry, food, love, politics, philosophy, humor. The third party had it, wrong. He could talk to me about things. Not with. Nobody could talk with him about those things. Not all those things.
So in I came and through the dark front office to the lab with its rows of Miller flasks, with the hoods, the beautiful bewilder of crystal plumbing, the computer array with its visual mutter of indicator lights and readouts, red and orange and off-white to green, the huge pegboard over the electronics bench with its racks of tools and shiny black boxes and bundles of test leads like parades of trained baby snakes with chromium jaws. Through an inner door I could see something of the chemistry and bio lab, where, if the readouts muttered in lights, the gleam of glass was a complex whisper. Around the back wall, where I could not now see it, I knew there were cages and surgical instruments, a scrubbing sink with treadle-controlled valves, a stainless steel vet’s examining table, microscopes, microtomes, two centrifuges, a sterilizer and a sink. Two entire walls, right to the ceiling, were glass-fronted cabinets of chemicals. Through a further door was, I knew, a library with its own computer terminal for instant retrieval of book locations and to tap into outside sources.
The main laboratory, where I stood just inside, was lit only by a wash of yellow light from the open door of the little room in which Stromberg kept nothing but his cot and his coffee, and a dazzling cone of “daylight” fluorescence from a point in the ceiling. On a low stool in the center of this disc of light sat Stromberg, half dressed—the top half—with his legs spraddled out due south and due west respectively, anointing his pubic area heavily with a thick blue-gray paste. He flashed me a smile, said “Nothing alarming,” and went on with his work.
I had nothing to say and so sa
id it while he finished what he was doing. He then wiped his fingers with a succession of tissues, replaced the cover on the jar of paste, placed a series of gauze pads on the affected area, where they stuck enthusiastically, and rose. I followed him into the cot-and-coffee room. “I needn’t have said that,” Stromberg grinned, “about being alarmed. Not to you. You have that virtue—did anyone ever tell you? You seem to be completely accepting. You’re not judgmental. You don’t apply moral and social yardsticks to what people do. You just take it in and you wait. That’s kind of nice.” He went into the little bathroom in the corner and washed his hands busily, like a surgeon. “Make coffee.”
It was made. I fixed mine, honey and milk, and his, black, in big ceramic cups. I could have corrected his accolade. I have as many prejudices, make as many moral evaluations as the next man, and more than some. What Stromberg was not in a position to know was that I did not, would not, could not apply any of them to him, and never had. Just for an immediate example, when he came out of the bathroom wearing only a polo shirt, with his masculine apostrophe protruding from a nest of stuck-on white gauze slowly staining grey, it could not be called ludicrous. Stromberg was never ludicrous. Not to me.
He slid a drawer out of the wall and removed a pair of white boxer shorts and a disposable white coverall. He put them on and slid his feet into throwaway slippers, took from another drawer a large plastic bag, banged it open, and handed it to me. He stripped the cot completely, rolling up the foam mattress, sheets and blanket, and while I held the bag open, manhandled the whole bundle inside. He twisted the top closed, padded out to the office, and came back with a big bright tag reading CONTAMINATED. “Go wash your hands,” he said, dragging the bag off toward the outer door. “Nothing lethal,” he reassured me as I went into the bathroom.
Case and the Dreamer Page 12
