Except that it wasn’t. The smell in the room wasn’t dye or incense, it was a more familiar smell. One day while The Mick was at school, it drew Xavier in. He lifted the black linen drapery just inside the door. Behind it was more blackness. A harder blackness. And the smell of fresh paint. The Mick had painted the walls black. Then he’d disguised his misdeed by hanging black sheets over the proof of his contempt for Xavier’s rules. A closer look showed Xavier that two of the room’s four walls were no longer draped in black at all. The Mick had put these sheets on his bed and rigged a swag-bellied black canopy from the ceiling with the remaining dyed linen. The Mick had played him for a sucker. Had lied. Had laughed him to scorn.
“Why?” Xavier raged when The Mick got home from Ephebus. “Why would you go to so much trouble to deceive me?”
“No trouble at all,” The Mick said. “Had me a blast.”
“You’ve mocked me. Stabbed me in the back. Why?”
“This is my room, I live in it, not you. And I wanted black walls, okay? Issat a fucking crime?”
“If I say so, it’s—”
“If you say so, unc, it’s gigo: garbage in, garbage out. Relax. It’ll grow on you. That’s why I did it this way. So you wouldn’t have nine heart attacks getting over your fuddy-duddyism and cadging how to skate the nool.” Nool, Xavier had learned, was a slangy collocation of new and cool. Fearful of a firecrackerish sequence of heart attacks, Xavier backed out of The Mick’s room, slammed the door, and stalked to the kitchen for a double shot of scotch.
*
The Mick made few friends at Ephebus Academy. He talked about school only if Xavier pumped him. When he did talk, he offered few details and seemed indifferent about the school. If pressed, he’d say “It’s boring,” or “The kids’re all nerds, and the teachers’re tofu-eating yuppies.”
Mikhail’s inability, or refusal, to make friends did not seem to bother him. Once home, he put on his funky duds and diddled with the graphics on his computer. Or he flopped down to read his Decimator and Scarab comics, admitting that although most retropunks despised superheroes, he thought they were “’lutely nool.” Sometimes he plugged into his CD player to listen to hoodluminati bands like Mace, Rectal Exam, Cold Grease on Cary, and Smite Them Hip & Thigh. He never seemed to do homework, but he somehow passed his classes. Every essay and test paper he brought home had earned him at least a C-.
About six weeks along, The Mick sauntered up to Xavier, then relaxing in a wing chair, and handed over a note from his English teacher. The note said Mikhail adamantly refused to do certain assignments, an attitude that wanted correction.
“What assignments?”
“Anything that bores me. If it bores me, I can’t do it.”
“What’s the latest thing you haven’t been able to do?”
“Read Moby-Dick.”
“Moby-Dick, the great American novel, bores you?”
“It drags, Uncle Xave. No juice, no jazz, no pizzazz.”
“Mikhail, you’re just missing it.”
“It ain’t there.”
“From the teeming wisdom of your years, you’re saying Moby-Dick’s a bore?”
“It and Nostromo and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Sound and The Fury and Women in Love. Yawnsville, all of ’em.”
“Who do you like, Mikhail?”
“Jim Thompson. Philip K. Dick. Stephen King. Frank Miller. Elmore Leonard. John Shirley. Those guys.”
“Nobody else?”
“Stuff they won’t let in the door at Ephebus. Private-eye stories. Sci-fi. Horror. Comic-book superheroes.”
Xavier stared at The Mick as if at some incomprehensible sci-fi alien. Mahler, Melville, and Monet bored him. His idols were punk rockers, horror novelists, comic-book artists. Xavier’s heroes were elitist stiffs who’d lasted as long as they had only because nerdy academic types had taken up their overclever crap as the best route to gassier egos and longer careers.
What could Xavier say? That he loved what The Mick loathed? That he found in the strivings of even the most difficult artists a heroic affirmation of intellect as well as heart? That symmetrical complexity can be as beautiful as stark simplicity? Sure, those would be good things to stress. But he could also say that anyone may learn to appreciate both kinds of beauty . . . if not repeatedly warned away from the former by philistines and from the latter by snobs. Maybe, in rendering certain judgments, he came on like a snob? He didn’t like to think so. You couldn’t praise the bad just because it was accessible. Or dis the praiseworthy simply because it failed to excite the masses. Unless, of course, you didn’t give a damn about the truth. Xavier didn’t think he was an elitist. He believed in the Keatsian doctrine “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and he didn’t like people to mistake pewter for platinum. Out of this reverie, Xavier found that The Mick had retreated to his bedroom. He followed him to his door.
“Mikhail, do you think I’m a snob?”
The Mick, cross-legged on his bed, sat under a poster of the hoodluminati band Smite Them Hip & Thigh: five teenagers of three distinct racial phenotypes and six different hair colors. Linked by an electronic umbilical to his music, Mikhail unplugged.
Xavier repeated his question.
“You’d know better’n me, Uncle Xave.”
“Let me rephrase: Do I seem to you a snob?”
The Mick smiled cryptically. “Do you think I’m a fucking yahoo?”
“You’re unfinished. And too quick to label boring what you don’t yet understand. But you’re no yahoo. You’re too smart.”
The Mick considered this. “You’re unfinished, too. You in your high-art way, me in my hoodluminati rat hole. Your way may be worse.”
Xavier would have liked to argue this, but he had to pick up Bari at the Salonika Trade Mart, and so their discussion came to an indeterminate end. Still, he left thinking that it might be a good experiment to sit down—when he had more time—and listen to the irritating hoodluminati yahoos known as . . . Smite Them Hip & Thigh.
Maybe.
10
Critical Mass
One morning, Xavier took Bari and The Mick to mass at Christ’s Episcopal Church in downtown Salonika, a lovely white edifice in the classic Greek style. Mikhail hadn’t wanted to go—he’d never gone with Xavier to church before—but when he learned that Bari was also going, he reconsidered.
On the walk from Franklin Court to Jackson Square, he slouched along behind Xavier and Bari in his blue jeans, sneakers, and a clean white T-shirt with his Ephebus Academy tie. Xavier had been about to forbid him to come, if he dressed with so little respect, but Bari, a vision in mockingbird-grey and eggshell-white, had urged Xavier to relax his standards—not to demean high communion, but to make it easier for Mikhail to go with them. “What’s more important, Xave, that he look like a little earl or that he take part in the Eucharist?”
Even Xavier knew the answer to that question; and in the wide, cool sanctuary of Christ’s Episcopal, as the choir on the balcony sang to guitar and flute accompaniment, the issue of the kid’s dress ceased to matter. Xavier felt uplifted by his presence in the church and exalted by the music. Nietzsche would puke, but Xavier was religious not just by childhood upbringing but on tested philosophical-aesthetic grounds. Preparing for high communion, he felt exactly as he did when strolling past a superb exhibition in the Upshaw or seeing Aeschylus well performed at the state theater.
So what if The Mick had schlepped into God’s house clad like a retropunk whirled through a men’s shop? So what if Xavier’s head still throbbed from too much wine at Lesegne’s? So what if Bari had come along more to keep him company than to take the elements? And so what if his nephew was paging the Book of Common Prayer as if it were an out-of-date volume of Comic Buyer’s Guide? What mattered now was this sublime striving toward Godhead. A sublime striving—as scandalous as the notion struck most priests—spiritually akin to the Nietzschean urge to obtain to the Übermensch.
“Are you all right?”
Bari asked Xavier.
“Fine,” he said, surprised they were still in a building in latter-day Salonika.
The robed priest had finished his homily. He was calling parishioners to the altar to take the wafer and drink from a silver goblet. Ushers were gesturing pew occupants to their feet and nodding them into a shuffling double queue. The huge painting of Christ behind the altar, a fresco in which Jesus looked like either a Dante Gabriel Rossetti longhair or a superannuated hippie used-car salesman, seemed to lend the Savior’s own blessing to this steady procession. Xavier grabbed a pew back to get to his feet.
whoosh! his sinuses roared open. He pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, dabbed his upper lip and chin. But Xavier was the victim of an untimely allergy. Not only did his nose run, but his eyes gushed, his lips discharged a colorless sebum, and his ears drained a waxy amber goo.
“Fucking gross,” yucked The Mick.
Xavier was disoriented, as if a very large person—Lee Stamz, say—had seized his head and plunged it into a zinc bucket of acidic vanilla extract and melted crayons.
“Xavier, you’re ill,” Bari said, taking his arm.
“I’m all right!”
“You can’t go up, Uncle Xave,” The Mick whispered. “They’re using a fucking common cup.”
An usher—a watery ghost in a three-piece suit—said, “He’s right. Things being what they are nowadays, we can’t let you take with everybody else.”
Had Xavier insisted on that privilege, there might well have been a scene in Christ’s Episcopal. But Xavier didn’t insist. Balloon-headed, he offered no protest when the usher led him and his companions to the vestibule.
Asked the usher, “Should I see if there’s a doctor in church today, Mr. Thaxton?”
“No, thank you.”
Xavier, Bari, and The Mick walked home. Or, as it seemed to him, swam home, dog-paddling through the bizarre mists generated by his own inner weathers. Yuck. (The only word adequate to the situation.)
Later, laid out on the sofa in his living room, a towel protecting the pillow under his head, Xavier tried to compute the chances of drowning while unsubmerged.
“We should call a doctor or visit the ER at Salonika General,” Bari said.
“Unh-uh. I’ll be all right.”
Squatting, The Mick opened the louvered doors hiding the TV.
“Not now, Mikhail,” Bari pled.
“Uncle Xave didn’t get decently churched. Watch this.”
Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s Great Gospel Giveaway flickered into view. Wide-angle pans of the Televangelism Temple in Rehoboth, Louisiana, revealed several thousand jubilant worshipers. McElroy was dunning them and his video audience for money, now with a performance by twelve poodles dressed in robes: McElroy’s Dixie Dog Disciples. The poodles danced about the stage as a two-hundred-member choir sang: “Giving your all, / O yes, your all, / Yes, giving your all / For JEEEEEE-suhss.”
“What a fucking trip,” said The Mick.
“Spare me,” Xavier said, squinting at the spectacle between his stockinged feet. “Mikhail, spare me.”
“Come on, Mick,” Bari said.
“Just want Uncle Xave to get his minimum weekly fix of religion, Bari-Bari.”
“That’s not religion, Mikhail, but an abominable mix of sideshow hucksterism and pious razzmatazz.” Xavier sat up and pointed at the screen. “Great Gospel Giveaway has about as much to do with cultivating faith as astrology has with acquiring knowledge about the heavens. A hypocritical sham. It makes me sick. Sick to my soul.”
“That may be. But,” Bari said, “you seem to be doing a little better physically.”
Xavier recoiled to find this true. Strange fluids had ceased flowing from his eyes, ears, and nose. His mucous membranes had dried out, he was witnessing McElroy’s vaudevillian tom-foolery with mist-free eyes. Gospel Giveaway offended him spiritually, but he couldn’t deny that he was otherwise in the pink of health.
How thoroughly he’d recovered from his untoward allergy attack during high communion!
“Turn that off, Mikhail. Now.”
The Mick, picking up something implacable in his uncle’s tone, obeyed.
11
Chad, Di Pasqua, and the Therac 4-J
Teri-Jo Roving’s two-year-old son, Chad, stood on the carpeted speaker’s platform in an auditorium of the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic. Dr. Witcover, a visiting oncologist, had just given a lecture on new advances in detection-and-diagnostic procedures, and Chad, podium mike in hand, was doing a dead-on baby-talk impersonation of the departed lecturer. Dr. Di Pasqua heard the noise and returned from the corridor. He had been so busy dispensing hospitality and local color to Dr. Witcover that Teri-Jo hadn’t yet had a chance to talk with him. Well, that chance seemed imminent. . . . “I’m sure you all have things to do,” Dr. Di Pasqua told Teri-Jo and the others watching Chad.
“Yessir,” everybody said, beginning to leave. Chad stayed on stage, beside the podium, swaying in knock-kneed spasms and talking to a mike that returned nothing but amplified popping. “Your grandson?” Dr. Di Pasqua asked Teri-Jo, now trying to halt the toddler’s performance.
“No, Dr. Di Pasqua, my firstborn.”
“Sorry,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “Of course.”
Teri-Jo carried Chad down to Dr. Di Pasqua. During her pregnancy, he had been on a research sabbatical. As a result, he had forgotten, or had never learned, that her labor had been hard and her recovery slow.
“Chaddie’s here because my husband’s sick. Our regular day-care providers are remodeling their building.”
“Never mind. So long as he isn’t burlesquing a distinguished guest, I don’t object to his being here.”
“Mamma,” Chad murmured lowly. He placed both hands on her face and pushed his button nose into her hair.
“Come, Nurse Roving,” Dr. Di Pasqua said. “I’ve something to show you.”
They left the hall. When Dr. Di Pasqua thought better of Chad’s accompanying them, Teri-Jo took him to Bonnie Gainsboro, a secretary, who seemed even less thrilled by this arrangement than did Chaddie. His heartbroken wails were audible all the way to the service elevator to the basement.
*
Downstairs, Dr. Di Pasqua led her into the tunnel connecting the cancer clinic with Salonika General. “A custodian found this yesterday, but Dr. Witcover’s visit kept me from facing the problem until now.” They stopped short of the tunnel’s midway point, in a bleak tributary corridor that Teri-Jo had never really noticed before. Kept me from facing the problem, she amended her boss’s words. That’s what you really meant.
“This is an auxiliary storage area.” Dr. Di Pasqua opened the door with a tarnished key. “The custodian came in yesterday to inventory cleaning equipment, but ended up”—he escorted Teri-Jo past a tall rack of disinfectants and paper products—“finding something alarming.”
Briefly, Teri-Jo imagined the janitor stumbling upon a corpse, maybe even Dr. Wayman Huguley’s. Which was absurd. She’d gone to that old man’s funeral.
“There.” Dr. Di Pasqua pulled a frayed light string to reveal the inanimate cause of his alarm: “That.”
Teri-Jo gaped. It was a cancer-therapy device, an antiquated machine whose type the clinic no longer used and a working example of which she hadn’t seen in over fifteen years. Radiation therapy was yet a fairly young science, but before this obsolete treatment machine, Teri-Jo felt as a contemporary sports-car enthusiast might in the presence of a Stanley Steamer.
“What I’d like to know,” Dr. Di Pasqua said, “is if this thing has been radiation-decommissioned.”
“Desourced?”
“Yes. This was one of Dr. Huguley’s purchases. There’s no telling how long it’s been moldering in here.”
Despite the Scrooge-like slur on Dr. Huguley, her boss might be right. If he were right, he’d shown bad judgment letting them walk in here as if the therapy machine were as benign as any old Wurlitzer. They should have worn vest shields and carried a dose
-rate meter. If any of the janitors had been cleaning with radioactive disinfectants, the clinic’s weekly checks would have told them so long ago.
Teri-Jo knelt by the machine. Its markings—and her own memory, now kicking in—identified it as a Therac 4-J, a device once manufactured by the EarthRay-Schenck Corporation of Danby, Ohio. Teri-Jo examined it carefully.
“It looks like its source is intact, Dr. Di Pasqua. The cylinder holding the cesium cake is here, just where it would be if the device worked. But there may be no cesium in the can.” She wrote down the machine’s serial number and date of manufacture.
“How likely is that?”
“Not very. If somebody’s going to decommission a source—empty out its heat—why would they shove the empty cylinder back into the machine? We’d probably be smart to regard the Therac 4-J as alive.”
“All right. We will. So we may have another disposal problem on our hands. If so, I’m charging you to get rid of this machine without a drawn-out search for a disposal site. We don’t have the room, and I don’t have the patience.” Dr. Di Pasqua directed Teri-Jo back out into the main tunnel.
Tell me something new, Teri-Jo thought. Aloud, she said, “At least I’ve got a telephone number this time. If they haven’t changed it. If they’re still in business.”
Dr. Di Pasqua locked the door, and he and Teri-Jo returned to the clinic, where she rescued Bonnie Gainsboro from Chad (and vice versa) and carried him into her own office to scan the computer files for the radiation-disposal invoice and to flip past all her dog-eared Rolodex entries looking for the number of . . . Environomics Unlimited. Ah, there.
“We’re in business, Chaddie.”
On the floor with a box of facial tissues, Chad pulled them out and tossed them away like a magician releasing doves with clipped wings.
*
That afternoon, Milton Copperud, the NCR physicist assigned to the cancer clinic, dropped by to tell Teri-Jo that, as she had surmised, the Therac 4-J was still loaded. It had not only its source cylinder, but, within it, a hefty complement of the radioactive stuff that had once made it a moderately effective therapy instrument. Moderately effective because this model of the machine had always had some design problems.
Count Geiger's Blues Page 6
