“Its last resupply from EarthRay-Schenck was two years before Dr. Huguley hired me,” she told Copperud, consulting a folder no one had ever logged onto a computer disk. “Cesium 137’s half-life is thirty years. That means there’s still a goodly mess of curies clicking away in there.”
“Well, Teri-Jo, they’re safely pent—the emission level’s not even measurable yet. But the sooner the Therac’s gone the better.”
“You talking public health, Milt, or my job security?”
Copperud laughed, winked, and took off for another part of the clinic. Chad slept in a nest of carpet shag, snoring in an eerie high-pitched impersonation of his daddy’s sleep sounds. Smiling, Teri-Jo punched out the old number for Environomics Unlimited.
Blessedly, it rang.
12
Variations on an Unknown Malady
In the next month, nothing similar to, or quite similar to, the episode at Christ’s Episcopal befell Xavier. He told himself that an allergy had been to blame. When this theory failed to quell his doubts, he posited such causes as diet, stress, a rampant virus, or an extreme reaction to exhaust fumes or other pollutants. Damn it all, his body had begun to betray him in strange ways. Nothing like the sinus problems—“head leakage,” Mikhail had dubbed that complex of symptoms—suffered at communion, but stuff equally hard to account for and deal with. In fact, Xavier accounted for and dealt with it all by refusing to think about it.
If he thought about it, he’d have to take steps—write out a list of his episodes, visit a doctor. And visiting a doctor was out of the question. He didn’t want to know what the doctor might find. Cancer. Muscular dystrophy. AIDS. Alzheimer’s. Nothing but a clean bill of health would relieve his anxiety, and maybe he couldn’t get one. So he never thought about his illness except recurrently through the day and continuously through the night. In “The Night-Song” from Thus Spake Zarathustra, the prophet says, “But I live in my own light, I drink again into myself the flames that break forth from me.” Xavier was living in his own darkness and drinking again into himself every potentially enlightening tongue of flame. Maybe those flames would flicker out if he ignored them. . . .
The Mick just survived his classes at Ephebus, bringing home a D- in English for refusing to let Melville, Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner “bore” him. This attitude enraged Xavier, who saw it as an excuse for avoiding the unfamiliar and dismissing big chunks of humanity’s past as unworthy of study.
During Ephebus’s Christmas break, The Mick hunted different means of getting through his days while Xavier worked. He read (comic books), eyed the tube (soaps and game shows), fiddled with his computer (video games), and listened to his tapes and CDs (especially those of Cold Grease on Cary and Smite Them Hip & Thigh). What he didn’t do, Xavier noted, was throw the football in Le Grande Park, lift weights at the Y, take walks, or join a youth basketball league. “You’ve got to get some exercise,” Xavier told him. “You can’t just sit up here and vegetate.”
So The Mick rummaged up his skateboard, bought knee and elbow pads, high-topped athletic shoes, and a helmet, and spent his days “thrashing” the sloped concrete walls at Skateboard City on Battery Place. He did this morning and the afternoon. He did it wearing court gear and a pair of loose dove-grey sweats—so that when he got home in the evening, he had the parboiled look of a lobster and the reek of a well-worked dray horse. His shins, forearms, and palms bore the bruises and hamburgery scrapes that he got playing “war” against other skateboard jockeys, and at dinner Xavier felt lucky if Mikhail didn’t nod off while eating.
“Go easy,” Xavier said. “Don’t wear your skateboard out before the New Year.”
So The Mick stayed home the next day, and that evening Xavier asked him to play chess. It took a while to persuade Mikhail, his own preferred sports being televised women’s roller derby and the all-out sort of concrete surfing favored at Skateboard City, but at last he fetched the chessmen and the board. This, thought Xavier, is what Mikhail needs. Skateboarding was on a par with declassé amusements like pro wrestling, jai alai, and drag racing, but chess was a hallowed variety of intellectual combat.
The game began. The two traded pawns and erected defenses even as they plotted wily lines of attack. Xavier was into it, and likewise The Mick. Abruptly, Xavier’s nose began to bleed. He’d never had a nosebleed in his life, and the sight of so much crimson splashing the chess pieces—“The Red Sea!”, to quote Cyrano—unnerved him. Maybe the hemorrhage implied a fatal cancer. Both hands over his nose, he recoiled from the board as if from blazing coals.
“Caramba!” The Mick cried. “Looky, unc—you’ve done a Friday the Thirteenth sequel on your whole damned army!”
Nearly every piece on Xavier’s side of the board resembled the victims in a slasher film. Seeing the bloody carven knights, bishops, and other pieces, well, it made him recall every rotten horror film he’d stumbled into accidentally or whose plot he’d heard numbingly detailed by the Urbanite’s Popular Culture staff. Abruptly—as abruptly as it had begun—his nosebleed was staunched. Mysteriously staunched.
“You okay?” The Mick asked.
“I think so.” Xavier wiped his face and hands with a tissue.
“Here.” The Mick picked up the board. “I’ll clean the bloody fuckers up.”
“Okay, but I’ll never touch one of those chessmen again. Never.”
The Mick considered the crimson flood an interlude in their play, not an emphatic period, but Xavier would not continue. He retreated to the bathroom for a washcloth and peered at himself in the mirror with haunted eyes.
*
That same December, some actors set to act in the next George Bernard Shaw Drama Festival in Placer Creek came to Salonika’s Oconee State Theater to do a staged reading of “Don Juan in Hell” from Man and Superman. This reading was a preview of the festival and a sop to city officials who felt that Phosphor Fog Community College was too small an institution, in too remote a spot, to host such a prestigious event.
Xavier, now recognizing Ivie Nakai’s passion for all things Shavian, took her with him. Because she would attend the GBS Drama Festival & Country Crafts Fair as the Urbanite’s Fine Arts reporter, he wanted her to have a head start on the out-of-state competition. He had outperformed the New York Times, Washington Post, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters who’d come to Oconee last July. Ivie would too.
The first reading was a private affair for the mayor and a few media people. The actors dressed casually and moved about the bare stage as if their playbooks were superfluous. Their preparation and the ease with which the actors playing Don Juan and the Devil spieled Shaw’s witty speeches impressed Xavier.
Suddenly, he found himself resisting an urgent pressure in his lower colon. Ivie Nakai, enraptured by the performance, was unaware of his problem. How to dam this intestinal tide? Should he run to the john to prevent public embarrassment? Near the end of the piece, as the Devil advised, “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human,” Xavier had no choice. Standing, he said, “Forgive me, Ivie. This is . . . urgent.”
It was, too, and in the john, he tried to recall if he’d eaten or drunk anything that would have affected him this way. Out of disgust for its radio ads, he avoided Ricardo’s, and he’d never been big on martinis or kraut dogs. But even as empty as an unused wineskin, his stomach continued to knot and unknot. Xavier crept back into the theater and eased down in his seat just as the actors were taking their final bows.
“God,” Ivie said. “You’re as white as a slug, sir.”
*
Xavier left the theater and caught a taxi back to the Ralph McGill Building. He had work to do, and his continuing cramps were no immediate threat to his sanity. They’d surely stop soon. (Wouldn’t they?)
In the lobby, Donel Lassiter saw Xavier and waved a tabloid called the Instigator at him. “See this rag. A classic, a bona fide classic.”
“Garbage, Donel. Garbage pure and simp
le.”
“How can you say that, sir? This story”—slapping the front page—“is Pulitzer Prize material.” He thrust the Instigator into Xavier’s hands. “See for yourself.”
“Wait a sec—!”
But Donel exited hurriedly onto the street. Xavier, gut aching, carried the paper to his office and read “84-year-old woman gives birth to frog!” —the headline of the story that Donel had cited as Pulitzer Prize material.
Other headlines?
TEENAGE SEX SLAVE’S FAVORITE SNICKERDOODLE RECIPE
JESUS’S UFO TWIN VISITS ISRAELI KNESSET WITH JOHN LENNON’S GHOST
DANNY DEVITO AND JACKIE O. REVEAL THEIR FORBIDDEN LOVE
Xavier, incredulously agog, perused the accompanying stories. In a while, his wrenching intestinal spasms ceased, and he felt himself again.
An evening later, Xavier attended a performance of the Salonika Symphony Orchestra. The airier his spirit, though, the heavier his body. As the tenor horn sounded soulfully in a late movement of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, his knees began to tremble, his eyes to tear, his arms to depend like dead-weight salamis. Not again, he thought.
He had to stay alert. If he fainted, he’d halt the winter concert, embarrass himself, and miss the piece’s stirring Kapellmeistermusik parody, a rondo that never failed to tickle and revive him. How terrible, to succumb again to the perverse ailment that had plagued him off and on ever since . . . his fateful camping trip in the Phosphor Fogs.
What barbarous times, he thought, still trying to focus on the fourth movement’s lovely Nachtmusik. A barbarism that includes various nuclear threats, random terrorism, the galloping debasement of popular tastes—and the soul-destroying physical and emotional fallout from these horrors. Xavier envied the civilized romantic angst of Mahler, who had written this movement in 1904 at Maiernigg in the Tyrolean Alps. Even in those transitional times, one could fall into existential nausea. But in 1904, at least, one could still shape, without embarrassment or apology, sublime works of art, passionate expressions of the human soul that could change one’s life and redeem the age.
The harp and the tenor horn lifted Xavier’s spirit ever higher, but his body had filled with sludge. “Xavier,” said the beauty beside him in the Urbanite’s reserved box. “Xavier, what’s wrong?” Bari Carlisle, a world-famed couturière. The woman he planned to marry. He could not answer her. He pulled himself up by the balcony rail and stared down on the audience. Closing his watery eyes, he reached toward the musicians brilliantly rendering the Seventh. Gravity seized him, and he began to topple.
“Xavier!” Bari cried.
Later, people conferred above him.
“An honest-to-God swoon,” a male voice said. “You rarely see that anymore.”
“Better to call it a ‘swoon dive,’ ” a woman said.
“If Ms. Carlisle hadn’t grabbed him by the cumberbund.”
“Otherwise,” the woman replied, “he’d’ve taken out three or four concertgoers.”
“Who is he, Tess?”
“Fine Arts editor of the Urbanite. Or he favors that highbrow idiot’s picture.”
“Idiot or no, he brought this Mahler marathon to an end. I’m forever in his debt.”
Bari knelt beside Xavier. “Then why not give the ‘highbrow idiot’ a little air?”
“Why?” a woman said. “I mean, he’s always giving himself airs, isn’t he?”
Holding a moist towel to Xavier’s forehead, Bari glared at the bitch, and she and her escort slunk off via the stairs.
Belatedly, the orchestra launched the bravura fifth movement of Song of the Night. “Thanks,” Xavier managed, opening his eyes and reaching for Bari’s hand. He still felt weak, but getting out of their balcony seats had restored a modicum of his vitality. Unfortunately, the wonderful music swelling anew in the concert hall had begun to erode it again.
“We’re leaving,” Bari said.
“I can’t leave. Concert’s not over. I’ve got a review to do.”
“Haven’t you liked what you’ve heard so far?”
“Of course. This is a definitive Seventh, Bari.”
“Then the fifth movement won’t be a letdown, either.” Bari helped Xavier stand. “Write what you’ve told me and your review’s as good as in the system.”
“That’d be cheating, Bari. That’d be—”
“—surviving, lover, and that’s all we’re going to say about the matter. Come on.” She helped him down the stairs and out of the concert hall.
13
At First Stringers
A counterman at First Stringers cried, “Walk two mutts through the mud! Coupla spudboats ’n’ a pair of dopes, make ’em beanless!” Xavier couldn’t believe he was in this trilevel fast-food emporium, Salonika’s greasiest greasy spoon. He hated hot dogs, French fries, onion rings, soft drinks, all the garbage urban masochists devoured in their search for what he could only assume was Perpetual Dyspepsia. That Bari’d brought him here, thirty minutes after he’d swooned at a Mahler concert, flouted all logic.
“He means two chili dogs, two orders of fries, and a couple of decaf Cokes.”
“I know, but we’re actually ordering these culinary offscourings.”
“Pretend it’s caviar, coq au vin, and Napoleon brandy.”
“If I could do that, I’d quit my job to write novels.”
He looked around. Of all places to end up, First Stringers was the nadir. Its patrons were pimply vo-tek students, Oconee State undergraduates, acne-afflicted ladies of the night, maybe even pimply pimps. Sometimes, a few tony uptowners would come in slumming, but they were worse than the locals who had nowhere else to beg or buy their next assembly-line burger.
Bari, carrying their tray as if he were an invalid, led him into a cavelike first-level dining room, on one wall of which was mounted a concave screen showing an ancient episode of Gilligan’s Island; Xavier took the tray and placed it atop one of the old-fashioned school desks serving as tables, then watched with numb incredulity as Gilligan and the Skipper played hot potato with a prodigious crab. Around the room, six or seven zombied-out customers bovinely chewed and bovinely watched.
“Bari, what’re we doing here?”
“Squelch that, okay? How do you feel?”
Weirdly, pretty good. The bone-deep ennui that had overcome him at the concert hall had fled. Even the pervasive reek of grease and stale streetwalker perfume hadn’t yet reversed or noticeably slowed his recovery. He told Bari as much, marveling that he should be “dining” in this egregious travesty of a “restaurant.”
“Say what you like about First Stringers, Xavier. It seems to be one of the cures for your peculiar malady.”
“What peculiar malady? I swooned at the symphony. Now I’m fine again.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve been having spells like this for weeks.”
“No, I haven’t. I mean, they’re just brief moments of weakness. I work hard and hit my deadlines. It takes a toll.”
Bari asked him to remember their most recent outing: “Last week, at the Upshaw, we were standing in front of that lovely Vermeer. After ten minutes of devout silence, you dropped to your knees in what initially seemed an excess of admiration.”
“A flukish episode. As soon as I’d sat down for a while, I was okay again.”
“You sat on a marble bench in the viewing room, but you didn’t feel better until I told you to look out the window facing Sycamore. The buses going by with ad panels for Uncommon Comics and the tristate tractor-pull finals—that’s what did it. Five minutes of drecky ad panels was all it took to replenish your vim, lover.”
Xavier eyeballed Bari skeptically.
“Deny it,” she said. “You can’t, though. It’s true.”
“I recovered, that’s all. I’d had a dizzy spell from standing so long.”
Bari demurred. “Look, we left the Upshaw. You were fine again. We caught a taxi to the Bergman revival at Screen Dreams. Where, please recall, you sat—did not stand—for an
exclusive showing of Smiles of a Summer Night. What happened there?”
“Nothing, Bari. Or nothing much. I fell asleep.”
“You never fall asleep at a Bergman flick. You could happily watch The Silence three times in a row. But you zonked out during maybe the most charming film the Infallible Ingmar ever made. A romantic comedy!”
Xavier glanced at the big curved screen. Gilligan was standing on a rock imitating a crippled albatross. “I was tired, Bari. It’s that simple: I was tired.”
“Not that tired. Ray and I practically had to give you CPR to bring you round. We feared you’d had a heart attack. Once we’d got you awake, Ray made you gobble jelly beans—for energy, he said. Then he sprocketed up an old Mighty Mouse cartoon, and you were fine again. Again.”
“What’s your point?”
“That you’re refusing to draw the inevitable conclusion.”
“This is absurd.”
“Absurd or not, the inevitable conclusion grows more and more obvious.”
Xavier took another bite of his chili dog. By almost any standard, it was execrable food, and yet he felt, well, fortified by it. “You’re saying that although I esteem high art, the kind that stretches our God-given capabilities to the limit, the products of high art have begun to tear me down physically.”
“Partly. What else?”
“Shoddy work replaces the vigor leached from me by my appreciation of Quality. Uncompromising artists weakeneth me, but dreckmeisters restoreth my strength, if not my soul.”
“Bull’s-eye.”
Although now alert and able-bodied, Xavier slumped. “What am I going to do?”
“See a doctor.”
“A nonsense syndrome. I must be its only victim.”
“Remember when you were a kid and thought every nutritious food had to taste bad? Liver, spinach, Brussels sprouts? For you, Xavier, it’s happening again—but in a way that violates your carefully cultivated grown-up tastes.”
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