Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “If you don’t buy it now, unc,” The Mick said, “I might hotfoot it again.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Mikhail.”

  They bought the costume. Xavier shared the cost with Bari, who threatened to dump him if he didn’t let her chip in: a tender sort of blackmail.

  “Sorry I already boxed it,” Griff said. “Hope you didn’t plan to wear it home.”

  27

  The Suit

  From that evening forward, Xavier developed a secret relationship with his Count Geiger suit. Wearing it every day (although it put him in mind of the “garments,” officially blessed underclothes, that some Mormons wore, believing them charms against a host of unspecified injuries), he had to admit that the Suit seemed to work for him. He went back to editing the Urbanite’s Fine Arts section, labors he could now perform without feeding plum assignments to Ivie Nakai, Donel Lassiter, or Pippa Wiedmeyer.

  Secreting the costume under his clothes, Clark Kent-style, did create some minor problems. Its lightness, flexibility, and micromolecular thinness aside, it still contrived to make Xavier sweat. The fact that September and October were a little cooler than usual mitigated this tendency, but Walt Grantham insisted on maintaining a year-round work-environment temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes, encased like a laminated cheese slice in his stalwartly long johns, Xavier tried to imagine that a cooling blizzard had swept through Salonika, that soothing snows were drifting through its late-autumn asphalt canyons and tarry culs-de-sac. And he began to dread next summer, still seven months away.

  Every night, Xavier hand-washed his costume. It dripped dry in an hour, then he’d spray it with a commercial fixative obtained by his nephew for an exorbitant fee at SatyrFernalia. The fixative dried on contact, but, usually, Xavier sat in his bedroom, naked, luxuriating in his evening respite from the Suit’s tyranny. Eventually, he’d put it back on, for if he dawdled too long without wearing it, a snatch of Beethoven’s Ninth, overheard from an adjacent apartment, could trip a pernicious somatic response—Xavier never knew what sort—and threaten his livelihood. So he was careful. Dressed in the Suit, he could enjoy historic recordings by Gluck, Gershwin, and, yes, even Gregor McGudgeon. Without penalty, he could read all that he most admired, see all the films and artwork deserving his attention, listen to all that he deemed meritorious. For Xavier, this was freedom—even if imprisonment in, and subtle manipulation by, the Count Geiger outfit was freedom’s despotic price.

  *

  The Suit had other disadvantages, some too personal or intimate to record. (But let’s relate one anyway.) In brief, like a bundling board, the Suit literally got in the way of Xavier and Bari’s evolving physical relationship.

  Although he could roll its tinfoilish sheath onto his naked person with speed and precision (a kind of body-sized prophylactic), the costume was damned hard to skin out of. On those evenings when The Mick wasn’t home—finally, he’d made a friend or two at Ephebus—it was frustrating for Xavier to discover that he couldn’t unzip, unpleat, unholster, or disencondom himself fast enough to address the urgency of his or Bari’s passion.

  Bari still had not agreed to his marriage proposal, noting that the fashion products of Bari’s of Salonika were now so popular that she’d be unable to fulfill the vows that he, as a Suthren male of old-timey values, would expect her to meet. On the other hand, in The Mick’s absences, when her work didn’t call, she still liked to “do the deed” (her words), and it drove Xavier crazy—crazier—to have to wage all-out war on his Reynolds Wrap skivvies to take advantage of her randy moods.

  “Don’t rush,” Bari’d whisper. “Please don’t rush.”

  But generally he did, pinching the porous, pliant foil, digging at it with his fingernails, struggling doltfully to prise apart the invisible seam bisecting it into vertical body halves, making so many unseemly noises—grunts, moans, curses—that Bari often wound up laughing, albeit with a flushed face and visibly perky nipples. It wasn’t as bad as daily victimization by the Philistine Syndrome, but almost.

  Things would have gone better if he’d just asked Bari over after struggling free of his Count Geiger duds. Then he could’ve met her at the door in a dressing gown. But that approach was so clinical it sabotaged the element of romance essential to a fulfilling erotic encounter. For spontaneity was a crucial part of the mix, and Xavier didn’t want to assume too much, on any given evening, about Bari’s desires. If she’d had an especially grueling day, for example, all she wanted was a shoulder to cling to, and he was more than happy to oblige. Meeting her at the door in his dressing gown would have been like placing a bowl of condoms on his coffee table or slapping an X-rated cassette into the VCR as soon as they finished dinner.

  One evening, The Mick away taking an acoustic-guitar lesson in a neighborhood called Sinatro Heights, Bari showed up in a state of diffident rut. The Suit (as they both referred to it, subjecting its tyrannical traits to glum upper-case mockery) had thwarted them at least twice before. But this evening was different—Bari had brought two small packages, neither bigger than a man’s wallet, wrapped in silver, gold, and ebony foil. “Excuse me a sec,” she said, retreating to Mikhail’s room but reappearing, moments later, in a sexy Saint Torque costume, rented, as it turned out, from the gerbily Griff Sienko at SatyrFernalia.

  Xavier, smiling, “You look—”

  “Don’t say it. I know.”

  “Scrumptious was the word I had in mind.”

  “Beats the one that was surfacing through my vocabulary—it’s hard to be positive about the couturier’s design approach.”

  Xavier nodded toward The Mick’s room. “So what’s in the other little box?”

  “Later. If this” —lifting her arms, doing a quarter pirouette— “does anything for you now.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  And, in fact, it helped to see his heart’s first lady clad in a costume as corny and kitsch-freighted as the Suit that, there in his living room, he speedily stripped to. It helped a lot. Xavier found a seam of tenderness in himself that he had not explored in a long time. Beside it, so to speak, he located a hidden seam in his Count Geiger costume that let him explore this tenderness with Bari at pleasurable length. Eventually, Bari dragged herself off to The Mick’s room only to show up again, revitalized, in the outfit of a modern Amazon known to UC-comic readers as Warwoman. To Xavier’s amazement, more hanky-panky ensued. His strength was renewed, tried, depleted, and renewed again. The mechanism of this renewal—minus the fumbling and frustration that the Suit ordinarily inflicted on him—seemed to be the synergistic effects spawned by two SatyrFernalia costumes interfacing in lubricious cahoots. So there was a way to sidestep at least one of The Suit’s major shortcomings, and, through this method, Xavier knew several welcome kinds of relief.

  *

  After these diversions, he Suited again and carried Bari a glass of pink-grapefruit drink. In the lotus position on his sofa, she sat sinuously brushing her hair. “We could be married at Christmas,” he said, handing her the glass. “The festiveness, the color, the . . . the anticipation.”

  “Oh, yeah. Whose?”

  “Mine,” Xavier said. He feared that if he didn’t put a band on her finger and an official state imprimatur on their relationship, she would break it off and turn to another. You could also escape from a marriage, of course, just as you could be faithless within it, but Bari was in many respects still an orthodox Suthren girl, and if he took her to the altar, he’d have her. Really have her.

  “We’ve danced all over this topic.” Bari sipped her pink drink in the minimalist costume that the First Couturier had fashioned for her. “Not tonight too.”

  “Christmas would give us plenty of time to plan.”

  “Only if we substituted a Saint Torque or a Warwoman outfit for my wedding gown, lover.”

  “I’d have no objection.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t. Would you stand up in the Suit?”

  “Well, I’d—”

  “I’m
assembling my line for the February couture in Paris. That’s occupying all”—glancing down at herself—“well, not quite all, of my energies at present, and if I agreed to marry you at Christmas, it wouldn’t be fair to you as my new husband to put you on hold for the following two months. I was lucky to get away tonight. Designing a new collection’s like laying out strategy for a global war. How many times must I explain this to you?”

  “If you’d do it in person, every night would be fine.”

  Bari set her glass down and drew the multicolored shawl draping the sofa back around her shoulders. She patted the sofa. “Sit down, Xave.” He sat. “Don’t doubt me, okay? I hate being doubted, and preemptively possessed, and jerked around by someone else’s insecurities. You should be more worried about how you and The Mick stand than about how you and I are doing. You and I are doing fine.”

  “Is Mikhail the reason, I mean, is he the—”

  “He’s got nothing to do with my determination to hold off a while. Is that what you’re trying to ask?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “What paranoid rot. Sure, I’d like to see you guys hitting it off like frat brothers, but that’s not a precondition of our marrying.”

  Xavier stared at his glittery thighs. “Right now, Bari, we’re into mutual tolerance. He’s back at Ephebus, and although he’s still doing crappy, I don’t ride him as much and we can take breakfast together without throwing Pop Tarts at each other.”

  “Commendable.”

  “Know what’s helped?”

  “His knowing you’re all he’s got Stateside. His protector and food source.”

  “Maybe. What else?”

  “Your rave for Smite Them Hip & Thigh.”

  “Yeah, there’s that, I guess. What else?”

  “Your expanded septum of appreciation.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know, lover. What?”

  “This Suit. He’s proud of himself for getting us to buy it. He’s proud that it’s helped me. But mostly, he’s proud that he has an uncle running around in aluminum-foil long johns in secret impersonation of a comic-book stalwart.”

  “Well, sure,” said Bari, laughing. “Well, of course.”

  28

  Shaker Design, Shaken Faith

  Early in November, Xavier noticed, or thought he noticed, that the Suit’s effectiveness against the Philistine Syndrome had begun to taper off.

  He wore the Count Geiger costume, under his sports clothes and minus the stalwart’s hood, to an exhibit at the Upshaw called “Shaker Design.” The Mick also went because his history class was studying Early America Utopianism, and the hand-crafted objects on display—wheelbarrows, cupboards, spinning wheels, baskets, and dry-goods dippers, among other items—spoke eloquently of the artful practicality of these “radical idealists,” as a typed label beside a toy milk bucket characterized the Shakers.

  One section of the exhibit, under the watchful eye of a museum guard, allowed visitors to touch some items. Mikhail took up an ax handle. Xavier ran his fingers over a pyramid of drawers in a cherrywood cabinet. Although the idea was heresy to the kid, maybe the past did have something to teach the present.

  Xavier turned smugly to The Mick. “Well, how does this hoary old stuff stand up to today’s VCRs and PCs?”

  “Not bad,” The Mick conceded. “It’s technology too—an earlier technology. And it’s art because it’s so, uh, spiffily framed.”

  “But primitive technology, right?”

  “Shit, no. For the time these holy rollers crafted ’em, it was state-o’-th’-art gear.”

  “Interim technology. That’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?” Because Mikhail was contemptuous of any human enterprise antedating Smite Them Hip & Thigh, and because Xavier felt pinched by his Suit, his job, and the retropunk lodger in his apartment. It had been a lousy day. Although this Shaker stuff was weirdly soothing, a kernel of irritability gritted somewhere inside his hidden underarmor.

  The Mick shot back: “All technology’s interim, unc. That’s what technology is: one step from Back There to Up Here, forever. A technology that ain’t interim is end-o’-th’-world. Unless you can do some adds-on later, who’d give a fuck about it anyway?”

  “Easy, Mikhail. Didn’t mean to rip your cord.”

  “What’s the problema? You ready to stick me on a flight to Bangladeath?”

  “Mikhail, I am sorry. It’s the Suit, and work, and Bari’s refusal to marry me.”

  “You mean I’m putting the kabosh on your at-home adult entertainment.”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Yeah you do. So get this: you don’t exactly light up my social life either.”

  The guard strolled over, as if sensing imminent combat between them. Gently, he took the ax handle from Mikhail and laid it back on its display case, a priest returning a saint’s bleached ulna to its reliquary. The guard’s name was Addams, it was impressed on a hard plastic tag above his heartside pocket. Addams apologized for liberating the ax handle from The Mick. Ax handles, even Shaker ones, made him nervous. In Atlanta, once upon a time, his great-uncle had been bum-rushed out of Lester Maddox’s Pickrick restaurant by a group of white men brandishing ax handles—“nigger knockers” in their fey lingo. Thus his tendency to focus in on any whitey so equipped, even if with a 175-year-old Shaker forerunner of the bigots’ weapon of choice. This story told, Addams launched a by-the-numbers spiel about the Shaker exhibit: “Mother Ann Lee of Manchester, England, was the primary Shaker mover, so to speak—a working-class lady who arrived in NYC with eight disciples. Her followers eventually established communes here from Maine to Kentucky. . . .”

  The Mick, incredibly, was listening to Addams’s spiel, at one point even recording it on a Japanese device that looked more like a Day-Glo clothespin than a tape machine. Could The Mick be getting into history? He was largely a blank slate, a void between the ears. Ordinarily, his interests were limited to the newest retropunk CD, “chix” with “to-die-for bods,” the next local thrasher challenge, and Soap Opera Digest’s rundown of the latest doings on By Love Designed.

  “One of Mother Lee’s most distinctive tenets—it says a lot about every item you see here—explains the Shakers’ tendency to turn their handicrafts into art: ‘Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.’ Deep, huh?”

  “Yeah, deep,” The Mick agreed. Addams picked up and passed back to him for another reverent feel the Shaker ax handle.

  Xavier heard footsteps in other galleries and on the Upshaw’s swooping atrium ramps as a soft drumming, a music of reconciliation. The burr in his undersuit ceased to chafe. He found serenity in the beveled smoothness of all the Shaker spinning wheels, chairs, benches, plows.

  Later, on the street with Mikhail, Xavier felt nausea flying moth circles in his gut. Had the sublimity of a certain kind of art—today, Shaker spirituality bodied forth in fine household goods and farm tools—gnawed through the metabolic/psychological shield afforded by the Suit? Or had lunch at First Stringers—a hot pimiento-cheese burger, flaccid fries, and a cup of coffee not even a beat cop could have stomached—done that nasty trick? Hard to say. They’d taken lunch hours ago. Before the trip to SatyrFernalia, attacks of his syndrome had always come during, not after, a fine-arts experience. So lunch seemed the likelier of his two choices—though it may’ve taken a while for the sublimity of the Shaker Design exhibit to counteract the beneficial whammy of his weakening costume. Maybe.

  Xavier put an arm over Mikhail’s shoulder and limped back to Franklin Court with him uncertain and apprehensive.

  29

  “Say Yes to Droogs”

  In Satan’s Cellar, the Droogs needed Christmas bread, and two Droog eyemen, Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T, had had a warehouse under heavy vid for three days. That night, a prop cop in a go-truck stopped at the warehouse, checked it out, and shuttled on. “He be gone,” Qwarq said. “Let’s hit it.” Qwarq was amazing.
With more tools on his whip-thin person than a hardware store, he magicked a filament pick out of his coat. Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T ran in a crouch toward the warehouse, and Qwarq popped the padlock. Each took a door half and jammed it back so they could squeeze inside. Once in, they stood in a lumpy blackness, smelling goods rank with mildew and dust.

  At first, they stumbled around filching penny-ante junk, some of which would fence and some of which was so rat-gummed that a guy would have to be lidded-out even to consider boosting it. Finally, though, Shai Shiv-T bumped against a crumpled machine. The Droogs’ penlights tickled it. It had a nameplate, an ID tag: Therac 4-J.

  “Therac 4-J,” Shai Shiv-T said. “ ’At be some vandal handle.”

  The warehouse doors began to rattle. The prop cop who’d left a minute ago was standing in those doors with a beamer, flicking its light about like the hot ash of a cigar. His face was as broad and flat as a frying pan’s. He couldn’t see Qwarq or Shai Shiv-T and didn’t really seem to expect to, either. Shai Shiv-T threw a quarter at him. It banged against one door’s tin liner and ricocheted away. Qwarq, lithe and pantherine, closed the twenty steps between the Therac 4-J and the startled cop, clotheslining him with a jacket arm. The prop cop flopped. Almost as quick as Qwarq, Shai Shiv-T jumped him, a knee on either side of his bug-eyed face.

  “Ice him,” Qwarq hissed. “Ice him!”

  In a creamy blade of alley light, Shai Shiv-T watched the prop cop’s irises roll like marbles under his brow.

  “Do it!” Qwarq said. “Come on, Shaister—do it!”

  “Don’t sound me with that Shaister shit.”

  Qwarq backed off. After all, Shai Shiv-T was an entitled brother Droog.

  And the prop cop did appear to be surfing a totally trampled brain wave. He probably hadn’t even scoped them.

  “Reet,” Qwarq said. “Let’s rack him somewhere safe.” He dug into his hardware inventory, closed the prop cop’s mouth with a strip of duct tape, and blinded him from earhole to earhole with another silvery strip.