Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  Xavier was sweating. The amorphous suspicion that had plagued him ever since his visit to the Hazeltons’ place—the vague hunch that he’d seen illegally dumped radwaste near Plant VanMeter—eroded into a hard nugget of certainty. Perhaps if he had not impersonated Alex Meisel to get into the Hazelton house, he would have revealed this suspicion to the authorities months ago. He computed that that still would not have been soon enough to stop Environomics Unlimited from taking the Therac 4-J and depositing it in an ill-secured warehouse in Satan’s Cellar, but it might have been soon enough to spread the news that a dangerous piece of medical equipment was unaccounted for and that anyone finding it should (1) avoid toying with it and (2) report its location to the NRC or the Oconee Department of Natural Resources. Had he done that, the folks dying in Salonika General might have escaped that fate. Xavier now felt as he often had, in the days before the Suit, when listening to Mahler or beholding a Vermeer: feverish, weak-kneed, queasy. Mrs. Roving’s office did a stately but disorienting wheeling maneuver around him. “May I sit down?”

  Mrs. Roving, whom he had not even seen leave her desk, had a hand on his forehead. “My Lord, you’re on fire. Here.” She helped him to a chair.

  “I know where your misdirected radium waste is,” Xavier said. “Apparently, it’s been there for six years.”

  “Where?”

  He told her.

  “How do you know?”

  “About two years ago, radon seeping from canisters dumped into that stream made me sick with the peculiar intermittent ravages of the Philistine Syndrome.”

  “Come again.”

  Xavier gave a dismissive wave. “More recently, the radiation percolating through the water altered my cell structure and my body chemistry—on a second exposure to it—so I became the augmented being known to Salonika as Count Geiger. I became a living stalwart.”

  “Sounds like balderdash, Mr. Thaxton—er, Count Geiger. A second exposure to radiation would have just made you sick again. Depending on its intensity, it could have even killed you.”

  “I wish it had.” Xavier’s self-pity prompted only an eyeball roll. “Sometimes I wish it had,” he corrected himself. “No mere physical augmentation can make up for a person’s moral poverty, Mrs. Roving.”

  “I’ll make a note in my Bartlett’s. How long have you known about the radwaste up there? How do you know you’re not jumping to a wild-eyed conclusion?”

  “Cockroach,” he answered. “The six-legged racehorse now running for Hallelujah Stables in Tennessee. Also, a three-eyed catfish.”

  “Would you like a glass of water? A cold compress?”

  “I’ve never seen Cockroach, except on TV, but I did see the catfish, Mrs. Roving. It looked like the get of a surrealist’s feverish imagination. It was bioluminescent, it glowed, it watched me. Swear to God.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Thaxton. Relax a few minutes.”

  Xavier leaned his head against the wall and took a series of slow breaths. His nausea abated. His flushed skin clocked down to a cool off-white, and he asked, “Who actually did the pickups for Environomics Unlimited? Could you describe these people? Do you remember their names?”

  “I’ve tried to answer those questions twelve times each.”

  “Then let’s make it a lucky thirteen. This is important.”

  “Two men came the first time and two the second, but only one of the two came both times, and that was the guy in charge, the driver of the unmarked truck.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He called himself . . . Will. His first name was Will. I signed the transfer forms. He didn’t. He and his partner—a kid the first time; a Latin-American guy named Gooz the second—took our stuff and skedaddled.”

  “What’d he look like, this Will?”

  Mrs. Roving emitted a sing-song recitation that Xavier interpreted as annoyance with having to repeat it: “A white guy ten or twelve years older than me. A thin but paunchy, brown-eyed, rusty-haired white guy in company overalls. The second time he was here he didn’t feel well. He knew enough to boss his partner around, but he was no college grad. Or so I’d wager. He may not’ve graduated high school. Will: a paunchy, middle-aged, brown-eyed, rusty-haired white guy.’ End of portrait.”

  “Why don’t you think he graduated high-school?”

  Mrs. Roving hesitated, as if none of her interrogators had ever asked this question. “He had a countrified Oconee way of talking. An accent that was recognizably rural but at the same time all his own. A signature way of talking.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Mrs. Roving stared at the picture molding above Xavier’s head. “He said awl for all. He said arf for off. He said . . . my God, he said thonks for thanks. It was as if he sometimes got his a’s and o’s mixed up, sort of. Sarta, I should say.” She chuckled reminiscently. “I remember that even better than the way he looked.”

  “I know who he is,” Xavier said, startled by the insight that Mrs. Roving’s testimony had triggered. “Son of a bitch.”

  Mrs. Roving said nothing. She waited.

  “Sorry. Will is Wilbon Stickney. The only other man in the world, so far as I know, victimized by a form of the Philistine Syndrome.”

  As if Xavier had just spelled the final word in a competition that over several hours had eliminated every contestant but him, Mrs. Roving shut her eyes. Xavier felt relief, gratitude, a fresh sense of mission. Stickney was even more responsible for the fate of the Silvanus County’s radiation victims than he. Knowing this didn’t fully alleviate his guilt, but it eased it. It also gave him a solid reason to put Operation Uplift on hold. His attention belonged to matters of higher moment, greater urgency.

  “Tell whoever needs to be told about the radwaste cylinders in the Hazeltons’ stream,” Xavier said. “The Hazeltons, the NRC, whoever. I’ve got to find Stickney.”

  “Maybe you’d like to meet the Wilkinses. I could probably arrange it.”

  “Yessum. It’s just that—”

  “Wait too long and . . .” The consequences of waiting too long twisted before them like a trio of hanged innocents.

  *

  As Count Geiger, Xavier paid his visit to the radiation ward on the eleventh floor of Salonika General. Mrs. Roving escorted him. Gowned and masked, they stopped at the bedside of each medicated and IV-dependent patient. Most were too drug-befogged or ill to talk. Dr. Avery, the specialist treating these people, had determined that all but four had suffered damage to their internal organs and hematopoietic systems too severe to allow bone-marrow transplants. Despite the poor prognosis in every case, the FDA had refused to grant an emergency approval for the experimental hormone, GM-CSF. Xavier, along with Mrs. Roving and Dr. Avery, cursed the obstinacy and shortsightedness of the FDA. Given that several of these patients were otherwise doomed, why did the agency manifest such a hard-hearted scrupulosity?

  The Wilkinses—Larry Glenn, Missy, and Carrie-Lisbeth—lay in beds in an enlarged cloister at the end of the set-apart sick bay. Mrs. Roving said that Carrie-Lisbeth was critical. She could die in the next day or so, possibly within hours. If Dr. Avery determined that the time was shorter rather than longer, he would advise his staff to put Carrie-Lisbeth behind her own set of curtains again. The trauma of watching their only child die, even if medication eased her going, was hardly one that he relished inflicting on the parents, who would suspect the worst when she was moved. Consequently, he had frequently second-guessed the wisdom of uniting the family at all. Mrs. Roving shared these doubts, for she had often second-guessed herself.

  Larry Glenn was also a short-term patient—in his own words, a “goner,” “dead meat.” Purple lesions tattooed his face, chest, and arms. Patches of his hair had fallen out. Cell infusions that he’d received to counter hemorrhaging had puffed him up like a weird antierotic sex doll. Despite measured administrations of Prussian blue, he remained radioactive. Internally, he was bombarding himself toward irreversible nonbeing, a state he would probably find a merciful relea
se. Missy Wilkins shared his prognosis. The only patients who might walk out of Salonika General were Claudia Burrell, Ricky and Lulah Stamford, and two of the four little girls who, at Carrie-Lisbeth’s party, had blithely adorned themselves with cesium glitter. In store for them later, though, waited a state heavy with disease possibilities (cataracts, leukemia, colitis) and shortened life spans. No one walked away from violent radiation exposure unscathed. The idea that such exposure could boost one’s abilities, as it often did in the contemporary popular arts, was bogus, a brutal lie. Xavier was the exception that proved the rule. At Larry Glenn Wilkins’s bedside, he touched his surgical mask and said, “I’m Xavier Thaxton, also known as Count Geiger. I’m awfully sorry about what’s happened to you.”

  Mr. Wilkins’s irises floated on his sclera. “You gonna be in a movie, Count?”

  “I doubt it. I mean, I won’t. My character might. UC owns the character, but I’m not an actor. I’m just a person, like you or any other.”

  “If there’s a movie—” Mr. Wilkins—Larry Glenn—ran down. His bug-eyed gaze drifted off to another part of the room. Even lying prostrate, his body seemed buoyed on the uncharted ocean of his radiation sickness.

  “Yes?” Xavier prompted. “If there’s a movie . . . ?”

  “If there’s a movie,” said Larry Glenn, focusing sidelong on his wife and daughter, “go see it for us, hear? That’s a flick I’d probably really get off on.” He smiled at Xavier. “Yeah.”

  56

  Antinoolity Cubed

  “How’re you gonna find this Stickney turkey?” The Mick asked. “He coulda moved. He could be dead.”

  “He hasn’t moved,” Xavier said, rummaging through a drawer for the Greater Salonika Telephone Directory. “He was here to haul off the cancer clinic’s radwaste six years ago. And here last summer to pick up that Therac 4-J, and he was inhaling salad gas in P. S. Annie’s right after you pulled your stupid cut-and-run stunt.”

  “Hey.” For The Mick, a pretty low-key bristle.

  Xavier ran his finger down a tight column of names on a page of S’s. There were eleven Stickneys in Greater Salonika, but no “Wilbon T.” among them. (The closest was a “Willie Ray.”) He tossed the directory onto the counter and dug deeper into the drawer for an older book. The Mick sidled near to peer over his shoulder.

  “You could call some of these Stickneys and ask for Will or Wilbon T. Whoever answered, if they said ‘No,’ you could scope their voice to see if they was lying.”

  “Mikhail, my powers don’t function that reliably over Ma Bell’s phone lines. I’d probably alert Stickney that something was up and he’d bolt. No thanks.” Xavier found a three-year-old directory (saved for the addresses and numbers scribbled on its cover) and plopped it open atop the book already on the counter.

  Mikhail edged between Xavier and the counter and scanned the Stickneys with his index finger. Its ebony nail halted and tapped. “Here he is. ‘Stickney, Wilbon T. 1117 Jarboe Lane.’ But the number ain’t good no more, worse luck.”

  Jarboe Lane lay across the Chattahoochee in Satan’s Cellar, but it could offer a valuable lead. An old neighbor of Stickney’s might remember him. Somebody over there might even know where he’d moved. If he’d moved. If Xavier’s questions didn’t panic his tipster and trip a cascade of alarms all along the ghetto grapevine. To Xavier, a visit to Stickney’s old address seemed worth the risk and aggravation.

  “Just give the police his name,” The Mick said. “If he’s a hopelessly blown weed-eater and repeat offender, they may already know where he is.”

  “What? Mikhail Menaker—the outlaw regent of retropunkdom—wants me to ask the morally iffy enforcement agency of our fascist establishment? Do my ears—”

  “Yeah, yeah: ‘deceive me?’ Never mind. But if you’re going, I’m going with.”

  Xavier started to protest, but caught himself and relented. As new as he was to Salonika, The Mick was savvy about the Cellar. As his guardian, Xavier ought to forbid him to come. Dangers abounded over there, motiveless slayings were commonplace—but where an expedition of one might end in injury or failure, the two of them together might succeed and actually return to savor the triumph. Xavier had a small brainsquall. “Bring your Geiger counter, and I’ll be happy for you to come.”

  “My Geiger counter? My Geiger-Müller counter?”

  “Yes. Bring it. Do you want to come or not?”

  “Affirmative,” The Mick said. “Absodamnlutely.”

  *

  Even with a map of Satan’s Cellar (from the Salonika Tourist Center, with tiny fire decals to denote crime hot spots), Jarboe Lane was no cinch to find. It was squeezed between two alleys not far from the trolley terminus, amid a jumble of flophouses, flea-bag hotels, and fly-by-night shops. At least three times before identifying it, Xavier and The Mick strolled past the cavelike entrance to Jarboe Lane: a cobbled defile barely wide enough for a hot-dog cart, gloomily awninged over with mildewed canvas scraps. Farther in, the narrow, tread-worn stairs of 1117 Jarboe Lane took Xavier and The Mick up one flight of steps to a turn-around office occupied by three Oriental males playing a board game with pielike plastic counters. Its door stood open. Xavier and sidekick Mick entered, Xavier in the same outfit in which he’d emulated a Smitten at Grotto East, The Mick in a getup virtually de rigueur in the Cellar.

  “‘Which UC stalwart is known to his mundane colleagues at Zoo Salonika as Leonard White?’ ” the thinnest young game player said, reading the question from a card that he immediately returned to its box.

  “The Snow Leopard!” a second player shouted. “Hai yah!”

  “Does Wilbon T. Stickney live here?” Xavier asked the group.

  “Never heard of,” the card reader said.

  “Maybe,” said the player facing the open doorway.

  “Down hall on left,” said the player who had just called out the answer to the thin card reader’s question.

  The Mick’s brow furrowed in evident puzzlement. “Mr. Stickney doesn’t have a phone listing at this address anymore. He hasn’t for like three years.”

  “Probably not here then,” the thin card reader said.

  “Out on business call,” the player facing them said.

  “Sleeping with TV on,” the third player told them. “Always sleeping with TV on. Apartment five.” Neither of the other men rebuked him for divulging this information.

  “Thanks,” Xavier said. He and The Mick did an about-face and walked down the boxy hall to apartment five. Outside it, they could hear strangled crowd noises, no doubt from the TV. Above that sound was the broken nasal trilling of an announcer, his every word unintelligible. The Mick knocked. Once. Twice. A third time, louder than before. Then he tried the knob. The door drifted inward, flooding the hallway with frantic audio and a grainy wash of televised light. Stickney, if it was Stickney, wallowed in a beat-up recliner, an Edsel-era La-Z-Boy. He lounged facing the blue-grey TV screen, nodding before it as if disastrously poked out. Not surprisingly, the room stank of salad-gas fumes and of sweat-soured clothing.

  “Phieuw,” The Mick said. “Gaawghh.”

  Xavier soft-shoed over the threshold behind The Mick and closed the door. Had he been a thief or a hit man, he could have walked off with all of Stickney’s worldly goods or his dirt-cheap life, if not both. Who would have cared? Maybe Stickney was already dead. Xavier crossed to the recliner to see.

  It was Stickney, all right, the pokehead who—while sitting, no less—had accosted Xavier on his first visit to P. S. Annie’s. He had an army recruit’s haircut, a drowned man’s bloated jowls, a sunburned tourist’s lobster-broil tan. The fingers that had seized Xavier’s wrist in P. S. Annie’s were flabbier now. They gripped the chair’s arm with an almost pitiable looseness. Under the flap of his malodorous Oriental robe, Stickney’s other hand basketed his groin. Xavier started to jostle his elbow when a sudden click and an insistent mechanical whirr halted him.

  “Only the VCR,” The Mick said. “The tape’s run out
. It’s on like automatic rewind or something.”

  Xavier and Mikhail waited, doing homage to the rewind (Xavier realized) like Episcopalians hearing out a communion homily. When the process concluded, a softer click and a fresh whirr brought the tape’s FBI warning against unauthorized copying wobbling into view. Again.

  “It’s on automatic replay too,” The Mick said. “Stickney’s set it up on a kind of never-ending flashback loop.” The tape’s opening titles appeared: a Sports Monthly compilation of clips from the career of the world’s most inept heavyweight boxer, Rashid “Eggshell” Harrell. The clips were brief: Harrell had never lasted more than three rounds in any official bout. He’d had hundreds of fights, of which more than twenty had ended with his ejection, over or through the ropes, from the ring. A montage of these graceless exits appeared. Like a misfired Scud, Harrell repeatedly achieved parabolic flight before crashing into a different set of ringside seats.

  “Mr. Stickney.” Xavier squeezed his shoulder. “Mr. Stickney, wake up.”

  Stickney showed his eyes the way a KO’d boxer, under the knuckles of a referee, involuntarily shows his, his irises the sad grayish beige of used bath water. “Wha thuh?”

  “Turn that off,” Xavier told Mikhail. “Who knows how long it’s been on?”

  “Turn it off? But—”

  Xavier gave him a look. Mikhail went to the set—it and the VCR seemed to be the only functional pieces of equipment or furniture around—to kill the boxing tape. Instantly, the set’s screen was a riot of flying phosphor dots. The Mick clicked it off too. Now the only light came from a night-light plugged into the socket beside the La-Z-Boy. Molded to caricature a naked adult female, the night-light glowed a warm vulvar pink. A truly tacky item, Xavier thought. It embarrassed him, and all the more for monopolizing The Mick’s attention.

  “Turn on another light,” Xavier said. “Right now.”

  The Mick sidled to the kitchen and turned on the fluorescent above a sink stacked high with roach-colonized pie plates and empty cans of spaghetti.