Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “You’re naked, Mr. Thaxton.”

  “Under that uniform, so are you, Officer—”

  “Leveritt.”

  “Officer Leveritt. As is Mr. Stickney under my Suit. Clothes make the man, right? A naked emperor is a fool.”

  “What?”

  “Ms. Carlisle—Bari—give me your bag.” Xavier took the bag from her across Stickney’s outstretched form and quickly pulled on the clothes that he had shed in the elevator. Without the Suit on under them, his slacks felt like pantaloons, his shirt like a voluminous poncho. Officer Leveritt was gawking. “A human being is an animal that wears clothes,” Xavier said, trying some banter. “An animal in clothes is either a circus performer or a Park Avenue matron’s trot-along doodad.”

  In his glittery duds, Stickney lay before them like a body in state. Xavier patted his shoulder. “We’re going, Officer Leveritt. Make sure no one but his doctors and approved staff come in to visit him. He’s a witness. His testimony will be crucial in implicating whoever’s responsible for the mess in Philippi.”

  Xavier grabbed Bari’s hand and pulled her around Leveritt into the hall before the officer could move or protest. The whole episode had stunned the man. What now? Was Stickney in violation of the ordinance prohibiting anyone but the “real” Count Geiger from dressing like him?

  61

  A Feeble Cheer for Altruism

  Not many people can focus for long on the plight of others. Even those moved by the starving millions in Africa, los olvidados in Latin America, and the flood and cholera victims in Bangladeath (as Mikhail insisted on calling it) seldom dwell on these issues longer than it takes to voice their heartsickness at a cocktail party or to write a conscience-salving check.

  Xavier’s sister Lydia conceded that making a humanitarian mind set last longer than five minutes is hard even for relief workers at the scenes of misery and devastation. Yielding to pragmatism, they shift into a crisp, do-the-job state of consciousness that removes the need to hand-wring. Mother Teresa, for example, didn’t tenderheartedly brood on the disease and hunger of her untouchables; she gave them medicine and food. “In many ways,” Lydia told Xavier during a long-distance call, “it’s easier to be here doing something, even if it’s semifutile, than watching it on TV. Being here reduces the guilt. It brings home the situation’s unmanageability, too, but I’d rather be work-ridden than paralyzed by guilt.”

  “Most people turn off the TV,” Xavier said. “They flip to the funny pages.”

  “Sure,” Lydia said. “But Mom and Dad raised us to drive around wagons heaped to the scuppers with nobility and guilt.”

  Xavier had to admit—to himself, if not to Lydia—that she was right. Altruism is rare, and self-interest, which doesn’t have to be selfish, still almost always overwhelms other-directed generosity. Which was why, even though suffering for his altruism and thinking himself a fool, Xavier was glad he’d given his Suit to the comatose Stickney.

  Also, Bari had come around again. By witnessing his sacrifice in Stickney’s room, she’d found her natural bias in his favor validated. Oddly, in giving up the clothes of a stalwart, he had become for her the hero that she had despaired of finding in him.

  Stickney began to improve at once. This encouraged Dr. Avery, Stickney’s doctor, for Larry Glenn and Missy Wilkins died within an hour of each other in the early hours of the day after Bari and Xavier’s hospital visit. Dr. Avery’s other patients on the radiation-poisoning ward—Claudia Burrell, the Stamfords, three of Carrie-Lisbeth’s birthday-party guests, the mothers of two of the little girls, a neighbor of the Burrells, four neighbors of the Stamfords—were still in danger, but the prognosis for the group was cautiously positive. For Dr. Avery, then, Stickney’s turnaround was a ray of sunlight lasering through a thunderhead. It also made Teri-Jo Roving happy. As soon as he could sit up, Stickney recorded his story (“Confessions of a Waste-Disposal Flimflam Man”?) on a police cassette that the department copied and locked away in a half-dozen different official files. Stickney himself, once Chief Rapp understood the nature and severity of the threat against him, went into protective custody on the south Oconee coast.

  “Mr. Finesse and his legal trust will pull strings and search out loopholes,” said District Attorney Hamilcar Clede in an interview with the Urbanite. “He’ll bully, cajole, rant, plead, and try to finesse us. But unless God cracks open the municipal-courthouse dome and announces that Mr. Finesse is as innocent as His only begotten Son, we’ve got the old fraud.” It looked, in fact, as if Mr. Clede might be right. The police had Finesse under round-the-clock surveillance to keep him from absconding. Moreover, agents of the Oconee Bureau of Investigation had recently arrested the “voice” of Environomics Unlimited, the hack who had also functioned as the telephone front for Eco-Specialists Incorporated and Back-to-the-Earth Industries, among other phony waste-disposal firms. His arrest appeared to strengthen, immeasurably, the DA’s case. So did impounding the paperwork linking Oconee-Oregon Transit System vehicles and warehouses with the fraudulent disposal jobs overseen by Stickney. Investigators from reacts and the NRC had added their reports to the accumulating evidence. His wealth and local influence aside, Finesse looked to be facing some heavy-duty prison time.

  Xavier wrote the following in his journal soon after his and Bari’s hospital visit:

  As for me, I am no longer a stalwart. The fact that the Philistine Syndrome has returned (afflicting me again in some painful, dignity-stealing way every time I try to indulge my aesthetic tastes) has sabotaged any tendency in me to altruism. A man enduring the pangs of cancer, or drugged to insensibility to alleviate those pangs, seldom pays courtesy calls on the local old-fogies home or AIDS hospice. I am such a man.

  What’s worse is that Mikhail is a major culprit in my undoing. By teaching me that even such low-order fare as rock ’n’ roll, comic books, junk cuisine, Hollywood movies, and science fiction may sometimes resonate artfully, he has multiplied by a staggering sum the number and types of experiences that can now kick off my syndrome. Not just Rigoletto, but Revolver. Not just Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen. Not just pâté de foie gras, but salsa picante. Not just The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but They Drive by Night. Not just Ulysses, but Ubik.

  Thanks, Mikhail. In expanding my septum [sic] of appreciation, you have also expanded the scope of my susceptibility [sic sic sic]. With a nephew like you, who needs pathogens?

  (The Mick is beside me. “ ‘Low-order’?” he says, reading over my shoulder. “ ‘Low-order’? You still don’t glom it, do you? You’d make distinctions between Number Two yellow pencils. Coca-Cola bottle caps, even. Sheesh.”

  “Not between, Mikhail, among. But it can be done. One can discriminate among pencils or bottle caps, if one looks closely enough.”

  “Pardon me,” The Mick says disgustedly. “I’m going to fetch in The Sound and the Fury and read to you until you like herniate or something, okay?” He departs. To carry out his threat?)

  In any case, nowadays I am so far from a stalwart that I am almost an invalid. To stay ambulatory, I avoid everything of any aesthetic consequence. As a result, I eat stale breakfast food and freezer-burned TV dinners. I listen to The Mick’s Up Periscope albums. I read, from cover to cover, every number of the National Instigator. I diligently peruse the “Let’s Get Personal” blurbs in every issue of the Urbanite. Every afternoon, I watch For Love Designed—with Bari if possible, a shared activity that has the compensatory virtue not only of holding my syndrome at bay, but also of cementing the bond between us.

  And I lie down to sleep every night with a cracked plaster-of-Paris flamingo in my arms. . . .

  62

  An Episode in the Terry

  One night, unable to sleep with or without the help of a plaster flamingo, Xavier left his building and strolled into town. He wore faded jeans, a rumpled George Bernard Shaw T-shirt, and a pair of frayed huaraches. The walk, he’d decided, was not just to clear his head b
ut to test himself on the streets minus the cozy somatic undergirding and the familiar moral support of his Suit, a kind of self-dare.

  Xavier, he asked himself, what are you doing?

  Looking for trouble, he immediately replied.

  It was crazy—an impulse to suicide, a quest for self-validation—but Xavier could not resist it. The feeling reminded him of what he had experienced dashing through the gerbil tube from the Zapotec to the EleRail station. Opportunistic vigilantism, call it. Looking for trouble. Pining for it.

  Salonika did not cooperate. A balmy evening. Light traffic. At the Parataj, where in early December he had fled a fine performance of The Nutcracker, there lingered in the ginkgo-studded patio court the leftovers of a crowd that had earlier attended a week-night performance of an Aaron Copland ballet. Men in white linen suits or pastel tuxedos, ladies in Donna Karan trouser outfits or short-skirted Ungaro gowns. If not for his release by Grantham, Xavier would have covered the opening of this production himself. Instead, Pippa had done so—with a column too effusive in its praise, too niggling in its censures. Xavier stared into the court at the stragglers, men with their jackets off and one elvin-faced woman dangling her sapphirine shoes from her fingers.

  “Here,” said a silver-haired man striding past him toward a limousine at curbside. A regal woman who refused even to look at Xavier clung to his arm. Xavier glanced down. The man had given him a dollar: a wadded, velvety bill. Xavier laughed. The alms giver had taken him for a street person. “Thanks, guv!” he cried, but the limo was already rolling unhailably down the avenue. Xavier followed along on the sidewalk, keenly aware that, tonight, Salonika’s police had swarmed the theater district. Only a well-armed, and foolish, mugger would try to stalk a victim here.

  Forty minutes later, Xavier entered a black section of Salonika called the Terry (short for the Territory), a semi-hilly neighborhood of rundown mill houses and shabby businesses—barber shops, pawnshops, grocery stores, poolrooms, clothing or appliance outlets—where an occasional cooing couple sashayed by, winos lay in the bushes or sprawled under broken streetlamps, and crack smokers limped the porches of shadowy, weed-grown bungalows not far from their sidewalks. Squad-car patrols were so rare that a flash of headlights on any of the Terry’s narrow streets alarmed rather than reassured Xavier. His floating whiteness—the ghostly pale of his face and hands—marked him out as an alien. Suspicious residents would have to decide if he was one bad mother or an unlucky tourist with a lousy sense of direction.

  “You buying?” a shadow on a porch yelled at him.

  “Just walking,” Xavier said, demonstrating.

  “Selling, then? You selling?”

  Xavier’s demonstration continued. So did the row of mill houses, until, down the stumble of a litter-strewn hill, another stretch of streetfront shops jockeyed into view. Xavier jolted down the slope toward it. A squat vehicle standing in a pinched intersection beyond the shops—along with an emission of psychic energy from two figures in front of the glowing door of a video parlor—told Xavier he’d found his trouble. The shadows at the door seemed to be trying to clip out a panel of glass large enough to step through. They were using glass cutters and a pair of suction cups on wooden handles, trying not only to enter, but to thwart the shop’s alarm system. Burglary, with that open-topped jeep for the getaway. Xavier drew near the figures—gangbangers, lean young hoods in fatigue pants and monstrous tennis shoes. They ignored him, but the remp he laid on them—a net of rotten threads—told him they knew he was there. A fluorescent slogan, say yes to droogs, shone on one guy’s T-shirt. It rang a distant bell. “Keep footing it, Caspar,” said one or the other of the gangbangers.

  “Aren’t you fellas a long way from your usual stomping grounds?”

  The hood in the T-shirt looked at Xavier. The other, still ignoring him, removed the excised glass panel from the door and leaned it against the shop. Without a backward glance, he stepped through the hole into the store. Xavier hoped for sirens, flashing lights, rain from a sprinkler system, but got . . . absolutely nothing.

  “We stomps where we wants,” the T-shirt thug said. “And you better—”

  Xavier stepped through the rectangular cutout into the video parlor. The hoodlum outside signaled his two cohorts in the getaway jeep. Xavier thanked God he hadn’t come into the shop after him. At the EleRail station, he’d handled four muggers at once, but even a stalwart liked better odds. Meanwhile, the Droog inside had just rummaged a cash-computer drawer. Now, he was probably looking for a safe. Most of the video cartons in here, Xavier noted, featured black performers—Paul Robeson and Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll and Flip Wilson, Spike Lee and Robin Givens.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “Give it up!”

  Beyond another long shelf, the Droog turned and glowered at Xavier. His face, lit by the shop’s safety lights and the headlamps of the jeep outside, was so malevolently crimped that he resembled a purple demon. Xavier had no time to think about the threat implicit in his angry fleer, for a VHS cartridge—and another and another—came winging at his head, each cartridge a hard-edged bomblet. The first clipped his ear. Xavier tried to slow time, as he had done in the Hemisphere skybox, but tonight could only marginally impede the videos’ tumbling.

  “Qwarq!” someone yelled. “Hunker, bro! Hunker!”

  An earthshaking crash sounded behind Xavier. The gangbangers in the jeep had driven it, like a four-wheeled battering ram, onto the walk and into the shopfront. The parlor’s picture window had collapsed. Lights revolved. An alarm cycled earsplittingly. The jeep backed up and rammed the shop again. Inside, the Droog called Qwarq darted past Xavier toward the door. Xavier seized him, lifted him high, and repeatedly rammed his extravagant ’do, with its razor stripes and topiary bat wings, into the ceiling. If only the parlor had had a chandelier from which to hang the punk . . .

  *

  Qwarq gouged Xavier in the eye, twisted free, and fell into a jumble of video cartons—Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Godfrey Cambridge, Pam Grier—but quickly leapt up and broke for the door. Aching, Xavier scrambled after him. When Qwarq stepped through the cutout in the door, Xavier, trying to emulate him, tripped and knocked out the glass framing the hole. On the sidewalk, still upright, he now faced all four young men choreographing this penny-ante heist.

  “Who the fuck you think you are?” one of them said.

  “Man, you dead now,” Qwarq said.

  Another Droog stepped toward Xavier and cut his forearm with a lightninglike swipe of a foot-long shiv. Xavier yelped. Then he lifted his arms high, spread them wide, and cried: “I’m Count Geiger!”—his face a grandiose mask of outrage. “I’m not wearing my costume, but I’m still Count Geiger and you punks are dooooomed!”

  “It is him,” Qwarq said.

  The gangbangers scattered, abandoning their mangled jeep and all hope of salvaging any spoils beyond bad memories. A pair of squad cars squealed into view, but an immediate effort to corral the perps failed. A heavyset patrolman questioned Xavier, while his partner notified the shop’s owner of the incident.

  “Good job, Count,” the patrolman said.

  “They escaped. All of them.”

  “But you foiled the robbery and helped recover that stolen jeep.”

  Xavier sat down on the curb amid a rime of broken glass. His head throbbed, and the long cut on his forearm began to bleed alarmingly. The cop wrapped it with a cloth and had him hold the bandage in place by gripping his right shoulder with his right hand, a worrisome stunt. It also dismayed him that his knife cut had not instantly healed.

  “What else can I do for you?” the cop asked. When Xavier said, “Keep me out of the papers,” the cop said, “I’ll try, but readers would eat this story up,” and walked over to the jeep to study its smashed grille.

  Xavier brooded. He had foiled the robbery, but had not made a clean job of it. And he was hurt—not badly, but demoralizingly. Stalwarts were supposed to stymie bad guys without breaking
a sweat or calling for Mercurochrome. Worse, it was reputation rather than performance that had thwarted these thugs. Reputation and a desperate bluff. Xavier got up and started to walk.

  “Hold it!” the cop cried. “You’re hurtin’, Count. Let us give you a lift.”

  In the end, moved by weariness and depression, Xavier accepted the patrolman’s offer, but rebuked himself for riding.

  63

  O Suitless Me

  Mikhail and Bari decided independently that Xavier needed a new Suit to offset his recidivist illness. The Mick went to Satan’s Cellar for a black-market facsimile of the Howie Littleton creation that they had bought at SatyrFernalia, but Griff Sienko had nothing to sell The Mick. The statute prohibiting Count Geiger impersonations had stifled demand, he said, and thus all production of the item.

  “I may be an acne-ridden kid,” The Mick told Sienko, “but I didn’t hatch three days ago. Come on, I know you got somethin’.” Sienko did. He brought it out, a leotardlike costume sculpted from the kind of polyester film used to make the helium “balloons” sold on birthdays and anniversaries by florists. Mylar? The Mick asked. Yep, Mylar, Sienko replied. When Mikhail balked—“That stuff conducts electricity. In a storm, a guy could get like fried”—Sienko swore that this Count Geiger costume was the only one he had. He insisted so loudly that his gerbil hid in a toilet-paper tube atop the counter. Anyway, the price was fifty bucks, take it or leave it. Mikhail took it and carried the filmy, mirrorlike suit home to Xavier.

  It fit. (Boy, did it.) It fit so well, clinging to Xavier’s every anatomical nuance, that unless he tried to pass himself off as Rudolf Nureyev, sans codpiece, he would have been arrested for indecent exposure a New York minute after hitting the street. On the other hand, had the Mylar suit worked, so what? Unfortunately, the facsimile suit didn’t work. Xavier gave it eight hours, but his syndrome-freighted metabolism declined to recover. Mozart’s The Magic Flute made Xavier as sick the next morning as it had made him the night before.