Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  Further, using scraps of Chemesh No. 9 salvaged from various unsold designer fashions at boutiques and department stores around the city, Bari’s employees made two new Count Geiger costumes. They worked from patterns that Howie Littleton, at Bari’s urgent requisitioning, had faxed them from New York. One suit was for Wilbon T. Stickney; the other was a backup for Xavier, should the original halt or counteract the onslaught of his untoward decline.

  Unhappily, the original Suit did not slow the process. A facsimile costume, rushed to Stickney, prevented any return of his version of the Philistine Syndrome, but when Bari, using Dr. Avery as her contact, had the second facsimile costume sent by bicycle messenger to Xavier at Salonika General—on the off chance that the original had again lost its potency—it proved equally ineffective and morale-blighting.

  Xavier had Stickney’s old room on the tenth floor. He hated it because he hated hospitals—their impersonality, their inescapable antiseptic background stench, the way they teetered on the emotional interface between timid hope and ineffable gloom, the separation from Bari. The nurses and orderlies always had one of two approaches: a forced joviality or a diffuse sort of petulance. Nobody ever acted . . . normal. That was because, if you assumed great healthiness was the quotidian standard, hospitals weren’t normal human environments, but waystations to Frankenstein monsterdom or death. So Xavier hated them. Hated them.

  “All I can say,” Dr. Avery told him, “is that you’re not on life support, you can walk about if you choose, and friends and family have stuck by you.”

  “Shuffle,” Xavier said. ‘‘Shuffle about.” He perched on his bed in a fanny-hiding hospital gown that preserved a slender modicum of his fading dignity. Xavier’s ankles were thin, bony, and white-haired (like his dad’s before his fatal heart attack). He crossed them to keep Bari and The Mick, who were visiting during this consultation, from staring at them. In the five weeks since the funerals in Silvanus County, the stalwart in Xavier had become, sadly, a novice dotard.

  “But you’re not wholly incapacitated,” Dr. Avery hectored him. “You’re aging too fast, yes—a result, I think, of the damage done to your system not only by radiation exposure, but also by the repression of symptoms and the boosting of abilities mediated by your original costume.”

  “Burn the damn thing.”

  “Mr. Stickney’s wearing it again, but once he’s used it up, we’ll dispatch it to an official radwaste-disposal site to be incinerated or stored.” Dr. Avery laid a gaunt hand on Xavier’s shoulder. “We’ll do what we can, but, as heartless as this may sound, it looks like it’s nearly time to pay the piper, Mr. Thaxton.”

  The Mick had the TV turned to the one-millionth rerun of a Star Trek episode. “These dudes once did a story very like yours, unc. Everybody on the Enterprise, down on some alien planet, turned into these really antinool geezers.”

  “This isn’t another planet! This isn’t Star Trek!”

  “Mikhail, your uncle Xave is reminded of The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Bari said. “A loftier allusion.”

  “Semiloftier. What I’m reminded of, you yahoos, is that I’m dying. Dying!”

  Bari said, “My hypothesis is that his body’s belatedly catching up to his natural curmudgeonliness.”

  “Thank you so much,” Xavier said.

  The Mick turned off the set with a jazzy remote. “I’m sorry, Uncle Xave. Am I like a jerkbrain or what?” He wandered remorsefully into the hall.

  “I think we should send you home,” Dr. Avery said. “Unless you think you’d be more comfortable here, there’s no good reason for you not to go home.”

  “To die.”

  Aloud, Dr. Avery said, “It’s your call.”

  “Then I’ll go home. Only a masochist would stay.”

  “Good for you,” Bari said.

  *

  When they got back to the condo apartment on Franklin Court, the first thing Xavier had Mikhail do was toss all the tacky flamingos, bean-bag chairs, and framed dogs-playing-poker prints—something he should have done during the brief phase of his stalwartliness, while the Suit was holding his syndrome at bay. Then he’d not quite had the nerve. Now, it hardly mattered. He could indulge his most basic, as well as his most discriminating, tastes without fear of the consequences. He was dying. Nothing he ate, read, beheld, or listened to would change that fact. Death was a fearsome predator, but his awareness of its certain approach gave him freedom, confidence, maybe even God. If not God, then the genius of Mozart and the melancholy virtuosity of Mahler. Maybe that was God.

  The day after his arrival home, Walt Grantham visited with some of Xavier’s former colleagues: Lee Stamz, Donel Lassiter, Ivie Nakai, and Pippa Wiedmeyer, who were dumbfounded by his looks, but clever enough to disguise their shock. A few weeks ago, this man had been collaring thugs, defending damosels, and healthfully rearranging the city’s eating habits. Today, he looked like a refugee from the Nearer My God to Thee Nursing Home. Bari fixed them all gin and tonics, Xave’s favorite hot-weather drink. Ivie and Pippa carried the conversational ball, oohing over the interior decoration—Mikhail had kept the door to his room closed—and gossiping about colleagues.

  “Your color’s wonderful,” Pippa said. “You look really good.”

  Grantham jumped in: “I want to rehire you, Xavier.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not a stalwart anymore. So there’d be no conflict of interest.”

  “Rehire me as what? Fine Arts editor?”

  Pippa smiled but her jaw tightened, and Grantham said, “That position’s filled.”

  “Entertainment editor?”

  Lee Stamz laughed. “We’ve been that route, Xave. You don’t wanna switch back again, do you?”

  “As a columnist, Xavier. I want you to resurrect ‘Thus Saith.’ A column a week. Two, if you feel up to it—about anything you like. Anything.”

  “Walt, do you remember ‘Jury-rigged Rainbows’?” (One advantage of looking old was that you could address everyone familiarly.)

  “All too well.”

  “That column was my swan song. Thanks but no thanks.”

  Out of politeness, the crew stayed a while longer. Chitchatting with them was pleasant but wearying, and Xavier was grateful when Bari rose to show them out.

  “Hang in there, Xave,” Lee Stamz said.

  As they passed his chair, Ivie and Pippa gave Xavier quick pecks on the forehead. That wasn’t surprising. What was—briefly, at least—was that Donel, who had been reticent and watchful throughout the visit, kissed him on the ravaged cheek—a tender memorial kiss, the warmth of which stayed with him like a gentle brand.

  68

  A Conviction, a Dream, a Conviction

  Toward the end of Xavier’s fast-forward decline, F. Deane Finesse came to trial on the attempted-murder charge. Xavier’s testimony was an ordeal that lasted the better part of two days. At the trial’s outset, a furor arose over the legitimacy of his intended witness. Sheila Ling, Finesse’s lead attorney, questioned Xavier’s identity. She remembered what he’d looked like at Tim Bowman’s trial, and Xavier, in her view, now more nearly resembled an older relation than he did his putative self.

  Hamilcar Clede, once again the prosecutor, countered with fingerprints, voice prints, and DNA readouts. These exhibits persuaded the court of Xavier’s uninterrupted selfhood, from his previous vigorous stint as a witness to this startling manifestation as a stooped Methuselah. Obliged to question Xavier, Ms. Ling attacked him as if his sudden physical decrepitude betrayed a deep-seated moral failure, an unreliable memory, and a bent to deception. These tactics, whether pursued by Ms. Ling, Mr. Rutledge, or any of the other well-dressed barristers at the defense table, backfired. The jury regarded Xavier with sympathy. They recalled his brief but glorious reign as Count Geiger. They were moved to see him beset by an untreatable illness that was bearing him, unappealably, toward death. They believed what he said, including his story of the slowing of time during Finesse’s bodyguards’ attempt
on his life, when bullets came inching toward him through the skybox like tranquilized bees. Cleverly, Hamilcar Clede suggested that this slowing of time had somehow precipitated Xavier’s own accelerated aging. What was bought on layaway then, so to speak, was now being paid for at a furiously compounded temporal interest. Although Rutledge’s angry objections were sustained, most observers felt that the jury had registered Clede’s speculation and would remember it in spite of the judge’s warnings to disregard it.

  Bari, Linzy Keene, Geoff Satterhedge, and the bodyguard named Mark, who had turned state’s evidence in a pretrial plea bargain, all marched to the stand to further incriminate—“badmouth,” as Geoff put it—F. Deane Finesse, but Xavier’s testimony might have carried the day even without their corroboration. He had withstood subtle personal attacks and a withering, fact-centered cross-examination. Everyone agreed that he made a better witness as an old man than he would have as his former fit, but quasi-fussy, middle-aged self. Feisty old men, especially sick ones, were bang-up prosecution witnesses. And, by the final day of the trial, Finesse seemed reconciled to its likely outcome. On the stand in his own behalf, he concluded one rambling denial of evil intent—toward anyone but opposing ballplayers—with this comment: “And maybe Grady Garavaglia. He kissed away a nine-point lead in the last two innings of the Dodger game. He hauled us into extras. Amazing.”

  The verdict came back as expected: guilty. Owing to last-minute maneuverings in the judge’s chambers, as Hamilcar Clede and Finesse’s legal team jockeyed with each other, the sentence handed down was a surprisingly lenient ten years without parole, all to be served in the Phosphor Fog Correctional Institution, a spanking-new penal facility with comfortable two-man cells and a gymnasium for the use of the prisoners. In an unsigned editorial, the Urbanite blasted this sentence—in some ways a small miracle, given Finesse’s reputation, wealth, and power—as “sheer capitulation to a nose-thumbing plutocrat.” But another trial, undoubtedly a bigger one, was yet to come, when Finesse faced a jury of his less affluent peers on charges of environmental abuse and reckless endangerment of the Oconee public weal. At these proceedings, Xavier would not have to testify. He was sick, very sick, and he was, in Clede’s phrase, “a peripheral witness, an incidental victim.”

  After showing up in court to hear Finesse’s sentence, Xavier said, “I’d take ten years, if the judge could guarantee them,” then returned to Franklin Court. Bari put on Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, and he fell asleep in his chair. On some troubling level, he listened to this music even as he dreamt.

  *

  At Zoo Salonika there was a tiger that the zookeeper hated. The tiger had clawed him during one of his early attempts to feed it, but someone decided—this wasn’t clear in Xavier’s dream—that the mishap had resulted not from the tiger’s viciousness but from the keeper’s own carelessness.

  The keeper had failed to close a grate that would have kept the tiger securely penned during the feeding. As a result, the tiger had raked the keeper’s forearm while dragging a bloody chunk of horse meat close enough to it to eat. The injury to the keeper had not been severe. He quickly came back to work, but with a bandaged arm and a bitter enmity. Under the cloud of this hatred, the tiger began to age. Years passed, or seemed to, for the tiger. Its clear green eyes, which always spooked the keeper, prodding him to various petty cruelties, went opaque and flat. Its beautiful striped coat took on the look and feel of frosted straw. The tiger began to lose its teeth, and its claws were ground to nubs by habitual pacing on the ledges outside its cage.

  The keeper never aged. He looked exactly like the Count Geiger impersonator whom Xavier had accosted at Zoo Salonika and humiliated before his daughter. In any case, it seemed that the keeper would have found his revenge on the tiger in its relentless aging, but no, he somehow came to despise the tiger even more furiously. Now that the tiger had no teeth, the keeper had to mash its horse meat to a paste and shovel this vile mixture through the bars, almost as if slopping pigs. The keeper hated these duties, and his resentment of the tiger took on an intensity that no other zoo worker noticed or could have fathomed even had the keeper’s hatred been more conspicuous.

  An odd sort of revenge occurred to the keeper. From the office of the zoo’s veterinarian, he stole a radioactive medical substance, iodine 131, and injected it into the tiger’s mashed horse meat. He did this every day for eight days, replenishing his supply of radioactives from the vet’s office as needed. He took the stuff early in the morning and put it into the tiger’s food in the cold grey dusk just before sunrise. Near the end of this period, the tiger started vomiting up its feedings. Late one evening, several children observed that the droppings on the tiger’s exercise ledges, fecal matter and vomit alike, were glowing. A child reported this to the authorities. Count Geiger was summoned to investigate. He showed up at Zoo Salonika in his silver uniform, carrying a Geiger counter. Even though Xavier’s dreaming self had been observing the keeper appalled, Count Geiger was ignorant of all that had gone on. He had no idea that the keeper was poisoning the already decrepit tiger.

  Soon, working among the concrete ledges where the tiger spent most of its days, Count Geiger discovered that its droppings emitted radiation. His detector went crazy, chattering away, and he finally understood that the person assigned by the zoo to care for and protect the tiger was trying to kill it. No one else had such ready access to the big cats, and one day Count Geiger heard the tiger alternately snarling and bleating—sounds from the echo chamber of its cage. He ducked into the tunnel leading from the outdoor ledges to the cage, and the tiger’s cries, along with a recurrent thumping, grew louder the deeper into the tunnel he crept.

  Emerging, he saw the keeper beating the tiger with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The stripes inflicted by the whip overlay the stripes of the tiger’s wintry pelt like broken scarlet bars, and, except for its feeble snarls, the tiger was powerless before the keeper. Suddenly, in the dream, Xavier’s costume was gone. His Geiger counter was gone. He stooped naked in the mouth of a cage tunnel watching an evil man beating a once beautiful but now damaged tiger. With great effort, Xavier pushed the keeper aside. He felt the braided tails of the keeper’s whip bite into his back. As the whip continued to score him, he sank to his knees beside the tiger and embraced it. He put his face into its bloody neck fur and wept. At last, the whip ceased to fall, as if the keeper were taken aback by this unexpected act. Meanwhile, the sounds of Xavier’s sobbing went on and on. . . .

  *

  Xavier awoke in a full-body sweat, unable to tell if it was tears, sweat, saliva, or all three that had soaked his pillow. A part of his consciousness, he understood, was trapped forever in the dream, and an ache like a tormented sea rose through his chest, almost unbearably.

  *

  The primary witnesses against F. Deane Finesse in his second court case were Teri-Jo Roving; Wilbon T. Stickney; the captured functionary who operated the phones for Finesse’s fake hazardous-materials firms (another sullen plea bargainer); a Latino named Agostino Guzman; two former members of a street gang called the Droogs (also plea bargainers, but more eager ones); a small group of hospital and manufacturing-firm administrators, including a very ill-at-ease Edward Di Pasqua; Dr. Zane Woolfolk; Dr. Joseph Lusk; and, a surprise to Xavier, Deke Hazelton and his daughter Ailene, of the Placer County farm where “Environomics Unlimited” had dumped its radium-waste shipment from the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic.

  Before the trial began, Xavier sent in a signed deposition, summarizing his own testimony. He also answered, on tape, a sheaf of written questions constituting the defense’s cross-examination. This tape was edited under the supervision of the trial judge—Judge Devereaux again—with the semicooperative input of both the prosecutor and Finesse’s attorneys, and then played in court for the benefit of the jury. These complex arrangements were necessary because Xavier was now too weak to appear in court. Under a special dispensation approved by opposing counsel and granted by the Oconee state legislature
(Finesse seemed stricken with a patrician remorse, for a man once younger than he now looked old enough to be his biological father), closed-circuit TV cameras were set up in the courtroom, and Xavier, Bari, and The Mick were able to watch the proceedings at home.

  The trial was noteworthy for the bizarre quality of those offering testimony or presenting evidence. Stickney took the witness stand in the Count Geiger costume that had first belonged to Xavier. Under the Suit, his tumorous paunch had the appearance of a large metal mixing bowl strapped to his abdomen. He said that he had worked as the chief disposal agent for EU, Back-to-the-Earth Disposal Industries, Keep It Green Waste Services, Eco-Specialists Incorporated, and Pollution Nixers Amalgamated, performing over a hundred jobs a year throughout the Southeast, for wages that barely kept him clothed, fed, and fumed, every weekend, to total zonkedness.

  “Why did you do it?” Hamilcar Clede asked.

  “I liked th’ hours. I liked th’ driving and th’ ’venture. Ittuz awmost a nanstap hoot.” (Nanstap, Xavier belatedly flashed, was Stickneyese for nonstop.) Stickney volunteered that on one occasion Finesse, delighted that Stickney had dumped used industrial solvents on a skeet range in southern Tennessee for the use of Consolidated Tri-State muckymucks, had paid him in person: three hundred dollars in cash and tickets to a Cherokee home stand against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  “And thattuz when them boys really stunk too—worse ’n a beagle breeze.”

  Even odder than Stickney’s testimony was the show put on by Deke Hazelton and his daughter Ailene. They brought a videotape of their former thoroughbred, Cockroach, scuttling to a second-place finish in the Pulaski High Stakes in April, its first professional outing for Hallelujah Stables. They argued that if not handicapped by two extra legs, flimsy antennalike appendages curving out from its rib cage, Cockroach would have won that race, hands down. The offending mutation, of course, was the result of used radium illegally dumped in the drinking water of Cockroach’s mother. Hazelton would not have cared all that much, of course, except that the colt’s new owners were upset by its failure to come in first and peeved with him and Ailene for reputedly overselling the critter’s speed. “Caveat emptor,” Hazelton said. “On the other hand, second place ain’t so bad. On the other hand”—as if he too had an extra appendage—“it’s no picnic having my honor besmirched on account of a radiation disaster that wasn’t my fault.”