Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  Next, as dramatic living exhibits, two giant bullfrogs and a three-eyed catfish were brought into the courtroom in an aquarium on casters. Ailene pushed the aquarium past the jury box as if she was moving a sofa. The oversized amphibians and the glowing fish immediately drew everyone’s attention. A defense attorney argued that the bullfrogs were from a common African species and that the catfish’s central eye was false, a clever stick-on. A pisciculturist and an ophthalmologist testified that it was real, and that the bullfrogs and the catfish deserved to be admitted as evidence. Judge Devereaux agreed, and the critters, in their algae-grown glass domicile, were in fact admitted.

  Toward trial’s end, in his own defense, Finesse said, “A frog is a frog is a frog. Stewball was a racehorse. So is Cockroach. Stickney, well, Stickney stinks. So does pollution. I hate cancer, Freon sludge, battery acid, contaminated dirt, plastic-goods byproducts, hot waste, and Anthony Perkins movies without psycho in the title. (Or fear.) I hate Consolidated Tri-State. You should see my electric bills. You should see the Hemisphere’s. I’d go buggy if you were me. So would you. So would your average three-eyed bullhead.” Despite this eloquent apologia, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Finesse had struck out on only two swings. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in Phosphor Fog Correctional Institution, the first ten to run concurrently with his previous sentence. He would then be eligible for a parole review. Before any part of this sentence could take effect, however, Finesse must undergo a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

  Sitting in the Franklin Court condominium apartment watching the sentencing on WSSX, Bari and The Mick broke into spontaneous applause.

  “Hear hear,” Xavier said, his birdlike head turned toward the set on a plumped-up pillow. “Hear hear.”

  Epilogue

  Ends and Beginnings

  On sentencing day (unbeknown to Xavier, Bari, or The Mick), the Miriam Finesse Cancer Clinic—whose honor had been besmirched by the son of its late namesake—did the right thing. It reinstated Teri-Jo Roving as chief administrative nurse, with full back pay and a salary increase to compensate her for past work and the cruel indignity of her suspension. The clinic’s board of directors determined that Teri-Jo’s duties should not rightfully include the principal responsibility for hazardous-waste disposal and rebuked Dr. Di Pasqua for improperly delegating this authority. It would be agreeable to report that the board also fired his ass, but Dr. Di Pasqua, as a weekend golfing partner of two long-term board members, sidestepped this fate. As a result, Teri-Jo had to tolerate his condescension, morose humor, male chauvinism, and occasional outright fatuousness until his retirement, six years later.

  *

  As Xavier lay dying, Bari sat on his bed stroking his papery, blue-veined hand.

  In the front room, Lydia Menaker, just arrived from the Asian subcontinent, paced with a glass of pineapple juice at whose rim she often moistened her lips. She was upset. It was hard to believe that Xavier was going to predecease her, even harder to credit that the ravaged stranger in the bedroom was her younger brother, the same man with whom she had boarded her son. Despite a host of distractions and a squeak-by on his English exam, The Mick had passed all his finals at Ephebus Academy, and he was trying to calm Lydia down and reassure her about the future. His maturity, in Lydia’s state of mind, was almost an irritant. “Why don’t you scoot in there with Miss Bari?” The Mick said. “Uncle Xave’s still hitting on a cyl or two. He’ll know who you are.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Your brother. An all-right dude. Who else?”

  *

  Bari understood a little of what Lydia was going through. Xavier had become his own fossil, his face a death mask, his hands the carapaces of two dead crabs.

  “Any arrangeable last requests?” she asked.

  “Closed casket, as at the Wilkinses’ funerals.”

  “Of course. Anything else?”

  “Make the casketmakers make me something flamboyant and borderline tacky to be casketed in. Something visibly . . . not-me.”

  “Another Count Geiger costume?”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Feathers? Sequins? S-curve zippers?”

  “Whatever you think inappropriate. But”—he swallowed painfully—“everything else has to be dignified. Dignified and—”

  “Tasteful?”

  “Yes. Tasteful. Aesthetically topnotch.”

  “But your casket vestments—gaudy, maybe even vulgar? Wildly out of Thaxtonian character?” Nothing about Xavier’s ordeal, even the televised grotesqueries of Finesse’s second trial, had been fun. With this goofy last request, though, he clearly wanted to reverse that state of affairs.

  It took Xavier a while to reply: “Suits me.” Then he closed his eyes. And never opened them again.

  *

  In the front room, Mikhail told his mother, “Everything’s gonna be fine, Lyd. Everythin’.”

  The funeral took place two days later, in Christ’s Episcopal Church on Jackson Square. Its monumental fresco of Christ, with his arms outspread, and the teeming choir lofts on either side of the sanctuary dominated the well-attended ceremony. A string quartet played Bach. A priest recited Paul’s words on the incorruptibility of the resurrection body, over and against the undeniable corruption in which one’s mortal body is sown. As he recited, a headliner from the city ballet performed a pantomime dramatizing the passage. Scarves leapt around her like pentecostal flames.

  No one in the sanctuary, of course, had a chance to look upon the outfit that Bari—not the head mortician at the Mitford-Joyce Funeral Home—had dressed Xavier in for commemoration and burial. The service, as he had requested, was closed casket, and there was no viewing of the body.

  *

  On the morning that F. Deane Finesse was to be transferred from his jail cell to the mental hospital in Corinth, Oconee, for his psychiatric evaluation, Big Mister Sinister walked into an upscale gun store that had opened that spring in Salonika Plaza, not far from Goldfinger’s. On the wall behind the store’s main counter was a banner declaring AN ARMED SOCIETY IS A POLITE SOCIETY, a motto indirectly accounting for the flood of etiquette books from Beirut, Peshawar, Belfast, and East Los Angeles.

  “I’d like to buy a gun,” Big Mister Sinister said.

  “What for?” The proprietor meant to be helpful. He could have added, “Target shooting? Hunting? Display?” but it never occurred to him that the customer might misunderstand him.

  “To shoot somebody,” Big Mister Sinister said.

  “Good one.” The proprietor smiled. “I guess you’d like a handgun then.”

  “Please. I’m in a hurry.”

  “I could refuse to sell you one,” the proprietor joked, “but a thug like you’d just barter for one on the street or steal one from a law-abiding citizen.”

  “That’s right.” And Big Mister Sinister bought a Ruger Redhawk .44 Magnum revolver with a 7.5-inch barrel and a box of ammunition, charging them to a Visa card issued only a few days ago by a bank in Aberdeen, South Dakota. The name on the card was Timothy Bowman, but the discrepancy between this name and the bearer’s zoot-suited impersonation of Big Mister Sinister did not trouble the gun-shop owner. He seldom read comic books, and the bearer had not even bothered to introduce himself. Big Mister Sinister touched his hat brim and walked out of the store with his purchases.

  A half hour later, in front of Nick City’s central stationhouse, Big Mister Sinister shot F. Deane Finesse three times in the chest with the Ruger Redhawk. To his assassin, it seemed an intolerable cruelty that the man who had given Big Mister Sinister, via Timothy Bowman, his start in life should have to spend his declining years in prison. He therefore meant the shooting of Finesse as both a gift and a mercy. As soon as he had fired the third shot, several plainclothes officers wrestled Big Mister Sinister to the pavement. Finesse staggered a few steps, despite support from a uniformed cop, and collapsed in agony.

  With his cheek pressed to blazing concrete, Big Mister Sinister pee
red with one eye at his victim. It was a true disappointment to him that the look on Finesse’s contorted face betrayed not a shadow of gratitude.

  *

  Suzi Pybus had an afternoon talk show on WSSX called “The Suzi Pybus Show.” It came on at four o’clock, an hour or two before most folks got home from work, and it blew away all the competition in its time slot, ratingswise. In less than a month, Suzi Pybus had become the biggest instant celebrity in town since the late Count Geiger. On the program that aired the afternoon of F. Deane Finesse’s murder, Suzi whirled down some steps and paused in front of her cheering audience in a Bari’s of Salonika outfit that flattered her figure while hinting at both independence and style.

  “Today,” she said, “we’ll be talking with seven impersonators—five men, two women—of popular comic-book stalwarts. Why do they do it? Do they hide their fetishes or parade them in public? Is their behavior evidence of an aberrant personality or just good kinky fun? In a moment, we’ll ask the impersonators themselves.” The camera panned the costumed guests on Suzi’s stage. “Stay with us for an exciting hour of issues, arguments, and laughs.”

  The prereleased theme music from the Count Geiger film debuting in Salonika on the Fourth of July filled the studio with stirring electric trumpet flourishes and fortissimo synthesizer chords. Suzi did a cute twisting-in-place jig to this music and exaggeratedly mouthed, We’ll be right back.

  *

  In Placer County, the reactors at Plant VanMeter generated power for millions of homes and businesses in three states. The public devoured this energy, and the keepers of the reactors, blameless in the accident that had brought heartbreak to Silvanus County, took a quiet pride in undemonstratively feeding it.

  In Oconee’s next gubernatorial election, Hamilcar Clede ran an aggressive campaign. He reminded the voters how he had prosecuted the big shot responsible for the disaster in Silvanus County. He also reminded them that, properly handled, a facility like Plant VanMeter was the cheapest and most efficient power source for the region’s growing needs. Come November, he won a smashing victory over the doubting-Thomas incumbent.

  *

  Bari and The Mick inherited Xavier’s apartment. The day after his funeral, Bari heard Smite Them Hip & Thigh’s “Count Geiger’s Blues” booming from Mikhail’s room. She knocked on the door. No answer. Bari pushed the door open and saw Mikhail sitting over a carton of comic books, the latest issue of UC’s Stalwarts for Truth series in his hands. Grimacing, he ripped out a handful of its pages and dropped them to the floor. Bari entered the room and stood directly in front of him.

  “Mikhail—”

  “I’m junking this crap,” he yelled over the bass notes of “Count Geiger’s Blues.”

  “Don’t. Your collection’s worth money.”

  “It isn’t worth shit.”

  “Neither is destruction, Mikhail.”

  “It’s good to destroy antinoolity and lies.” He tore out another sheaf of ink-stained pages. “But it’s better to make something.” He stood and flung the rest of the torn comic away. He wept as Smite Them Hip & Thigh wailed and the room jitterbugged.

  Bari stepped through the debris, took Mikhail in her arms, and held him until the angry music ended.

  About the Author

  Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel Unicorn Mountain, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective, edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies Light Years and Dark, three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ, and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human. Soon to appear is his novel for young persons, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, dedicated to the Bishops’ exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, a retired elementary school counselor who is now an avid gardener and yoga practitioner. They share a house with far, far too many books.