Need

by Nik Cohn

  The Fifth Dimension? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be—Madame Vronsky had got that one right. For a certainty, it played hell with your orgasms. Though she’d heard that executioners had the same trouble. Swings and roundabouts, she supposed. The grass was always greener.

  But so much blether. Such a carry-on and commotion just because she had sight. A knack that wasn’t her doing, that she could not even control.

  It made her pillow hot on both sides.

  It made her wish she’d been a shopgirl or some waitress, free to jump out of her window any night she felt the urge, head for the nearest dance hall and pick up any stranger that caught the light, pull him out in the back alley. Or a cocktail lounge would do. With one of those blue neon signs, the champagne glass and bubbles. Or a bowling alley, even.

  That was the only sex she had ever wet-dreamed about. In her teens, when she was in Jeanerette, she’d used to sneak out the back door between visions and hitch a ride on Highway 90. There was a place in New Iberia, the Club Why Not, she’d heard was Babylon on the half-shell. But Charley Root had always caught up to her, and dragged her home intact. Or an approximation thereof, as Ferdousine would say. No mindless abandon for Katy. No such fucking luck.

  The year that Rubber Ball was a hit.

  Bobby Vee, or was it Bobby Vinton? And now it was Snoop Doggy Dogg. And she had rolls of fat behind her knees. Still and all, she was desired.

  It almost felt a pity that she didn’t desire him back. Wilfredo Diliberto. Little Wilfred. It almost seemed a loss. But what was a girl supposed to do? She didn’t find him attractive. He didn’t ring her chimes. Did anyone still say that? Not the cream in my coffee, not the cherry on my sundae. Not the sour cream on my baked potato. No, he wasn’t. Not, not, not.

  In the morning, though, she woke to find herself back to twitching. The early sunlight slanting across the white walls stained them arsenic yellow, turned Fred Root’s crooked grin into a homicidal leer. How could she have slept with his picture at that sick angle? More to the point, how could she have lain awake and thought such thoughts without throwing up? Not the sour cream on my baked potato. But what was a girl supposed to do? Give herself an enema, if she could still find the right hole.

  All her senses felt overturned, her nerve endings exposed and raw, the way that ex-junkies described when they told you their cold-turkey stories if you didn’t get away from them in time. No extra layers of skin left, no protection. Every sound a fingernail scraped on a blackboard, and every touch another bruise.

  The weight was the worst. The gross tonnage of the past. She felt stuffed to bursting with it, bloated like a rotting fish. At the window she tested for shifting breezes, but there were none. Smoke didn’t drift, loose papers on the street were not stirred. Not a thing that Kate could see moved.

  It was a day for a bonfire.

  She laboured, huffing, on the stairs, her nightie rode her like a hairshirt. And meeting Anna Crow didn’t help. Especially an Anna Crow wearing a long trailing robe of azure velvet, a blonde wig curling down her back and silk daisies garlanded in her hair, silk daisies in bracelets at either wrist. “Ophelia?” Kate asked.

  “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

  “Oh what can oil thee, knight-at-arms, alone and feebly squeaking? I did that at school, it stunk. Miss Etheridge in the Ninth Grade, she wore silk stockings. Real silk. Married a stoker in the merchant marine, but he sank.”

  “How triste,” Anna said. She looked nervous, and Kate couldn’t blame her, dressed up like a mobile florist’s with that belt of moulting marigolds round her waist. “That’s my fragrant zone,” she explained. “You know, I made her a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She look’d at me as she did love, and made sweet moan.”

  “She took me to her elfine grot. ”

  “Yes, I know, sickening, but that’s Verse-o-Gram for you; ours not to critique what they write, ours just to be white and recite,” Anna said. She made to edge past Kate, and they brushed arms. For a beat Kate saw her in a wheelchair, swaddled in blankets, being pushed by a uniformed nurse down a white corridor. Then she was on these stairs again, practising her droop. “The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing,” she said, and passed on like death going down.

  A nasty turn, but Kate was not entirely shocked. From the moment she’d wakened, she had suspected as much. That creeping in her fingertips, the buzzing in her ears—she knew the symptoms all too well. In the Ansonia, they’d been her living.

  No place to run, no use to hide. And besides, she had need of kindling. So she walked without knocking into Ferdousine’s sitting room, where he sat eating his breakfast. Patum pepperium, it looked like. Melba toast and burnt Seville marmalade, and the cricket scores in the English papers. “I need my files,” Kate said.

  The man did not protest. Only regarded her with his head cocked sideways as ever, his bird’s eyes intrigued but not alarmed. He wiped his fingers clean on a starched napkin, one by one. Held them up to the light for inspection, and he was eighteen again. A Westminster schoolboy on vacation, standing on a latticed balcony that looked like a set in a Sabu movie, The Thief of Baghdad or some such, looking down into an inner courtyard lit by oil lamps.

  Inside this courtyard there was great feasting. A wedding party, it seemed, with musicians and jugglers and acrobats. All the guests were loosely robed, the men in djellabas and the women in chadors, but Ferdousine himself, watching from above, was dressed in Oxford bags, a Fair Isle sweater, a cravat.

  There was a woman with him. A faceless and shapeless bundle swathed in black, leaning over the balcony with her shalwar kameez flipped up to expose her naked buttocks. Round and fatted as Dutch cheeses they looked, but pocked and flabby, gone to pulp. Not an appetising prospect, Kate thought, but Ferdousine didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he squeezed and pinched them with relish.

  The woman had no reaction. Seemed oblivious to everything but the wedding feast in the courtyard below, a scene straight out of an ad for Turkish delight, all flickering oil lamps and inlaid marble: the guests in their robes reclining on peacock-patterned cushions, the violinists strolling among the pomegranate trees, the belly dancers and tumblers, the aghound with his hennaed beard and long painted fingernails like talons chanting prayers beside the goldfish pool, the groom drinking arak from a silver goblet, the veiled bride in her jewelled headdress, and the peacocks, of course, peacocks out the kazoo.

  Beside the pool marriage gifts were heaped on ornate teak tables—a silken quilt made of a thousand pieces, brass and copper drinking vessels, lapis lazuli plates—and the faceless woman in the balcony above kept leaning out further and further into space, straining to catch a closer look, till it looked as if she must overbalance at any moment, flutter down like a great black bird shot out of a tree.

  A magician stood directly beneath her, and began to coax a kingfisher through a velvet hoop no bigger than a curtain ring. The kingfisher seemed to have no bones, no substance, and the magician fed it through a sequence of shrinking circles, first the bleached eye socket of a skull, then the neck of a wine bottle, finally the entrance to his own ear, which swallowed the bird without trace, and, as it disappeared, Ferdousine gave the woman’s buttocks a slap, plunged himself into her rear. Took the road less travelled, and Kate nearly choked.

  The dirty bastard; the filthy swine. In the street a man with a megaphone was shouting Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not, while Ferdousine nibbled at his melba toast. “Have some burnt marmalade,” he said.

  “Just my files will do,” Kate snapped, and when he failed to move she fetched them herself. Three bulging manilla folders, cross-referenced and classified, complete with bibliography, she carried them up to the roof above poor Godwin’s room where she kept her garden.

  Sheltered in a sun trap, and peopled by concrete deer, this garden bore carrots and onions and squash, green tomatoes propped on curtain rods, rows of flaccid broad beans. Wild
flowers tangled with herbs, and weeds ran riot everywhere. Alehoff and comfrey, skullcap and creeping jenny. When Kate stepped out among them, melted tar sucked at her feet like quicksand.

  Vandals had molested the wrought-iron brazier where she burned dead leaves. It reeked of stale piss and lighter fluid, and a sparrow lay decomposing in a bed of charred rubber. But this sacrilege only hardened her resolve. Grabbing paper from the files in random fistfuls, she started thrusting it and hurling it into the brazier’s gut, pounding on the pile to make it lay flat, cursing at it when it went astray. Newsprint stories, publicity flyers, wire pictures. Treatises and pamphlets. The manuscript of a Ph.D. thesis in German. Glossy magazines in Italian, Spanish, Greek. And boxes full of souvenirs. Katerina Rhute key rings and wallets and barrettes, Katerina Rhute prayer books, model Katerina Rhutes in first-communion dresses. Rubber-stamped autographs, and I Bear Witness scented candles. Katerina Rhute decals and buttons. Deodorant and mouthwash. Bubblegum.

  A was for Amarillo.

  Lot of cows in Amarillo. Back in 1959, cows and churches was all she wrote, and Charley Root had set up shop in a store-front chapel, born again as Brother Karl Rhute. Her mother had done the Christian thing by then, and Palmetto was tired of them. Between kited cheques and rival bookies who wanted him kneecapped, Charley Root had run out of real estate. So they’d saddled the hound and ridden. Tallahassee and Port St. Joe and Pensacola, Mobile and Biloxi, Pass Christian, Zachary and Opelousas, Nachitoches and Nacogdoches, Waxahachie and Cisco, Sweetwater and Lubbock, till Amarillo seemed the only place left. Especially when Charley Root caught sight of its skyline all spires and crosses, and the sinners picking their way through the cowchips with their billfolds hanging out. Right then, he tossed his Racing Form in the trash, and found the Lord.

  He’d been sliding that way anyhow. Ever since the night in Tarpon Springs, in fact. Not that Kate had told him the details; she never was a blabbermouth. But Charley always had a nose for an angle. Somehow he’d caught a whiff of money. So he kept his beady eye on her, and when she got embroiled with the ginger toupee at McMurdo’s Hardware, came home with her hand in bandages, he knew he was in luck.

  It must have seemed like a last-minute reprieve. Like being handed a brand-new ticket. Abel Bonder had his knives, God had his wife, and now he could trade in the name of Rhute, which spelled like a touch of class, not a goddamn rutabaga.

  In Amarillo, when he wasn’t tied up healing, he stuck on Kate like rice on ice. There was a city park with a boating lake, Buddy Holly Park, where she liked to cycle after school, and Karl Rhute would peddle right behind, his breath like an exhaust pipe, belching sour-mash toxics down her neck.

  Late afternoons there was a crap game behind a boathouse, where she would be bribed with ice-cream, sometimes Rocky Road, sometimes chocolate mint chip, while Karl on his knees prayed to his new friend up top for seven the hard way. There was a baseball cage and miniature golf, there were rowboats on the lake. And Kate saw the girl for the third time.

  It was late spring, the April sun was sinking across the lake, and she came trotting across the baseball field in bluejeans and a sweatshirt, playing with a beach ball. Flipping and sporting it in the air, showing off. Doing tricks like rolling it down her back, then bumping it with her tailbone and catching it on her heel. Or making the ball bounce fast, faster, fastest, till its stripes became a blur, a spinning sun like a top on the girl’s shoulder, then on her bowed neck, then on the back of her stretching hand.

  The faster the ball whirled, the faster she ran behind it. Flying past the boathouse and the dice game, she hardly had time to glance in Kate’s eyes. Just one flash, and she was past, skimming over the grass in radiance towards the lake’s edge, into the flame of the setting sun, and when she reached the water, she neither seemed to dive or float above it, she simply blended with it, she vanished, ball and all. Leaving Kate to stare at the space she had left. To stare into the sun, which did not burn her eyes—she didn’t even feel it. Standing unaware as her icecream melted and dripped down her skirt, until even Karl Rhute noticed, and he shouted at her to shape up. “What are you playing at?” he yelled, and Kate’s voice answered without permission, as if a stranger spoke through her: “Sancta Virgo Virginum,” it said.

  So the jig was up, her cover blown. Karl Rhute carried her home semiconscious, fed her a cup of hot chocolate, then he was on the phone to the Clarion, who sent along a cub reporter, “MIRACLE AT BUDDY HOLLY?” the headline next morning read. Page 5, column 3; not much more than a filler. But Karl Rhute had caught a glimpse of Zion, and he was a pit bull, no power could shake him loose.

  Kate herself was mortified. The girl had come to her in good faith, as a free gift. Even to talk of her seemed a betrayal, the worst kind of spiritual boasting. To turn her into cash seemed mortal sin.

  Oddly enough, the girl herself seemed to take no offence. Far from leaving in a huff, she even chose to appear more often. Her visitations came weekly, then almost daily. Soon she was Kate’s best friend.

  A dog came too, a stray mutt that the girl had picked up somewhere in her travels, part terrier and part border collie, his other parts God knows what. One ear up and the other down, black coat spotted with white, and an irregular white circle like a melted monocle round his left eye, which gave him a quizzical look. The girl left him in Kate’s care, and Kate named him Pompey, she couldn’t say why.

  Charley Root tried to run the mongrel off, he was a man who loathed and despised all dogs. Filthy, slobbering pests, he thought them; the love of them was a disease. Still, he was in no position to argue. Needing Katerina, he couldn’t afford to anger Kate. So Pompey was housed and fed, an animal of no breeding, no brain, no quality whatever, except for eagerness. His face with its one cocked ear never lost its vigilance, even in sleep. He had been created to wait, and serve, nothing more. The girl came to see him every weekend.

  By now the press called her the Amarillo Virgin, but that was not how she seemed to Kate. There was nothing motherly about her, you would never have thought that she had a child. In age, she might have been Kate’s big sister, but that wasn’t right either; she didn’t act bossy or sarcastic the way big sisters did. If anything, she was most like a hall monitor in school, the sort you’d have a crush to die for, gracious and serene, a little bit distant in the nature of things but infinitely patient.

  When they could no longer meet publicly without being hounded by the press, she came to Kate in private, in her bedroom or the back yard, frequently in her bath. Sometimes she brought a chocolate bar or a sucker; once, a ham and Swiss sandwich on rye. Often she seemed weary, maybe worn by too much travel. And always there was a vague sense of melancholy, though she never thought to complain. A yearning, Kate thought. A feeling of loss.

  Maybe she had been unlucky in love.

  Maybe she had grown up in a village or on a farm, and one day a smooth operator had come calling. A travelling salesman, say, or even a criminal on the run. Who had won the girl’s heart, and they had run off together; they’d driven by night like Bonnie and Clyde, living on love and their wits, till one day the Law caught up with them and her lover died in a hail of bullets, they’d filled him full of lead, leaving the girl to wander on alone, haunted by his memory, a fugitive all her days.

  It was just a thought, of course.

  But it seemed to fit. That would explain the restless way the girl sat, never quite in repose, perched on a windowsill or tree stump or even the toilet seat, she had no false pride, with her face half-turned from the light as if listening, as if she was forever waiting, though nothing ever arrived.

  Nothing except for tourists, that is. With Karl Rhute’s stoking, what had started as a squib on page five of the Clarion soon turned into a cult. TV crews started gathering outside the garden fence, and writers from the national press. An article appeared in Newsweek, and a Hollywood agent with a toothbrush moustache threw pebbles at her window, his name was Irvin Lipschitz. Tour buses unloaded the convinced and the me
rely curious, and Karl Rhute set up a concession stand: T-shirts and postcards, Katerinaburgers on a sesame-seed bun. A pop-up picturebook was published, there was talk of a record deal. Billy Graham sent a Christmas card.

  By global standards it was small potatoes. Nothing you could compare with Conchita of Garabandal’s cult in the Sixties, or the spiritual Disneyland that Marija of Medjugorje would spawn in the Eighties, three million pilgrims in a year. Katerina at her peak was good for one busload of trippers per day, perhaps five thousand bucks a week. Chickenfeed, really. But not to Karl Rhute.

  Nor to the Church, which determined to shut his playhouse down. A Monsignor Beebe travelled up from Dallas, a reed-thin man with a huge head, puffy and purplish round the jowls, he looked like a blood clot on a stick, and he brandished a black book called False Apparitions. Afterwards, scientists with white coats put her through a battery of tests, electroencephalographs and electro-oculographs, and many raps across the kneecap with a rubber hammer. And all of them together agreed that she was fraudulent, a brazen imposter. There was no Amarillo Virgin, there was nothing. “Evil is an absence,” said Monsignor Beebe.

  Kate could have told him that for free. The girl she knew was not the type they were looking for at all. According to False Apparitions, the Virgin was a lady in long white robes who never showed her feet and was indescribably beautiful, her conversation all beatitudes. But this girl wore sneakers or stack-heeled boots, you had to assume that she had feet underneath, and she spoke a bare minimum, seemed happier to listen. Hard to know what she was really thinking, but reverence and fuss made her tense, that was obvious, while stories helped her relax. “Call me Mary,” she said, and seemed happiest when Kate spoke of Elvis.

  Sometimes she showed herself to the trippers as they hung over the garden fence, snapping instant photos. It didn’t seem to bother her, she’d only shrug and smile; and the light from her eyes then was blinding. Kate would put up a hand to shield her own sight from its dazzle, and all the trippers would start to scream, Look at the sun! Oh my God, look at the sun!