by Jim Nisbet
But here he was, prone on the sidewalk, and there Laval was, casing his way down the block, coming directly at him. It was almost too good to be true. It was almost too tempting, too. Maybe I should just shoot the motherfucker, Protone thought. But then he rethought. If he took out Laval, Protone would be faced with going home every night instead of coming here. Home to the crummy sunset garage apartment the divorce settlement had left him enough money to rent. Home to Chinese takeout, to 275 channels of belligerently inane television, much of it cop shows, home to the two or three pillow cases bulging with soiled dry goods that doomed him sooner than later to two horrible, feckless hours in a brightly lit laundromat.
He heard the crunch before he’d even realized that Laval was making a move. Protone rolled into a crouch behind the shopping cart. You got to admit, Protone admitted, Laval has gotten good over the years. He pulled a pair of cuffs and a sap from his hip pocket.
And tonight, as Protone could see as he stole along the sidewalk, Laval had his act together. He had on batting or cycling gloves, so as not to cut his hands. He was dressed mostly in black clothing, culled no doubt from the free box at St. Vincent de Paul. Even his day pack was a dark color, and a dark hood blended his head with the night.
By the time Protone made it across Octavia and the fifty yards up the sidewalk to the scene of the crime, Laval had the passenger door open and only his left leg was visible on the sidewalk, in the full extension peculiar to the short-burglar. The victim was a late model Ford Excursion. No alarm sounded. The distinctive sounds of road maps, of insurance and registration papers, of an operator’s manual reached Protone, as they hit the floor mat after being swept from the glove compartment. Then came the clatter of jewel cases as with both hands Laval swept CDs from the center console into his day pack, unzipped on the passenger seat.
The odor, from three feet away, stopped Protone in his tracks.
Laval-odor, distinct and immutable and rank enough, this was not. Laval released the passenger seatback, the seat sprang forward, and he set to rummaging. The edge of his hand found a wristwatch, which he transferred into the backpack. Under the back seat he found a small telescoping umbrella, which he dropped into the gutter.
Protone stood at the rear bumper, astounded. All the years he’d spent on the force, all the nights he’d stalked Laval, all the crime scenes, the aberrant behavior, the perversions, the charnel basements of sex slave massage parlors. …
“Fuck me,” he growled aloud. Laval didn’t react. “Fuck you,” Protone shouted. Laval showed his head. “Don’t you know a cadaver when you smell one?” Protone screamed at him. He waved his cuffs and sap. “Look at the flies!”
“Flies,” Laval said, backing out of the crevice behind the passenger seat, “are a fact of life.”
“Something’s dead in there!” Protone yelled.
“Leave me alone!” Laval screamed at the top of his voice. “You’re hurting me!” He slapped the top of the Excursion with the bike lock sufficient to dent it. “I got enough problems!”
“You can’t smell that?” Protone lifted his instep toward Laval’s balls and missed. “Drop the weapon!” He kicked and missed again. “You can’t smell that dead body, you useless piece of shit?” And, despite his mouth filling with flies: “Lemme see your hands!”
Laval took a swing with the lock. Protone smiled and whacked the wrist with the sap. The lock clanged to the sidewalk. Then he clipped Laval behind the ear. Laval went down. As Protone resisted the urge to hammer Laval into the substrate, Laval sank his teeth into Protone’s ankle. “You’re under arrest!” Protone declared, spitting flies, and he brought the sap down on the side of Laval’s head. “Off!” Laval turned loose long enough to scream, “Help!” before he bit down on the toe of Protone’s sneaker.
Plainly, Laval was hopped up beyond pain. This called for tact. “Give me that swag, you cocksucker.” Protone clutched one of the backpack’s straps and yanked. CDs spilled onto the sidewalk.
“Get away from my stuff!” Laval yelled. He gave a vicious twist to Protone’s ankle. “Don’t touch my stuff, man!” Beneath the struggle, an inch or two of crushed safety glass rasped like gravel. Laval grabbed the other strap.
He doesn’t recognize me, he attacks a cop, he’s far gone tonight, Protone thought, as he fell on his back, parallel to the Ford. Adding his other leg to the captured one, he levered Laval almost straight overhead and rolled back onto his shoulders. His legs and Laval kept right on going, like the hands of a clock going backwards, until Laval’s head completed a full half circle truncated by the sidewalk, pursued by all of his pitiful but not discountable inertia, down the axis of his junk-whittled frame, collapsing vertebrae like they were saucers in an industrial plate stacker.
With a pause, then a sigh, Laval sagged against the right rear tire of the Excursion like a sack of autumn leaves.
Protone had lost the cuffs. He rolled over and did a two-handed pushup, only to discover that each palm was attempting and failing to flatten dozens of shards of safety glass. He collapsed, turning his head so as to lacerate one ear instead of his face. He rolled through the glass onto his back and lay still, panting. Sweat rolled from his hairline. The watch cap was gone. Advanced putrefaction, cooped up in the vehicle for only a coroner would be able to tell how long, assailed his nostrils. Thousands of flies darkened the air between the Ford and a lit storefront at the Octavia intersection. Protone knew the smell. He didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Masticated croissant and two cups of coffee assailed the valve at the base of his esophagus. How the hell could Laval stand to shake down such a vehicle, despite the sweetly pungent reek savory only to maggots and turkey vultures?
“Laval …” No answer. “Hey.” Protone rolled over and shook Laval. “You okay?” Laval lay still. “Laval! Lie to me. Tell me you’re sorry …”
A shudder extenuated Laval’s 125 pounds. His lips slowly parted and stayed that way. A black rivulet, not an eighth of an inch across, ribboned over the downside corner of Laval’s mouth, darker even than his complexion.
So much for job security.
Before the coroner got there the rivulet would follow an expansion joint to the curbstone, still granite in this part of town, and build there until it spilled over it, to disappear into the gutter in the shadow of the Explorer.
The coroner would count three bodies, once he’d sorted them out, including Laval. BTW, the email would read, there was an extra head. So there were actually four dead people. Laval was the obvious stiff. The coroner’s assistants referred to the other two bodies as “hairball stew,” which remained unidentified. Murdered, though. That much they could tell.
The head showed signs of having been frozen and thawed. No cause of death. Unless you count decapitation. Ah. Ah ha. Ah ha ha … ha. The coroner, Jimmy Nix, was a card. There were three parking tickets on the Excursion, which had been stolen in Berkeley.
In truth these facts told little more about Laval than they did the three unidentified victims. Dental records got nowhere. Even a tattoo, decipherable only as Semp … Imp … Dub … , yielded no tip. A scan of the only distinguishing mark on the other full set of remains, a high resolution bar code lasered onto the perineum, yielded a meaningless fourteen-digit alphanumeric string. There was nobody to call, no record of any next of kin, no corresponding missing person report. No loved one came to blink back a tear as Jimmy Nix drew open the respective drawers in the big freezer. Not even Laval’s social worker showed up to gaze with regret and opine, “What a waste.”
The paramedics gave Protone a tetanus shot right there at the scene, the skipper took a statement, gave him a bye on the paperwork, and damn if he didn’t grant administrative leave on the spot. The skipper thought he was doing Protone a favor.
A black-and-white gave Protone a ride home. Despite a long hot shower and two ice-cold bottles of beer, there lingered a stench about his fingertips and the taste of flies on his tongue, and anyway it had turned into yet another of those nights he so dread
ed. A night endured at home staring through the not-so-fun house lens that is the vitrified teton, seeing only the two weeks of administrative leave, his mouth locked up by a kind of vocal tenesmus, something to say, nobody to say it to, and no words to say it with anyway, no way to express anything at all.
THIRTY-SIX
THE THIRD GIN MARTINI, HOT-RODDED WITH A SHOT OF ABSINTHE, PUT HER right over the top.
LECTURE 4
La Bwana waited for the crowd to get over the umpteenth iteration of the chorus to the Condor Silversteed megahit, “Asian Dollars (‘Scape My Grasp).”
The markets are tumblin’
The polls are aghast
For the keys they are fumblin’
And the locks are all trashed
Succor’s for sale
But we know nothing lasts
Umbrage ain’t happenin’
Cause everbody
Ev’ry bod eee
Ev’ry bod eee
Can reeeeeeeeeead
Your mail …
After enjoying the Quietusation of a few antigroupies the crowd settled sufficiently to be gaveled to order.
The gavel, by the way, is a Yubiwaza, a Japanese framing hammer with a twenty-eight ounce kryptonite head able to bang a 16 d. greased sinker (3-1/2”) flush at a single blow, and yank them likewise thanks to its 18” handle sculpted from pure Rain Forest CrunchTM in the shape of the lithesome stalk of an otherwise extinct orchid.
“I don’t have enough computer up here to show the videos …”
Knowing laughter from the darkened hall, as it was a long-establish fact of cunning, industry, and espionage that the Committee controlled the most powerful computers in all of Cryptopolis.
“… but you should note the etymology of zeitgeist, a German word—zeit equals time, geist equals spirit. Thus its definition, the spirit of an era.” As La Bwana recited, the big screen above and behind her, as well as those at eye-level over every wall-hung urinal in the building. etc., spelled them out. “The intellectual mores and cultural climate of a specific epoch or age. …” The salients of La Bwana’s smile beamed benevolently over the hall, the expensive teeth, the sculpted lips, the diamond Skoda-Benz logo lasered into the right front incisor. “… which I generally interpret as the here and now, along with its logical extension, here today, gone tomorrow. Think bell-bottom trousers, Herbert Marcuse, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”—gales of laughter—“… responsible environmentalism,” chortles and snorts, “… not to mention plenipotentiary democracy—i.e., the stratum of forgotten detritus left behind by every so-called culture, society, civilization, and empire—nationalized banking and privatized mass transit, for two—of which subsequent states remain more or less completely unaware, not to say, institutionally amnesiac.”
“Young, dumb, and full of come!” someone shouted from the floor.
La Bwana leaned into the microphone, took a beat as the laughter swelled and evanesced, then said huskily into the microphone, “That’s disgusting.”
Knowing laughter.
“There’s no way,” La Bwana resumed, “to predict what this may consist of. For example, we still have the Mayan calendar—a so-called continuum I pick deliberately if only because so many of you still refer to it.” Here La Bwana held a wallet-sized Mayan calendar aloft for all to see, which gesture was duly iterated 100X in the screen above and behind her, at eye-level on the inside of restroom doors, etc. “Let’s see those Mayan calendars!” Dozens, then hundreds, and finally a total of 758 left hands shot aloft, each bearing a wallet-sized duplicate of the Mayan calendar, all of them compliments of BiggieBank, part of the convention grab-bag. In the screens appeared long panning shots of shadowy wallet-sized cards held aloft by phantom limbs.
“But we have no idea what happened to the Mayan culture, do we?”
Vague muttering.
“So think about it.”
Rhinogenerics suffused the hall with the smell of burning electronics. The crowd began to chant. “Think, baby, think. Think, baby, think …”
“If you were Mayan,” La Bwana resumed, as the chant wilted beneath her stentorian bellow, “with your half-paid-for condominium in Cryptopolis, and that BiggieBank promotion in the works, and your world suddenly came to an abrupt and complete end, what would look more important to you as ‘they’ (an invading, slave-taking army, possessed of and driven by an idolatry the exact contrapositive of your own to wit videlicet: They is not us therefore Not they is us) or “it” (an earthquake, an asteroid, a plague), carry off you and your family, or kill the women and rape the men—what, I say, would look more important to you in the moment: the calendar on the wall, the rivets in the slave-taker’s armor, or the symptoms peculiar to the iBola virus? That’s the one where your phone hemorrhages,” she added helpfully.
Complete silence descended upon the hall. Even the pink noise of various spheroidicentric events, oxidizing from a wide spectrum of generation-old skull chips, faded to a barely discernible hiss.
“Zeitgeist, adiós. And then, just as abruptly, you are brought back to consciousness a mere five hundred years later, or, better, a thousand, only to discover that all anybody knows about you and your era (and the few who do know are specialists, and much of what they know is wrong) is the partial remains of your calendar some contractor found in a stratum of ash a mere three inches deep, some five feet beneath the compaction of subsequent shopping-middens, not unlike the one in which you yourself, teased along by your grandfather, discovered a blue glass patent medicine bottle in Darwin, California, in 1985, except, as it was about two inches below the surface, maybe it had been there a mere one hundred years. And even the calendar is mostly the pinup part of it, a nice Mayan boy in a negligee twirling a solid rubber basketball on the tip of his index finger, chiseled into stone with a few box scores below him, mostly Arabic numerals, base ten, and of course the Mayan boy thing means nothing because sex means nothing now, in our era …” Tittering among the young, sighs among the old. “… so nobody knows what it’s about, but that doesn’t stop them from speculating, quite the contrary, the dearth of fact fuels speculation, that like for instance a full moon on July 13, 1987, in apposition with Venus and transiting Sagittarius later that evening, portended the demise of your civilization twenty-five days, weeks, months, years, decades later, with huge—and I’m talking enormous—implications for the fate of our own egregiousness a thousand years afterwards—which is now! And everything else—the text messages from the party of your choice which continued to assure you that everything was okay, the buboes on your face in the mirror, the dust raised by the invading army as it rumbled over the Bay Bridge (an engineering marvel dating from 2013 which the last man in charge of saving the city couldn’t bring himself to destroy, but the invaders will take great pleasure in so doing, after they’re done with it)—all these and almost everything else have disappeared without a trace; of which we, now, a thousand years later, have not even a rumor upon which to base a fantasy concerning your. …”
“Zeitgeist!” a hundred voices supplied.
“Zeitgeist,” La Bwana repeated, as if introspectively. “A German word, a combining form meaning time and spirit, thus, the spirit of the times and, by implication, no more or less ephemeral than fashion, than technology, than motorized transportation, than the printed word, the printed circuit, the cathode ray tube, the four-inch diameter basketball of solid caoutchouc—gesundheit—” Laughter. “—and of course the silly custom of sacrificing the losing team: than almost any cultural artifact you could name. How did you feel the night your phone died of the plague, or on the day it first showed the deadly symptoms? Except for the fact that a human might empathize with your loss, and perhaps even join you in mourning, though a thousand years separate your loss from their empathy, it’s equally possible and much more likely that someone postdating you and your culture by a thousand years won’t even have an inkling that your culture, your epoch, your zeitgeist so much as exited, let alone existed. Let alone that you
were there, too.” La Bwana pointed into the lights left right and center. “And you and you … Ah hahahaha …”
“Ah hahahaha,” the audience repeated.
“Zeitgeist,” La Bwana intoned as if introspectively, “might well be interpreted as the tendency of an era to overestimate its relevance to history—or to anything else. Boil it down to this!”
The Moscone Holodome fell absolutely silent. You might have heard a screw creak in a veteran’s ankle.
“What have you done for pi today?”
“Huh?” three hundred voices asked. “Huh?” the other 458 asked.
“I said,” La Bwana restated, “What have you done for pi today!”
Silence.
“See? The collective unconscious is not dead!”
The silence peculiar to a mob that has just experienced a moment of sympathy with a true thing, that fleeting elision between one state of ignorance and the next, like a flash of daylight from the air vent in the roof of the tunnel vision through which the room is traveling at a high rate of speed, other than which there is no evidence that any motion is happening whatsoever, the moment at which, despite all efforts of the subcommittee that dispenses the Wonders of History, a particle of truth trickles down the angled berm of the Comfort Zone like a pubic hair down a trouser leg.
The audience gasped and went nuts, and while the telepathic simile caused Tipsy to frown and stir in the Adirondack chair, she did not wake up. Buffeted by a clamoring fog wind, the martini glass fell soundlessly into the embrace of the nasturtium bed.
