"Yeah, why don't you?" Joe put it. "You can check out my collection of bad religious art from Ireland."
I shook my head. "I promised I'd be back. My dad was scheduled for a spinal this morning. I thought about phoning from Denver," I said, "but you know how it is."
They both nodded that they did and no more was said about it.
We dropped Dr. Mortimer off at the gas station. His wife was nowhere in sight, but we might not have seen her; there was still a jam of cars stretching around the corner of the block both ways. Joe began to fret as soon as the looming complex of the hospital came into sight. "I think I ought to swing in, anyway," he said. "We can make a quick round while they're gassing us up at the motor pool."
He braked to make the turn and the guard at the gate waved us on. He pulled to the NO STOPPING curb in front and motioned the aide sweeping the lobby to come out.
"Mr. Gonzales? Would you mind driving this bomb around back and filling it up?"
Gonzales didn't mind a bit. Grinning at his good fortune, he gave Joe the broom and took the wheel. Joe shouldered it and marched around to my door.
"Come on," he implored, "you can stand it if I can." He even added an enticement. "Maybe I can scrounge up another pink pill."
I could see he was needing the company; the hopeful glow had gone out of his eyes, leaving a gloomy smudge. I caught the strap of my shoulder bag and followed him toward the lobby, resolved to stand it.
The lobby was empty and completely changed. The renovation was nearly finished and the workers had knocked off for the weekend. There was gleaming new tile on the floor and fresh white paint on the walls. The veteran squad of khaki couches had been discharged and a replacement of recruits waited in close-order file, still in their plastic shipping bags. All the Venetian blinds had been removed from the windows, and the wooden window frames replaced by chrome. It glistened in the harsh sunshine streaming through the big windows.
The only thing about the lobby that was the same was the fluorescent lights. They still buzzed and fluttered even in the shadeless sunlight. They made me think of the ward above. And this suddenly made my resolve start to flutter like the chilly light in those long tubes. I backed out when the elevator door opened.
"I'll wait down here," I had to tell Joe. "Maybe I'll finish that Ching you interrupted the other morning."
"Right," Joe said. "So you can find out whether to go or not to go to Florida." He handed me the broom. "Find out for me too, why don't you?"
The elevator took him up and left me standing there, knowing that I had let him down. I leaned the broom against the wall and went to the drinking fountain and spit out my last piece of Aspergum. I tried to rinse out the taste but it wouldn't go away. It tasted like pennies, or a lightning storm in the making. I walked to the receptionist's deserted desk. Two of the buttons on her switchboard were blinking. As I watched, they both stopped. Calls were probably being relayed to another board during renovation.
I managed to get an outside line and dial my parents' house. I listened to it ringing at the other end. Maybe they were still at the hospital. Maybe something had happened. I should have tried to call earlier. I had lied about Denver. I hadn't thought of calling from there at all.
I tried awhile to ring Information for the number at the clinic, but I couldn't decipher the complicated switchboard. I finally gave up and walked to the couches. I took a seat in the one at the front of the rank, right at the windows. New louvered sun shades waited along the baseboard. They would replace the old blinds. Now the sun boomed in dead level, like cannon fire.
I got up and went around to the couch at the rear. It was still in the sun but I managed to pull it over into the bar of shade from one of the window frames. I sat down in the narrow shadow and closed my eyes.
Joe was gone a long time. The sun angled along. I had to keep scooting on the plastic to stay behind that shadow. I slumped back and folded my arms, hoping I might appear calm and relaxed should a guard happen past. I just about had the flutter in my breath under control when a thumping crash right at my feet made me jump a mile. My shoulder bag on the couch had been spilled by my fidgeting - the thump was the I Ching hitting the floor; the crash was the martini glass I'd swiped from Szaabo.
I tried to make fun of myself: Whadja think, one of the guys in white gotcha with his butterfly net? I was leaning to gather up the spilled stuff when I saw something that got me worse than any net ever could. It was on the front cover of the book, one of the pictures taken years before-of a little boy in pajamas looking over the rail of a crib at the back of a cluttered bus. God Almighty had that been all there was to it? Nothing but a spell of deja vu! a commonplace phenomenon triggered by that glimpse of Caleb standing on the porch in his nightclothes? It seemed to be that simply: the image on the porch had resonated with the photograph of that other time I traipsed off to see this mysterious Wolf Doctor. Always one of my favorite of Hassler's bus pictures. That's why it's front page center in my collage. A ringing moment from the past, and it happened to find a corresponding note in the present. This could account for all these shadows that have been haunting me. Reverberations. The nuthouse reverberations. Woofner repeated. Separate splashes in the same pond, the ripples intersecting. Resonating waves, that's what it is, clear and simple -
yet...
there must be something more to it than surface waves to get you so good. It stirs too far down, rolls from too far away. To roll that far, wouldn't the two moments have to share something deeper as well? some primal heading? some upwelling force from a mutual spring that drives the pair of times to join forces and become one many times more lasting than either original time alone, a double-sided moment that can roll powerfully across years and at the same time remain fixed, permanently laminated in a timeproof vault of the memory, where the little boy stands longing yet, in unfading Kodachrome, in flannel pajamas and Grateful Deadshirt both, on the porch at the farm and holding to the crib rail at the back of the bus, eyes shining forever brave down that dim and disorderly tube -
and yet...
it isn't the longing. Or the bravery. It's the trust. If Dad leaves a speed demon to babysit, the very act must signify it's aw-right, right? If he says a visit to Disney World is a Big People's business trip, then that's that. Trust doesn't fume off in a pout, like big brother Quiston, or wheedle like May or Sherree; but it does expect to have something brought back. It does expect to reel in something if it casts far and often and deep enough, like those faces on the ward. It does expect to slide in someday to more than a plate of dirt if it rounds bases enough. It expects these things because these things have been signified. That's what gets you.
Especially if you're one of those that's been doing the signifying.
So the discovery that I was having deja vus did not bring me any ease. It only clarified the fearful murk that had been nagging me into something far more haunting: guilt. And when I closed my eyes to shut out the little face looking up from the book on my lap, I found my head crammed full of other faces waiting their turn. What was my mother going to say? Why hadn't I phoned? Why wouldn't I lend poor Joe a little support a while ago after all of it he's afforded me the last two days? Why can't I face those faces upstairs? I know now that it isn't my fear that chains me back. It's the bleak and bottomless rock of failure, jutting remote from the black waters. Onto this hard rock I am chained. The water pounds like blame itself. The air is thick with broken promises coming home to roost, flapping and clacking their beaks and circling down to give me the same as Prometheus got... worse! Because I sailed up to those forbidden heights more times than he had - as many times as I could manage the means - but instead of a flagon of fire the only thing I brought back was an empty cocktail glass... and I broke that.
I clenched my eyes, hoping I guess to squeeze out a few comforting drops of remorse, but I was as dry as the Ancient Mariner. I couldn't cry and I couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't do anything about anything, was about what it came down to. All
I could do was sit by myself on my godforsaken reef of failure, clenching my eyes and gnashing my teeth in morbid self-recrimination.
This is what I was doing when I realized I was no longer by myself.
"Squank!"
She was leaned over the back of the couch, her twin telescopes within inches of my face. When I turned she reared away, wrinkling her nose.
"Tell me, Slick: are you wearing that expression to match your breath, or are you this lowdown for real?"
When I regained myself I told her that this was about as real as it got, and as lowdown.
"Good," she said. "I hate a phony funk. Mind if I join you? I'll even share your troubles..."
She came around without waiting for an answer, tapping her way to a place beside me.
"So. How do you explain this hangdog face?"
"I swallowed more than I can bite off," was all I told her. I didn't think this myopic little freak would understand more, even if I could explain it.
"Just don't spit up on me," she warned. She leaned around to get a closer look at my face. "Y'know, dude, you look kind of familiar. What do they call you besides ugly?" She stuck out a skeletal hand. "I'm called the Vacu-Dame, because I'm out in deep space most of the time."
I took the hand. It was warm and thin, but not a bit skeletal. "You can call me the Veja Dude."
She made a sound like a call-in beeper with a fresh battery. I guessed it was supposed to be a laugh. "Very good, Slick. That's why you look so familiar, eh? Very clever. So what's with all the pictures stuck on that book in your lap? Photos of your famous flashbacks?"
"In a way. The pictures are from a bus trip I took once with my gang. The book's an ancient Chinese work called The Book of Changes."
"Oh, yeah? Which translation? The Richard Wilhelm? Let me have a look at it, so to speak."
I handed her the book and she held it up to her face. I was beginning to suspect that this freak might understand more than I thought.
"It's the English edition. That's what I used when I first started throwing the Ching. Then I thought I'd try using Wilhelm in his original German. I wanted to see if it helped the poetic parts. I found such a veritable shitload of difference between the two that I thought, 'Shit, if it loses this much from German into English, how much must've been lost from ancient Chinese to German?' So I decide to hell with it all. The last Ching I threw I threw at my degenerate Seeing Eye dog for turning over my wastepaper basket looking for Tampons. The sonofabitch thought I was playing games. He grabbed the book and ran outside with it, and by the time I tracked him down he'd consumed every page. He was a German shepherd. When he found something written in his ancestral tongue he just couldn't put it down. What's all this glass underfoot, incidentally? Did you drop something or did I just miss a Jewish marriage? I don't care for dogs but I love a good wedding. It gives the adults an excuse to get soused and let all the dirty laundry hang out. Is that where you're bringing such a booze breath back from, Ace? A big wedding?"
"I'm bringing it back from Disney World, believe it or not."
"I believe it. On the Red Eye Rocket. Here, you better put your fancy book away before I see a dog."
When I tried to reach around her for my bag I bumped her staff. It tipped and fell before I could grab it.
"Watch it!" she shrilled. "That's my third eye you're knocking in the broken glass!"
She picked it up and turned around to stand it behind the couch, out of danger. Then she leaned close again and gave me a fierce frown. "You're the one broke it too, ain't you? No wonder you got such a guilty look on you, cursed with such a clumsy goddamn nature."
For all her frowning, I couldn't help but grin at her. She didn't seem as fierce as she looked, really. She might not have realized she was frowning all the time. She wasn't as hopelessly homely as she first appeared, either, I decided. Or as titless.
"Speaking of curses," I said, "what was that one of yours the other day? It was formidable."
"Oh, that," she said. The frown vanished instantly. She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. "It isn't mine," she confessed. "It's Gary Snyder's, mostly, a poem of his called 'Spel Against Demons.' You want to know why I happened to memorize it? Because one time I spray-painted the entire thing. On a football field. Remember when Billy Graham held that big rally in Multnomah Stadium a couple of years back?"
"You're the one who did that?"
"From goal line to goal line. It took nineteen rattle cans and most of the night. Some of the words were ten yards big."
"So, you're the famous phantom field-writer? Far damn out. The paper said the writing was completely illegible."
"It was dark! I've got a shaky pen hand!"
"You were plenty legible the other afternoon," I prompted. I wanted to keep her talking. I saw her cheeks color at the compliment, and she started rocking back and forth, hugging her knees.
"I was plenty ripped is what I was," she said. "Besides, I recite better than I handwrite."
She rocked awhile in thought, frowning straight ahead. The sun was almost out of sight in the ridgeline across the river, and the light in the room had softened. The chrome trim was turning the color of butter. All of a sudden she clapped her hands.
"Now I remember!" She aimed a finger at me. "Where I know your melancholy mug from: the dust jacket of your goddamn novel! So far-damn-out to you too!"
She started to rock again. It wouldn't have surprised me to see her put her thumb in her mouth.
"I'm something of a writer myself," she let me know, "when I'm not something else. Right now I'm an astral traveler on layover. Too far over, too, after two days of Miss Seal's Bed and Breakfast."
I told her she didn't look nearly as far laid over as the others I saw up there. This made her blush again.
"I cheek the tranqs," she confided. "I never swallow anything they give me. Watch -"
She felt around between her ragged deck shoes until she found a big shard of glass. She tossed it to the back of her mouth and swallowed. She opened wide to show nothing but teeth and tongue, then a moment later spat the shard tinkling across the new tile. "Want to know the reason they hauled me in here? Because I dropped three big blotter Sunshines and went paradin' around the rotunda at the capitol. Want to know why I got so ripped? I was celebrating the completion of my new novel. Want to know the name of it?"
I told her that as a matter of fact I would like to know the name of her novel. I couldn't help but feel that somebody was getting their leg pulled, but I didn't care. I was fascinated.
"I called it Teenage Girl Genius Takes Over the World! Not too shabby a title, huh?"
I conceded that I'd heard worse, especially for first novels. "First your ass! This is my goddamn third. My first was called Tits & Zits and my second is Somewhere Ovary Rainbows. Shallow shit, those first two, I admit it. Juvenile pulp pap. But I think Girl Genius has got some balls to it. Hey, let me ask you something! My publisher wants to reprint the first two and bring all three out as a package. But I'm not so sure. What's your thinking on that plan, as one novelist to another?"
I didn't know what to think. Was she on the level or lying or crazy or what? She sounded serious, but that could have been like the frown. I couldn't get over that feeling of a pulling sensation on my leg. I avoided her question with one of my own.
"Who's your publisher?"
"Binfords and Mort."
If she'd named off some well-known New York house like Knopf or Doubleday I'd have started shoveling pantomime manure. But Binfords & Mort? That's a specialty house for high-class historic stuff, and hardly known outside of the Northwest. Would she pick such company to lie about? Then again, would they pick her?
"I think you could do worse than follow the advice of Binfords and Mort," I averred, trying to probe her eyes. I couldn't get past the glass. I'd have to try another test.
"Okay, Girl Genius, I've got one for you."
"It'll have to be quick, Slick. I think my chariot has just arri
ved."
A black sedan had indeed just pulled up at the no standing curb. She must have heard it. An ambitious-looking young legal-type flunky got out and started for the lobby door.
"Quick it is," I said. "I'd like to know what's your thinking - just off the top of your I.Q. - on the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"
If I hoped to see her thrown by this, I was disappointed. She got very deliberately to her feet and stood in front of me. She bent her face down until it was almost touching mine. The thin lips were starting to stretch at the corners. The eager pad of driver's footsteps stopped a few feet away but neither the girl nor I turned.
"Melissa?" I heard him say. "Everything's cleared, Sweetie. Your father wants us to go to the Leaning Tower and order a couple giants - a pepperoni for him. He'll join us as soon as he gets rid of that damned delegation from Florence's fishing industry - they're still singing the blues about the salmon regulations. How does Canadian bacon sound for the other one? It's smoke cured...?
The lenses never wavered from me. But the lips continued to stretch, wider and wider, until it seemed her whole head might be split in half by her grin. The blush raged across her cheeks and neck, and her eyes flashed around their crystal cages like giddy green parakeets. She finally cupped her hand so we were shielded from the driver's eyes.
"Entropy," she whispered behind her hand, like a resistance fighter passing a vital secret under the very nose of the enemy, "is only a problem in a closed system." Then she straightened and spoke up. "What's more, a singing fisherman from Florence sounds better to me than a singed pig from Canada. How about you, Slick?"
"Much better," I agreed.
She nodded curtly. The scowl snapped back into place. Without another word she turned on her heel and stalked unaided past the waiting flunky, across the lobby, and straight out the door toward the sedan, majestically, or as majestically as possible for a knobby-jointed maybe-crazy half-green-haired nearly-completely-blind girl-thing from another dimension.
"If you're ever in Mt. Nebo," I called after her, "I'm in the book!"